BOOKSHELF
Anticommunism's Triple Threat A joint biography of Reagan, John Paul II and Thatcher makes good use of Moscow archives.
BY THOMAS J. BRAY
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

It was, as they say, a close-run thing. Within the brief space of 26 months, attempts on the lives of the three leaders who would see the curtain ring down on Soviet communism--Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher--failed. If any one of the killers had succeeded, history might have turned out very different.
That's the thesis of John O'Sullivan's "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister," and it's hard to dispute. The British-born Mr. O'Sullivan, currently editor-at-large of National Review and a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, covered the Reagan presidency as a Washington journalist, wrote frequently about John Paul II and served as a special adviser to Lady Thatcher. He weaves the major strands of their lives together in a highly readable--and mercifully concise--fashion.

It is tempting to say in retrospect that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. But when empires collapse, it is usually a bloody business. And in any case, there was no such certainty. One of the more delicious parts of Mr. O'Sullivan's narrative is his recollection of what some of the West's leading peaceniks and intellectuals were saying at the time.
"That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene," warbled Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1984--even as Kremlin leaders were discussing what to do about their increasingly parlous situation. "Primitive," sniffed a New York Times columnist at Reagan's 1982 speech to the British Parliament, in which he predicted that the march of freedom would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
And then there was Sen. Edward Kennedy's disgraceful visit to the Kremlin in early 1986 after Reagan had returned home in triumph from the Geneva Summit, where both sides pledged, in principle, to reduce nuclear arms. Mr. O'Sullivan cites a secret report by the deputy head of the Soviets' International Department that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union. In it, Mr. Kennedy is alleged to have expressed the thought that, "from the Democrats' point of view, all of this is very bad." He warned the Soviets that Reagan might "abuse a good thing for bad purposes," entering into arms-reduction dialogue while still pursuing "military preparations." The senator expressed his willingness "to suggest some specific ideas" to "keep increasing pressure on the administration." In a footnote, Mr. O'Sullivan notes that Sen. Kennedy's office says he had a "close working relationship" with the White House during his Kremlin visits.
Mr. O'Sullivan rejects after-the-fact attempts to make Mikhail Gorbachev the hero of the piece. Mr. Gorbachev's refusal to send the tanks into Eastern Europe in 1989, as citizens began to rise up against their governments, deserves praise only if "a Soviet leader is praised for not actually shooting his own people." And Mr. Gorbachev's effort at reform, which unleashed a tiger he couldn't ride, was intended to improve the communist system, Mr. O'Sullivan reminds us, not overthrow it.
But Mr. O'Sullivan is mainly out to tell a great story of how three people of seemingly ordinary backgrounds--three "middle managers" from the early 1970s, as he calls them--rose to greatness. He deftly sketches the economic revolutions under Mr. Reagan and Lady Thatcher that remoralized the American and British allies while undermining communism's claims to superiority. And he explores John Paul II's subtle but devastating cultural and religious war against communism in his home country. (Interestingly, Lady Thatcher, Mr. O'Sullivan's old boss, mentions John Paul II only twice in her memoir, and then only in passing.).

Mr. O'Sullivan's account of the 1986 Reykjavik Summit is particularly absorbing. It was at Reykjavik that Mr. Gorbachev rolled the dice, agreeing to the possibility of deep reductions or even the elimination of strategic and intermediate-range nuclear weapons in an effort to get Reagan to give up on his Strategic Defense Initiative. (Ultimately, no agreement was reached.) The book cites a Soviet note-taker's admiring assessment of Reagan during the lengthy, exhausting talks: "He is like a lion! When lion see antelope on the horizon, he is not interested, he go to sleep. Ten feet away, too much, leave it. Eight feet, the lion suddenly comes to life!"
In this instance, and in others, Mr. O'Sullivan makes good use of Moscow archives that were briefly available after the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But much of his narrative is a vivid account of already well-reported events. And Mr. O'Sullivan seems to go a little wobbly when trying to explain the convergence--and survival--of three such visionary leaders at a critical moment in history.
An early chapter is pointedly titled "Did God Guide the Bullets?" But notice the question mark. Near the close he writes: "It is a spiritual element that best explains [the three leaders] and their achievements," but then goes on to interpret the spiritual element as little more than their shared ability to replace fear with hope, perhaps evoking Franklin D. Roosevelt's formulation that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
It seems as though Mr. O'Sullivan, by implying a secular as well as a providential explanation, is trying to have it both ways. But such puzzles shroud most of history's turning points.

Mr. Bray is a freelance writer in the Detroit area. You can buy "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.