What did George Shultz really mean?

By Bob McKenna

George Shultz seemed to offer praise for President Obama this week. Or did he?

When Barack Obama chaired the United Nations Security Council last week, he received high praise for achieving a non binding resolution (2300 words long), the main aim of which is, eventually, to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.

The announcement of the resolution on television news was followed by a brief close up of Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz saying:

Ronald Reagan looking down at us is smiling today.

Secretary Shultz, a former United States Marine Corps Captain, has always been a personal favorite of mine, but at the age of 88, he might be mistaking his old friend Ronald Reagan for someone else.

Secretary Shultz was present with President Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986, when Reagan walked out after Mikhail Gorbachev refused to accept any deal that would not result in the United States abandoning its proposed missile shield. It is true that Reagan would have gone along with the banning of all ballistic missiles, but the establishment of a viable missile defense was non-negotiable in Reagan's mind.

My first thought after hearing the Shultz quote was that surely he was being facetious, and maybe he was, but that's not the way the media played it.

In any case, I doubt President Reagan is smiling down; he surely is still wearing a frown over this administration's drastic cuts in our missile defense systems in both Alaska and California, and our abandonment of two of our most loyal allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, by reneging on our agreement with those countries to install missile defense systems within their borders.

I don't see President Reagan smiling. I see him wearing the just mentioned frown while paraphrasing the adage popular for some time on bumper stickers:

When nuclear weapons are outlawed, only outlaw nations will have nuclear weapons.