Thank You, President Reagan

The McCain story, the resulting backlash against the NY Times, the upcoming debate all have eclipsed what should have been the number one news story today; the rocket launch that blasted the disabled satellite to pieces. In other words, Star Wars actually works! Wow.

On March 23, 1983 I listened to President Reagan give his Strategic Defense Initiative address to the nation. In it he asked “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”.

This idea became known as Reagan’s Star Wars plan. It quickly became the subject of constant ridicule, vitriolic attacks and incessant derision from liberal naysayers in our own country. And no surprise that the Soviet Union plus most of the free world once again denounced the US and our military policies.

But I believed because I had literally grown up along with our space program and felt that anything was possible. I had been a very young child when a man first walked on the moon. Over the next few years I vaguely recall seeing capsules parachuting into the ocean and watching the astronauts safely retrieved.

Two years before the Star Wars speech I had stood on the roof of my high office building in Orlando watching the contrails of the first space shuttle lifting off in the east. As it climbed higher and higher I could hear cheers and clapping from the bankers and construction workers, lawyers and policemen and all the others standing on rooftops entranced by the site of this shuttle. And yes, years later I also stood with tears running down my cheek looking at that awful Y shape in the sky as the Challenger disintegrated. Even with that disaster, over time the lift off and landing of space shuttles became so common place in Florida that only the tourists would go outside to watch.

So the idea that we can shoot a missile out of the sky seemed perfectly reasonable to me. And yesterday we did it. This story, not some ridiculous gossip about McCain, should be the primary topic today. It is a triumph in technology and military precision. It is also a tribute to President Reagan’s vision. So once again, thank you President Reagan for contributing yet another accomplishment to our great country.