A brilliant piece of investigative journalism, this book reconstructs the 1981 massacre of 800 men, women and children in a remote Salvadoran village by an elite American trained army battalion. It shows how the Reagan administration made the problem go away -- and how the press was complicit in the cover-up. In the end one is left with what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called "A powerful indictment of our national capacity to betray our own noblest ideals when we claim the right to decide the destiny of other countries." The "New Yorker" magazine devoted an entire issue to it.  (CAM67, $14.95)