Way Out There in the Blue
FitzGerald, Frances
They Still Can't Touch Him Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War Frances FitzGerald Simon & Schuster / 592 pages / $30 R E V I E W E D BY John Curry I n...
...she meant the people like herself--the liberal upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan, who live on a planet far distant from those other Americans, away from the sound of that bell...
...And Reagan vowed to dispel the nuclear threat and lead the world out of darkness on, or at least under, a mountain...
...The old movie actor suited them very well...
...If Reagan's policies played any part at all in persuading Soviet leaders they had to reform, Ms...
...Meanwhile hopes rose and fell, and apparent breakthroughs died almost at birth...
...FitzGerald admits this herself in her book, although I am sure she doesn't mean to...
...As Ms...
...But Soviet military publications carried similar reports...
...and Pravda said the CIA was plotting to kill Corazon Aquino...
...That was exactly what he did, of course, even though Ms...
...W r ay Out There in the Blue may be wrong-headed about these things, but it is never less than provocative, and clearly it reflects an enormous amount of research...
...Meanwhile Way Out There in the Blue is on shaky ground when it says Reagan made the proposal as a cleverly disguised political ploy...
...Then the question is, would it be wrong, as Ms...
...Nonetheless hopes for a missile defense system persist, and Reagan's old proposal to make missiles "impotent and obsolete" has taken on a new urgency...
...The American Spectator _9 May 2o o o 77...
...Ms...
...FitzGerald seems to think he somehow didn't play fair, and that when the evil empire collapsed it was not because of his policies, but despite them...
...Whether that is, "as always," the goal of the Republican right is doubtful, but let us say now that it is...
...Jesus rejected the devil on a mountain...
...FitzGerald still shows she is nursing a grudge...
...What bell was ringing with other Americans that I 1 1 ~. 1 7 " COUlOn t near...
...Early on she describes Reagan's visit to the North American Aerospace Defense Cornmand, or NORAD, at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, in July 1979, eighteen months before he became president...
...She mentions them, of course, but when she does it is usually to suggest that they had created problems that more statesmanlike men had to solve...
...Certainly there is abundant evidence he was a true believer, and that a missile defense was as important to him as was his desire to bury the Soviet Union...
...As intelligent and graceful a writer as she may be, Ms...
...Way Out There in the Blue is subtitled "Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War," and as Ms...
...Reagan, Ms...
...Therefore in the 6 NORAD scenario Reagan becomes the ~ 76 May 2 o o o The American Spectator hero who discovers his mission...
...But by "Northeast city people," Ms...
...were poisonous throughout Reagan's presidency...
...down, intercept, or otherwise destroy an incoming enemy missile is always said to be just around the corner, but it never quite arrives, even though, between 1983 and the fall of 1999, the U.S...
...they also published articles on the advisability of conducting a nuclear first strike...
...FitzGerald may be straining here-the NORAD dwarves, after all, were on our side--but she is an imaginative thinker, and she wants to find meaning...
...Both thought of themselves as rugged individualists standing up to the dark powers of collectivism, and both thought their enemies were slippery and evasive, and probably intellectuals, too, while they themselves were distinguished by their honesty and plain-speaking~ In other words, you could hardly imagine either of them ever voting for a liberal Democrat, and when they looked for someone just like themselves, Reagan became their man...
...spent some $60 billion on anti-missile research...
...They Still Can't Touch Him Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War Frances FitzGerald Simon & Schuster / 592 pages / $30 R E V I E W E D BY John Curry I n the last sentence, the very last sentence, of Way Out There in the Blue, Frances FitzGerald considers the most recent effort to deploy a national missile defense, and arrives at a mournful conclusion: "As always for the Republican right, the goal was weapons in space-that is, weapons, which, if they materialized, could contribute to an offense, as well as provide a defense for the United States...
...Meanwhile Ms...
...FitzGerald delightedly points out, the technology needed to shoot As intelligent and graceful a writer as she may be, FitzGerald still shows she is nursing a grudge...
...Red Star said the FBI was connected to the death of a schoolgirl on a peace crusade...
...And yes, reports that the Pentagon wondered whether it could fight a protracted nuclear war probably did make Moscow nervous...
...The command center deep in Cheyenne Mountain, for example, recalls the caves of the Nibelungen in Wagner's Ring and the caves in Norse c~ mythology where the dwarves forged magical weapons...
...FitzGerald, however, misses much of this...
...Consequently when Way Out There in the Blue describes the Cold War and how it ended, the description gets skewed...
...But the people who thought of the 198o's that way were the people like herself, and not those other Americans, about whom she feels some disdain...
...Ms...
...He hit his marks, read his lines, and saw the world of the movies and the real world as one...
...He didn't appeal to Northeast city lomq Comfy is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...he spoke its language, and in the wake of the dispirited 197o's, he promised a national revival...
...Her eye is on Reagan and what she thinks of as his mistakes and malfeasances...
...FitzGerald, however, does not quite accept the NORAD scenario...
...And yes, American rightwingers did make irresponsible accusations, but Soviet charges against the U.S...
...Many others have also said this about him, of course, although Ms...
...FitzGerald extrapolates more deeply...
...Four years later, as president, Reagan announced his plan to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete...
...FitzGerald argues, fits into the Protestant evangelical tradition...
...The end-times were here, and Christ and his saints would soon fight the battle that would lead to Christ's 1,ooo-year reign on earth...
...FitzGerald seems to think it would be, for the United States to have these weapons, and if so, why...
...Moses received the tablets on a mountain...
...The SDI and anti-ballistic missile lobby will hate it...
...For all its merit, Way Out There in the Blue is still liberal high bourgeoisie...
...FitzGerald told the Washington Post in a pre-publication interview, she decided to write it because she had been baffled by Reagan...
...A seed was planted, and apparently then it grew...
...She notes that when he called the Soviet Union the "evil empire" he did it in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, and she says that to the conservative clergymen the phrase evil empire invoked "the whole eschatotogy of Armageddon...
...Even at the time," she writes, "the 198o's was not thought of as a period of national dedication, but rather as a time of false prosperity, indulgence and speculation, when even the most solid middle-class citizens dreamed of getting something for nothing...
...She also says the NORAD scenario has Biblical overtones...
...FitzGerald says, lived in effect on a sound stage...
...people like me," she said...
...FitzGerald did not mean the people in Flatbush or Queens...
...They went to visit theme parks rather than real places," she says, and were beguiled by the makebelieve...
...Both North Korea and Iran are now thought to be close to having the ability to launch ballistic missiles that could hit the United States...
...In 1987, the same year in which Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington, Izvestia said the CIA had been responsible for the Jonestown massacre...
...It twinkled with video displays and lights, and it looked the way command centers looked in the movies...
...FitzGerald never addresses the question directly in Way Out There in the Blue, but her book rests on the assumption that it is better for the U.S...
...I wanted to know what that was...
...The Army eventually said it had "high confidence" that 25 percent of the Patriot engagements had led to Scud kills, but then the General Accounting Office disputed even that...
...FitzGerald finds a connection between evangelical Protestantism and nineteenth-century populism that in time would lead to a connection between the radical rightwinger and the mythic American Everyman...
...Yes, many Europeans did demonstrate against the deployment of American intermediate-range missiles and in favor of a nuclear freeze, but the principal organizer of the demonstrations was the World Peace Council, a wholly owned Moscow subsidiary...
...Some things are understood...
...During the Gulf War, the Army's" Patriot missiles supposedly intercepted all the Iraqi Scuds they aimed at, and while blowing aside a Scud in the atmosphere and hitting a missile in space are two distinctly different operations, the Patriot's apparent success was seen as a boost for SDI...
...But it was never that, of course, and in subsequent evaluations of the Patriot's performance, even its supposed kill rate melted away...
...But he had an extraordinary connection to the deep mythology of America...
...Reagan was right and the liberals were wrong, and she really can't stand it...
...to disarm rather than arm, and placate rather than confront, and so she doesn't have to...
...The story goes that Reagan became alarmed when NORAD's commanding general told him the wondrous facility could track incoming Soviet mis, siles, but had no way to stop them...
...It seems they did not want a real president, but rather a man who would only play one...
...NORAD was an underground city, with a huge command center deep in the core of the mountain...
...She never hears that bell, either...
...His decision to embark on the largest peacetime military buildup in American history and his determination to reverse the Brezhnev Doctrine appear to be irrelevant...
...FitzGerald believes what she believes, and most of all she believes that when the Soviet Union wanted to end the Cold War, Ronald Reagan stood in the way...
...he is "Siegfried setting out to end the reign of the mischief-making dwarves and to restore the gods to their rightful place...
...She leans more to the idea, popular among the high bourgeoisie, that Reagan found his inspiration for Star Wars not at Cheyenne Mountain but in the movies, either the 194o Murder in the Air, or the 1966 Torn Curtain with Paul Newman...
...Reagan biographers, hagiographic and otherwise, have said the NORAD visit inspired his proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars...
...On the other hand, as she examines Reagan's appeal to those other Americans, she finds in the NORAD scenario the powerful myths that she thinks may have seduced them...
...FitzGerald seems unaware of it...
...It said that in most of the supposed kills, the Army could prove only that the Patriots had come close to the Scuds, not that they had destroyed them...
...For Reagan, Ms...
Vol. 33 • May 2000 • No. 4
