Books In Brief.

The Competition of Ideas: How My Colleagues and I Built the Hoover Institution, by W. Glenn Campbell (Jameson, 409 pp., $35)

Since its founding by Herbert Hoover in 1919 as an archive of war- related materials, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace has become one of academia's brightest spots. The list of scholars who have found shelter at Hoover-Friedrich von Hayek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milton Friedman, Robert Conquest, and Thomas Sowell, to name just a few-reads like the starting lineup of the 1927 New York Yankees. And the fact that this conservative all-star team has done its work on the campus of liberal Stanford University (of which the Hoover Institution is a part) makes its achievements all the more impressive.

In The Competition of Ideas, Glenn Campbell details his tenure as Hoover's director from 1960 to 1989. During this remarkably fruitful period, the institution rededicated itself to its founder's free- market, antitotalitarian principles, saw its endowment grow from $2 million to $125 million, and established itself as an oasis of clear thinking and sound public policy. Conservatives will seethe as Campbell recounts the repeated attempts by Stanford officials to undermine Hoover's independence and drive its director from office; mostly, though, the reader is left with a sense of appreciation-and gratitude- for the efforts of Campbell and others to make the invaluable work of Hoover's scholars possible.