Who Is Peter Schweizer's Chapter In Living In The Eighties

Peter Schweizer’s chapter in Living in the Eighties he discusses the Iran-Contra scandal and how President Reagan’s policy was a “great success” (148), because his actions led to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union. Schweizer sates that “The arms sales [the] Iranians demanded did not free the hostages but did generate secret profits that were funneled to the Nicaraguan contras to contravene congressional restrictions on American funding for the contras” (149) so even though America looked weak and Reagan was painted as contradictory there is no foul here because of success in the long run.
If that was a sentiment actually echoed by Schewizer, Sean Wilentz would wholeheartedly disagree with Schweizer’s perception of the situation. In Wilentz’s book The Age of Reagan he dedicates an entire chapter

The story that I am alluding to is a trip that Ronald Reagan took to a cemetery in Germany to celebrate the anniversary of V-E day. Reagan does just the opposite of that by visiting this particular cemetery he is not “honoring Kohl’s country but Hitler’s henchmen” (Wilentz 210, this whole situation turned into a “political crisis”; a crisis Regan would go as far to call his “Dreyfus case” (210). The fact uses this awful analogy speaks to Reagan’s “shallowness in [his] understanding of history and begins to shed light onto his stubborn side. That stubborn side and shallowness is exactly why this incident leads off the chapter, Wilentz immediately brings into play Reagan’s inability to adapt to situations that do not fit into his ideals or course of action. This is one of many occasions where the president could not fully grasp what he was doing would be seen as unfavorable and thus led to a debacle, which is identical to how the Iran-Contra scandal played