Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself.
The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him.
The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day.
Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.
FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended.
Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.
Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself.
The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him.
The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day.
Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.
FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended.
Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.
Way out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
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Overview
Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself.
The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him.
The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day.
Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.
FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended.
Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743203777 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2001 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| File size: | 810 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: The American Everyman
On March 23, 1983, President Reagan announced that after consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff he had decided to embark on a long-range research-and-development effort to counter the threat of Soviet ballistic missiles and to make these nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The announcement, made in an insert into a routine defense speech, came as a surprise to everyone in Washington except for a handful of White House aides. The insert had not been cleared with the Pentagon, and although Reagan was proposing to overturn the doctrine which had ruled U.S. nuclear strategy for more than three decades, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state were informed only a day or so before the speech was broadcast.
In background briefings White House aides explained that the research effort would be directed towards producing space-borne laser and particle-beam weapons with the potential to provide a reliable defense for the entire United States. Most of the scientists and defense experts invited to the White House for dinner that evening expressed incredulity: the technologies were so futuristic they would not be ready for decades, if then, and the cost of an all-out development effort would be staggering. Some further objected that any effort to develop an anti-ballistic missile capability would lead to a new and more dangerous form of arms race with the Soviet Union.
Reagan's proposal was so vague and so speculative that it was not taken altogether seriously at the time. Press attention soon shifted away from it and did not fully return until March 1985, when the administration launched the Strategic Defense Initiative with fanfare and asked the Congress to appropriate twenty-six billion dollars for it over the next five years.
At this point the debate over anti-missile defenses began in earnest, and journalists for the first time inquired about the origins of the proposal that Reagan had made so abruptly two years before. The President maintained that the idea was his to begin with, but said nothing more about it. However, Martin Anderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution and a former Reagan aide for domestic policy, told journalists that the idea had first come to Reagan during a visit to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) that he had made at the beginning of his presidential campaign in July 1979. In his book Revolution, published in 1988, Anderson described that visit at some length. His account subsequently became embedded in the history of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Journalists, academics and official SDI historians have all quoted it in more or less detail -- and small wonder, for it is a marvelous story. To paraphrase Anderson's text, it is this:
On July 31, 1979, Anderson accompanied Reagan from Los Angeles to the NORAD base in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The visit had been arranged by a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, Douglas Morrow, whom Reagan had known for some years, and Morrow came along on the trip. NORAD, Anderson explains, "is the nerve center of a far-flung, world-wide network of radar detectors that alerts us to any surprise attack." Its computers, he writes, would track a Soviet missile from its launch pad and give the President the facts he would have to rely on in deciding whether to launch a retaliatory strike. As for the command post, it is "a vast underground city, a multi-level maze of rooms and corridors carved deep into the solid granite core of Cheyenne Mountain," with "a massive steel door several feet thick." Once inside these portals, the visitors spent most of the day in a series of windowless conference rooms listening to briefings on the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union and on the means for detecting a nuclear attack. Towards the end of the day they were ushered into the command center, "a very large room several stories high," which looked "just like such command centers do in the movies." A huge display screen with an outline map of the United States covered one end of the room, and in front of it, facing video display screens with dozens of switches and lights, were "the young men and women who constantly monitor these displays for the first sign of a nuclear attack." Later the visitors talked with the base commander, General James Hill, and the discussion turned to the issue of what could be done if the Soviets fired just one missile at an American city. Hill replied that they could track the missile but that nothing could be done to stop it.
On the flight home to Los Angeles, Reagan, according to Anderson, seemed deeply concerned about what he had heard. "He couldn't believe the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles. He slowly shook his head and said, 'We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.'" Towards the end of the flight he reflected on the terrible dilemma that would face a U.S. president if, for whatever reason, nuclear missiles were fired at the United States and concluded, "We should have some way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles."
Anderson then reminded Reagan of "the ABM debate that occurred early in President Nixon's first term of office, of how we pursued the idea of missile defense and then, inexplicably, abandoned it." He suggested that they look at "what technological advances had developed" and reexamine the idea. Reagan agreed, and a few days later Anderson, with the permission of the campaign manager, John Sears, wrote a memo on the broad issues of defense and foreign policy. In it he included a section proposing the development of a "protective missile system," arguing that "the idea is probably fundamentally far more appealing to the American people than the questionable satisfaction of knowing that those who initiated an attack against us were also blown away," and that "there have apparently been striking advances in missile technology during the past decade or so that would make such a system technically possible."
According to Anderson, Reagan embraced the idea wholeheartedly, and so did a number of his key campaign advisers. However, Reagan's political advisers vetoed the proposal on the grounds that "there was no way Reagan could discuss radical changes in traditional nuclear weapons policy without leaving himself wide open to demagogic attacks from his Democratic opponent." The idea was then shelved, but, as Anderson tells us, only temporarily.
This story of Reagan's epiphany on Cheyenne Mountain is perfectly good history: General James Hill has confirmed the basic facts, and Reagan himself referred to his NORAD visit in an interview six months later when talking about the need for a defense against nuclear missiles. At the same time it must be regarded as something more than history. There is, after all, a high narrative gloss to the story, and in confirming it General Hill suggested that it had been somewhat dramatized. Though life may well have been imitating art, the story sounds very much like the allegorical stories Reagan habitually told to illustrate the meaning and moral of an action. Because it first appeared in public long after Reagan's 1983 speech, it has always been understood in light of that speech, and as a reflection upon his exhortation to the scientific community to make "nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." In a sense it is a myth of origins.
Of course, looked at in a certain way, the story is pure comedy. To read it literally, Reagan did not understand that the U.S. relied on deterrence until eighteen months before becoming President of the United States. Taken to NORAD by a Hollywood screenwriter, he discovered to his amazement that ballistic missiles could not be stopped in mid-flight. While in the grip of this revelation, he was told by an economist from the Hoover Institution -- and one of the architects of Reaganomics -- that there might be a way to stop them. Then the economist, who apparently did not know why Nixon and his successors failed to pursue the idea of missile defenses, went off and wrote a memo proposing that the candidate call for a change in the entire strategic posture of the United States. Reagan was thrilled, and had it not been for his political advisers, he might have gone along with the idea -- and possibly lost the election.
Though the story would seem to show that a supply-side economist was the brains behind SDI, there is another possible author of SDI in the story: the Hollywood screenwriter, whom Anderson inexplicably abandons as a character early on in the narrative. Could the screenwriter have orchestrated the whole drama of Reagan's conversion and suggested the solution without Anderson's actually knowing it? Doubtless not. All the same, his presence in the narrative, and Anderson's observation that the NORAD command center looked like a movie set, seemed to lend credence to the theory held by a number of journalists and academics that Reagan took his missile-defense idea from a science-fiction film.
When Reagan announced his initiative in March 1983, the project was immediately dubbed "Star Wars" in the press. The title was a reflection not merely on the improbability of making nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete," but on the fact that Reagan in a speech just two weeks before had spoken of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire," and commentators were still joking about "the Darth Vader speech." Yet those who later maintained that Reagan took his inspiration for SDI from the movies were not joking at all.
In the mid-eighties Dr. Michael Rogin, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, published a series of scholarly papers making a case that Reagan's thinking was profoundly influenced by the movies he had starred in. The thesis seemed plausible to journalists covering Reagan, for by then many of them had noticed that Reagan took some of his best material from the screen. For one thing, he had a habit of quoting lines from the movies without attribution. For example, his famous retort to George Bush during the primary debate in Nashua, New Hampshire, "I'm paying for this microphone," came from a film called State of the Union. For another thing, he sometimes described movie scenes as if they had happened in real life. Speaking to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in December 1983, he told a World War II story of a B-17 captain whose plane had been hit and who was unable to drag his wounded young ball-turret gunner out of the turret; instead of parachuting to safety with the rest of the crew, the captain took the frightened boy's hand and said, "Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together." Reagan concluded by telling the society that the captain had been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. But no such person existed: the story came from the 1946 movie A Wing and a Prayer. Within a month of this event Reagan told the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that the roots of his concern for Israel could be traced back to World War II, when he, as a Signal Corps photographer, had filmed the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Reagan, however, did not leave California during World War II; he had apparently seen a documentary about the camps.
While screening some of Reagan's own films one day, Dr. Rogin came across a 1940 Warner Brothers spy movie called Murder in the Air in which Reagan had played an American secret agent charged with protecting a newly invented superweapon, the "Inertia Projector," capable of paralyzing electrical currents and destroying all enemy planes in the air. In the film a Navy admiral claims that the weapon "not only makes the United States invincible in war, but, in doing so, promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered." Rogin thought it obvious that this film had influenced Reagan's thinking about missile defenses. But there was another candidate: Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, a 1966 film which revolves around an attempt to develop an anti-missile missile. In it an American agent played by Paul Newman declares, "We will produce a defensive weapon that will make all nuclear weapons obsolete, and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear warfare." Reagan's own aides were struck by the similarity of the language to that of Reagan's speech.
Historians of SDI have referred to these films as possible sources of Reagan's inspiration. Yet in retelling the Anderson story they pass over the movie references in it, and they pay small attention to the role of Anderson himself. The story as they tell it focuses on Reagan's epiphany about ballistic missiles and his resolve to end the existential tragedy of the balance of terror. This is, of course, the dramatic centerpiece of Anderson's narrative, and, read with or without irony, it is a great story in itself. It is in fact the perfect complement to the SDI speech, and to read it without irony, as most SDI historians have, is to see that it has a very rich symbolic content. But, then, the same is certainly true of the speech.
A year or so after Dr. Rogin discovered "the Inertia Projector," Professor G. Simon Harak of Fairfield University in Connecticut examined the SDI speech from a theological point of view. In an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, he asked why it was that Americans had become so enthralled with Reagan's vision of SDI in spite of all the evidence that a perfect defensive shield was currently beyond the reach of science. The answer, he maintained, lay in the way in which Reagan had laid claim to the soteriology, or the salvation doctrine, of the American civil religion.
In his speech Reagan had said, "I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." With this sentence, Harak writes, Reagan assumed the role of a prophet: he implicitly reproved the scientists for creating the Bomb in the first place and called upon them to redo their work. In reproving them thus he seemed to be identifying them -- as they sometimes did themselves -- with the "smiths" of mythology. Not only in the Norse myths but in other mythological traditions the "smiths" were at once feared and venerated because of their mastery over fire and metal; further, they were often portrayed as having their own agenda -- as opposed to the master plan of the gods -- and in a very human fashion creating mischief, or loosing disorder upon the world. Thus, in calling upon the "smiths" to redo their work, Reagan was asking for an act of redemptive reconstruction: the scientists were to restore the time of harmony and innocence before they had interfered with the God-given order of the world.
In the American context, Harak continues, the "smiths" are not just being asked to make up for their mischief in creating the Bomb; they are being asked to restore America to the time before it became vulnerable to nuclear annihilation: the time before the Bomb. In the American civil religion, he writes, America is seen as "the virgin land," protected by two oceans and innocent of the corruptions of the Old World; it is also seen as a nation guided by divine Providence with the mission of bringing light to the world. That foreigners had the ability to attack America from the skies was in itself a pollution of this Eden. By calling for a defense that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," Reagan was, Harak writes, holding out the promise that America might once again become an invulnerable sanctuary, its sacred soil inviolate, as it was in the mythic past; then the nation, unsullied, could once again undertake its divinely ordained mission to the world. "My fellow Americans," Reagan said in peroration, "tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history."
Harak's analysis may seem a bit farfetched, drawn as it is from two sentences in the SDI speech. Yet Reagan later spoke quite often of his desire to create a "space shield" or a "roof" over the United States, and his speeches were often filled with the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. As President he repeatedly affirmed that a "divine plan" put the American continent between two oceans, where people who "had a special love of freedom" could come and create "something new in the history of mankind." Americans were God's chosen people, and, according to Reagan, they had a purpose. Celebrating the anniversary of the Constitution in 1987, Reagan said: "The guiding hand of providence did not create this new nation of America for ourselves alone, but for a higher cause: the preservation and extension of the sacred fire of human liberty. This is America's solemn duty."
The nation, Reagan insisted, had to be a model to mankind, "a beacon of hope, a shining city," with "a creed, a cause, a vision." On dozens of occasions Reagan concluded speeches with John Winthrop's image of the country as a "city on a hill" (or a "shining city," as Reagan preferred it) and with Tom Paine's words, "We have it within our power to begin the world all over again." But Reagan, unlike Paine, was not calling for something new under the sun; rather, he was asking for a "spiritual revival" or a "moral renewal" or a "rebuilding" of America, "the land of our dreams and mankind's great hope." Our need, he declared in his 1981 inaugural address, was "to renew ourselves here in our own land" so that we would again "be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom." This was much the same message Harak drew from the SDI speech: at once nostalgic and forward-looking, at once isolationist and internationalist.
Of course, many of those who listened to Reagan's patriotic pieties did not actually hear them, so perfectly liturgical were they. American exceptionalism had Puritan roots -- in the conception of the country as a covenanted New Israel -- but it was in its complete form a secularized, or, rather, a deicized version of nineteenth-century Protestant beliefs about spiritual rebirth, reform and evangelism. Since the mid-nineteenth century these pieties had been a staple of American civic rhetoric, not only in the political arena but in every setting where patriotism might be invoked. The admiral in Murder in the Air and the American agent played by Paul Newman in Torn Curtain delivered the message of American exceptionalism as well as any Rotary Club chairman in speaking of the purpose of their superweapons. Yet in the 1960s and '70s there had been some faltering in the incantation of this national mythology. American exceptionalism was challenged from the left, and, in the wake of the Vietnam debacle, domestic unrest and Watergate, Presidents Nixon and Ford found it difficult to use the rhetoric in any convincing fashion. Henry Kissinger did not believe in it, and Jimmy Carter, possibly because he was a devout Southern Baptist, tended to speak of what required redemption and renewal rather than of renewal, period. By the late 1970s many Americans seemed actively to crave such rhetoric -- a surge in the membership of conservative evangelical churches was one evidence of this -- and Reagan, who had never stopped speaking of American goodness, gave it to them like a diligent pastor. For the country Reagan's rhetoric was a ceremony that recalled the golden age of economic prosperity and military success before Vietnam, Watergate, civil disturbances, the oil shock, the hostage crisis and other disorders.
Though some associated him only with Hollywood, Reagan was in fact supremely well equipped to preach this national revival. His mother, Nelle, became a convert to born-again Christianity at the turn of the century, and until he left college he was thoroughly immersed in his mother's evangelical church. In later life he was far from a consistent churchgoer, but that in a sense was an advantage: the civil religion cannot be confused with any particular religion or it ceases to be national, and, as Jimmy Carter discovered to his dismay, it does not include all aspects of the Christian message in secular form. Yet it includes more than one, and Reagan had a range of expression quite exceptional among politicians of the 1980s.
In all the levity about Star Wars that followed a speech he gave on March 8, 1983, when he called the Soviet Union the "evil empire," it was generally forgotten that Reagan was talking to the National Association of Evangelicals, and that, as the clergymen understood him, he was speaking about evil. This was not the first time he had applied the word to the Soviet Union. In a speech at West Point in May 1981, for example, he had referred to the assembled cadets as a "chain holding back an evil force." Yet the phrase "evil empire" had a much more precise theological significance. To conservative evangelicals, such as those in his audience, the phrase would trip-wire the whole eschatology of Armageddon. According to fundamentalist doctrine, derived from the Book of Ezekiel, the Book of Revelations and other sources, the evil empire will appear in the end-times under the leadership of the Anti-Christ; after a seven-year period of tribulations, Christ and his saints will fight the evil empire and confederated nations in a great battle on the field of Armageddon in Israel, and their victory will usher in the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. The evangelical clergymen would not have been surprised that Reagan identified the Soviet Union as that empire, for ever since the Bolshevik revolution, fundamentalists had identified Russia as the Biblical "Ros," where the Beast would appear.
To look at the Anderson story about Reagan on Cheyenne Mountain in the light of Harak's analysis of the SDI speech is to see a story that resonates with Biblical and mythological overtones. In that story Reagan can be seen as the innocent, the American Everyman who on the eve of his election must undergo initiation into the terrible secrets of power. Led into the "granite core" of a mountain -- into the innermost sanctum of esoteric knowledge -- he looks for the first time upon the horror that scientists and their masters have created for the country and for humankind. But then, rather than to accept initiation into the guardianship of this horror, as his predecessors have done, Reagan cuts through the arcane and dangerous knowledge with pure common sense and vows to deliver his people from impending doom. Anderson, his guide -- his guardian angel or his Merlin -- then shows him the road he must travel.
The Anderson story -- or perhaps it is the Reagan story in that Reagan performed it for him -- recalls a host of other stories, including some of the most powerful ones in the culture. It recalls, for example, "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which the adults are so blinded by deference to authority and their own hypocrisy that only the child, the innocent, can see the truth. The NORAD command center in the core of the mountain recalls the caves of the Nibelungen in Wagner's Ring and the caves of Norse mythology, where the dwarves, the "smiths," forge magical weapons: swords and spears which can never be broken and never miss their mark. In this setting the story is clearly that of the birth of the hero, or the moment when the pure youth receives his mission and sets forth on the difficult and dangerous quest. Here Reagan becomes Siegfried setting out to end the reign of the mischief-making dwarves and to restore the gods to their rightful place, bringing order once again to the world. Then, too, the story recalls a number of Biblical narratives about prophetic epiphanies and the banishment of scholastics and apostates, among them the story of Moses going up on a mountain to receive the tablets and descending to destroy the golden idol. It recalls Jesus's simple response when the Scribes and the Pharisees spoke to him of tradition; and it suggests the story of the temptation of Christ, in which the devil takes Jesus up on a mountain and offers him all the kingdoms of the world in return for the acknowledgment of his authority.
Of all these stories, the New Testament narratives may be the most relevant, in that they have some very specific reverberations in the American tradition.
At least until the twentieth century, most American Protestants, from the Puritans on down, saw the Roman Catholic church as a vast, sinister institution, whose rites were conducted in an arcane language and whose priestly hierarchy interposed papal authority and scholastic tradition between the believer and his God. Identifying themselves with the early Christians, they called for the restoration of a simple, democratic church, whose sole authority was the Biblical word of God, and whose Scriptures were an open book, available to all. Evangelical Protestantism, which sprang out of the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and '30s, went a good deal further than Calvinism down this egalitarian, anti-institutional and anti-intellectual track. For evangelicals the emphasis was -- and is -- on the direct experience of Christ rather than on knowledge of doctrine or ritual practice, and on the individual rather than on the body of the church. Whether the evolution of American democracy in the nineteenth century created this particular form of Protestantism or vice versa, the same basic attitudes existed in the popular political movements of the period. The Populists, to pick just one example, tended to regard the financial centers of the Eastern Seaboard in much the same way that evangelicals regarded the Roman Catholic church. In secular as well as sacred contexts the primary conflict of American society was understood to be that of Christ versus the Scribes and the Pharisees, the pure and the innocent versus the worldly and corrupt, the plain people versus the cosmopolitan elite with its esoteric knowledge. Of course, by the early twentieth century urbanites regarded the Populists and fundamentalist evangelicals -- the two united in the person of William Jennings Bryan -- as provincial and backward-looking, as people left behind by the complex transactions of an industrializing society. Yet these "provincials" stood for the virtues still generally thought to be most quintessentially American: anti-elitism, distrust of the experts, a belief in democratic values, in plain speaking and common sense. It was they who created the American Everyman -- or the part Reagan played in the Anderson story.
What all of this suggests is that the Martin Anderson story could stand as a synecdoche not merely for the appeal of SDI but for the appeal of Reagan himself. Certainly it is difficult to think of another politician who could have fit the role assigned to him so well. Anderson, an ardent supporter, spoke of Reagan as clear-sighted and steadfast -- as a leader who could cut through the thickets of conventional wisdom with a simple truth. Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House and Reagan's favorite antagonist, saw him, by contrast, as stubborn, simple-minded and ignorant of the world. Yet the difference between the two perspectives was merely the difference between the two paradigmatic views of American populism. Supporters and critics alike would agree on the character he projected, both as an actor and as a president. In his fine book on the Reagan presidency, Lou Cannon, the journalist who knew Reagan the best, described it thus:
Reagan was Illinois come to California. He was the wholesome citizen-hero who inhabits our democratic imaginations, an Everyman who was slow to anger but willing to fight for the right and correct wrongdoing when aroused. It was a role in a movie -- personified by Reagan's friend Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- in which homespun American virtue prevails over the wily and devious "special interests" that rule that nation's capital.
Throughout his political career, Reagan presented himself as a citizen-politician: an amateur who ran for office to restore common sense and common decency to a government which had grown too big, too complex and too far removed from the concerns of average Americans. There was always a populist and anti-intellectual theme to his rhetoric. The solution to the crime problem, he once said, "will not be found in the social worker's files, the psychiatrist's notes or the bureaucrat's budget. It is a problem of the human heart...." And, as Cannon writes, Reagan evoked the image of Cincinnatus, the Roman general who left his farm to lead the besieged armies of his nation to victory and then returned to the plow.
Of course, as Tip O'Neill might have pointed out, Reagan and the role he played were not always the same thing. This "Mr. Smith" had, after all, spent half of his working life as an actor-celebrity and the other half as a professional politician. This "populist" often suggested that, with all the employment ads he saw in the newspapers, there was no reason for anyone to be unemployed or poor. This "Cincinnatus" did not go home for twenty-two years after first taking office, and when he did, it was not to a farm but to a three-million-dollar house in Bel Air. But, then, the Anderson story had a certain theatrical quality to it.
The drama of the story resides in the notion that Reagan had never actually contemplated the fact of American vulnerability to nuclear weapons before his visit to Cheyenne Mountain. This was plausible enough. Both those who saw him as Mr. Smith and those who thought of him as a bubble-headed actor could imagine that he never really had grasped this fact of life before. In actuality Reagan had been preaching the horrors of deterrence for some years before he visited the NORAD base. Addressing the Republican National Convention in 1976, he told the delegates: "We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in each other's country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in."
During his 1976 campaign for the Republican nomination Reagan often made the point that nuclear deterrence was like "two men pointing cocked and loaded pistols at each other's heads." Then, in a 1978 radio broadcast, he said, "If the Soviets push the button, there is no defense against them, no way to prevent the nuclear destruction of their targets in the United States." Even Mr. Smith could not have forgotten so basic a truth from one year to the next, and Reagan had, as it happened, a very good memory for the anecdotes and striking phrases that he himself had used before. Therefore, either Reagan reenacted the drama of his epiphany for Anderson, or Anderson, who certainly knew what Reagan felt about deterrence, used a bit more poetic license than historians generally consider legitimate.
Remarkably, however, the SDI historians who retell the story do not, with one exception, comment upon this piece of theatrics, even though several of them, including Anderson himself, also quote Reagan's previous remarks about the threat of nuclear weapons. But, then, no one ever took Reagan to task for being a professional politician rather than the amateur he played.
The explanation surely has to do with the power of a good story and the power of Reagan as an actor-narrator. Reagan was a simple person in the sense that he believed in simple ideas ("There are simple answers, just not easy ones," he liked to say), but he was not simple in the sense of being transparent. Reagan was not Mr. Smith. Yet he played Mr. Smith rather better than a real Mr. Smith might have played himself in front of cameras and a national audience. "Be yourself" is after all a command that only actors can respond to -- and they do it by impersonating themselves. As Laurence Olivier has said, the art of mimesis consists in seizing upon certain recognizable characteristics and exaggerating them slightly, as opposed to copying all the overtones and subtle shadings that actually exist in life. Truth to an audience lies in some slight degree of caricature.
All actors and all stories leave something to the imagination and lend themselves to more than one interpretation. In the Anderson story Reagan was playing a scene, not explaining precisely what was going through his mind. Left to the imagination is how Reagan conceived of a defense against nuclear missiles in July 1979. In light of the SDI speech, the account of Reagan's epiphany with all of its mythical and Biblical overtones would seem to suggest that Reagan always thought of an ABM defense as a way to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons. Yet this cannot be established as a fact from the story, nor can it be established from Reagan's speeches attacking deterrence. When Reagan compared the U.S. and the Soviet Union to two men with pistols pointed at each other's heads, he never proffered an alternative. In an ideal world, would both men be disarmed -- or only one of them? Reagan's conservative supporters thought they knew what the answer was. Certainly they never thought of Reagan as a nuclear abolitionist or a closet one-worlder. Indeed, when during his second term as president he proposed the elimination of all nuclear weapons and embraced Gorbachev in Moscow, they claimed that he had changed, that he had abandoned all of his old principles. Possibly they were right, for Reagan did assume different roles. He did not always play Mr. Smith, the part was scripted for him when he began his political career in the 1966 campaign for the governorship of California. Before that he played a somewhat different character.
In 1954, with his movie career almost at an end, Reagan signed on with General Electric to be the host of a GE-sponsored television series and to make appearances around the country on behalf of the company. He stayed with the job for eight years. For the first couple of years, he spoke at GE plants, entertaining workers with stories of his experiences in Hollywood. Proving a popular speaker, he was sent out to Chambers of Commerce and other civic groups, and as time went on, his speeches grew more substantive. They also grew more and more right-wing. By the late fifties, he was denouncing all the New Deal measures still extant, from rural electrification to Social Security, and warning of the imminent demise of the free-market system. The Eisenhower administrations were hardly unfriendly to business, and yet Reagan grew more and more alarmist about the threat of creeping socialism. He took to calling the graduated income tax "this progressive system spawned by Karl Marx and declared by him to be the prime essential of a socialist state." In his 1965 memoir Reagan explained that his speeches "underwent a kind of evolution, reflecting not only my changing philosophy but also the swiftly rising tide of collectivism that threatens to inundate what remains of our free economy."
At the time, Reagan was not generally thought of as an expert on the political economy, so to give authority to his argument he studded his speeches with statistics and scraps of information gleaned from newspapers, right-wing periodicals, conversations and fan mail. According to Reagan, the Federal Power Commission once handed natural-gas producers a 428-page questionnaire that would require seventy thousand accountant man-hours to fill out; U.S. foreign aid paid for the construction of a model stock farm in Lebanon with nine stalls for each bull; a Washington bureaucrat, whose job was to initial documents and pass them on to the proper agency, once initialed a document he wasn't supposed to have read and twenty-four hours later was made to erase the initials and initial the erasure. When Reagan spoke about Communism, he would begin by describing his efforts to defeat a vast Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood when he was on the board of the Screen Actors Guild in the late forties. With his credentials thus established, he would go on to speak in apocalyptic terms about the global Communist threat. Addressing the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce in 1961, Reagan declared, "Wars end in victory or defeat. One of the foremost authorities on communism in the world today has said we have ten years. Not ten years to make up our minds, but ten years to win or lose -- by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free."
The version of the standard speech he included in his 1965 memoir is perhaps the most eloquent. In the introduction, Reagan struck the theme that would unify the long address. Americans, he said, were faced with the choice of going up towards freedom or down into "the ant heap of totalitarianism," and he warned: "Already the hour is late. Government has laid its hand on health, housing, farming, industry, commerce, education, and to an ever-increasing degree interferes with the people's right to know." Reagan then made his way through a mass of statistics on wasteful federal spending on farm subsidies, urban renewal, welfare, youth programs, and Social Security, stopping from time to time to tell anecdotes about bumbling bureaucrats.
Towards the end of the speech he turned to the subject of international Communism. "We are faced," he said, "with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars." Having figured Communism as the devil (though in the context of Darwinian evolution), he went on to suggest that American liberals were making a pact with him because of their policy of accommodation, which was appeasement. And he said: "We are being asked to buy our safety from the threat of the Bomb by selling into permanent slavery our fellow human beings enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. To tell them to give up their hope of freedom because we are ready to make a deal with their slave masters."
Though Reagan did not actually counsel an attack on the Soviet Union, he asked whether those Americans who believed it was better to be red than dead thought there was anything worth dying for: "Should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery rather than dare the wilderness? Should Christ have refused the Cross? Should the patriots at Concord bridge have refused to fire the shot heard round the world?"
Americans, he concluded, had the choice of preserving "the last best hope of man on earth" or of sentencing their children to take the first step "into a thousand years of darkness."
The year after Reagan published this speech in his memoir, he was running for the governorship of California with the backing of a number of wealthy Los Angeles businessmen anxious to unify the California Republican Party after the Goldwater-Rockefeller split of 1964. Under the tutelage of Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts, the political consultants who had worked for Rockefeller, Reagan ran a mainstream campaign. Early on, Spencer and Roberts confronted Reagan with the fact that he was facing Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, one of the most experienced and knowledgeable politicians in the state. It would therefore be unwise for Reagan to claim authority via his usual array of factoids and unsourced statistics. Reagan, they said, should play to his strength and campaign as a "citizen politician," as a "Joe Doakes running for office," as someone who shared the average voter's sense of alienation from professional politicians. And Reagan did just that. The right-winger metamorphosed into the bland Mr. Smith.
The transformation was achieved more easily than might be imagined. On the one hand, Reagan took direction very well; on the other, there was far less distance between the American Everyman -- particularly in the form of Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith -- and the quintessential fluoride-in-the-water right-wing crackpot than most Americans have ever wanted to admit.
In the late fifties and early sixties a group of distinguished American scholars, including Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell, wrote a series of ground-breaking studies on the radical right of the period: the McCarthyites, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. One of Hofstadter's contributions was his marvelous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
In the essay Hofstadter begins by explaining that he is using the term "paranoid style" in much the same way that an art historian would speak of mannerism or the baroque. He goes on to describe the salient characteristics of the style -- and much of his description would loosely apply to Reagan's rhetoric of the early sixties. The central image, he writes, is that of a vast, sinister conspiracy, a gigantic yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion by forces of almost demonic power. The paranoid spokesman claims to know what others do not yet know, and sees himself as the center of an apocalyptic drama. "He is," Hofstadter writes, "always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days."
Though these apocalyptic warnings run close to hopeless pessimism, Hofstadter continues, they usually stop just short of it, their function being much the same as the description of the consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon. The paranoid spokesman sees the world as a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil; thus social conflict is not something to be mediated or compromised; only total victory will do. He is obsessed by one subject. His particular enemy is the cause of all evil -- not just some of the evils of the world, but every one of them. The enemy is the perfect model of malign intent, and yet, possibly because the enemy is a projection of self, the paranoid spokesman tends to imitate its ways. If the enemy is Communism, his organization sets up secret cells; if the enemy is the cosmopolitan intellectual, he outdoes him in claims to elite knowledge and in the apparatus of scholarship.
The paranoid style, Hofstadter pointed out, was not confined to the American radical right of the 1950s and '60s. It was an international phenomenon, and examples of it could be found in many periods of history. In American history small explosions of it occurred in every decade from the founding of the Republic on. At the end of the eighteenth century, for example, at the time of the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, conservative Congregationalist divines, including the geographer Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, announced that the United States had become the object of a Jacobinical plot conceived by the Bavarian Illuminati, and that this anti-clerical conspiracy would soon overwhelm the forces of religion and order across the country if Americans were not roused. In the 1820s Protestants in rural upstate New York attacked the Masonic Order -- at that time a citadel of Enlightenment ideas -- as a sinister elite conspiracy against Christianity and republicanism, some identifying it as an engine of Satan and one of the confederate powers that would fight against Christ in the battle of Armageddon. During the 1830s and '40s nativist and anti-Catholic spokesmen spun fanciful tales of Jesuit priests, financed by the Catholic powers of Europe, infiltrating the country in deep disguise to subvert American freedom. There were a few paranoid spokesmen among the abolitionists and, later in the century, among Populist leaders, the latter imagining that an international cabal of gold traders was secretly plotting to undermine the economy and pauperize American farmers. The paranoid style, in other words, appeared within both reformist and reactionary movements of the nineteenth century and within groups that would be difficult to place on the spectrum of right to left.
Hofstadter finds important differences between nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists and those of the radical right in the 1960s, but his own account shows a relationship between them: a line of succession. What the nineteenth-century groups had in common was their close association with evangelical Protestantism. Most of them sprang from revival movements, and their "paranoid" rhetoric appeared side-by-side with new Adventist doctrines and new social- or moral-reform agendas. Many of the twentieth-century groups Hofstadter discusses, including the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, were closely associated with Protestant fundamentalism, and, like some of their nineteenth-century counterparts, were nativist and anti-Catholic. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Catholic, was an exception to this rule, and yet, elected in Protestant Wisconsin, he created a new and ecumenical form of nativism by labeling his opponents "un-American." To him, as to others of the radical right, Communism appeared in exactly the same dress as Catholicism had appeared to nineteenth-century nativist Protestants: as a vast international conspiracy with secret agents financed by foreign powers to subvert the Republic.
Like most nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists, the radical right-wingers of the fifties and early sixties were virulently anti-establishment and anti-intellectual. Though their economic program was far from egalitarian, they were engaged in a struggle against the cosmopolitan elite of the Eastern Seaboard, which, as they saw it, controlled Wall Street, the universities and the federal government. In this sense they could be called populists -- though theirs was a form of populism that would make itself right at home in Scottsdale or Palm Springs.
Given this genealogy, the connection between the radical right-winger and the mythic American Everyman with his homespun virtues becomes easier to see. Related by their common origins in evangelical Protestantism and nineteenth-century populism, they shared certain salient characteristics. Anti-intellectual and anti-elitist, they both saw themselves as representing the plain folk, the real Americans, whom they picture as rugged individualists standing up to corporatism and collectivism. Both thought themselves commonsensical, and their enemies caught up in esoteric, irrational systems of thought. The radical right-wing movements of the 1950s and '60s were distinguished by the ugliness of their temper. But if you took away their hostility and their elaborate, quasi-metaphysical theories, they might look very much like the party of Mr. Smith.
What most people seem to remember about Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is that it is the story of an endearingly naÏve young man who, appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate, runs afoul of corrupt special interests, stands up for principle and eventually wins. Those who remember a bit more about the movie remember that Mr. Smith, who comes from some unidentified Western state, is bewildered by the ways of the capital and horrified when he discovers that his fellow senator, Joseph Paine, has sold out to the political boss of the state for the sake of his own presidential aspirations. Paine, Smith discovers, has sponsored a bill providing for the construction of a dam that the boss will profit from through kickbacks. Smith knows this because he has just written a bill that would establish a national boys' camp on the proposed site of the dam. He objects. Paine, who has previously befriended Smith, takes his junior senator before the Senate Ethics Committee, claiming that Smith owns the land around the dam. The Ethics Committee, whose members have interests as murky as Paine's, charges Smith with conflict of interest and calls for his removal from the Senate. Smith asks the people of his state to support him and filibusters on the floor of the Senate for twenty-four hours until the letters of support can arrive. However, since the political boss owns all the newspapers and radio stations in the state, the journalists report that Smith is guilty of conflict of interest. Therefore, all the letters that come in condemn Smith. But then, just as Smith is about to collapse from fatigue and disappointment, Paine rushes onto the floor of the Senate and confesses that he, not Smith, is the guilty one.
Mr. Smith is about the virtuous individual versus the corrupt system, but there are a number of overlapping themes.
To begin with, Capra creates what must be the apotheosis of the American civil religion in film. The score is a medley of patriotic tunes -- "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "Yankee Doodle," "Taps," and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," among others -- plus a few sentimental favorites, such as "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" and "Auld Lang Syne." In his unidentified Western state, Mr. Jefferson Smith is said by the governor's children to be "the greatest hero...the greatest American we've ever had," though for reasons the film quickly passes over. Arriving in Washington, Smith neglects pressing business to tour the national shrines -- the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Vernon and so forth. The camera dwells on the statue of Lincoln, presenting him to Smith's eyes, and to ours, not as the great debater, politician and statesman, but as an icon, the graven image of a martyr or a god. In his filibuster Smith reads all the national scriptures -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address -- apparently for the edification of the other senators. Smith thus emerges with the mantle of pure patriotism swung about him, representing all that is good in the nation. In the end Senator Paine, abandoning his own selfish interests, rushes down the aisle of the Senate and flings himself on the low wooden railing in front of the dais. "I am not fit for office," he cries. Clearly he is making an act of contrition, or having a born-again experience, on the altar rail of the national church.
What is disturbing about this theme is the suggestion of Caesarism or Bonapartism, if not something worse, for in the course of the film it becomes clear that the problem is not simply that there is corruption in Smith's own state, but that all congressional politics are corrupt. Under the glorious capitol dome that Smith so venerates, there are a lot of cynical, small-minded men who, in corrupt solidarity with Paine, unjustly condemn the innocent Smith. However bumbling Smith is, and however much of an underdog, he is still in his own way a Siegfried among the scheming, deal-making dwarves. Charged with graft, he defends himself not by the legal route of proving that he does not own the land around the disputed site but by the demagogic tactic of calling upon the people of the state to attest to his virtue. This tactic does not succeed, because the boss and the political "machine" of the state tell the journalists what to write, and the people believe what they are told. Clearly the people are not responsible citizens, but a mob.
In addition there is the theme of nostalgia for a purer, more idealistic past. Senator Paine and Jefferson's father, Clayton Smith, had been friends in the old days, when Smith had run a crusading four-page newspaper and before Paine had sold out to the bosses (also, presumably, before he had acquired his transatlantic accent). Clayton Smith, who is said to be "the patron saint of lost causes," had taken up the case of a single miner against a mining syndicate and had paid for bucking the system with his life. Paine had found Smith slumped over a rolltop desk with a bullet in his head and his soft-brimmed hat still on him.
The third, and connecting, theme concerns the difference between boys and men: the boys are pure and idealistic and the men are cynical, powerful and corrupt. Smith, played by a very young Jimmy Stewart, is a hero to the children of his state because he is the head of an organization called "The Boy Rangers" and because he has helped put out a forest fire. When he gets to Washington -- arriving with a basket of white pigeons -- he behaves like a child, playing hooky amid the national monuments, and then like a shy adolescent in the face of Paine's sophisticated, conniving daughter. The only possible love interest for Smith in the film is his worldly, somewhat older, secretary, who teaches him the ways of the Senate and says she loves him "like a mother." The only friend Smith has in the Senate is a pageboy, and his only supporters are the boys of his state and, in the galleries of the Senate, a troop of boy scouts, or "Boy Rangers," who come to listen to his maiden speech proposing a national boys' camp. Childishly, Smith never asks himself whether the camp is a workable idea -- or whether the dam might not actually help the people of the state in spite of the graft. No, he is right and the men are wrong. "Either I'm right, or I'm crazy," he says. Confronting him with the political facts of life, Paine tells Smith, "You live in a boys' world. This is a world of men, and it's a brutal one." Later Smith, in defending his proposal for the camp, counters, "Men all start life being boys." In the end, when justice triumphs, it is the man, the surrogate father, Paine, who prostrates himself before the pure, innocent boy.
This last theme seems to beg for psychological interpretation, but, looking past that to the politics of the movie, Mr. Smith is clearly not the pragmatic republican that liberal historians have conjured up as the American Everyman. Indeed, given a different temperament, Mr. Smith might take his sense of victimization and create an explanatory structure around it having to do with the near-victory of demonic forces over the America he knows and loves. As it is, Smith sees himself as a lonely prophet, and the key figure in a national struggle of good versus evil. Like Hofstadter's paranoid spokesman, he believes that individuals, and indeed whole societies, can be transformed overnight from one to the other. Because he believes himself to be without self-interest, he cannot imagine that politics might be a negotiation between legitimate interest groups; and no matter how much he reads the Constitution, he cannot understand that human societies require checks and balances. He is a believer in natural harmony. He is, of course, an optimist, but so, too, in the final analysis, is the paranoid spokesman. In a sense the two are alter egos; there is something quite childish about both of them. The difference is that the first Mr. Smith remains wide-eyed and extroverted, whereas the second one retreats into the solitude of his own imagination and creates the model of a hostile world in which trains will crash and armies will be swept from the board -- unless he at the last moment intervenes to save them. Yet for both Smiths the world is controlled by powerful adults with whom it is impossible to negotiate.
Historically speaking, the connection between the two Mr. Smiths is nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism. Indeed, its two major eschatologies -- post-millennialism, or the belief that as a result of Christian zeal society will soon grow to such a state of perfection that Christ will return, and pre-millennialism, or the belief that society is falling into such sin and apostasy that Armageddon is nigh -- more or less mirror their contrasting temperaments.
What made Ronald Reagan exceptional as a politician in the 1980s is that he could speak the language of both the post- and the pre-millennial Mr. Smith. As if in homage to Capra, he often told stories about unsung American heroes -- ordinary people who by their moral courage and persistence had triumphed against all odds. He also liked to picture his antagonists, whether bureaucrats, liberals or professors, as a collection of faceless little men. Reagan always looked and sounded like the first Mr. Smith. Even in his seventies he had pink cheeks and a boyish charm about him that suggested modesty and goodness, and he was unfailingly optimistic. Yet sometimes, in a sweet and slightly bumbling manner, he would deliver the lines of the other Mr. Smith. He never stopped telling people that he knew the purposes of the Kremlin from his reading of Karl Marx, and like some earlier Cold War leaders, he sometimes came quite close to the paranoid style. For example, describing the purpose of American military aid to El Salvador in 1981, he said:
What we're doing...is [to] try to halt the infiltration into the Americas by terrorists, by outside interference and those who aren't just aiming at El Salvador but, I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America -- and, I'm sure, eventually North America. But this is what we're doing, is trying to stop this destabilizing force of terrorism and guerrilla warfare and revolution from being exported in here, backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba and those others that we've named.
Two years later the President revealed to a joint session of Congress the probable consequence of inaction in Central America: "If we cannot defend ourselves there, we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere. Our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy."
In the course of his career, Reagan veered back and forth several times between the two rhetorical styles, but at no time was his oscillation more abrupt or more radical than at the time of his SDI speech.
Reagan's March 23, 1983, speech is now generally thought of as his SDI speech, though only the last few paragraphs concern the initiative. The rest is what Washington journalists at the time called "the standard threat speech." In it Reagan painted an alarming picture of the Soviet military buildup, called for a sizable increase in spending for offensive weapons and in peroration asked Americans to choose wisely between the "hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger every day." This mini-jeremiad echoed the "evil-empire" speech he had made just two weeks before. Reagan then changed gears. He had, he said, been talking with the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the need "to break out of a future" that relied solely on nuclear retaliation. "Over the course of these discussions," he said, "I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence...Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?"
With hardly a paragraph of transition, Reagan had leapt from one form of millennial prophecy to another. No longer was the Beast slouching towards Armageddon, but the human spirit was rising towards heaven, and the enemy had disappeared. "We seek," he continued, "neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose -- one all people share -- is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war." In closing he declared, "My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history." Here the innocent, optimistic Mr. Smith was asking his countrymen to undertake their time-honored task of making the world all over again.
Still, Reagan's call for a defensive shield could be seen to complement his earlier call for more offensive weaponry. Both proposals, after all, offered technological rather than political solutions to the problem of the Cold War. Further, a shield can be used for offensive as well as defensive purposes. Reagan acknowledged this objection in his speech and answered it by promising to share SDI technology with the Soviet Union as well as with America's allies. The proposal was never taken seriously in Washington, much less Moscow, yet that was precisely what the American admiral in Murder in the Air and the Paul Newman character in Torn Curtain had proposed: their superweapons were going to make the United States invincible in war and then the great force for world peace. Movie audiences suspended disbelief, for to Americans it seemed perfectly plausible that the United States would disarm its enemy and then seek no advantage for itself.
The promise of an anti-missile shield was surely Reagan's most characteristic idea, for, being perfectly ambiguous, it had appeal for both Mr. Smiths: for the pre-millennialist who saw enemies advancing from all quarters and for the post-millennialist who believed that the human spirit could rise to an almost godlike state of disinterestedness. It was the ambiguity inherent in the idea which allowed Reagan to make the transition between a vision of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire," and a vision of world peace and disarmament. These perceptions seemed contradictory to many in his administration, but in the national liturgy they were merely a harmonic interval apart.
Though a defense shield might have been the conception of either the pre-millennial of the post-millennial Reagan, it was certainly that of Reagan the actor and storyteller. A perfect anti-ballistic missile defense was beyond the reach of technology. It was just a story, and yet to trust the polls, the idea had great popular appeal in the mid-eighties, and many Americans believed such a thing could be built. In that sense the Strategic Defense Initiative was Reagan's greatest triumph as an actor-storyteller. The fact that the program did not produce a single weapon only helped Reagan, for had it produced some sort of ABM system, the story with all of its mythic overtones would have given place to a piece of technology with a lot of practical difficulties attached. Politically at least, anti-missile defenses were better air than metal.
According to Cannon, President Reagan used to bridle when his movie career was mentioned in the press, for so often in the past his opponents had joked about his old movies and tried to dismiss him as "just an actor." (It was only in the last month of his presidency that he spoke of the link between his two careers, telling David Brinkley that he sometimes wondered how anyone could do the job who hadn't been an actor.) Similarly, Reagan was annoyed when his defense initiative was dubbed "Star Wars." Richard Perle, however, his brilliant young assistant secretary of defense, told colleagues that he thought the name wasn't so bad. "Why not?" he said. "It's a good movie. Besides, the good guys won." What Perle meant, of course, was that the George Lucas movie -- which was far better known than the initiative at this point -- had good associations for people that might rub off on the program. Perle might have said much the same thing about Reagan's movie roles, for the aura of the decent all-American hero he had so often played hung about Reagan in his political career. And Reagan surely knew this. In a commencement address at Notre Dame in 1981 he described how the role of the Gipper came his way and then made the film Knute Rockne -- All American into an allegory of American patriotism. As Paul Erickson has pointed out in his marvelous analysis of Reagan's rhetoric, Reagan managed to read himself into both the role of Rockne and that of the Gipper, and, by moving back and forth between fiction and the real world, to associate Rockne and his team with the Founding Fathers. He also managed to move American history and the American future into the safe space of a movie in which the good guys won.
Still, an actor's roles and his persona are two different things. Those who associated Reagan with the roles he played were in some degree suspending disbelief, just as people do in the movies. On the other hand, those who pointed to the President as a former actor or "just an actor" were focusing attention on the possibility of deception or inauthenticity. This was, of course, what worried Reagan, both in regard to himself and in regard to the name "Star Wars." Yet some movie actors are not just actors but celebrities -- stars -- who inhabit a magical realm somewhere between the real world and fiction. They are a kind of royalty, not just because they light up rooms with their entrances but because, unlike partisan politicians, they belong to all of us equally. What is more, even the aura of inauthenticity -- or unreality -- they bring along with them has its attractions. Anderson's story of Reagan's epiphany on Cheyenne Mountain suggests the purposes the aura might serve.
Reagan surely would have disliked the movie references in the story of his conversion to anti-ballistic missile systems. Certainly, when he spoke of the NORAD visit, he did not say that it had been arranged by a screenwriter. And yet these references do a great deal for the story. Because movies are the common currency of American life, Anderson was describing the NORAD command center in the most efficient manner possible when he said that it looked just the way such command centers do in movies. He was also triggering that slight sense of unreality that most people feel when contemplating the possibility of a nuclear war. His own discussion of Soviet first strikes is far less alarming than it otherwise would have been, and, given the light touch, neither he nor Reagan has to play the heavy: both are at one remove from actually thinking about weapons systems and nuclear war. Of course, to look at the symbolic content of the story, the Hollywood set makes a bizarre backdrop for the epiphany scene with all of its mythic and Biblical implications; it gives the whole story an uncomfortable post-modern quality. But there is a strategy to post-modern design: with a hint of play, or self-conscious levity, the liturgical repetition of classical forms cannot be dismissed as trite or impossibly earnest. In the case of the Anderson narrative, the movie references provide a bubble-gum-pink coating for an extremely heavy dose of symbolism. Readers may think they have just seen Reagan wandering about a movie set dreaming of an Inertia Projector, whereas in fact they have swallowed the whole epiphany, complete with Siegfried, and Christ among the Pharisees.
In the same way, those who sneered that Reagan was "just an actor" were not necessarily producing the effect they intended. According to the polls, large numbers of Americans voted for Reagan who did not agree with many of the conservative positions he took. Many of these liked the character Reagan projected, but some of them must have told themselves that Reagan was, after all, only an actor, so there was no need to take his rhetoric too seriously: perhaps he did not really think the Soviet Union was "evil," and even if he did, responsible people in his administration would surely prevail. By 1983 a fair number of Republicans who thought they had voted for a good-natured actor had unhappily concluded that they had elected an ideologue. Conversely, by 1988 conservative spokesmen in Washington were complaining that the man they had thought a true conservative had turned out to be a man without substance or principles, particularly when it came to his dealings with the Soviet Union. These spokesmen, however, represented only a small fraction of the public. Most Americans did not want a continuing state of conflict with the Soviet Union, and had never been ready to send American boys to fight Communism in Central America -- and they were extremely happy when Reagan turned out to be less than serious about either enterprise.
In fact, it could be argued that what Americans really wanted in the 1980s was an actor for President. Many, after all, were able to persuade themselves that America was "back" and "standing tall" when American troops managed to occupy the island of Grenada. And many thought the handsome front-man, Colonel Oliver North, a red-blooded American hero. Even at the time, the 1980s was not thought of as a period of national dedication and sacrifice, 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. Most Americans wanted military spending and a tax cut; they wanted a tax cut and Social Security with cost-of-living increases; they bought junk bonds and forgot the risk associated with them. They went to visit theme parks rather than real places, and they seemed to want a President who could speak all the lines of FDR and Churchill and Tom Paine without seriously threatening to act upon them. Certainly they did not seem to mind that the President who spoke of homespun virtues and old-fashioned family values was a divorcÉ who rarely saw his children or went to church and whose wife shopped on Rodeo Drive. In the days of Jim and Tammy Bakker, when Pentecostalists prayed for the miracle of a Cadillac, who wanted the innocent, self-righteous Mr. Smith? Who wanted a real populist, anyway? Better an actor who could play Mr. Smith but who, reassuringly, spent the Christmas season in Palm Springs. Better a President who would promise the miracle of a perfect defense and world peace without preaching the need for struggle or compromise. Reagan, the actor and politician, may have understood this.
Copyright © 2000 by Frances FitzGerald
Table of Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE
ONE The American Everyman
TWO The Making of an Orator
THREE Doubling the Volume
FOUR Space Defense Enthusiasts
FIVE To the Star Wars Speech
SIX Selling the Strategic Defense Initiative
SEVEN Hard-Liners vs. Pragmatists
EIGHT What Happened at Reykjavik?
NINE Falling Stars
TEN Reagan and Gorbachev
ELEVEN The End of the Cold War
AFTERWORD National Missile Defenses, 1989-99
GLOSSARY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX