But I am finishing "The Clinton Tapes," busy as I've been, because I love it, with reservations. My reservations differ hugely from Evan Thomas' in the Washington Post, which was another prod to blog about the book again, I admit. What a disappointment: Because of his Robert F. Kennedy biography, which I loved, and because his grandfather was Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas (a bit of journalism/history trivia I also love), I always expect Thomas to be smarter than he often is. And he underperformed hugely in his "Clinton Tapes" review.

Thomas' main point was that Branch's friendship with Clinton -- as young folks working for George McGovern in 1972, revived after 21 years when Clinton became president -- skewed his perspective on key political and historical issues. I think Thomas could be right -- in my opinion there is too much on Haiti in the book, I'm sad to say, mainly because President Aristide was a friend of Branch's and Haiti's evolution toward democracy was one of his passions. There were probably other questionable focuses. But what omission does Thomas question? Branch's failure to delve into the causes and effects of Clinton's Monica Lewinsky affair. Thomas writes, painfully:

"How could Clinton have been so foolish as to take up with a White House intern just as he was turning back the tide of Gingrichism in the fall of 1995? The reader longs for some insight, some Shakespearean narrative to help explain Clinton's self-destructive recklessness. But Branch does not deliver; he merely reports that Clinton said he "just cracked." Branch seems almost too embarrassed to try to find out more. Partly because Clinton did not summon him for several months as the Lewinsky scandal was breaking in the winter of 1998, Branch skips past the drama of the darkest days, when Clinton's presidency seemed to hang in the balance.

"By the time Branch catches up during the impeachment phase, Bill and Hillary have reconciled, sort of ... One wishes Branch could have confronted his friend more directly and persistently; he might have more effectively redeemed him."

Jesus, take me now. We know way too much about the Lewinsky mess; we know not nearly enough about the collapse of healthcare reform, the compromises over Clinton's crime bill, the strategies of GOP leaders in those years, and yes, certainly, Haiti. Who really thinks we don't have enough insight into what Clinton thought and felt about the Lewinsky affair? What grown-up journalist who lived through Whitewater, the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment, in the prosperous days before 9/11 and the Bush economic collapse, doesn't hate themselves in the cold light of (post-Bush) day?

Sadly, most of them don't. Many are reliving minor Clinton issues through the lens of Branch's book, at the neglect of the major ones, including my friend Chris Matthews on "Hardball."

Having said that, I must admit I found the next 130 pages of "The Clinton Tapes," after the first 80 pages that I loved, a bit of a slog. I think the book suffers from Branch's bias toward history and away from journalism -- as a journalist (but also as a lover of history) I wish he'd made choices to distill his insights, observations and raw interview data into a fixed set of topics that he drilled into. The chronological, "Clinton told me this, and then that" approach isn't totally working.

Still there's a wealth of insight here, and (my biggest passion) much that's relevant to the travails of President Obama and the Democratic Party as they struggle to change the country while merely possessing both houses of Congress and the presidency. That sounds more cynical than I mean it to. Clinton faced a GOP that was, 15 years ago, already the party of "No," already convinced that the only way back to power was thwarting a sitting Democratic president, and that's an important insight. I think they were right. But it's not clear what the answer was or is.

In my opinion, both Clinton and Obama were hurt by their efforts to regularly pick off a couple of conservative or vulnerable Democrats to help their cause. But we are still waiting for someone to try hardball Democratic populism, the GOP be damned, as a way to hold on to power. We don't know that that will work, and yet we can look at the troubled Clinton experiment to know that bipartisan groveling and triangulation didn't keep the wolves at bay.

Specifically, Branch's book is profoundly illuminating about:

• The way a small conservative cadre of Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee blocked Clinton's efforts at healthcare reform: specifically, current Obama headaches Max Baucus and Kent Conrad, plus former senators John Breaux (a healthcare lobbyist today, no surprise) and the frequently useless Democrat David Boren of Oklahoma. Painful to read.
• Hillary Clinton's prescient opposition to the appointment of a special counsel on Whitewater issues. Sure, conservatives will say she was saving her ass, but her reasoning was correct: First of all, the deeds in question (which the Clintons denied) didn't occur while he was president, so the court system could and should handle them after his time in office. Second (and more important), she laid out for Branch the way the House Judiciary Committe, which she worked for, narrowed the specs of the Watergate investigation, in a way her husband never forced Congress to do. "The committee had narrowed its scope to specific allegations that Nixon had abused presidential powers," Hillary Clinton told Branch, "adopting careful standards to reduce partisan bickering, and, more important, to confine the dangers inherent to the struggle between the branches of government." She trashes Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his silly advocacy of a special counsel, given his relative smarts (and it's funny to read, knowing how she kissed his ring to run for his Senate seat). Remarkably, Hillary predicted the moderate bipartisan Robert Fiske would eventually be dumped -- and he was, after finding that Vince Foster had killed himself, rather than having been murdered by the Clintons -- for Kenneth Starr. Ouch.
• The brilliant Bob Somerby may skewer me (and he won't not skewer me because I called him brilliant), but I was struck by Clinton's self-pity as he recounted his belated decision to intervene in Haiti on behalf of democracy and controversial President Jean-Baptiste Aristide. This was a real problem for Clinton; I don't believe it was fabricated by the MSM. But I was also struck by Clinton's conviction, in hindsight, that he shouldn't have stopped the migration of Haitian refugees in 1993, because, in fact, people were concerned about the refugees only "because they were black, and now they don't care [to intervene] because Haiti is black." He concluded he could have and maybe should have framed intervention as an anti-crime/national security initiative, and then he might have had national support. Ouch again.

I stopped reading tonight at the end of "Yeltsin and the Gingrich Revolution." It culminates in the stinging rebuke of the 1994 midterm elections. Once again Branch captures Clinton's "gallows humor" -- Thomas would call it "self-pity" -- that he'd accomplished the creation of "five million new jobs, peace intiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction," and yet his party had lost control of Congress. Clinton blamed "too many little scandals. Health reform had failed ... [H]e had pushed change too rapidly for voters to digest." He predicted House Speaker Newt Gingrich "was power mad, and would make many mistakes," and concluded "he would have to counterpunch from the center." I think history will show he was wrong about that, but I'm looking forward to Branch's take on it.

I'm still reading, and will pick up this thread as soon as I am able. For now I am mainly struck by the consistency of the GOP's "Just say no" strategy, and the importance of the Obama White House knowing the lessons of history. If anyone else out there is reading the book, please share your thoughts in comments! 

So I thought I'd try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you're reading the book. Every few days I'll write about what I am learning, and anyone who's reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with "Going Rogue" next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

I have to start by saying Taylor Branch's trilogy, "America in the King Years," is my favorite work of history. He brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive for me. And to see my favorite civil rights historian -- so far, there are some up-and-comers that deserve a look, too! -- grappling with the president who, until Obama, thought and did more about civil rights than any president before him, well, it's a thrilling combination. The book opens with the pair believing they are fulfilling the movement they'd worked for as young men, convinced Clinton can do so much to advance King's goals, though we know that eventually politics got in the way. Still, it's important to remember that civil rights was the mission that animated Clinton's, and Branch's, passion for politics.

One hundred pages in, here's what's fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush's life, so W. wouldn't have to start a war!); the disappointment of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on healthcare reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that's the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework), well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic senators to tell Clinton why they'll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don't dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!). Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines: "I couldn't tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window" as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors.

But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn't tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horse-trader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped policy, or even the silly idea of what's right or what's best for the country, in every single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama's battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama (after compromising) won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma's Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan. (Hello, Max Baucus!) The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They've been the party of no for 16 years, even switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they're suddenly worried about deficit spending (after eight years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and healthcare, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton's strange passivity with the press -- he just accepted that they're against him, and he put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American (who'd apparenty been in Clinton's "Faces of Hope" campaign materials), and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won't compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? [In fact, the R.S. interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: "Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on."]

Clinton "kind of went off on him," he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for ... He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn't really care about results in the world ... He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don't mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness."

Clinton took a breath. "I did everything but take a fart in his face."

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory (although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it). You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It's fun.

Here's Clinton's retort, verbatim, with some narration from R.S.:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke -- an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

"But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

"I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, 'Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?' So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

"Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

"But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill."

[At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell.]

"That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

"That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here."

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration's dilemma in 2009:

"That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media."

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it's just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe "You lie!" Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson (whose rant maybe went over the top,) even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic healthcare plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson's string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on the rhetoric war. I tried. It's going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.

It would be easy enough, and rather predictable, to lament this state of affairs and to find in it evidence of an anemic literary culture, a dangerously aggrieved minority, or at the very least the diabolical efficacy of bulk sales.

But such liberal cant totally misses the point. Having spent the past two weeks in what I might call a spiritual communion with these authors, I can assure you that these texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia.

As such, they fit into a long literary tradition, one that extends from the rhapsodic delusions of "Don Quixote" to the airborne toxic events of Don DeLillo, from the surreal prophecy of Revelation to the post-apocalyptic visions of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Though written in different eras and wildly divergent styles, these works are all about the incursion of sinister forces on an unsuspecting populace.

Which brings us back to Beck and Co. Rather than accepting the standard narrative -- that a disillusioned electorate rejected eight years of conservative mismanagement in favor of a pragmatic (and frankly wonky) Democrat with an inspirational pedigree -- they have created a vivid "counternarrative" in which the events of November 2008 represent a coup d'état. Actually, Malkin regards the arrangement as an oligarchy, while Levin goes all in with nascent totalitarianism. Either way, you get the point. The point is danger, urgency, what we in the fiction biz call "stakes."

"Glenn Beck's Common Sense" (No. 1, nonfiction paperback, 13 weeks on the list) is perhaps the boldest of the lot, which should come as no surprise. Anyone who has seen his syndicated TV show or his infamous YouTube tirades knows that Beck is a wildly imaginative performer, a man who weds the operatic impulses of the demagogue to the grim mutterings of the conspiracy theorist.

His tract, accordingly, takes the form of a direct address to the reader, in which he seeks to reassure us that he too feels a "creeping sense that SOMETHING JUST DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT. America has let thieves into her home ... Our country is about to be stolen ... Open your eyes ... These people are robbing us blind. They have set our house on fire and blocked all the exits." In short, Eeeeeeek!

We might take this as a textbook example of what Richard Hofstadter called, way back in 1964, "the paranoid style in American politics." Except that Beck is not a politician. He's an entertainer, in this case a writer indulging in a mischievous satire narrated by his energetic counterpart "Glenn Beck."

"Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature," John Farrell observes in his trenchant "Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau," "and its peculiar constellation of symptoms -- grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy -- are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero." Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Glenn Beck," modern hero.

The most striking aspect of Beck-as-narrator is his acute racial neuroses. It's not just that he compares Joe the Plumber to Martin Luther King -- heck, that's meant to play for laughs. It's his veritable obsession with slavery, specifically the likelihood that he (and his children and you, the reader, and your children) will be enslaved.

How will this happen? "Glenn Beck" won't say exactly. After all, he needs to leave room for a sequel. But here's a hint: It has something to do with universal healthcare.

At first glance, Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny" (No. 9, nonfiction hardback, 23 weeks on the list) bears a striking resemblance to "GBCS." Just as Beck looks to Thomas Paine's pamphlet for inspiration, Levin -- a lawyer turned radio host who served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese -- cites the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Both authors envision the nation's infancy as a Golden Age, in which rich white men enjoyed the perks of moral heroism. They got to throw off the yoke of imperial tyranny and draw up the rules of governance, without ever once having to worry about being enslaved.

But whereas "Glenn Beck" hollers from the soapbox, "Mark Levin" whispers from the shadows. One feels the gentling hand of erudition in his prose. Reading his book is sort of like hearing "Animal Farm" as told by Dick Cheney.

"Modern liberalism," Levin writes, "promotes what the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville described as soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism)." It's just a matter of how hard you rub it, I guess.

While "Glenn Beck" seems almost touchingly reluctant to identify his villains by name, "Mark Levin" has no such compunction. The leftist takeover took root, he asserts, during the Great Depression, which Franklin Roosevelt used as a flimsy pretext to subvert the Constitution.

And here's where our learned narrator turns away from the dull platitudes of historical fact and instead launches the reader into the exhilarating fictional pastures of persecution. Roosevelt's New Deal reforms, you see, were not about helping citizens avoid hardship. Nor were the Great Society programs designed to aid the disenfranchised. They were about consolidating the powers of the State.

The seeds of sedition sowed by these so-called Liberal Statists will be reaped by the Obama administration. Here's a brief list of what they intend to do:

* Provide medical care to illegal aliens

* Tax your personal carbon use

* Spontaneously abort your male offspring

The tantalizing beauty of a "Mark Levin" text resides precisely in this ability to attribute any crisis of State to its nefarious indulgences. The current economic meltdown, for instance, should not be blamed on the psychotic greed of Wall Street, but on the State's deranged need to throw money at the poor and undeserving.

The greatest risk of all is healthcare reform, which will allow the Statists to control "not only the material wealth of the individual, but his physical well-being." Without vigorous dissent there shall arise a "politburo in which political appointees" and their bureaucratic minions decide "who lives and dies." (Note to all Obama Statists: Novelist "Mark Levin" issued this warning back in March.)

Clinton consigliere turned Fox News prognosticator Dick Morris sounds the same siren in his recent opus, "Catastrophe," co-written with Eileen McGann (No. 8 nonfiction hardback, 10 weeks on the list). As a stylist, Morris tends toward the tropes of pulp. His narrative has a sort of devil-may-care recklessness to it, as one might expect from a guy whose résumé includes titles such as Tax Cheat, Toe Sucker of Whores and, perhaps most embarrassingly, Political Consultant.

That said, the man has studied his Tom Clancy. He knows that the best way to capture the modern reader is by ratcheting up the threat level. Obama will (of course) usher in an era of socialism. But he will also set terrorists free among us, allow Muslim law to take over the country, and repeal the Declaration of Independence. Then it's on to Year 2.

It's sometimes hard to tell whether Morris is crafting a canny parody of right-wing dementia, or an ironic thriller. The wonder of this breathless novel is that it manages to be both.

Blogger/columnist Michelle Malkin pulls off the same feat with her newest, "Culture of Corruption" (No. 1 nonfiction hardback, five weeks on the list). On the surface, this is one of those transparently mercenary clip jobs, patched together via large doses of Red Bull and Google, and delivered to the publisher by an ink-stained intern. The book chugs along on the fumes of innuendo for 40 pages, until, at last, we arrive at Chapter 2, the piquantly titled "Bitter Half: First Crony Michelle Obama." The beloved first lady, we learn, "was literally born into the Chicago political corruptocracy." It is here we start to discern the true intent of our avid narrator "Michelle Malkin": She is crafting a scathing satire of feminine envy.

In fact, she can't help casting herself as a kind of doppelgänger. She, too, is a woman of color, a mother of two, a no-nonsense breadwinner. As she sets out damning aspersion after aspersion, the reader starts to catch on: It is "Michelle Malkin" who should be our first lady! Instead, she has been forced to scrap out a living on racial self-hatred and frantic opportunism. No wonder it drives her mad to see the dignified Madame Obama ascend so effortlessly to the seat of power.

Alas, our courageous narrator's animus keeps getting the best of her. She's not just enraged, but aroused. Michelle the Merciless, or "That Other Michelle," as she's known in Malkin's home, has become her forbidden love object!

It's the sort of hilarious and subversive twist one would never expect from a second-tier pundit. But such is the brilliance of the modern conservative literati. While liberal scribes earnestly prattle on about the necessity for good policy in the face of global warming and peak oil and blah-blah-blah, the authors of the right have long since abandoned this outdated "reality-based" model. The reader's heart is captured, after all, not by an adherence to the murky truths of the known world, but by the ecstatic possibilities of the imagined. Are these gifted artists to be reviled for writing prose that gratifies the most cherished and depraved sentiments of the body politic?

I say no. And I further suggest that those literary historians who hope to understand the salient psychology of our age put aside their Updikes and Morrisons in favor of Becks and Malkins. They don't just rule the bestseller lists, people. They own the future of belle lettres as well. 

Genuine support for Communism -- meaning the Marxist-Leninist governing ideology of the Soviet Union and its allies, as distinct from various flavors of socialism or social democracy -- was minimal in the Western world, despite the United States government's best efforts to uncover it. But you didn't have to endorse Communism to be fascinated by it. Simply the existence of that alternate model, with its claim of scientific inevitability and its alleged utopian aims, had a bizarre, distorting effect on political discourse clear across the ideological spectrum.

Significant sectors of the left were paralyzed by Communism, unwilling or unable to criticize regimes (no matter how nightmarish and autocratic) that nominated themselves as the enemies of capitalism and imperialism and the champions of third-world revolution. Right-wingers became hysterically obsessed by it, finding a creeping Red stain in Hollywood movies, pop music and abstract art (and never realizing how much they were mirroring the paranoia of the Soviet commissars). Eager to prove they weren't closet pinkos, the mainstream liberals of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations launched a disastrous series of overt and covert anti-Communist proxy wars, whose echoes continue to reverberate today. (Osama bin Laden, after all, was a nasty little piece of Cold War blowback.)

Academics pumped out scholarly treatises on the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism by the yard, and debated the Soviet system's merits and flaws feverishly. Now all those copies of "The Lenin Anthology" and Leszek Kolakowski's "Main Currents in Marxism" are moldering in the garages of former grad students, and our collective memory of the great 20th-century struggle between capitalism and Communism is a series of clichés and blurry newsreel images: Stalin and FDR guffawing as they carve up the postwar world, Kennedy and Khrushchev daring each other to push the button, Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague, Reagan instructing Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!"

Archie Brown's whopping study, "The Rise and Fall of Communism," which is modest in tone but comprehensive in scholarship, marks an important effort to dig past those iconic stereotypes and painful memories and figure out what the hell was going on in that 75-year-long failed experiment called Communism. This is still an exceptionally difficult subject for Americans to confront with any clarity, I think. Our political life remains haunted in peculiar ways by the specter of Communism, which has become (to mix metaphors) an all-purpose ideological cudgel to use against one's enemies.

In some quarters, President Obama is denounced as a Leninist for suggesting tepid social-democratic reforms to the healthcare system (which come nowhere near the government-administered programs of Canada or Western Europe). To other critics, Obama is merely a spineless replica of a Cold War liberal, unable or unwilling to stand tall against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei the way Reagan did against the Soviet Union. Or, that is, the way he did in their mythical version of the story.

As Brown sees it, Reagan definitely played a role in the dissolution of Communism, but not the role most Americans think. Brown describes Reagan's confrontational first-term cowboy act, and his "evil empire" rhetoric, as almost entirely destructive, heightening tensions and strengthening the resolve of Kremlin hard-liners. It was in Reagan's second term, under the guidance of his pragmatic secretary of state, George Shultz, that he strolled amicably through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev, and negotiated a series of arms-control agreements that ended the threat of nuclear war in Europe.

One might summarize the central argument of Brown's sweeping tome this way: Communism meant different things to different people in different contexts, but the very things that made it successful, at least for a while, also paved the way for its destruction. A professor emeritus at Oxford and perhaps Britain's most prestigious Sovietologist, Brown has crafted a readable and judicious account of Communist history, from its theoretical beginnings in 19th-century Europe to its practical collapse at the end of the 1980s, that is both controversial and commonsensical.

Having served as an informal advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a crucial period in the early 1980s, Brown has anti-Communist bona fides, and does not pretend to be a neutral observer. But given the immense sweep of time, ideology and geography he strives to cover in 600-odd pages -- as Brown observes, almost every one of his chapters could be a book on its own -- "The Rise and Fall of Communism" is a work of considerable delicacy and nuance.

Brown draws an important distinction between upper-case "Communism," to describe states governed by Marxist-Leninist political parties, and lower-case "communism," to describe the classless future utopia imagined by Marx, which no such state ever claimed to have reached. Furthermore, although those countries typically called themselves "socialist," Brown avoids the term. For one thing, Lenin and his followers were trying to steal the word away from the Western social-democratic tradition, which has produced elected leaders in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Australia and elsewhere. There is an evolutionary relationship between Western socialism and Soviet Communism, to be sure, but their bitter split predates the Russian Revolution, and many of Communism's sharpest critics have been socialists. It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians.

There is none of the jingoistic cheerleading in Brown's book that you'd get from an American neocon. He firmly believes that constructive engagement with the Communist world was morally and strategically superior to tough talk and saber-rattling. In fact, between the lines you can read an account of his influence: In 1983 Brown delivered a paper at Chequers, the prime minister's private retreat, that convinced Thatcher to talk directly to the Soviet leadership. In turn, she convinced her good friend Reagan to follow suit. Brown does not see all Communist regimes as identical or uniformly totalitarian -- the notorious police state of East Germany was vastly different from the relative tolerance and openness of Communist Hungary -- and believes they contained the possibility for genuine reform. Indeed, he points out that Gorbachev did reform Communism from within, before deciding to abandon it entirely.

As many anecdotes Brown lifts from recently opened Communist archives reveal, leading officials in the Soviet bloc were keenly concerned with events and perceptions in the outside world. To most ordinary people in the West -- and to many of our politicians, who ought to have known better -- the Soviet bloc looked like an implacable monolith in which a mysterious elite ruled over the terrorized and/or brainwashed masses. Men inside the Kremlin and other centers of Communist power, on the other hand, knew that their own populations were increasingly restive and saw the wealth and might of the "bourgeois democracies" arrayed against them. They understood that their hold on the reins of power was tenuous and contingent.

Brown focuses tightly on a series of factual historical questions as he hopscotches from the Soviet Union and its satellite states through Mao Zedong's China, Fidel Castro's Cuba, Pol Pot's Cambodia and other epiphenomena of international Communism. He pays some attention to significant non-ruling Communist parties -- especially the big ones in Italy, Spain and South Africa -- but his principal concern is the 16 nations that at one time or another were ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party recognized as such by the Soviet Union.

His central questions are these: How and why did Communists come to power in so many different places? How did their authoritarian and manifestly unpopular regimes hold onto power for so long? And why did most of them collapse so abruptly? He also addresses, at the end of the book, what might be called the question of Communist hangover: How have self-described Communist regimes endured in Cuba, North Korea and (at least nominally) China, long after the collapse of the international movement that once sustained them?

For Brown, a Communist system had three pairs of identifying characteristics, all of which have their origins in Lenin's ideology and philosophy. In the political realm, a monopoly of power was held by one party, with most of the power concentrated at the top, and that party operated through the process Lenin called "democratic centralism." That was supposed to mean that open discussion could precede decision-making, which was then administered with unanimity and iron discipline. It usually meant, of course, that decisions were handed down from a dictator or a small circle of oligarchs, and were neither discussed nor questioned. In the economic realm, the state controlled the means of production, and a command economy, rather than a market economy, predominated. In the ideological realm, the declared aim of building communism -- for Marx, the classless, stateless final stage of human development -- was the state's "ultimate, legitimizing goal," and the state belonged to an international Communist movement aimed at moving the whole world toward that future society.

Communism remained a politically effective force as long as these three pillars worked to support each other. While the command economy was notoriously bad at delivering consumer goods and the one-party state offered little room for civil rights or liberties, they did deliver improved healthcare and education and widespread social mobility, along with rapid industrial progress. As long as at least some people in a society truly believed that they were part of a historic and inevitable shift away from capitalism toward something better, the hardships seemed to be worth it. Brown suggests that many people in Communist societies, including their leaders, did believe that until at least the 1960s.

Yet as people in such societies became healthier and better educated, they began to wonder about the massive social costs that "socialist progress" required in the best of times, not to mention the famine, starvation and murder it occasioned at others. They wondered about the police state the ruling party always seemed to require to maintain order, about the fantastical future that seemed to be getting no closer and about the non-Communist world, where higher living standards and greater political and personal freedom seemed to go hand in hand.

According to Brown, Nikita Khrushchev -- probably the last Soviet leader who believed in the future promise of small-C communism -- used to tell a joke in which a party apparatchik delivers a talk at a collective farm deep in the Russian countryside. "Comrades, some of you may doubt that we will ever live under communism," he intones, "but I tell you it lies just beyond the horizon!" An aged peasant sticks up his hand and says, "Comrade Lecturer, what is the horizon?" The lecturer says, "I am glad you asked that, Venerable Comrade. The horizon is the imaginary line where the land meets the sky, which has the unique property of always moving further away as you approach it." The aged peasant replies, "Thank you, Comrade Lecturer. Now I understand completely."

Brown has read virtually every available scholarly work published about the Communist era in either English or Russian, and has studied the now-declassified Soviet archives extensively. Arguably he offers nothing startling or new on such well-rehearsed topics as the October Revolution, the brilliant and ruthless figures of Lenin and Trotsky, and the Stalinist reign of terror that followed. But his arguments are balanced and clear. One doesn't have to excuse the brutality and bloodshed of Lenin's revolutionary regime, for instance, to grasp that he would have been horrified by Stalin's paranoid and murderous expansion of it.

When Brown turns to the long endgame of the Communist era, from Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about Stalin to the long, slow percolation of dissent under Brezhnev and the sudden explosion of perestroika, his account is frequently mesmerizing and leavened with colorful anecdotes. He offers considerable new insight into what leading figures within the Communist bloc were saying and thinking at such critical junctures as the Cuban missile crisis, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Solidarity uprising in Poland during the early '80s. In all three of those cases, the Soviet leadership tried to walk a fine line invisible to outsiders. They could feel their empire slipping away and sought to preserve it, while also trying to stave off an intra-Kremlin coup by Stalinist hard-liners.

Brown does not believe that Soviet Communism was fated to die because of its economic failures or its autocratic character, nor does he think it was brought down by the arms race or Reagan's muscular rhetoric. If anything, he is a charmingly old-fashioned historian who sees the slow process of social change embodied in individual personalities. He suggests that if either Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko -- Gorbachev's short-lived predecessors -- had survived a few more years, or if the ruling Politburo had elected any other member as general secretary after Chernenko's death in March 1985, recent history might look very different. Furthermore, if the Politburo members had understood Gorbachev's thinking a little better, they would certainly not have chosen him.

Gorbachev's life experience and philosophy, Brown argues, gave him a mental flexibility and imagination that were unique among leading Communists. He began as leader with the genuine aim of reforming the one-party state, largely by relaxing censorship and encouraging open dialogue. Some of his fellow Communists were ready for this, but few were prepared for Gorbachev's rapid evolution into a social democrat. By 1989 he had decided that it was too late to save Communist rule, and abruptly announced that the party would abandon its "leading role" in society and hold free elections.

This launched a process Gorbachev could no longer control, which included an explosion of nationalist feeling in Russia and the other Soviet republics and the unexpected emergence of a one-time Moscow Communist boss named Boris Yeltsin. In this exciting, pell-mell experiment in democracy -- Brown says 100 million Soviet citizens watched the early legislative sessions on TV -- Gorbachev hoped to preserve the Soviet state, or most of it, while fundamentally changing its character. After the failed putsch by hard-line Communists late in 1991, that was no longer possible. But Brown is always cautious about hindsight, and says only that the question of whether the Soviet breakup could have been avoided is "unanswered and unanswerable."

Brown is a big believer in the idea that history is not carved in stone. If Czechoslovakia had been allowed to become a social-democratic state in 1968, as both its citizens and its Communist leaders wanted, the Cold War might have ended 20 years earlier than it did. On the other hand, if Gorbachev had been ousted by the Politburo in early 1989 and Soviet tanks sent into Poland (as urged by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu) then the Communist states might not have toppled one after another. As Brown explains it, the now-legendary opening of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, was an accident rather than a policy decision, the result of a careless remark made to Tom Brokaw by a spokesman for the East German Politburo.

One thing was not a historical fluke or accident, though: the fact that a political system based on some half-baked utopian musing by Marx and Engels, and their bogus claims of scientific certainty, was not going to work out well for anybody. There's room for argument about whether it had to turn out quite as badly as it did, and plenty of room for discussing the continuing validity of Marx's insights into capitalism. But there's no denying that the works of a philosopher who championed human creativity became the basis for a social system devoted to crushing it. It's the platonic ideal of historical irony, to which other historical ironies can only aspire, and suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature.

In much of the world, the term "socialism" has been poisoned by its association with Soviet-style Communism; in the United States, it is virtually a term of hate speech. But as Brown (who is certainly no socialist) makes clear, it was socialists who saw the dangers of Communism first and most clearly. In 1918, at the dawn of the Soviet era, Karl Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels in his youth, wrote a diatribe against Lenin's use of the vague Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Kautsky insisted it had been meant metaphorically, and that genuine class struggle presupposed genuine democracy. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat "always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders" and to a situation where ordinary people "only become instruments for carrying out orders."

Although Lenin was trying to defend the Soviet Union against very real enemies within and without, he took time out to bang out an angry broadside against "the despicable renegade Kautsky," which suggests how much the criticism stung. (With characteristic directness, he described his newborn state as "a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie.") Lenin was too intelligent not to understand that there were real dangers in conflating the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of those who claimed to know what was best for the proletariat, but he had long since convinced himself that the imaginary ends justified the brutal means. Seventy years later, the last leader of Lenin's party and Lenin's state would decide that Kautsky had been right all along.