Word: mx
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ronald Reagan and the MX missile, the political equivalent of Yul Brynner and The King and I, played another engagement last week, and the staging was as impressive as ever. Olive-drab Army buses wound down Pennsylvania Avenue, ferrying more than 100 members of Congress to the White House for a last- minute patriotic pitch from the Gipper. Chief Arms Control Negotiator Max Kampelman made a special guest appearance, jetting home from the Geneva arms talks to add diplomatic luster to Reagan's argument that a vote in the House against the MX would weaken America's bargaining position with...
...elaborate White House choreography worked, as it had in the Senate the previous week, when lawmakers handed Reagan a 55-to-45 victory. Led by Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, the Armed Services Committee chairman, who drew hisses and boos when he defied his party's leadership and defended the MX, the House gave Reagan slimmer but significant margins in the back-to-back votes (219 to 213 on Tuesday, 217 to 210 on Thursday) needed to free the MX funds. The outcome was clearly influenced by Democrats' reluctance to be seen as "soft on defense." Said California's Tony Coelho...
Opponents of the missile argued that the MX is too expensive, vulnerable to Soviet attack and likely to upset the nuclear balance between the superpowers. Some Democrats who voted for the missile hope that by letting Reagan take the MX to the bargaining table, they can force him into serious negotiations ; with the Soviets. Said Representative Norman Dicks of Washington: "We want to keep President Reagan's feet to the fire and give him no excuse...
...really tragic part of the MX debate was that the one quarter of the House Democrats who crossed party lines to vote to the weapons, without whom the effort would have failed, did so out of fear that the Republicans would get a lot of political mileage out of labelling them soft on defense. Political calculations held reasoned judgement hostage...
DRAWING ANALOGIES from history is risky business, but nevertheless there was something about the MX battle unmistakably reminiscent of the early days of Vietnam. In debating the correctness of our involvement there, successive Administration managed nearly to ignore the actual situation in that complicated little country where the odds were heavily stacked against a successful U.S. intervention. Insisted on using Vietnam as an arena in which to demonstrate to friend and foe alike our readiness to resist communism anywhere and everywhere in the world. In addition, foreign servicemen, bureaucrats and lawmakers all backed this position not for its merits, which...