34. Bill Clark, “President Reagan and the Wall,” Address to the Council of National Policy, San Francisco, California, March 2000, 8–9.
35. George Shultz said, “SDI was entirely the president’s idea.” George Keyworth added: “There was never any single initiative by the Reagan administration that was so thoroughly created and invented in Ronald Reagan’s own mind and experience. It was his decision. It was his creation.” For quotes, see D’Souza, Ronald Reagan, 175 and Ken Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 298. That said, there were a handful of men who were influential in Reagan’s thinking on missile defense, including Martin Anderson, Daniel O. Graham, Malcolm Wallop, Karl Bendetsen, James D. Watkins, Harrison H. Schmitt, Angelo Codevilla, and Edward Teller, among others. Especially important was a February 11, 1983 meeting between Reagan and his joint chiefs of staff. Among other sources, see William Broad, Teller’s War (Simon & Schuster, 1992), 96– 120, 136.
36. Reagan once remarked that “it kind of amuses me that everybody is so sure I must have heard about it [SDI], that I never thought about it myself. And the truth is, I did.” Reagan, “Interview With Morton Kondracke and Richard H. Smith of Newsweek Magazine,” March 4, 1985. George Keyworth stated: “I don’t know of anything that was more clearly Ronald Reagan’s than SDI was. There is absolutely no question that SDI originated with the president.” George A. Keyworth interviewed by Donald Baucom, September 28, 1987, RRL, OHT, Folder 37, Box 8, 28.
37. See the important findings from Schweizer’s Reagan’s War, 84–85, where he talks of earlier Reagan meetings with another Californian involved in defense technology. 38. Interview with Edward Teller, July 15, 2003. See Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 508–9; and Edward Teller interviewed by Donald Baucom, July 6, 1987, RRL, OHT, Folder 35, Box 8, 1–2.
39. Edward Teller interviewed by Donald Baucom, July 6, 1987, RRL, OHT, Folder 35, Box 8, 1–2.
40. Interview with Edward Teller, July 15, 2003.
41. Among the examples of Reagan deploying Teller, in August 1982 he dispatched Teller to Sicily for the ERICE Conference on preventing nuclear war. Teller was thrilled with the assignment. “I was deeply honored by your asking me to present your message to the conference,” Teller told Reagan, “and I did so with great pleasure and feeling of pride which I do not often experience.” Teller wrote this in an August 25, 1982 letter, to which Reagan responded with an October 25 letter to Teller. The letters are filed at the Reagan Library in the presidential letters section, Folder 54, Box 4.
42. “Memorandum to the President, Subject: Letter from Edward Teller,” from Jay Keyworth to President Reagan, July 29, 1982. The memo, printed on White House letterhead, is on file at the Reagan Library in the PHF:PR section, Folder 48, Box 4.
43. On this, see, among others, Anderson, Revolution, 80–85, 99; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 261–63; and Lou Cannon testimony at University of Virginia’s Miller Center is published in Thompson, ed., Leadership in the Reagan Presidency, Pt II: Eleven Intimate Perspectives, 61.
44. Reagan, An American Life, 550. See Reed, At the Abyss, 254–57.
45. At last, a solid work has been devoted to Reagan’s hatred of nuclear weapons and desire to eliminate them. See Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005); Oberdorfer, The Turn, 26; and Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 700.
46. Reagan, “Remarks at a Ceremony Marking the Annual Observance of Captive Nations Week,” July 19, 1983.
47. Reagan, “Remarks to Private Sector Leaders During a White House Briefing on the MX Missile,” March 6, 1985.
Reagan told Walter Cronkite on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France on June 6, 1984: “Walter, I have said, and will continue to say, a nuclear war cannot be won. It must never be fought. And this is why the goal must be to rid the world once and for all of those weapons.” Reagan, “Interview With Walter Cronkite of CBS News in Normandy, France,” June 6, 1984.
48. Reagan, “Interview With Alastair Burnet of ITN Television of the United Kingdom,” March 10, 1988.
49. Among many others, see Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 26, 1984; Reagan, “Debate Between the President and Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale,” Kansas City, Missouri, October 21, 1984; Reagan, “Interview With Arrigo Levi of Canale 5 Television of Italy,” March 10, 1988; Reagan, “Interview With Soviet Television Journalists Valentin Zorin and Boris Kalyagin,” May 20, 1988; and Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Soviet-United States Relations,” December 3, 1988. Also see Reagan, An American Life, 288; and Kenneth W. Thompson, “The Reagan Presidency: Interview with Frank Carlucci,” Miller Center Journal, 2 (Spring 1995): 43.
50. Quoted by William Pemberton, Exit With Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997), 131.
51. Interview with George P. Shultz, July 15, 2003, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
52. Reagan, “Remarks to a White House Briefing for Republican Student Interns on Soviet-US Relations,” July 29, 1986.
53. Reagan, An American Life, 257. Also on MAD, see Reagan, “Interview With Morton Kondracke and Richard H. Smith of Newsweek Magazine,” March 4, 1985; Reagan, “Interview With Foreign Journalists,” April 25, 1985; Reagan, “Statement on the Fifth Anniversary of the Strategic Defense Initiative,” March 23, 1988; and Joseph Coors, oral-history testimony, July 31, 1987, RRL, OHT, Folder 35, Box 8.
54. Reagan, “Remarks to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis at a Conference on the Strategic Defense Initiative,” March 14, 1988; and Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 327.
55. Reagan, “Remarks to Citizens in Hambach, Federal Republic of Germany,” May 6, 1985.
56. Reagan, “Remarks to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis at a Conference on the Strategic Defense Initiative,” March 14, 1988.
57. Interview with Ed Meese, September 23, 1998.
58. Adelman quoted in Cannon, Role of a Lifetime, 278.
59. Reagan, “Remarks to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis at a Conference on the Strategic Defense Initiative,” March 14, 1988.
60. Reagan, “Remarks to Administration Supporters at a White House Briefing on Arms Control, Central America, and the Supreme Court,” November 23, 1987.
61. See Reagan, “Remarks at a Luncheon Hosted by the Heritage Foundation,” November 30, 1987.
62. Reagan, An American Life, 571.
63. Reagan, “Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference,” March 8, 1985. 64. Keyworth interviewed by Baucom, September 28, 1987, RRL, OHT, Folder 37, Box 8, 30.
65. Gergen interviewed on television series, “Television and the Presidency,” Fox News Channel, December 25, 2000.
66. Cannon, Role of a Lifetime, 683. At one press conference in Moscow, for example, he spoke of SDI’s potential to “make it impossible for missiles to get through the screen.” Of course, it is possible that Reagan was willing to exaggerate SDI while in Moscow. Reagan, “President’s News Conference Following the Soviet-United States Summit Meeting in Moscow,” June 1, 1988.
67. Reagan, “Foreword Written for a Report on the Strategic Defense Initiative,” December 28, 1984.
68. Later, he was also measured when negotiating directly with Gorbachev, a moment when bluster and exaggeration might be expected. In the third plenary session at the Geneva Summit on November 20, 1985, he told Gorbachev that “no one was sure whether SDI would work; the U.S. effort was designed only to find out if a defense was possible.” It “would be years before this was known.” See Details in “Geneva Meeting: Memcons,” Box 92137, Folder 2, RRL.
69. Reagan, An American Life, 609.
70. Ibid., 608.
71. What made the idea promising, wrote Reagan, was that, if it worked, “and we then entered an era when the nations of the world agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons,” it could serve as a “safety valve against cheating—or attacks by lunatics who managed to get their hands on a nuclear missile.” This was precisely the thinking behind the U.S. Senate decision to vote 97 to 3 in January 1998 in support of President Clinton’s proposal to pursue a missile-defense system. Reagan, An American Life, 608.
