Fire in a Fake - Frances FitzGerald and her ‘Star Wars’ myths.
Say this much for Frances FitzGerald: She has great timing. She began her book about Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990. What an unpromising chore it must have seemed! The Cold War was ending, and missile-defense plans were already struggling; Clinton- administration cutbacks were about to make the challenge doubly difficult. Also, missile defense is a highly technical subject, one that’s tempting to leave entirely to the guys in the white lab coats; FitzGerald, a journalist with a degree in history, had no particular knowledge of rocket science. Her editors must have wondered whether the book would have any relevance at all when it was finally completed.
Yet FitzGerald persisted, for nine years. Missile defense mesmerized her, and so did Reagan. “The achievements of his administration seemed elusive to many,” she writes in the book. She wanted to know: “What other President, after all, could persuade the country of something that did not, and could not for the foreseeable future, exist?” Antiballistic-missile defense, she said, “was beyond the reach of technology.” But it marked “Reagan’s greatest triumph as an actor- storyteller.” He fooled so many, so well.
FitzGerald has now produced what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. calls “a brilliantly perceptive and illuminating portrait of Ronald Reagan.” With incredible timing: Just as missile defense has started to make news in a way it hasn’t since the 1980s, Simon & Schuster has published FitzGerald’s book, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. The critics adore it, and the catchy blurbs for the paperback edition are probably being typeset at this moment. Her story is “oddly gripping” and “clearly, eloquently, and engagingly” told, purred Alan Brinkley in the New York Times; it’s “devastating,” admired Lars-Erik Nelson in The New York Review of Books. “Endowed with enough drama, irony, and political perception to match its importance,” marveled Kirkus Reviews. “This well-written book . . . even has chortlesome footnotes,” raved Ruth Walker in the Christian Science Monitor. (Chortlesome? Alas, not everything can be “well-written.”)
If only all of this were true. Reagan and SDI have long deserved a close examination of the sort they receive from FitzGerald, but Way Out There in the Blue is a tendentious work. Sadly, it now stands as the closest thing there is to an official record of Reagan’s SDI program. Historians who aren’t yet born will turn their attention to Reagan, and it is this book-for want of any real competition-that threatens to mold their thinking on some of the most significant political conflicts of the 1980s.
The warm reception given to Way Out There in the Blue comes as no surprise. Frances FitzGerald has been a liberal star for 30 years. She has an impeccable blue-blood pedigree, descending from Boston’s Peabody clan. One great-grandfather founded Groton, and a great-grandmother helped start Radcliffe College. The historian Francis Park man, too, is an ancestor. Her father was Desmond FitzGerald, a deputy director of the CIA during its swashbuckling days. Her mother was Marietta Tree, one of the legendary grandes dames of New York. Her parents’ union did not last long; Tree went on to notoriety as a mistress of director John Huston (briefly) and Adlai Stevenson (for many years), as well as the wife of an heir to the Marshall Field fortune.
Yet Frances FitzGerald achieved fame largely through her own efforts. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1962, Frankie (as pals call her) went to work at the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a group that secretly received CIA funding (her father helped her land the job). She wanted to write a novel, but never did. So she ventured into journalism, first writing for the New York Herald Tribune, then jetting off to Vietnam on The Atlantic Monthly’s tab. Her reporting from Southeast Asia won her an elite audience, as well as space in The New Yorker and other leading magazines. In 1972, her book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, nabbed the Pulitzer Prize. A fawning profile in Vogue the following year called her “a remarkable young woman within a remarkable old family.” She was made.
That first book’s appeal is easy to understand-it was saturated with the highbrow anti-anti-Communism prevailing among liberal intellectuals, then and now. FitzGerald delivered idealized portraits of the North Vietnamese, condemned American involvement, and looked forward to “one of those sudden historical shifts when ‘individualism’ and its attendant corruption gives way to the discipline of the revolutionary community.” Yes, the revolution must come: “It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the American war. . . . It is the only way the Vietnamese of the south can restore their country and their history to themselves.”