Reagan, long viewed as the consummate Cold Warrior, was hesitant to rush into war, a new book persuasively argues.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan
By James Mann
Viking Adult, March 2009, Hardcover; 416 pages; $27.95

Ronald Reagan’s legend has become so considerable in the last two decades, that it sometimes seems like he may have very well dismantled the Berlin Wall with his own two hands. After all, the central image of the Reagan presidency is of him in front of the Brandenburg Gate, calling for Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” It would topple four years later, and in its wake would follow the dissolution of what Reagan once called an “evil empire.”

But as James Mann shows in his balanced and meticulous new Rebellion of Ronald Regan, the so-called “Great Communicator” forged a path that arose from the conviction – not shared by many in his camp – that Communism was “a temporary aberration which will one day disappear form the earth because it is contrary to human nature.” The Soviet Union would be best approached, he argued, through a challenge to its calcified leadership and an appeal to its long-suffering people, not as a military problem to be solved through the arms race. Mann portrays Reagan as maneuvering against an intransigent hard right – on whom Mann has written in The Rise of the Vulcans – that implores him, without much success, to take a harder line against Gorbachev.

We are lucky, in retrospect, that Reagan did not listen to the morally bankrupt duo of Nixon and Kissinger, instead taking much of his advice on Russia from Suzanne Massie, an author who had no experience in foreign policy but found a willing audience at the White House. Mann summons impressive detail to show, convincingly, how influential her sympathetic view of the Russian people softened Reagan’s stance: Massie’s Land of the Firebird captivated Regan much more than the likes of George Will, who accused Washington of falling for Gorbachev’s “Iron Smile.” Nor did appear bothered when, after his appearance at the Berlin War, a Washington Post columnist called his address “a meaningless taunt.” For better or worse, Ronnie usually kept his own council.

But this is not a biography of Reagan, and those who have long mistrusted large swaths of his presidency may still read this work to find a president who – despite his well-chronicled failures, from social policy to Iran-Contra – pushed doomsayers aside to help the Soviet Union expire peacefully. He had that “vision thing,” as George W. Bush once called it. Many now hope that the current president does, as well.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan (Hardcover) [Amazon]