Ronald Reagan, it turns out, was almost as scary a figure to some of his realpolitik aides as to his critics in Western Europe and the former Soviet Bloc. Dreamer, moralist, and idealist are some of the words that might describe the 40th president of the United States, according to Paul Lettow’s fascinating and, at times, unnerving account of what might be called Mr. Reagan’s “hidden agenda” on nuclear weapons.

Some of the most interesting material in this book (Random House, 352 pages, $25.95), which takes as its subject the president’s intense disapproval of the bomb, was either recently declassified or comes from the author’s original reporting. It also includes extensive interviews with just about everybody who was in a position to know what Mr. Reagan said on and off the record about the nuclear standoff between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

But before all the neo-Wilsonians start claiming the Gipper as one of their own (his middle name notwithstanding), it is important to stipulate some important qualifiers.

First, Mr. Reagan may have come to embrace his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), in part, because of his deep distaste for the strategic doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction, which his aides nervously kept reminding him had kept the peace for a generation. But he also knew SDI was precisely the sort of high-tech gambit that would both frighten and dishearten the Kremlin elites at what Mr. Reagan clearly saw as one of history’s critical turning points. And he never allowed his people to use SDI as a bargaining chip for the reductions in nuclear arms he was seeking.

Second, Mr. Reagan viewed the nuclear issue within the context of the Cold War – a war he intended to win. As the author carefully notes, Mr. Reagan rejected containment as the proper U.S. policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. He sought nothing less than the breakup of the Evil Empire, and unlike many of the people who worked for him, especially at the State Department, he expected to see that fine day soon. In large part, his distaste for MAD was in keeping both with his rejection of moral equivalence between the so-called superpowers and MAD’s role in protecting the hated status quo.

Finally, like other successful presidents, Mr. Reagan always anchored his idealism in a policy that served the national interest and the facts on the ground, as well as his loftier notions about the nature and destiny of mankind. He rightly understood that the wellspring of the nation, and its most reliable compass, was precisely that idealism enshrined by the Founders in the documents that launched America. But even as he argued for and worked toward their ultimate abolition, he also famously insisted on deploying intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe to counter a very real Soviet military threat.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the peace activists who flooded the streets of Europe in 1983 to oppose that deployment would have made of Mr. Reagan’s passionate determination to rid the world of nuclear weapons, had they known about it – never mind the Soviet true believers inside and outside of Russia, for whom the name “Reagan” was synonymous with warmonger. Oh well, that particular crowd was used to shifting gears quickly; a few of the dinosaur Stalinists might even have remembered when Hitler seemed okay.

Though this book has many strengths and ought to be read, I have a few reservations. No president has had a better understanding than Ronald Reagan of the role of communication in prosecuting a war, yet there is very little mention made here of his extraordinary focus on public diplomacy, from the costly investments in public broadcasting to the former Soviet Bloc to the artful and consistently effective use of rhetoric: “Let Poland be Poland” and “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall.”

A more minor quibble has to do with the omission of the Soviet demographic data that fueled Mr. Reagan’s and others’ conviction that the Soviet Empire was heading for a crack-up. Anyone reading the groundbreaking work of scholar Murray Feshbach, for example, would have been aware of alarming trends in male mortality, increasingly catastrophic environmental damage, and disintegrating medical standards – as well as alcoholism rates that were off the charts.

So much for the critics who accused Mr. Reagan of wishful thinking.

Mr.Willcox last wrote for these pages on the history of communism.