Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.

The once widely held view that Ronald Reagan stumbled his way through the end of the Cold War by sheer good luck has been shattered by two recent books--one by a conservative scholar, and the other by a liberal intellectual historian. Together, these two books, building on the work of previous scholars since the collapse of the Soviet empire, catapult Reagan to the forefront of presidential greatness.

Paul Kengor's The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, contends that Reagan's goal of defeating communism and winning the Cold War can be traced to his early struggles against communists in Hollywood as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s. In this fight against an attempted communist takeover of the union, Reagan was, in the words of fellow actor Sterling Hayden, a "one man battalion."

Reagan continued to speak out against communism and the Soviet Union after he became a spokesperson for General Electric and a television personality, and when he entered the national political arena during the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964. Kengor shows that from that time forward, Reagan consistently advocated winning the Cold War rather than settling for the "containment" of communism. For example, in 1950 Reagan joined the "Crusade for Freedom," a group that called for the roll back of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. He later gave speeches at anti-communist meetings and produced anti-communist television documentaries. In May of 1967, during a debate with Robert Kennedy, Reagan, anticipating what he would dramatically do as president twenty years later, called on Soviet leaders to bring down the Berlin Wall.

The Nixon-Ford-Kissinger approach to detente with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s, coupled with the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, caused Reagan to challenge Ford for the Republican nomination for president in 1976. Although Reagan narrowly lost, he and his followers controlled the GOP's foreign policy platform which all but abandoned the notion of detente.

When he won four years later, therefore, Ronald Reagan brought to the White House strong opposition to detente and a determination to strengthen America's armed forces. But did he also have as a goal victory in the Cold War? And did he implement a concrete strategy for winning the Cold War? Or, as his detractors say, did Reagan just happen to be president when the Soviet empire collapsed due to internal problems unrelated to any of Reagan's policies?

Peter Schweizer, based at the Hoover Institution, was the first scholar to significantly make the case that Ronald Reagan deliberately set out to win the Cold War. In two books--Victory: The Reagan Administration's...