Breslin on Reagan’s Star Wars legacy:

He was Dwight Eisenhower’s science adviser. After that, he came to Columbia as a prized physicist. Which is how he got to Riverside Drive, and Costello’s on East 44th Street.

One afternoon, he spoke of the Star Wars missile defense that Ronald Reagan, then president, yearned for so earnestly.

“Don’t deprive an old man of his dream,” Rabi said. “Let him have it.”

“You mean the thing works?” he was asked.

“Yes. I’ll tell you exactly how:

“A baseball pitcher is on the mound. He has the ball in his hand. You have to shoot the ball out of his hand at the instant of release. You can’t shoot it before that, and you can’t shoot it after he has released the ball. You must shoot at the instant of release.

“So the pitcher stands there and holds the ball and you are looking at him and ready to shoot and the pitcher stands still forever and you watch him until you go crazy.

“We spend our money on it. It has Russia crazy. I know the scientists there. They know it’s nuts. But the generals come in and say, ‘America is spending huge amounts of money on it. They must know something. We better catch up.’”

That is the same system that Reagan’s inheritor, George Bush, advocates so strongly today. We have tested our missiles and they have hit nothing. Still we spend and work on them. They enchanted Reagan, so George Bush, inheritor, is enthralled with the glorious excitement of technology that, with the enthusiasm of the unwashed, he heralds as the answer, perhaps as early as next week, to the most diabolic of enemies.

And here’s Breslin on Reagan as governor:

He was known as a conservative and he said he certainly was, but when you looked around yesterday and compared him to the president we have now, Ronald Reagan was a moderate.

Those five soldiers died in Iraq without President George Bush even noticing it. That Reagan left us some cold offspring.

Reagan wanted people to starve without them bothering him. As governor of California he didn’t want to know the poor were alive. Willie Brown, then a member of the State Assembly, remembers that he would sit across from Reagan and show him a picture of a black child who hadn’t had a meal or a drop of milk in who knows how long.

Reagan would look at the picture and wince.

“Aw, come on,” he’d say to Brown.

“He’s real,” Willie Brown said. “Do you want me to bring him in here?”

Reagan always was near tears.

“Then we could cut a deal,” Willie Brown said.