The gipper and the hedgehog: how an "amiable dunce" outsmarted the world.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn

Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty rear struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, by Peter Schweizer, New York: Doubleday, 339 pages, $26

THE INNATE AND possibly genetically mandated stupidity of Republicans has long been treated as established scientific fact; it is so utterly beyond dispute that even a ninth-grade dropout like Cher, who once thought Mount Rushmore's heads were natural formations, can publicly declare George W. Bush "lazy and stupid" without fear of embarrassment. But however great a moron the current president is said to be, his dimwittedness pales beside that of Ronald Reagan. Even hardened journalists and academics, long resigned to their toil among the ignorant, have recoiled before the feeble-mindedness of Reagan.

Haynes Johnson, for one, was so struck by Reagan's vegetable-level intelligence that he put it in the title of his history of the Reagan presidency, Sleepwalking Through History. Frances Fitzgerald took the title for her account of Reagan's Star Wars program, Way Out There in the Blue, from a crack in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman about the simpleton Willie Loman: "way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." Former JFK/LBJ whiz kid Clark Clifford called Reagan an "amiable dunce," and historian Edmund Morris found Reagan's life so vapid that he actually made up characters and anecdotes in hopes of producing a more compelling biography.

Yet if there was an eggplant where Reagan's brain should have been, how did he manage to win the Cold War? How did he bring a victorious end to an ideological and military deadlock that defied Kennedy's best and brightest, Johnson's political cunning, Carter's brilliance (certified not only by his nuclear physics degree but also by an Evelyn Wood speed reading diploma), Eisenhower's strategic prowess, and even Nixon's widely acknowledged (if not always admired) skills as a back-alley fighter?

The general response among America's chattering classes has been that Reagan was the political equivalent of the millionth customer at Bloomingdale's. He was the guy lucky enough to walls through the door as the prize was handed out, as if everything was pre-ordained and would have happened the salve way no matter whether the White House had been occupied by Michael Dukakis or George McGovern or Susan Sarandon. An alternative theory posits that Gorbachev was some sort of Jeffersonian kamikaze pilot, taking his whole nation over the cliff for the thrill of being proclaimed Time's Man of the Decade.

Oddly, that's not the way the Russians see it. Says Genrikh Grofimenko, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, "Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that you won the Cold War because of your president's insistence on SDI," the Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars was formally called. Grofimenko marvels that the Nobel Peace Prize went to "the greatest flimflam man of all time," Mikhail Gorbachev, while Western intellectuals ignore Reagan--who, he says, "was tackling world gangsters of the first order of magnitude."

So how did Reagan...