Way Out There in the Blue
Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
by Frances Fitzgerald
Simon & Schuster, 592 pp., $ 30

Frances Fitzgerald’s thesis is not subtle. The title of her book, Way Out There in the Blue, is taken from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” This account of the birth of the Strategic Defense Initiative and its role in bringing down the Soviet Empire makes Ronald Reagan out to be the Willy Loman of the Cold War. He was a salesman-politician without peer, capable of peddling to the nation the Strategic Defense Initiative, a defense program that had more to do with “phantoms and mirages” than actual technology, and purporting to address the Soviet nuclear threat, which was more “hyperbole” than strategic reality.