The Crusader

more importantly, he hoped that an SDI system that was shared with the Soviets would make offensive nuclear weapons pointless and hence “obsolete” in that sense. Still, Reagan did not always pause to make such key distinctions when he employed words like “shield” and “screen.”⁶⁶

On the other hand, he was often careful and not guilty of hyperbole. A reflection of his realism—formally so—was the foreword by Reagan on the administration’s later “Report on the Strategic Defense Initiative.” Therein, Reagan revisited his initial March 23 announcement. The words he used were cautious and realistic:

On March 23, 1983, I announced my decision to take an important first step toward this goal by directing the establishment of a comprehensive and intensive research program…. SDI is a program of vigorous research focused on advancing defensive technologies to provide a better basis for deterring aggression…. The SDI research program will provide to a future president and a future Congress the technical knowledge required to support a decision on whether to develop and later deploy advanced defensive systems.⁶⁷

It is clear here that Reagan merely announced a research program to begin working toward the development of a system.⁶⁸ He told Margaret Thatcher that he was “simply embarking on a long- term research effort,” not a commitment to deploy SDI. “Obviously,” he told her, “it would be some time before we knew it would work as we hoped.”⁶⁹ As late as the early 1990s, in his memoirs, Reagan said that SDI “might take decades to develop.”⁷⁰ He added in his memoirs that he “never viewed the SDI as an impenetrable shield,” adding categorically that he believed that “no defense could ever be expected to be one hundred percent effective.”⁷¹

“STAR WARS”

It was difficult to tell who was most upset by SDI: certain members of Reagan’s own administration, liberal Democrats, or the Soviets. Liberal Democrats dubbed the initiative “Star Wars,” a term popularized by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who lampooned Reagan’s SDI speech the following morning as “misleading Red-scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”⁷² With those words, Kennedy, who in 1983 had his eyes on a presidential run in 1984, had started something.

“Star Wars” became a vehicle to ridicule SDI. In the 1980s, Reagan was often caricatured as a dawdling fool, a lazy man and nostalgic ex-actor, who spent his time watching movies, where he lost himself in a world of makebelieve. Surely, suggested the ridiculers, Reagan must have gotten the idea for SDI from the blockbuster movie “Star Wars,” envisioning himself as kind of presidential Luke Skywalker combating the forces of darkness of Darth Vader’s Evil Empire.⁷³ As a New York Times news story put it a week later, the SDI proposal was “Mr. Reagan’s answer to the film ‘Star Wars.’”⁷⁴

If Kennedy had hoped to discredit the concept, he was making strides. Kennedy’s “Star Wars” term became extremely damaging, especially once the partisan media at home and abroad delightfully ran with it. Reagan rightly feared that it suggested that he desired not a defensive system but an offensive war in space. It conjured “an image of destruction,” he said, when, in fact, “I’m talking about a weapon, non-nuclear…[that] only destroys other weapons, doesn’t kill people.”⁷⁵ SDI “isn’t about war, it’s about peace.”⁷⁶ He charitably allowed that the media probably did not envision such a deleterious effect, instead using “Star Wars” merely “to denigrate the whole idea.”⁷⁷ However, privately Reagan told one friend that he “bristles” each time the media used the label.⁷⁸ Echoing these complaints, he confided to two other friends that the term was “never mine” but the media’s, “and now they saddle me with it.”⁷⁹

In this endeavor, Reagan faced a huge PR problem begun by liberals in Congress and the press. This was evident in a later exchange with UPI’s Helen Thomas:

THOMAS: Mr. President, if you are flexible, are you willing to trade off research on “Star Wars”…or are you against any negotiations on “Star Wars”?

REAGAN: Well, let me say, what has been called “Star Wars”—and, Helen, I wish whoever coined that expression would take it back again—THOMAS: Well, Strategic Defense—REAGAN:—because it gives a false impression of what it is we’re talking about.⁸⁰

Immediately after Reagan’s plea, Thomas continued: “May I ask you, then, if ‘Star Wars’—even if you don’t like the term, it’s quite popular….”⁸¹

The term was popular because reporters used it. Reagan’s request was reasonable: the program’s name was the Strategic Defense Initiative. Objective reporters ought to be expected to use its proper name, not the name of derision used by partisan detractors. That did not matter. Reporter Chris Wallace followed Thomas: “I’m a little confused by your original answer on, if you’ll forgive me, ‘Star Wars’—if we can continue to use that term.” Wallace then answered his own question: “The question is now, in the talks that are going to begin, would you consider setting limits on the deployment and the testing of ‘Star Wars’?”⁸² Clearly Reagan was fighting an uphill battle.

In Moscow, the Communist media loved Kennedy’s term. To say that the Soviets embraced “Star Wars” is inadequate; they used the label in almost every story on SDI, rarely using the words Strategic Defense Initiative or the acronym. Tellingly, whereas the U.S. press typed “Star Wars” in uppercase to ridicule the idea as movie fiction, the Communists placed it in lowercase to suggest SDI was a vehicle for war amid the stars—“preparations for ‘star wars,’” as the Moscow International Service put it.⁸³ The Kremlin seized upon the term with abandon to portray Reagan as a nuclear warmonger. The number of examples could fill this book.⁸⁴ Here are but a few:

In a commentary for the Moscow World Service, Viktor Olin claimed that “Preparations for star wars are under way in the United States.”⁸⁵ The Red Army publication Krasnaya Zvezda published a lengthy, grave piece titled, “How the ‘star wars’ are being prepared.”⁸⁶ Expressing similar sentiment on Moscow TV’s “Studio 9” program, top propagandist Valentin Zorin, the KGB’s Vitaly Kobysh, and academic Yevgeny Velikhov hammered Reagan’s alleged “plans” to “fill the space around the entire planet with battle stations.” “Only in his speech of 23 March 1983 did he formulate his idea, which became known as ‘star wars,’” said Kobysh. This name, said Kobysh, was “very irritating” because of what it (allegedly) advocated. One group not fooled by Reagan, however, were liberal Democrats at home: “U.S. politicians,” said Kobysh, “call it [SDI] the greatest deception of our time.”⁸⁷

While the Soviets did much of their own propagandizing, they admired certain American politicians and columnists, regularly employing their sentiments in their attempt to twist reality. The most quoted U.S. senator in the Soviet press in the 1980s was likely Ted Kennedy, whereas the most approved of columnist was James Reston of the New York Times; the two were cited so often that at times their names made their way into the same articles in Pravda.⁸⁸ For editorials, the Washington Post was a preferred source, particularly for Izvestia hatchet man Valentin Falin, who employed one Post editorial to attack Reagan and SDI as “evil,” “cuckoo,” and, according to the Post editorial, a “prospect of fabulous new riches for the [U.S.] military-industrial complex,” a line that Falin underscored with special appreciation.⁸⁹

One Moscow periodical, the English language New Times, noted that Reagan felt “hurt” by the term “star wars,” and wished that the person who coined the expression would take it back because it misrepresented what he had in mind. Yet, the New Times was not fooled; it clarified Reagan’s ruse: As evidence, it cited a Los Angeles Times piece by Thomas S. Powers. The New Times quoted Powers: “The secret of ‘star wars’ is that it is intended to defend weapons, not people. The purpose is not to keep the Soviets from threatening us, but to make sure we can threaten them.”⁹⁰ TASS seconded the notion: “There is nothing defensive about SDI; an offensive system.” Reagan’s explanations were merely “clever tricks.”⁹¹

For its part, the Moscow Domestic Service was grateful to the American media and to politicians like