Page 188 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PERSUASIVE

the hydrogen bomb, and learned that it was possible to calculate with con-
fidence a warhead’s flight path; that was the first step toward being able to
intercept a missile. “As for guidance and propulsion, there had been a lot
of gains in that too. The scientists didn’t all agree uniformly, but there was
a consensus that yes, if you threw a lot of money at this, we would advance
our ability some day,” McFarlane said. “None of them said that we could
build this during Reagan’s term. But we could advance our ability to some
day defend against a missile attack, and it would bankrupt the Soviet
Union. I told the president that if he were to invest money in this, the
Soviets would see the writing on the wall and they would come his way on
arms control because they wouldn’t want to go bankrupt. They’d reduce
their systems, and we’d win.”
The trouble was that the MAD doctrine had worked for more than
three decades. Getting the public, Congress, and the allies to abandon that
successful strategy in favor of unknown and seemingly far-fetched tech-
nology would be a challenge. However, Reagan was committed to putting
an end to the arms race, and he and his advisors launched a systematic
approach to drum up support for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),
dubbed by some “Star Wars,” a space-based defense system that relied on
laser beans and infrared, radar, and optical detection systems not only to
protect the United States physically from nuclear attack but also to break
the Soviets’ confidence in their ability to compete. Reagan decided to take
his pro-SDI campaign straight to the American public first and attempt to
persuade them that it was the right thing to do.
“If he had gone to the leadership of the Congress and said he wanted
to overturn thirty-five years of successful strategy for something that
might not even work, it would have been strangled in the crib, and I
think that he was right about that,” explained McFarlane. “Starting with
the people at the grass roots was a perfect situation from my point of
view because it made Ronald Reagan the advocate, and he could sell ice
cubes to Eskimos. He was just great at selling things. So the idea was
basically for him to tell the public, ‘We don’t have any way of defending
you right now against a missile coming in, and I’m going to build one
for you,’ and that’s a winner. The economy was just beginning to turn
around after the recession of 1981, and Reagan’s tax cuts had begun to
produce a rebound at the end of 1982. His political capital was relatively
high at that point.”

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