Schweizer does not equivocate on the first question. Corroborating his answer are piles of government documents from the Soviet archives. Areport from the KGB predating the president s inauguration anticipated that "Reagan, who tackles all problems in an absolute pragmatic way, will pursue a foreign policy of a hard, but at the same time an essentially consistent line." By the mid-1980's, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would reaffirm the KGB s assessment: "Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he has teeth of iron."

For Reagan, gestures of vindication would come scarcely from the American left but the Soviets did more than enough to fill the void, especially after their once confident and audacious empire fell to pieces. Describing Soviet apprehension about the Strategic Defense Initiative, KGB general Nikolai Leonov remarked in a BBC documentary that "the concept underlined our technological backwardness. It underlined the need for an immediate review of our place in world technological progress." Leonov's collegue, General Sergei Kondrashey, admitted that the initiative "influenced the situation in the country to such an extent that it made the necessity of seeking an understanding with the West very acute." Recollections like these are as plenteous as they are invaluable. Also illuminating is the story of Reagan's intellectual warfare as an anti-communist in a Hollywood packed with coworkers who were often unreceptive and sometimes worse. He was active in a small group within the Motion Picture Industry Council helping to protect those, many of them Hollywood luminaries, who wished to leave the American Communist Party but feared for their safety. He later joined the Crusade for Freedom, a campaign to fundraise for Radio Free Europe.

We find in Reagan's War an absorbing tale of Reagan's career as a Cold Warrior that began much farther back than his 1980 inauguration and experienced no hiatus in his years as California governor. In the late 1960's, Reagan survived the first of several attempts on his life after taking action as chair of the Berkeley Board of Regents to curtail a string of violent protests against students meeting with Navy recruiters. By the time he became president, he was an old hand in this battle.

Schweizer does an outstanding job of bringing to light the psychological forces Reagan exerted on his most daunting adversary. Since President Kennedy, the Soviet Union enjoyed a succession of congenial U.S. administrations, a routine they felt so confidently would cease under a Reagan presidency that they tried to tarnish his candidacy in 1976 with a surreptitious propaganda campaign, the only one, to our knowledge, ever waged by the Soviets in an American primary.

The Soviets knew they would have a less demanding rival in a Gerald Ford or, to a greater degree, a Jimmy Carter who worried that an "inordinate fear of communism" would hinder a nobler struggle for universal human rights. (Moscow, we find out, would hardly fret during the general election.)
But if Reagan disdained the feeble global utopianism of Jimmy Carter, he was no more at home in the amoral realist ilk of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The Soviet Union unsettled Reagan in its brutality at least as much as in its geopolitical recklessness. Schweizer's allusions to Reagan's disgust at the harsh Soviet suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, to his avowed desire to see citizens of communist regimes liberated, to his admiration for Pope John Paul II's evoking the need for spirituality in Russia and in the Iron Curtain, all more than hint at it. But for all the evidence he provides, I don't know if Schweizer would agree with me. There is certainly some evidence suggesting that he might. He does explain at length the defects of Kissinger's proposal that the U.S. deal with the Soviets under the assumption that they would be an enduring geopolitical fixture. He also joins Reagan in chastising Nixon for liberalizing the U.S.-Soviet trade. The most important thinkers to have shaped Reagan's foreign policy appear, from the book, to be neoconservatives in the mold of Frederick Charles Ikle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Richard Pipes. Schweizer, however, is much closer in his professional relations with his occasional writing partner, and Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, as much a realist as any on the Reagan team. About whether the realists or the global democrats can claim Reagan for their own, he makes no contention. Schweizer's declining to take sides on this matter underscores a greater problem with the book, namely its want of analysis. Not once in almost 300 pages does he step into an ideological dispute and try to settle it. He prefaces his story by recounting a few attacks from Reagan's detractors, some to the tone of diplomat Clark Clifford's "amiable dunce" jibe. He recalls that no less than Henry Kissinger would muse, "How did it ever occur to anyone that he should be governor, much less president?" The most pointed criticism he mentions comes from Harvard historian Stanley Hoffman who derided Reagan's "ritualistic anti-Sovietism." Citing these examples of petty denigration seems to be the author's way of not taking any rival perspective seriously. Thoughtful, if wrongheaded, critics of Reagan are not hard to find. But Schweizer didn't care to look for them.

As a work of history, Reagan's War falls short, not because Schweizer's judgments are wrong, but because alternative judgments are never considered and, to boot, because the wonderful story his book encapsulates calls so desperately for a better writer. Many vignettes in the book are naturally stirring, and Schweizer tells some of them well. (His fifth chapter, for instance, offers a menacing depiction of the Soviet's preparations for nuclear or biochemical war.) But he fumbles every attempt he makes to develop a character's persona, most glaringly in the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy. "What separated Reagan from McCarthy and some of the other anti-Communists at the time was his belief in the profound weakness of communism," Schweizer avers. "For McCarthy, the ideology was a thing to be feared, an ironclad doctrine with strong adherents. For Reagan, on the other hand, communism appealed to the weak. Far from being a sign of intellectual strength or political courage, its wellspring was personal weakness." I suspect that the author simply contrasts Reagan with McCarthy for its hagiographical benefit. (Who, he must have thought, looks bad in comparison to Joe McCarthy?) But the Wisconsin senator comprehended America's foes with more nuance than Schweizer will admit.

This and many other moments in the book prevent it from becoming an indispensable resource on the Cold War and Ronald Reagan's part in it. It is the story of a great struggle undertaken by a great man in defense of a great nation. I look forward to the day when a great author will endeavor to tell it.