The peacemaker.

"WHY are you doing this?" a political consultant asked Ronald Reagan in a quiet moment of the 1980 campaign. "Why do you want to be president?" Reagan's answer was simple, surprising, and unhesitating: "To end the Cold War. There has to be a way, and it's time."

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In The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (Regan, 432 pp., $29.95), Paul Kengor makes clear just how central the defeat of the Soviet Union was to Reagan's personal project. Kengor, the author of biographies of Reagan and George W. Bush that focused on the two men's religious attitudes and practices, here trains his eye on the Main Event in Reagan's public life. His detailed account of the eight years in which Reagan managed the end of the Cold War will solidify the new consensus of historians: Reagan was a highly able man, who played a crucial role in the relatively peaceful eclipsing of the most dangerous regime in world history.

In January 1983, Reagan approved a policy document known as NSDD-75, which declared that henceforth the U.S. goal would be not merely "containing and reversing Soviet expansion" but also "promoting evolutionary change within the Soviet Union itself." As Kengor points out, this policy was highly controversial: It was assailed by both the Western and Communist-bloc press. But Reagan was committed to it as a long-term strategy, and would not be sidetracked.

Ink has been lavishly spilled on Reagan's skill as a rhetorician and orator; in Kengor's volume we also see a lesser-known side of Reagan, one just as important to the eventual victory over Communism. Consider one vignette Kengor recounts, concerning the September 1983 incident in which the Soviets shot down the Korean passenger airplane KAL 007:

  Though Reagan was steamed and blasted the Soviets in a statement, he
  reacted quite cautiously, and much more carefully than his critics
  would have imagined ... He told [national security adviser William]
  Clark: "[L]et's be careful not to overreact to this. We have too much
  going on with the Soviets in arms control. We must not derail our
  progress." "Bill," he said, "we've got to protect against
  overreaction."

This is almost a textbook example of prudence: knowing not just what to do but when to do it, and making all judgments with a view toward the endgame. Anyone who is tempted to confuse prudence with halfhearted-ness would do well to study the singlemindedness with which Reagan followed his multi-track anti-Communist strategy.

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Kengor includes as an appendix a KGB document alleging that, in 1983, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy approached Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov through intermediaries to try to undercut Reagan. If true, the document's allegations prove that Kennedy didn't understand that Reagan had the right idea on how to end the Cold War and promote world peace. Nor would Kennedy have been alone: Reagan's liberal and conservative critics alike viewed him, for different reasons, as a dangerously simplistic foreign-policy thinker. (Kennedy himself admitted after Reagan's death in 2004 that Reagan "will be honored as the president who won the Cold War.") Kengor's book tells the story of how, step by step, Reagan's strategy worked.

* The late emigre philosopher Leo Strauss has achieved a great deal of posthumous notoriety, demonized by the Left as the cynical spiritual father of imperialist U.S. policies. Strauss's thought deserves better--and gets it, in The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago, 306 pp., $32.50), by Catherine and Michael Zuckert. The authors, professors at Notre Dame, contend that Strauss made three central affirmations about America: "1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good." They wryly note that "it does not take a Ph.D. in logic to recognize some difficulty in the coexistence of these three propositions," and proceed to tease out how Strauss could indeed have seen them as reconcilable. Strauss, they write, "finds America good relative to the alternatives available within modernity ... he finds modernity not wholly or uniformly bad, and America not wholly or uniformly modern." Strauss, in short, had a nuanced and realistic view of America's liberal democracy, and viewed it as worth defending. In the Zuckerts' words:

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  The classical view of politics that Strauss advocated involved a
  recognition that since the wise will not rule, government ought to be
  limited, and those limits should take the form of laws. On the basis
  of that observation, Strauss concluded that "liberal or constitutional
  democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any
  alternative that is viable in our age." ... His experience as a young
  Jew in Weimar Germany had led him to doubt the viability of liberal
  democracy ... as it was defended on the basis of the principles of the
  Enlightenment. These doubts about certain manifestations and
  rationales for liberal democracy did not, however, turn Strauss into
  an opponent of that kind of regime, as is often said in the recent
  discussions of him.

The American Founders were heirs to the Enlightenment project, and thus wanted to put in place highly utilitarian institutions--which is to say, ones whose functioning was not utterly dependent on the characters of the political leaders of a given moment. But they also believed in the cultivation of moral and religious character; and this has remained a powerful undercurrent in the American polity, preventing it from becoming what might be called a hollow, procedural republic. The underlying respect for virtue has made the U.S. a mixed regime in which democratic elections allow some leeway to the aristocratic principle--choice based on merit, as opposed to pure self-interest--and thus the excesses Aristotle feared from a pure mob democracy have largely been avoided in this country. Strauss opposed modernity per se, but he saw on these shores a type of modernity that worked.

* Gilbert Meilaender is renowned as a bioethicist, but over half of his new collection of essays is devoted to much broader issues. In The Freedom of a Christian: Grace, Vocation, and the Meaning of Our Humanity (Brazos, 192 pp., $22.99), Meilaender tackles in a rewarding way the thought of such figures as Augustine, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II on the Christian life.

Especially fascinating is his discussion of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; does this "teleological suspension of the ethical" mean the Scriptures themselves teach the radical relativization of ethics? According to Meilaender, the lesson lies deeper than that. The moral law is indeed relativized, he writes, "not that we may be free--but that God may be." Man's idolatrous tendency is to elevate ethics to absolute status, to seek security in the rules themselves. But, Meilaender reminds us, "the moral life ... is not our possession, but the gift of God.... The way of life that is faith, as an immediate relation to God for which no conclusive argument can be given, is not a possession that anyone can hand on to others. We cannot even hand it on without fail to our children; it just cannot be mediated." What Kierkegaard is doing is not an effort to relativize ethics per se, but to re-root them more solidly in the will of God.

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Nor is this merely theological hairsplitting, of interest purely to those who like to contemplate the angels dancing on the head of a scholastic pin. This very issue erupted into the global headlines recently, because it was the subject of Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture that provoked such outrage. Ironically enough, the pope's lecture was not directed at the would-be jihadists who took such umbrage at it; it was an attempt to engage in the centuries-long Western conversation between those who stress that God is Reason and those who stress that He is also above Reason. The Greek word Logos means both "reason" and "word," and is one of the names applied to Christ in the New Testament; Benedict said that a move away from emphasizing this identification of God with Reason risks giving rise "to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness, [a view in which] God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind His actual decisions."

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Meilaender's essay on Kierkegaard, written before the current controversy, is a thought-provoking account of how God and Reason are related. His approach avoids the extremes both of a purely Hellenistic identification of the two (something the pope himself cautioned against) and of a comprehensively de-Hellenizing concept of an un-reasonable, inaccessible God. Like all of the essays in this fine book, it deserves close attention.

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* Discussions of the relation of religion to politics typically focus on the benefits and drawbacks of this relation for politics. In A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Ivan R. Dee, 288 pp., $26.95), Darryl Hart of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute looks at the other side of the coin: Is religious involvement in politics good for religion? He makes a strong case for reemphasizing the otherworldly element in Christianity--whose Founder, he reminds us, stressed that His kingdom was not of this world. "Using the Christian faith as the basis for culture or politics," Hart writes, "actually trivializes Christianity." It is Christianity itself that has been decisive in the development in the West of what we know as the "secular sphere"--the work of politics and government, which has its own dignity as a proper work of man. Moral principles informed by religion can and should influence this work, but there is no need to blur the boundary by campaigning for political positions as explicitly "Christian"--or by condemning them as such. Hart suggests, as a model for Christians today, the Biblical prophet Daniel. Adevout religious believer, Daniel lived a "hyphenated life": He was assimilated to Chaldean culture, and even mastered its pagan lore so thoroughly that he became a key counselor to the king; yet he still maintained the courage to practice his faith, even when it was outlawed by the very politicians with whom he was cooperating.

* Centuries before Madonna and other celebrities turned it into a public craze focused on superstitious strings and other trinkets, kabbalah was one of the most impressive achievements of the human religious spirit. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, scholar and translator of the Talmud, wrote a moving and accessible introduction to Jewish mysticism, a new edition of which has just been issued by Basic Books. The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse on the Essence of Jewish Existence and Belief (200 pp., $14.95) is an eloquent distillation of the Jewish faith--a spiritual system that encompasses the Divine without scanting the material world, and in which repentance, the turning toward God, is so important that it is held to have been created even before the world itself.