Page 189 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

President Reagan began to build his case for the major policy shift in
a series of speeches around the country in spring 1983. Finally, in a televised
address, he publicly announced his plan to pursue the Strategic Defense
Initiative. Although he received withering criticism from leaders at home
and abroad, he garnered the support of the American people. With that
battle won, the president and his advisors turned their attention to getting
Congress and U.S. allies to warm to the idea. McFarlane recalled the most
crucial leadership lesson he learned from Henry Kissinger and President
Nixon during his White House Fellows year: A great leader develops the
ability to persuade. “In most public policy pursuits your success will be
rendered far more likely if you are persuasive. The ability to define a
problem and its solution persuasively is decisive,” McFarlane said. “If you
are to win over congressmen, senators, or other key constituencies, you
must come into the meeting having studied their interests and how those
interests will be served by your solution to the problem. In getting SDI
funded, we had to convince a lot of smart people who really didn’t like
the idea. It took many meetings where I just talked candidly and honestly
about what I thought was going to happen. I said that if they invested this
money in this initiative, we would expose the relative backwardness of the
Soviet Union.”
President Reagan’s powers of persuasion had the desired effect. Con-
gress funded the initiative, and development of the technology started
in earnest. In summer 1984, the Army had success with its first Homing
Overlay Experiment when personnel intercepted a mock ballistic missile
warhead outside the earth’s atmosphere. Other triumphs followed, and most
of the allies changed their opinion of the new American defensive strategy.
Less than a year later, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet
Union, and President Reagan initiated contact with him. The two agreed
to a series of summits to negotiate arms control and the resolution of
other conflicts. The lessons about persuasion that McFarlane learned from
Dr. Kissinger and President Nixon came into play again as he helped
President Reagan prepare for his first meeting with Gorbachev. In the
six months leading up to the first summit meeting, the president focused
on building support among his key constituencies: the public, Congress,
and the nation’s allies.
“In the run-up to the first summit, we wanted our president to arrive
with maximum strength—strength in the measures that count in the

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