Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.

• Author: Dallek, Matthew

In early 1987 Dinesh D'Souza, just 26 years old and already an up-and-comer in the conservative movement with a flair for controversy, took a job as a senior domestic policy adviser in the Reagan White House. He was quickly disappointed. D'Souza discovered an administration driven by turf wars and petty personnel conflicts and a well-meaning but ineffectual president hardly up to the task of running the country. "No one -- not even the president -- seemed to be in charge," D'Souza confesses in his new book. "I liked Reagan as a person, but like many other conservatives, I worried that he lacked the intellectual temperament and administrative skills to give new direction to the country."

Now a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of best-selling screeds on multiculturalism and American race relations, D'Souza has changed his mind about his former boss. Drastically. Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became a Extraordinary Leader reads like a long mea culpa. D'Souza concedes that the president was not perfect, remaining aloof from policy minutiae and the day-to-day operations of his staff. But, the author argues, Reagan was a great visionary, a shrewd and calculating chief executive who cured inflation, jump-started the stagnant economy, vanquished malaise, spread democracy to nations in need, and won the Cold War.

D'Souza is convincing on one point: Reagan was a more sophisticated operator than many critics have acknowledged. The Gipper inspired intense loyalty in his aides and possessed, in addition to his much-ballyhooed PR skills, an uncanny ability to make popular seemingly simplistic and antiquated conservative beliefs. He also played, it seems fair to say, a role in ending the Cold War, helped lead the American right out of the political wilderness, and set the parameters for much of the current debate over welfare, taxes, and entitlements.

But the notion that Reagan was a brilliant statesman with a set of nation-saving policies -- a 20th-century titan who revitalized America and made the world safe for democracy -- contradicts much of what is known...