Star Wars : Hollywood Activists Give Pentagon Brass an Unusual Earful at Hearing

They brought along two public relations specialists, two attorneys, an engineer, a court reporter, several greeters and a sign-language interpreter.

They placed $25,000 worth of newspaper ads announcing their event, rented the Garden East Room of the Los Angeles Hilton and set out plenty of water pitchers and note pads. They even arranged validated parking for the 30-odd folks who showed up--including several retirees, a few unemployed people and a guy who looked a lot like a military officer in his civvies.

But this wasn’t a seminar on no-money-down real estate or the power of positive thinking. It was the U.S. Defense Department, in town last week to gather public comments on the latest stage of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the 9-year-old, multibillion dollar project known as Star Wars.

With charts outlining such subjects as “historic uses of ballistic missiles” and diagrams depicting “space-based sensors/interceptors,” Army Col. William F. Hecker Jr. tried to explain what SDI was all about--at least in terms vague enough for those without security clearances. While the Soviet threat may have diminished, he warned Americans not to let down their guard: “By the year 2000, as many as 20 nations may have ballistic missile capabilities.”

When he took his seat, the fireworks began.

To the lectern came the man with the crew-cut and martial bearing. But if the visitors from Washington figured Jon Cypher as a comrade-in-arms, they were in for a little L.A. acculturation.

“I play Gen. Marcus Craig on ‘Major Dad,’ ” Cypher said of his character on the CBS television series. Like all the 15 or so other speakers, he came to oppose SDI--and to question whether its proponents really want peace.

“I find (military officers) to be terrific people. I believe all of you are wonderful people. I think you love your kids and you want the best for this country. . . . But I don’t trust you at all,” he told the bemedaled panel. “I don’t think you can trust yourselves, I really don’t.”

Cypher then recalled researching his roles on “Major Dad” and “Hill Street Blues,” in which he played the opportunistic Police Chief Daniels, as well as his service as an Army private.

“I learned a lot about the nature of hierarchies and bureaucracies. I know that when the Commander in Chief says, ‘Jump!’ you jump, and when the chief of staff says, ‘Go!’ you go, (but) I’m asking you to actually be heroes.” That, he said, meant urging the brass to shut down SDI.

Citing his Broadway role as Thomas Jefferson in the musical “1776,” Cypher went on to quote the nation’s third President in his argument against SDI’s cost. “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt,” he said, holding up a picture of Jefferson and adding: “He looks like me.”

Cypher led something of a Hollywood contingent to the hearing, all of whom addressed the panel. In addition to his wife, activist Carol Rosin, he came with two young women he considered his “daughters”: Chelsea Field, who played Cypher’s daughter in the film “Masters of the Universe,” and Jane Rogers, who played his daughter on the daytime serial “Santa Barbara.”

But it wasn’t just the glitterati who had advice for the Pentagon.

“From the beginning, Star Wars was what the physicists like to call ‘spherically senseless’--nonsensical from whatever direction you look at it,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of a group called the Committee to Bridge the Gap.

One of the day’s more measured speakers, Hirsch chided the Pentagon for redefining SDI’s mission after the Cold War as protecting the nation from terrorist states. Rather than launching missiles, Hirsch said, “the old joke is that if an adversary wanted to get a nuclear weapon into the U.S. without detection, (he) should wrap it in a bale of marijuana, which appears to have no difficulty entering the country without interdiction.”

Hirsch, who formerly directed the Nuclear Policy Program at UC Santa Cruz, has an academic background in space research. But judging by most of the speakers, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to take potshots at SDI.

“The American citizen is tired of ‘experts’ that go around and lie through the nose,” an emotional Kei Utsumi, 56, told the panel. Raising an issue not addressed in the SDI literature, the Los Angeles retiree continued: “For instance, the Warren Commission. Thirty, 40 years they buried the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and J.F. Kennedy, and now we know all know that there’s a big cover-up. So when you get these Establishment-type people portraying themselves as experts, I think the people have a right to question it.” Then he added: “I’m a little fragmented in my thinking.”

The stream of hostile witnesses continued, from an Ethiopian emigre who asserted that SDI’s byproducts could “wipe out the whole of sub-Saharan Africa” to the woman who blamed the program on generals and majors with a “testosterone problem.”

After each speaker’s diatribe, Hecker politely said, “Thank you very much for your comments” and promised to study them.

Nonetheless, the colonel later confided he was unlikely to recommend that the Pentagon abandon SDI--one of the “reasonable alternatives” he had listed in his presentation.

“To me, (the testimony) doesn’t necessarily capture the entire view of the nation. The electoral process measures that,” he said, noting that Congress has regularly funded SDI under the Reagan and Bush administrations--$4.1 billion this year, up from $2.9 billion the previous fiscal year.

For Doug MacKinnon, an SDI spokesman, the public commentary seemed explicable only through “misinformation and ignorance. . . .

“The American people spend $20 billion a year on soft drinks, and this program is only a quarter of that.” Considering this measure of the nation’s priorities, he said, “we ask, ‘What’s so wrong about defending yourself against ballistic missiles?’ ”

Alas, MacKinnon observed, few in the audience seemed willing to listen to the Pentagon’s point of view: “We wish they would walk in with open minds.”

Opponent Hirsch, who has testified many times before federal panels, offered a variation on that theme:

“Coming to these things is a little like visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. We wail--and the wall just stands there.”