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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Frances FitzGerald (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 592 pp., $30 cloth.
In 1835 Tocqueville wrote that Americans "care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure." The durability of Tocqueville's insight is confirmed by the fact that in 1985 the majority of Americans came to embrace a futuristic idea of laser satellites that could make the nation invulnerable by shooting enemy missiles out of the sky, even though nothing remotely resembling such a technology existed. Linking this emotionally charged realm of American mythology and political culture with the arcane worlds of both defense technology and high-level diplomacy, historian Frances FitzGerald offers an analysis of Reagan and his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that helps to answer the question of how, during the Reagan administration, the United States committed itself to a multibillion-dollar missile defense program that was not only technically infeasible, but threatened the very basis of U.S.-Soviet relations.
Biographies of Reagan and memoirs of former top officials in his administration have depicted him as essentially disengaged from executive decision-making and ignorant of the details of policy FitzGerald effectively argues that such portrayals should not lead us to conclude that Reagan was a doddering simpleton or a crude ideologue living a fantasy of Hollywood westerns. That Reagan dealt in a world of perceptions did not make him "just an actor." Indeed, it was his instinct and training as an actor that kept him highly attuned to what his audience, the American people, sought in his performance. FitzGerald shows how Reagan perfected his presentation and rhetoric as head of the...