Shelf Life.(Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism; Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian; Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11; other books on politics)(Book Review)(Brief Article)

Like the famous hedgehog popuarized by Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan was a man of one big idea: freedom. In Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism (Doubleday, 339 pp., $26), Peter Schweizer tells the gripping story of how Reagan, as early as his Hollywood days, was motivated by the desire to rid the world of one of its most brutal tyrannies. The outline of the story is of course well known, but Schweizer has brought forth some interesting material. He quotes, for example, a 1951 article in which Reagan explained why he thought McCarthyite tactics were dangerous to the anti-Communist cause: "If we get so frightened that we suspend our traditional democratic freedoms in order to fight [the Communists]-they still have won. They have shown that democracy won't work when the going gets tough." These are wise words, of enduring significance for Americans; and they show Reagan as a man able to transcend the emotional currents of his time.

Some of Reagan's greatest hits appear in these pages-for example, a stirring declaration from the 1980 campaign: "There will be no more Vietnams. Regardless of price or promise-be it oil from Arabia or an ambassador sitting in Peking-there will be no more abandonment of friends by the United States of America." Throughout this book comes the clear idea that Reagan numbered among America's friends anyone who believes in freedom for humanity-and that Reagan made an incalculable difference in their great cause.

-- Historian John Lukacs has written a number of books in which Winston ChChurchill plays a key role. Now, in Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian (Yale, 202 pp., $21.95), he offers the summary of a lifetime's reflections on this indispensable man. The author's portrayal is sensitive, rejecting the representation of Churchill as "an atavistic Germanophobe Britisher, an old-fashioned John Bull, obsessed with the spectre of German power and obsessed with a single- minded desire to destroy it." Churchill's achievement was to see through Hitler's professions of anti-Communism, and recognize him as an immediate threat to civilization; Lukacs points out that Churchill was in "a minority among conservatives." The Churchill in this book is, in Lukacs's words, "complicated" but not finally "elusive." He was an anti-Communist who made common cause with Stalin; a British patriot who was also "a principal proponent of a united Europe."

Most important, as Lukacs observes in his closing chapter on Churchill's funeral, he was the pivotal figure who defeated the Nazis:

To the current generation it seems unthinkable that Hitler could ever have won the war. . . . People still do not know how close Hitler and his cohorts came to winning the war in 1940. . . . [The English] could have been conquered. . . . Churchill saved them from this fate . . . [and] it is a mark of the decency and of the common sense of the people of England ...