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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...
...PLAIN folks, sending a telegram overseas usually costs about a dollar or two. But last week Washington spent $1.5 billion on a message to our allies and the Soviets. By okaying funds for the controversial MX missile and thereby ending years of rancorous debate, Congress showed for all the world its readiness to back President Reagan's peace through strength rhetoric with action...
What was so disturbing, then, about the MX vote was the Reagan Administration's success in persuading a majority of lawmakers to pursue the goal of a strong defense blindly. The faults of this particular multiple warhead system are many and well-documented, chief among them being its vulnerability to a knock out strike. But the President made clear through his no-holds-barred lobbying effort that he was less concerned with the quality of the system deployed than just deploying something to demonstrate firmness to Moscow and its Geneva delegation. Similarly, a refusal to undermine our negotiators at arms...
...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...