Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

by Frances FitzGerald

Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prize­winning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. 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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, United States, War, Biography

592 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Frances FitzGerald is an American journalist and historian.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry, this book details the history of the Strategic Defense Initiative, 'Star Wars', from its beginnings under the Reagan administration until the time of publication in 2000. It also serves as a history of the Reagan administration from a defense policy standpoint and, incidentally, of the INF and START negotiations. All in all, not a pretty picture.

In fact, the SDI, for a long while a stumbling block to disarmament treaties with the Soviets, was never a good idea. Other than the fact that the technologies developed did not work--despite false claims to the contrary, and were prohibitively expensive, countermeasures were cheaply available. In the end, while warning the USA that it was wasting money, Gorbachev dropped Soviet objections.

What's amazing is how many public figures on the right clung to such dubious and expensive proposals even after the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had studied and rejected them. This, the apparent irrationality of it all, is only substantially treated in terms of President Reagan himself. The motives of the likes of George Will, Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger and Caspar Weinberger are not deeply examined.

The big villain of this tale is Defense Secretary Weinberger, cast in perpetual opposition to Secretary of State Schultz, one of the few level headed members of the Reagan cabinet. The unexpected hero, however, the real shining star, is Mikhail Gorbachev, consistently running circles around the doddering and unprepared Reagan. He, unlike the proponents of SDI, was the true man of vision.

[Adrian Halpert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this narrative on SDI, one of the most controversial projects of the Reagan Era. It was brimming with good research and interesting information about the project. However, Frances FitzGerald is a reporter and as I found out, it shows quite early on. She gives a wealth of detail on what happened, but has little to say about why it happened. She also doesn't present her material in a balanced way, basing portions of her narrative on interviews with White House staff Reagan fired or who quit - in other words people who would be unlikely to say anything good about their former boss. The result is a skewed picture of what happened.
So why am I still giving this a four star rating you ask? Again, FitzGerald presents a wealth of research, highlighting her skill as a reporter, and a very engaging narrative, so long as you're able to recognize some of the issues with this work.
4/5 Stars

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scrupulously researched (75 pp of notes), competently written, and . . . a little dull. How could Ms. Fitzgerald have known way back in 2000 that readers in the future would expect politics to be more entertaining? I think this material is probably better suited to a splashy musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber, I'm talking to you.

[Sam Lair · Rating 5 out of 5]

FitzGerald is truly masterful. Dense, compelling, dryly hilarious, this is up there with Nolan's Guardians of the Arsenal

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reagan's legacy is a complex topic, and unfortunately I felt that Way Out There in the Blue didn't do it justice. FitzGerald used Strategic Missile Defense to approach Reagan's time in office, but SDI never amounted to much. At best, it was just a poker chip bounced around between the Department of Defense, State, the National Security Council, and arms treaty negotiators, as various factions within the American government tried to advance any kind of coherent Soviet policy. Reagan and his administration do not come off looking well in this account. The man himself is profoundly disinterested in both policy and personnel, the movie star who sees his job as selling the American public on whatever his advisers have decided. Reagan was an idealist in the worst sense of the word, someone who dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons and of an American triumph, but without the fortitude to work out the messy details of his technologically impossible visions. Perhaps the most damning flaw is that despite the billions of dollars poured into SDI and new strategic weapons during the 80s, the Soviets never bit at the arms race, keeping their expenditures essentially flat without changing the classic Mutually Assured Destruction balance. According to FitzGerald, the USSR fell because of internal flaws and Gorbachev's overly ambitious reforms, not anything Reagan did. If that's the case, why should we even care about Reagan's foreign policy? And finally, despite the billions of dollars invested in basic research, science and scientists barely appear in this work, aside from a few pages with Edward Teller. How can you write the history of a scientifically dependent weapons system without the science?

There's probably an interesting (and much more theoretically ambitious) book about the imaginaries of strategic missile defense out there, but it isn't this book.

[Bret McGuire · Rating 4 out of 5]

An account of the Reagan administration told through the life and times of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Ronald Reagan described by Fitzgerald was always willing to play a role. The President latched onto the larger themes of SDI while staying ignorant of the details and offering little in the way of guidance or direction to his staff. To those who lived through the experience very little of this will sound surprising.

George Shultz comes off reasonably well here while Caspar Weinberger and the other hard-liners (including a young, or at least younger, Richard Perle) don't fare quite so well. Yet if there is a "hero" in this story it might very well be Gorbachev, who appears in these pages as something of an anti-Reagan: knowledgable, energetic and engrossed in the details of policy.

The book is quite rich in detail and Fitzgerald's prose is satisfying throughout. The books structure is a bit of a problem: individual chapters are quite long, denying the reader a natural point of division. The topics covered here are quite intricate (and they are covered in considerable detail) so the length is to some degree understandable. That said, slightly smaller chapters might have made for a bit of an easier read.

If you're at all interested in the history of this period this book makes for excellent reading.

[Ray Schneider · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many long chapters that were very technical in describing the nuclear arsenals of both countries and the the SDI technology. Some of the internal political battles in Reagan's cabinet were interesting. The book will answer the question: Who was more responsible for the end of the Cold War - Reagan or Gorbachev? I won't spoil it with the answer according to the book.

[Heather Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part is how Reagan kept telling Gorbachev all of these personal anecdotes that were really just plots from his old movies.