Blue Sky Dream (24 page)

And true, this space shield would be costly. “But is it not worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is!” declared Ronald Reagan. He wrapped up by straining for chords once sung by John F. Kennedy, echoes of a time, nearly forgotten, when aerospace people had first been invited to imagine themselves arbiters of America’s future. “My fellow Americans, tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks, and results take time. But with your support, I believe we can do it.”

In the weeks and months following his Star Wars speech, pictures began to emerge of what Ronald Reagan’s space shield might be. Seconds into an attack, our supercomputers would launch hundreds or thousands of satellite battle stations which, once in space, would target the flaming boosters of rising enemy missiles and knock them from the sky with killer beams. The pictures came to mind sharp edged and chiaroscuro, like Chesley
Bonestell paintings and George Lucas movies. The words were technicalese raised to incantation, the prayers of crusaders whose eyes were lifted toward the heavens. The saving killer beams, America was told, might be streams of neutral particles. Or they might be free electron lasers shined from Earth to bounce off mirrors in space. Or they could be X-ray lasers “pumped” by a nuclear explosion aboard each satellite, this last idea given the name of Excalibur.

“Y
ou wouldn’t believe. The money just
gushed
in.” That is how my father remembered Lockheed Missiles and Space Company right after Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency. “I can think of more than a handful of programs that sprung up literally overnight and ended up costing billions of dollars. Ideas that had lain dormant for years, ideas based on unproven technology, were suddenly given the green light on a handshake and a promise. We couldn’t hire people fast enough.”

After my father was assigned to one such program, he spent more and more time away from home. Often he stayed in Lompoc, a little town next door to Vandenberg Air Force Base, a launching pad set in the cattle country just up the coast from Santa Barbara. Other times he was gone for days and weeks to a place that mysterious people on the phone called The Ranch.

“Hal there?” an extremely serious male voice would ask whoever picked up the receiver at my parents’ house.

“No. Can I tell him who called?”

“Tell him Gunner called. From The Ranch. He’ll know.” Click.

What was this Ranch where Ronald Reagan had created new work for my father and for “Gunner” and for how many more? My mother and her children were curious, of course, but we had only the slimmest of details with which to construct a mental picture. We knew a man could find himself in some very high and precarious places at The Ranch, because one time my father returned
wearing a strange pair of glasses, clunky plastic frames bought off a drugstore rack. He had lost his, he said, “while stepping onto a catwalk. I bumped my head and off came my glasses. I heard them hit the floor about, oh, eight to ten seconds later.” My father smiled as he said this, smiling as he tended to smile when he had just told you something that was very intriguing but just shy of violating his security oath.

We knew The Ranch was in a place that could be very dark, because another time my father came back with a scabbed cut in his forehead. All he would tell us is that he had been driving across some dim landscape in the middle of the night in a rental car with the lights off and he had run into something and his head had been thrown forward into the steering wheel. “Why were you driving in the dark with no lights?” his wife and children all wanted to know. But his answer was a smile.

We knew that whatever went on at The Ranch made my father less prone to the sullen spells on Sundays before another week at Lockheed. In fact, he often seemed excited again to be an aerospace engineer. For twenty years he had sat behind a desk writing up test reports until he had all but forgotten what had drawn him to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in the first place, the intimacy with exotic and even heroic inventions he had expected. After all that time, my father had come to see himself as one barnacle among thousands, firmly stuck to the belly of a great company whose guiding brains were not even aware of his existence.

The gushing is what washed him loose. All those Ronald Reagan dollars flowing into Lockheed created the need for new project leaders, and my father soon found himself head trouble-shooter for whatever black budget technology was being refined at The Ranch. Now he was responsible for bringing together that system’s designers, builders, and testers and directing everyone through the final debugging process. To my father’s relief, he finally was spending much of his day with actual machinery that needed his corrective hands upon it. Often, too, the job placed him before audiences of Lockheed and Pentagon brass who listened
to his flip-chart presentations about how life at The Ranch was progressing. Apparently my father shined in both roles, for he was promoted into management, and many times during the Reagan years my mother let me know that my father had received yet another raise or performance bonus.

In his own wry words, my father came to be seen “as something of a testing guru” within the Satellite Systems Division of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. “Eventually,” he said, “I became the trusted spokesman for such matters. It just turned out that I seldom was challenged because I turned out to be right so often.” (This is the closest I have come to hearing my father boast.)

V
ersions of my father’s story, repeated thousands of times around tract home dinner tables all over America, made aerospace communities vote overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. And why wouldn’t they? How whole and complete, how self-affirming must it have felt for those aerospace workers to put an X next to the name of the candidate who so ardently endorsed their chosen way of life. How different, though, was the feeling for my father and mother, who happened to be among those many Americans who could not make themselves believe much, if anything, that Ronald Reagan ever said. My father had long disparaged the “hucksters” of Hollywood, and was not Reagan one of those, applying his same oily methods to politics? My mother had found some measure of grace in any political figure who was “for the poor,” but who could trust a man who blamed the poor for their own misery? During his eight years as Governor of California, my family had come to see Ronald Reagan as somebody else’s governor, but certainly not
ours
. Now Ronald Reagan had convinced enough other people to make him somebody else’s president, but certainly he was not
ours
.

We cringed when the new president said on television, with straight face and twinkly eyes, that America could spend a trillion
more dollars on defense while lowering taxes and cutting the deficit, all of this thanks to the Laffer Curve, a revolutionary new product that made economies grow faster than ever in history. We did not believe in the Laffer Curve, and we marveled that anyone else could. We did not believe that trees gave off pollution or that most people on welfare were lazy cheats or that most homeless people slept on the streets because they wanted to. We did not believe America could survive and win a nuclear war, nor did we believe that a space shield could be made to preserve us. We believed that Ronald Reagan was either a con artist or the slow-witted tool of con artists around him. In either case, his generous gifts to us would have to be morally tainted, ill-gotten loot thrust into our hands.

But what was one to do when the old uncle you can’t love has placed his hands around yours and, with eyes twinkling, is closing your hands around what he wants you to have, a gift stolen from someone else? For that, in the end, was the triumph of Ronald Reagan: not the slashing of taxes or government, neither of which shrunk significantly under his direction, but the massive transfer of federal subsidy from one group less fortunate to another very fortunate indeed. What he took from the smokestack cities he gave to the blue sky suburbs, building dream homes for families like mine wherever military contracting was done, along Route 128 outside of Boston, in Grumman’s Long Island, in Florida and Texas and Boeing’s Seattle, in the flourishing beltway around Washington, D.C., where all the Pentagon lobbyists and consultants came to roost, and most particularly in Ronald Reagan’s own state of California where nearly a third of all defense spending flowed, most of that to Orange County and Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. One in eight workers in California, held a defense-related job and for these favored ones, for families like mine, The Great Communicator proved a very great appropriator.

When John F. Kennedy had smiled so brightly upon our tribe, he had spun an illusion that presented my family, a Catholic, liberal-minded aerospace family, with nothing like this moral
dilemma. He had gushed military spending into aerospace, true. But at the same time he had charged us with a believably benign crusade, a race to the moon, a national excursion to space that would leave no one behind, not the poor, who would benefit from new Democratic social programs, not the blacks, who would live in a desegregated America of opportunity, not even the peasantry of backward nations, who would be lent, out of the goodness of our hearts, our Peace Corps know-how. The newly arrived aerospace middle class need not imagine itself distinctly favored; the country seemed rich enough, generous and expansive enough, that families like mine could tell ourselves we were only reaching the sunny suburbs a little ahead of the poorer folk who someday would join us there.

Ronald Reagan, for all his spinning of illusion, for all he gave us, offered no such comfort to the conscience. Ronald Reagan’s words and policies rarely made Kennedy’s pretense of binding the nation. Ronald Reagan’s ideology tended to divide America into the deserving whose fate need not be tied to the undeserving, the winners who owed nothing to the losers. As the anointed winners, not only were aerospace families handed the spoils from dismantled Great Society programs begun by Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but when that could not cover the Pentagon outlay, we were paid with funds wildly borrowed, money lifted from future generations. As Laffer Curve collapsed and recession took hold and federal deficit ballooned, Ronald Reagan continued to finagle for us with the shamelessness of a Buy On Credit! telemarketing pitchman. Four years into his reign, defense spending was up 60 percent, to more than $250 billion annually; within a few more years, the levels of the mid-1970s had doubled, surging past $300 billion. Even better for the blue sky tribe, each new Pentagon budget reserved a growing share for research and hardware, aerospace specialties. By the time he was through, Ronald Reagan would have America spending a third more on hardware and R&D than even during the peak years of Vietnam. All the while Ronald Reagan, eyes twinkling, would laud the inherent
“magic of the marketplace,” as if he had not artificially rejiggered the economy to enrich my tribe; as if, as
Fortune
noted, the same federal investment in other sectors would not have created 25 percent more jobs, albeit for different Americans; as if
Businessweek
did not acknowledge the reality with headlines like this one, printed a year after Ronald Reagan’s landslide election to a second term: “Pentagon Spending Is the Economy’s Biggest Gun.”

That, in the final analysis, is why my family so resented Ronald Reagan even as he gave us our father’s revitalized career, our dream house, our secured place among the winners of the 1980s. We resented him for not granting us the one illusion we wanted most: a way to continue believing that our gain did not come at the expense of other Americans, their suffering, their diminished futures. Instead, we were forced to concede that Ronald Reagan, beneficent con artist, spokesman for Armageddon, was very much
our
president whether or not we gave him our votes, and the question became how to make personal peace with that fact.

I
n the spring of 1984 I found myself at the wheel of my parents’ station wagon, my brother, Dan, next to me, my father in the back seat with my mother and my sister Maggie. We were heading north on Highway 101, having spent the weekend in Santa Barbara, Ronald Reagan’s chosen home. We had been there to enjoy the casually affluent charm of the place and to see my sister Marybeth graduate with a bachelor’s degree in ergonomics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. We had attended Mass in the old mission and we had window shopped along ritzy State Street and after the graduation ceremony we had looked on with delight as Marybeth and her friends danced on the beach in celebration, spinning and falling into the sand as the B-52s, singing “Rock Lobster,” blasted from an apartment window.

Now, as we sped north on 101, there flashed into view a
billboard urging travelers to turn off and visit the town of Lompoc, a beautiful spot, said the sign, “… where marigolds and missiles mix.” All of us laughed at that, knowing as we did that my father was spending a lot of time around Lompoc, and not for the marigolds. “Lovely Lompoc! Where nasturtiums nuzzle the nukes!” I said, eyeing the rearview mirror to catch my father’s chuckle, seeing his smile fade away when someone, my sister, I think, asked him whether he did in fact work on nuclear weapons.

“Directly? No. But I cash every paycheck Lockheed writes me. And Lockheed is a company that is in the business of preparing for nuclear war.” But for the humming of the tires on asphalt, the car grew silent and I began to feel bad that I had invited the chill with my joke.

I said, “I think it’s a pretty good guess to say you work on satellites, Dad. Satellites that take pictures that make it possible to verify nuclear treaties.” In the rearview mirror my father’s eyebrows were raised with amused indulgence. “So, really, Dad, what you do
prevents
nuclear war …”

“Let’s say I did happen to work on such projects,” came my father’s voice, calmly arriving over my shoulder. “And I’m not saying I do. Have you ever considered that the same satellite used to verify a treaty might also be used to pinpoint enemy targets for an all-out first strike? With the aid of satellites, those targets were picked long ago and they are constantly being updated. Insane, I know. But you can bet on it. And now there’s a man in the White House who seems rather, shall we say,
cavalier
about pushing the button,” said my father. “So if you ask me, these days nobody at Lockheed is clean.”