Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa.

• Author: Goodman, David

F. W. de Klerk's retirement from politics, announced on August 26, was a long-overdue acknowledgement of his irrelevance in post-apartheid South Africa. For the former president and one-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the drift from center stage to the political margins has been unsentimentally swift since Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first democratically elected president in May 1994. De Klerk, 60, seemed unable to grasp the fact that his moment in history had passed. By the time he resigned as head of the National Party last month, he was reduced to the role of a second-string pol carping from the sidelines. It was a humiliating final chapter to a volatile career.

De Klerk will forever be saddled with a dual reputation. He will be best remembered as the apartheid leader who broke with the past and freed his erstwhile enemy and eventual successor, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. But he also bears ultimate responsibility for the deaths of some 20,000 black South Africans during his reign, many of whom died as a result of actions by a "third force" of government security operatives that wreaked havoc in black communities. De Klerk, incredulously, continues to deny knowledge of or responsibility for these abuses.

The seeds of de Klerk's downfall were evident even as he negotiated South Africa's transition to majority rule. In her controversial new book, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa, author Patti Waldmeir explores the personalities and politics behind the South African transition. The book provides historical insight into de Klerk's current misfortunes. And in a curious sideshow, Waldmeir's conclusions were cited by de Klerk's adversaries earlier this year in their campaign to topple him.

Reality Check

De Klerk's macabre side and his stunning fall from grace are at odds with the fairy tale version of the South African revolution that emerged in the popular media. This mythology began to take shape the moment Mandela strolled into his new office in the Union Buildings in Pretoria in 1994. The made-for-TV rendition features characters right out of central casting: a black saint, a white knight, and the heavily armed forces of evil drawn from both races. The storybook ending has the saint and the knight realizing that they need each other, vanquishing the demons together, then placidly riding their steeds off into the multiracial sunset. The saint also forgives everyone of their sins, from police torturers to complicit Western politicians. It's a wonderful, heart-warming tale about how two men rose above their narrow self-interests to serve the greater good of humankind.

There's just one small problem: It didn't happen that way.

Patti Waldmeir, a Detroit native who served as Johannesburg bureau chief for the Financial Times from 1989 to 1995, offers a much-needed antidote to the fairy tale. Waidmeir's version of South African history includes real people: Mandela is a complex political animal, "a schemer, a conjurer, a manipulator of men" who spent his 27 years in prison studying his Afrikaner enemy in order to defeat him. F.W. de Klerk "was inclined to serious delusions of grandeur" and was intent on dinging to power, not giving it up. The author even confesses "a guilty sympathy" for the plight of Afrikaners, who "were fighting for ethnic survival." Waldmeir's willingness to challenge cherished stereotypes about the main players in the South African drama is a refreshing strength of this book.

Waldmeir's...