Gilding the Gipper.

• Author: Salam, Reihan
• Position: Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His 40-year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism - Book Review

REAGAN'S WAR: The Epic Story of His 40-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism by Peter Schweizer Doubleday, $26.00

PRACTICALLY FROM THE MOment he left office in 1989, there has been a determined effort among conservatives to canonize Ronald Reagan. Republican strategist Grover Norquist launched the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project to flood the nation with monuments to the beloved Gipper, affixing his name to streets, subways, and junior high schools in every state and county. A Republican bill to create a Reagan monument on the National Mall was introduced in Congress. There was even talk of adding Reagan's mug to Mount Rushmore.

A similar fever has gripped conservative historians, who, for several years now, have been doing their part to burnish Reagan's image by penning starry-eyed accounts of his presidency that exaggerate his achievements while glossing over any unpleasantness. The latest of these, Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War, is the real Ronald Reagan Legacy Project. It's a monument in print.

Those looking for inside details about the debates and decisions that led to the demise of the Soviet Union won't find them here. Schweizer is a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute--along with the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, one of the Vaticans of conservative orthodoxy--who has chosen instead to offer a predictable series of anecdotes that paint a simplistic, Hollywood-style tale of how one man's lifelong crusade against Communism brought down the Soviet Union. As a young man, Reagan stood down Red hooligans in Hollywood, where he first recognized that Communism was an unmitigated menace. After reading The Treaty Trap and Power Through Subversion (both written by old friend Laurence Beilenson) in the 1970s, he developed the strategy that years hence would bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan, Angola, and Central America and roll back the frontiers of Communism. The list goes on. And while Schweizer does briefly acknowledge the Iran-Contra scandal, he does so only to cite it as "a testament to Reagan's courage." Schweizer's Reagan is a real-life Jack Ryan: a selfless patriot who always gets it right.

Reagan's War reveals more about the minds of the conservative intelligentsia than it does about Ronald Reagan. According to Schweizer, Reagan's central virtue was his unbending belief in the evils of Communism and his willingness to maintain a steely hard-line in the face of those who lacked his internal...