Ronald Reagan

[smc]

Originally Posted by ila

Ronald Reagan always struck me a very sincere and likeable person. I realize that he was a politician and what a politician wants the public to see can be different from the real person.

One of the great debates of his terms as US president is whether or not he was responsible for ending the cold war. I would think that he was a key player in it, but certainly not the only one.

I think he just happened to be in the presidency at a time when two forces of history collided. The first was that the arms race was bankrupting the Soviet Union, and the second was that Mr. Honecker took one step too far in the GDR and finally precipitated the German people to tear down the Berlin Wall. That Reagan made a speech with a famous line in it a two years earlier ("Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall") is, I believe, largely coincidental.