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>From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]:
From: Alex Constantine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Ronald Reagan - Actor, Airhead, or What?
Date: Friday, May 12, 2000 8:11 PM
BOOKSPublished Sunday, May 7, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Airhead, actor or achiever?
Ronald Reagan and his legacy of `Star Wars'
* Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and Star Wars and the End of the
Cold War. Frances Fitzgerald. Simon & Schuster. 592 pages. $30.
BY IKE SEAMANS
Dismissed even by his official biographer as an ``apparent airhead''
with ``encyclopedic ignorance,'' Ronald Reagan makes an easy target.
Even books written by former close associates (more than a dozen) call
the ex-president a simpleton, a puppet, a man totally unprepared and
detached from reality.
According to Donald Regan, a former chief of staff, Reagan rarely
worried about presidential burdens, because he'd been ``learning his
lines, composing his facial expression, and hitting his toe marks for
half a century.'' In short, he was ``just an actor.''
ALL THE PUTDOWNS
In case you've missed any of the other endless putdowns, Frances
Fitzgerald's exhaustive research for Way Out There in the Blue has found
them all. Fitzgerald is no Reagan fan, but the Pulitzer Prize winner
(Fire in the Lake) concludes the man was no dope, and anyone who
believes differently really hasn't studied closely enough his life and
career. While she gives many examples of Reagan's detachment on the job
and how he left the details and frequently the decisions to others,
Fitzgerald writes that Reagan was the quintessential homespun Everyman,
rooted in 19th Century Protestant beliefs of national greatness; someone
with whom people could quickly and easily identify; a great storyteller
and superb speechwriter as well as performer once he found something
close to his heart.
Fitzgerald writes that the proof of Reagan's success was his ability to
restore national morale even while the achievements of his
administration seemed elusive. To make her point, Fitzgerald casts what
she calls a ``magnifying glass'' on Reagan's pet program and perhaps his
legacy: the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, or ``Star Wars.''
What other president, Fitzgerald argues, could persuade the country it
desperately needed something that did not and could not exist in the
foreseeable future: an umbrella-like shield of space-based weapons to
ward off destruction from Soviet missiles? ``SDI was surely Reagan's
greatest triumph as an actor-storyteller,'' she writes.
Reagan announced SDI in March 1983, just a few weeks after he had called
the Soviet Union the ``Evil Empire'' in an Orlando speech.
The concept was promptly rejected as unworkable science fiction by most
experts, including many within the administration, but SDI became
Reagan's greatest sales job when the public overwhelmingly endorsed it.
It also led to four ground-breaking summit meetings with Soviet Premier
Gorbachev who tried and failed to get Reagan to discard the project, one
his financially strapped country could not match. Fitzgerald presents
arguments, pro and con, on whether this is what caused the Soviet
Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War. She does credit Reagan
with declaring its demise long before the experts dared to do so.
Ironically, many early opponents now support the SDI concept, which is
the subject of mushrooming scholarly studies and government research.
FILM INFLUENCES
Fitzgerald writes about a University of California professor who is
convinced Reagan was greatly influenced by a 1940 movie, Murder in the
Air, in which he played a secret agent protecting an ``Inertia
Projector,'' which could destroy all enemy aircraft and ``make the
United States invincible in war.''
And in Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, a 1966 film about the
development of an anti-missile system, secret agent Paul Newman
declares, ``we will produce a defensive weapon that will make all
nuclear weapons obsolete and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear
warfare,'' language almost identical to Reagan's when he announced SDI
in 1983.
Fitzgerald's book also provides a complicated behind-the-scenes look at
U.S.-Soviet relations at a dangerous time of summitry, arms control, the
Iran-Contra scandal, a president oblivious to White House in-fighting
among advisers and Cabinet members and the end of the Cold War.
Fitzgerald's apparent effort to include everything she knows (which is a
lot), sometimes makes this long, rambling but fascinating history
plodding.
Still, Way Out There in the Blue will fill gaps and provoke discussion
and controversy. But readers interested mainly in the psychohistory of
our most puzzling president should stick to the first few chapters, into
which most of the juicy stuff is crammed.
Ike Seamans is senior correspondent for WTVJ-NBC 6.
Contact Us
Copyright 2000 Miami Heral
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