Blue Sky Dream (26 page)

I
left the Caribbean knowing, without telling myself or Deirdre, that I lacked the appetite for life with Ronald Reagan’s oppressed in the Third World. Back in Silicon Valley, my middle-class imagination now seemed only to want to write about people in the middle: bright, educated people struggling to live cleanly amidst Ronald Reagan’s seductive offerings. I thought I might have found a model of success, one February morning in 1986, in the fascinating person of Pierre Blais.

Pierre was a “knowledge engineer,” an expert in artificial intelligence at a moment when most AI research was paid for by Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon: $600 million were earmarked for a crash program to create “intelligent” weapons right out of a science fiction. The Army was to get a tank that drove itself. The Air Force was slated for an electronic “pilot’s associate” that conversed in English as it selected targets of destruction. Navy and Army were each to have their own “battle management system” keeping tabs on combat and advising strategy to commanders. Should nuclear war break out, artificially intelligent computers would say when and how to launch our missiles and the Star Wars defense. For the morning after a bout of NBC warfare (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical), the Army wanted a robot smart enough to roll through a body-strewn battle site and “detect and identify NBC contaminants, decontaminate human remains, inter remains, and refill and mark graves.” Another Army report looked forward to the day when corpse-gathering robots “could be loaded and, by merely activating a switch, dispatched to the nearest mortuary.”

The thematic richness of this macabre world was lost on neither me nor Pierre Blais, who could quote verbatim from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and who likened his profession to “the unquestioning scientists under Hitler. Whatever destructive technology you create is eventually going to be used—and that goes for artificial intelligence.” Pierre, sandy-haired and fortyish, a wearer of wire-rimmed glasses and double-knit suits, spoke of his troubled conscience in the precise tone of a technician, a tone cut sharper by a tinge of acid, a tone not unlike my father’s
whenever he chose to ruminate aloud about compromises made, complicity accepted. Unlike my father, however, Pierre claimed to be finally, truly, a happy man, having shaken loose the devil of Ronald Reagan once and for all, and I wanted very much to write a story about such a victory.

The more we talked in that first interview, the more it became clear that Pierre Blais had suffered a lifetime of sensationally misplaced faiths. As a teenager he had left his native Canada to fight on the side of righteousness in Vietnam, joining the Army’s 101st Airborne and winning a Bronze Star with a “V” for valor during the Tet offensive. But by the end of his stint, he would weep while standing guard, his head full of horrors he’d witnessed, piles of dead civilians “stacked like cord wood” on the road to Hue, a captured enemy executed before his eyes while Pierre, paralyzed, stared at a confiscated picture of the man’s family. Pierre had come home from that failed war with a “philosophy of pure nihilism plus pure pessimism, but I wasn’t ready for that. I was too young.”

And so he had joined the Mormons, married a fellow convert from Okinawa, and enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. There he learned computer programming under CIA consultant Richard Beal, soon to be Ronald Reagan’s special assistant for national security. By 1980 Blais himself was helping to program the CIA’s computer nerve center, working under a top secret clearance for Logicon of Southern California. The work was stimulating and he had given his wife and three daughters a cozy life in the suburb next door to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But then the nagging doubts set in, doubts rooted in Vietnam, its horrors still in his head. When Ronald Reagan mined Nicaragua’s harbor in contravention of international law, Pierre organized fellow Vietnam veterans in protest. Meanwhile, at Logicon, proposals crossing his desk filled him with increasing dread, including one to develop a system for reading another person’s mind by analyzing his every blink and twitch. Pierre buttonholed the proposal’s author, saying, “This is immoral, it’s 1984 stuff.” But the response was, “Don’t worry,
it’s just for using on the Russians in things like arms negotiations.” When Pierre shot back, “C’mon, what makes you think the CIA has any compunction about using this stuff on its own people?” the coworker clammed up. Shortly afterwards, Pierre’s top secret clearance was pulled and by then he was only too glad to resign.

When I met Pierre that winter morning in a Silicon Valley hotel lobby, he was, as I say, feeling relieved and triumphant. He and his wife had cut loose not only from Logicon but from Mormonism, disagreeing with, as Pierre said, the church’s “authoritarianism and weird apocalyptic nationalism.” He had landed a well-paying position with Teknowledge, one of Palo Alto’s leading commercial AI firms. He had been assured that his work would have no military component, and he had started a discussion group on science policy issues like Star Wars with coworkers. (Pierre’s view, shared by many in his field, was that software for so complex a system as Star Wars could never be glitch free, that Ronald Reagan’s space shield was therefore more likely to start a nuclear war accidentally than prevent one.) Pierre’s was a story of moral high ground sought and found and peacefully occupied, and I was pleased to be able to tell it.

I never got the chance. Before I could finish the piece, Pierre invited me over to the tract home, full of yet to be unpacked boxes, he had rented for his family. Teknowledge had fired him, Pierre said, and good riddance as far as he was concerned. He hadn’t much liked his coworkers (“so utilitarian … no consciousness about the outside world”) and they hadn’t much respected his skills (“One told me I had trouble forming mental models.”). But how was Pierre to concentrate on programming after discovering his faith had once again been misplaced, that top minds at Teknowledge were busy courting Defense Department contracts after all? Pierre had tried with all his might to draw certain definite lines around his work, his life, his soul, but what was the use of drawing lines if your employer sneaked around erasing them, leaving you to find out later? No, Teknowledge
was not a place where he could be happy, Pierre wanted me to know, and he gave me a perfect example of why.

On the day after Congress approved $100 million in military aid to Ronald Reagan’s contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, Pierre Blais arrived at work early and routed an electronic message to the terminals of every Teknowledge employee. It said: “Today is a day that will live in infamy in the history of this country.”

“Everybody yawned,” said Pierre, so next he ventured out of his cubicle and started ranting at a coworker he knew supported contra aid. “Why don’t you put your bod where your mouth is? Why don’t you grab an M-16 and shoot a few people? Why don’t you do that instead of retreating into your moral cowardice? Why don’t you do that instead of advocating that our money be used for others to do the killing for us?” What Pierre wanted me to put in my story was this: A week after he was fired, he stood before fellow protesters and returned the Bronze Star he won in Vietnam.

There was something in Pierre’s voice, the loss of cool precision as he spoke into my tape recorder on his kitchen table, that made me full of foreboding for him. Outside, his daughters were riding their bicycles in the quiet, empty street. His wife, who had not looked me in the eye when I arrived, was in a back bedroom with the door closed. What now? I asked him. His finances were shot, Pierre said, the rent past due. Homelessness was a real possibility, that and the break up of his marriage. And yet, his only work these days was for free; he was giving his time to a start-up company that swore off all military money. The company owners, headquartered in a Santa Cruz cottage, had promised to pay him when and if their product—artificial intelligence for personal computers—ever panned out. And if it didn’t, well, by then he might be long gone anyway, moved, Pierre said, to New Zealand or Japan, or to “some other country where they need high tech people but are more serious about peace.”

For a brief instant, a self-important worry crossed my mind, the thought that I might have egged on Pierre’s search for absolute
purity, making me partly responsible for ruining the comfortable California lives his wife and children no doubt had assumed would be theirs. Pierre, with his tract home payments and embattled soul, was about the age my father had been at the height of the Vietnam War, the age when my father had worn a black armband into Lockheed and a supervisor had told him to save his job by taking it off, and my father had complied so that he and my mother and we children would not have to experience what Pierre was causing his family to experience now. But, no, of course there was nothing in me that could have made Pierre come to this. All of it was deep within the man, a noble obsession surely, but one that now verged on the quixotic, one that would go on exacting a sobering price that I could not imagine his family enduring. I wondered, in fact, as I searched Pierre’s agitated eyes, if he physically could survive it. In hackneyed fashion, I tried to put a name to what might be within Pierre, asking him if he had ever really gotten over what happened to him in Vietnam.

His answer was, “If so-called post-Vietnam traumatic stress syndrome is moral pain, then I have it.”

I put that quote toward the end of my freelance piece, which ran in February of 1987 in the
San Francisco Examiner
’s Sunday magazine. Not long afterward, the Santa Cruz start-up company went bankrupt, its product a bust. I had by then already lost touch with Pierre Blais, had moved on to other stories. Recently when I went looking for him again I had no luck, and so I cannot say how well or badly it has gone for him, his wife, and their three daughters.

I
n the final spring of his presidency, my family found ourselves basking, once again, in the sun of Ronald Reagan’s hometown. This time it was my younger sister, Maggie, who was graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a bachelor of arts in Spanish, and it felt good to be reassembled in so lovely a place for such a happy event. So many good things had
come our way over the past eight years. Deirdre and I had married and we were living in a San Francisco apartment with a panoramic view while she pursued a PhD in education at Stanford and I worked as an editor at Pacific News Service and then, better paying with benefits, the
San Francisco Examiner.
My sister Marybeth had met her future husband, a medical student, and was earning a master’s degree in physical therapy. My brother Dan had graduated from the University of California at San Diego and was now in medical school at the University of California at San Francisco.

Ronald Reagan, via Lockheed paychecks, had continued to meet the bills that came to my father from these various universities. Ronald Reagan had also, by then, paid for the extensive remodeling of my parents’ tract home, a project that turned out even better than expected. When the renovation was done, my parents had hired a professional landscaper to make the backyard into an arboretum of native California bushes and fruit trees, my father building a new deck behind the new family room with its billiard table and another deck off of the new dining room with its redwood ceiling and windows all around. The renewed homestead made a wonderful gathering place, and we children would come for dinner often, bringing with us friends from work or school who marveled at what a nice house, what a nice family, what a nice life. While never giving Ronald Reagan a single vote, we had prospered alongside the other aerospace families on the block who did vote for Ronald Reagan and who added on to their own tract homes their own sun rooms and libraries and professionally landscaped gardens. In the end, to have lived well in blue sky suburbia under Ronald Reagan, it did not matter whether or not you had been able to make yourself believe a single word he said.

By the spring of 1988, Ronald Reagan’s claims for the powers of aerospace, his stories of a crusade to be won in the heavens, were already fading in the national imagination. Having reached an arms reduction agreement with the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan was now asking America to renew its faith in the commonality
of humankind and the peacemaking powers of two reasonably minded men willing to negotiate in good faith. The Space Shuttle program remained grounded after the
Challenger
explosion, more than two years before, had killed all seven astronauts, including the first civilian chosen for space, a grade-schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe who had seemed to embody blue sky optimism. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars “vision of a future which offers hope” had proven a mirage, a violation of too many laws of physics and common sense, so that now even the people in charge, the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, had come to admit the sham of an impervious space shield and had quietly redirected their efforts toward creating a system that (after perhaps one hundred billion more dollars) might stop a small percentage of warheads from landing on America, but nothing, certainly, that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” This did not surprise my father, who, from the early days of Star Wars, found consensus among his coworkers at Lockheed, a major Star Wars contractor: “Everyone I talked to was skeptical of the whole thing. Everybody I talked to figured, ‘This thing will go on for years and nothing will come of it.’ But nobody was turning down the contracts.” In the spring of 1988 Ronald Reagan’s military buildup rolled on with a momentum begun years before, when certain language, certain rewritings of myth, certain calls for renewal of faith had been necessary to get money moving from one segment of the population to another, from the undeserving to the deserving, from the losers to the winners.