MARTIN ANDERSON and ANNELISE ANDERSON, husband and wife, are coauthors of the New York Times bestsellers Reagan, In His Own Hand; Reagan: A Life in Letters; and Reagan’s Path to Victory. Both are Fellows at the Hoover Institution. Martin, an M.I.T. Ph.D., worked in the Reagan White House as an economic policy adviser and, more recently, sat on the Pentagon’s defense-policy board.
On February 6, 1981, at his first National Security Council meeting, Ronald Reagan told his advisers: “I will make the decisions.” As Reagan’s Secret War reveals, these words provide the touchstone for understanding the extraordinar...