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Both books are reviewed here by Steven F. Hayward for the Claremont Review of Books:

… Above all, no credit could be given to Reagan, because acknowledging him would be an implicit reproach of the establishment intelligentsia. It is simply unthinkable that the Hollywood bumpkin Reagan could deal effectively with the Soviet Union if he rejected the irenic ministrations of the Council on Foreign Relations. Admitting that Reagan bested the foreign-policy smart set would have the most searching consequences for those who, as Reagan once put it, “make a fetish of complexity.” Reagan proved that the simplicity of Occam’s razor is what is most needed in foreign affairs. Historical argument over the Cold War, like argument over the French Revolution or the American Founding, is a proxy for the fight over fundamental political principles, and has relevance for the present moment. September 11 raised the stakes: It’s a straight line from the “evil empire” to the “axis of evil.”

The latest entries in the battle of the books are Reagan’s War by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and The Fifty-Year Wound by Derek Leebaert, a professor of government at Georgetown University and founding editor of the journal International Affairs. Although very different in style and approach, both come to the same conclusion: Reagan won the Cold War—though not quite, as Margaret Thatcher put it, without firing a shot.

These two books may not be quite in the class of the latest from John Lewis Gaddis, “The Cold War: A New History”, but together you have a good basis for some study of what really happened during the half-century from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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