Who Was The Real Ronald Reagan

Review of Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and author of Mr. And Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons.

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It is hard to read about Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy without having the phrase "dumb luck" pop repeatedly into one’s mind. On one level, Reaganite foreign policy was a march of folly replete with an often clueless president, warring advisers, poorly planned summits, and absurdly priced Pentagon gadgets. The murder of 241 marines in Lebanon went unavenged. The president of the United States tested his microphone by joking about bombing the Soviet Union. Reagan and his advisers celebrated the liberation of Grenada as if it were the Battle of Iwo Jima. And the tragic-comedy of Iran-contra made the United States -- and its president -- a laughingstock.

Yet, today, especially after eight years of Clintonite waffling, Reagan’s foreign policy course appears more resolute than that of his two successors -- and quite triumphal. Under Reagan’s reign, the United States effectively won the Cold War and experienced a resurgence of national pride. A little more than a decade after Ronald Reagan’s retirement, the United States is the world’s sole superpower. The Iron Curtain is down, Germany is reunited, Eastern Europe is liberated, and even Nicaragua’s Sandanistas have been forced into retirement.

This dramatic disconnect between far too many flawed inputs and a series of miraculous outputs has confounded Reagan’s chroniclers. Unfortunately, many books about Reagan, and especially about his foreign policy, reveal more about the author’s theology than about actual history. Love him or hate him, too many analysts seem stuck rehashing the debates of the 1980s, and ultimately build their books on a particular personal belief that Reagan was either a savior or a fool.

In Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Frances Fitzgerald tries to solve the Reagan enigma. She believes that Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is his Rosebud, the key to understanding not just his foreign policy but his entire presidency. It is, in fact, a very good place to start.

What Reagan called SDI, what his opponents derided as "Stars Wars," is in many ways the quintessential Reagan program. It was enormously appealing to Americans: simple, sellable, and symbolically powerful. It was also malleable, a supposedly peace-making device that helped with the saber-rattling.

SDI showcased Ronald Reagan at his best: a bold and idealistic visionary who trusted good old fashioned American knowhow to free the world from the potentially lethal conventional wisdom. Reagan rejected the MAD orthodoxy of the time, the faith among Soviet and American strategists that they could keep the peace with Mutually Assured Destruction -- the threat that each country could destroy the other one, multiple times over. Once sold on the project, Reagan would not let go, stubbornly -- or valiantly? -- advancing his project, even when the Soviets offered widespread disarmament in the 1986 Reykjavik summit. Reagan supporters are convinced that Reagan’s commitment to SDI unnerved the Soviet leadership and helped bankrupt the system.

At the same time, the program represented Reagan at his worst: a stubborn and fanciful ideologue who clung to his vision in the face of all evidence and reason. Seventeen years and sixty billion dollars after Ronald Reagan articulated his vision of a defensive shield protecting the land of the free and the home of the brave, the quest for an effective anti-missile system remains quixotic and controversial. Even as Reagan’s Democratic successor sinks more money into the missile defense idea, scientists continue to doubt its viability.

To justify her own sweeping ambitions, Frances Fitzgerald begins her book by looking at the American people and their hero, Ronald Reagan. In two excellent opening chapters, Fitzgerald offers the reader a framework for understanding the rest of the work. The first chapter, "The American Everyman," builds on her previous book, Cities on a Hill, a fascinating look at contemporary American communities, including a retirement village and a fundamentalist haven. Fitzgerald probes the American psyche, uncovering our romanticism, our populism, our millennialism, our naivete.

The second chapter, "The Making of An Orator," shows how Reagan honed his message over the years and how, in the 1980s, the man and the message found the right audience. "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," Fitzgerald writes. "Though some associated him only with Hollywood, Reagan was in fact supremely well equipped to preach this national revival." In thirty smooth, punchy pages, Fitzgerald paints a far more accurate, substantive and useful portrait of the man who would be President than Edmund Morris did in his Dutch debacle.

The remaining nine chapters bring the reader back to the 1980s, while debunking many of the myths that developed then and still endure. The book occasionally gets bogged down in the alphabet soup jargon of nuclear arms talks with too many MIRVs and STARTs, INFs and ABMs -- most of us happily left all that SALT-speak behind when the Berlin Wall fell. Still, amid it all, Fitzgerald shines when she dissects, then corrects, what has now become the conventional wisdom -- ranging from the founding immaculate conception myth of the Star Wars saga, that the program just popped into the president’s mind one day, to the claim that not just SDI but the entire Reagan arms buildup had anything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While admirably exposing the truth behind the Reaganite facade, Fitzgerald demonstrates a bit too much of the intellectual’s disdain for Reagan’s disengaged style. Reagan’s obtuseness was sometimes affected and frequently useful. Throughout his political career Reagan exploited opponents who underestimated him. He was in fact, more focused, more savvy, more political, and more ruthless than his amiable affect and storyteller’s charms suggested.

This sharper portrait of Reagan runs counter to the picture reporters and memoirists painted. It emerges most vividly by studying his presidential papers at the Reagan library. Alas, in her vastly researched book, Fitzgerald combed press accounts, autobiographies, congressional documents, secondary sources, and interviews, but seems not even to have visited the presidential library in Simi Valley.

Despite these limitations, Way Out There In the Blue is a welcome contribution to the growing literature about Ronald Reagan. On the ever-popular question of who deserves praise for ending the Cold War, Fitzgerald concludes that Mikhail Gorbachev all but singlehandedly reoriented the Soviet system and thus changed the course of history. But she notes that Reagan’s excessively personal approach to world affairs not only helped forge a warm bond with the Soviet reformer, but Reagan’s embrace buttressed, legitimized, and helped further the Gorbachev revolution. Here and elsewhere, Fitzgerald does a superb job of proving that yes, Reagan was fortunate, but his luck was not "dumb" at all. He often demonstrated great skill in turning a welcome break into lasting good fortune.