Old presidents never die...

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN gave Boris N. Yeltsin no direct help during the years when he led the ultra-reform wing of the Soviet Communist Party and then the opposition to Communism itself. Reagan Administration luminaries like Secretary of Defense Caspar W Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense

Although Reagan's hold over the government was tenuous, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was his own contribution to the policies pursued in his name. One version of SDI's origins has been widely disseminated- "and small wonder, for it is a marvelous story," writes Frances FitzGerald in Way Out There in the Blue (Simon and Schuster, 480 pp., $30.00), her account of SDI's evolution and significance. The tale begins in the summer of 1979, when Reagan, campaigning for the Presidency, accompanied economist Martin Anderson to the Colorado base of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), whose function was to track incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in a nuclear war. After touring the facility, Reagan entered its control room, said by Anderson (in his 1988 book Revolution) to look ` just like such command centers do in the movies." Reagan asked the commander, General James Hill, what would happen if the Soviets launched an ICBM. Hill replied that NORaD could track it, but that was all. Reagan "couldn't believe that the United States had no defense against nuclear missiles," wrote Anderson.