Reagan Had It Right.(Ronald Reagan)(Brief Article)

In early 1982, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt traveled to Washington to discuss the crisis in Poland, where communist authorities had imposed martial law and outlawed the Solidarity movement. At a breakfast with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Schmidt declared that it was ridiculous for President Ronald Reagan to think that he could "overthrow the post-World War II division of Europe" by prying countries like Poland loose from Soviet control. Five years later, when Reagan gave his famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech at the Berlin wall, many Germans--and Americans--similarly scoffed at what they took to be the president's naivete. They continued to do so right until the moment when Solidarity swept to power, the Berlin wall collapsed and communist rulers were routed all across the old Soviet empire.

In "Reagan's War" (339 pages. Doubleday), Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, argues that Reagan understood the Soviet Union far better than the so-called experts. Relying on the public record, diaries, memoirs and recently declassified documents, he offers an engaging, richly anecdotal account to make his case that Reagan "won the cold war." Today's scholars can dispute the sweeping nature of that claim, but as someone who reported from Moscow and Eastern Europe during this period, I fully agree that Reagan knew more and did more to produce that outcome than any of his predecessors.

Earlier presidents had a totally different vision of the Soviet Union than Reagan did. Eisenhower quickly backed down from his early "rollback" policy of seeking the liberation of Eastern Europe, opting for "containment" and dialing back on defense spending. Preoccupied with finding a way out of Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of State, told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the Kremlin could disregard any public pronouncements from Washington about Eastern Europe since they were only electoral sops to "certain sub-strata of the American population." Nixon, Ford and Carter pushed arms control and new economic ties in the detente era, based on the premise that the West had a vested interest in the Soviet Union's well-being. The Kremlin saw the same policies as an opportunity to seek military superiority and to promote "national liberation movements" around the world.

From his early days in Hollywood to his presidency, Reagan dissented vociferously. He was deeply troubled by the notion that fear of a nuclear war was producing a consensus for accommodation with Moscow, with the result that the West was ...