In 1987, Ronald Reagan uttered the immortal phrase: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" Two years later, the Berlin Wall, the symbol and brace of the Soviet empire, fell under its own weight, while the real thing collapsed without a sigh on Christmas Day 1991 when the Soviet Union committed suicide by self-dissolution. No empire has ever exited from history without major war--recall the violent demise of the Wilhelmine, Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires in World War I. So whatever else Clio--the Greek goddess of history--may yet report about him, she will always praise Ronald Wilson Reagan for this absolute first in the annals of statecraft: an empire that died in bed. They thought him demented when he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. Yet down it came, and as I retrace the historic voyage of America's 40th president, I would like to note that I helped to pry a chunk or two out of the Wall.

Many forces contributed to the fall of the "Evil Empire", but foremost among them was the deployment of those 464 cruise and 108 Pershing II missiles slated to offset triple-warhead Soviet ss-20s and Backfire bombers that could reach all of Western Europe (but not the American homeland). Needless to say, it was not the "theo-logic" of deterrence that drove the counter-deployment. The drama was not really about "circular-errors probable" or "hard-target kill capabilities." The name of the game was as old as Thucydides' disquisitions on Peloponnesian power politics. It was a pure test of will and strength, and on its outcome hung, as it turned out, history. Yet what a slender thread it was.

Shift to the summer of 1982. One key European leader, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, would fall three months later--in large part because his Social Democrats were abandoning him over the missile deployment. Western Europe and West Germany, which was to take the bulk of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF), appeared to be in a prerevolutionary mood. Millions were marching against NATO and America; pacifism and neutralism were given a new name: "Hollanditis." The Soviets were playing missile angst to the hilt, predicting that Western Europe would crack under the pressure.

First to crack, though, was Paul Nitze, chief INF negotiator. More despondent about Europe's resolve than most, he had taken his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinski, on a walk into the woods near Geneva on July 16, 1982, where he offered a compromise: 75 triple-warhead ss-20s for the Soviets, 75 cruise missile launchers for the United States, but none of those swift Pershing IIs with their super-accurate nuclear warheads that could reach Moscow in minutes. After Helmut Schmidt's ouster in October, and with the Soviets salivating over an easy victory to come, Nitze grew ever more agitated about West Germany, the keystone in America's entire deployment architecture. Whenever he returned from Geneva, he would warn his colleagues at the State Department in ever more dire terms that without compromise the Germans would bolt.

I recall a lunch that I had in Washington with Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt in the summer of 1983 that surely turned around history (at least a bit). Burt was worried about Nitze, who kept pressing for a "walk in the woods"-type deal, arguing that if the Germans defected, so would everybody else. But to follow Nitze into the woods would undo the deployment as well. By unbundling its "double-zero" decision of 1979 (either no missiles, or 572 for the West), NATO would step onto a slippery slope. Once the Pershings that the Soviets pretended to fear were out of the equation, the Kremlin would pocket the prize and then play for time, confident that Western governments would not have the stomach to battle their peace movements sine die.

I took the opposite line, arguing that the Hollanditis hypothesis was wrong: Though the protesters dominated the television screens, they remained a minority. Moreover, the majority did not care enough about INF to reverse their governments, let alone topple them. Though nobody wanted the missiles in his back yard, other worries like unemployment, inflation or the threat to social security consistently and cross-nationally dwarfed inf. National elections would be decided on domestic grounds. Hence, Helmut Kohl would win the November 1983 vote. He did, and on the very next day, the first missile components arrived in West Germany. Thus, a single lunch had stiffened the resolve of the State Department, and the rest is history. All 572 missiles were deployed on Ronald Reagan's watch, and so the greatest Soviet power play in Europe was thwarted in an expense-account eatery on K Street.

Well, not quite. Messrs. Burt, Nitze and certainly Joffe were but bit players in the historic drama of empire's end. Enter Ronald Reagan, a president who, whatever else he was and did, was an extraordinary exemplar of "Only in America." He was an ingŽnue even by American standards, but as tough and hard-bitten as any Soviet general-secretary (post-Stalin, that is). He hated communism, but embraced Mikhail Gorbachev. He presided over the greatest peace-time military buildup in American history, but loathed nuclear weapons, confiding in An American Life that his "dream became a world free of nuclear weapons." He elevated supply-side economics from Arthur Laffer's back-of-the-envelope doodles to the reigning dogma of the White House and radically cut taxes--only to pragmatically raise them again in 1982 and 1983 when a "decent respect" for the opinions of Congress so demanded.

Ronald Reagan was John Wayne and Alan Alda rolled into one, a character they don't make in Europe, perhaps no longer even in America (who is John Wayne today?). Europeans showed nothing but contempt for him. They ridiculed him as a "cowboy" and matinee idol of b-movie fame, blithely or willfully ignoring that he had cut his teeth in politics as boss of the powerful Screen Actors' Guild and sharpened them as a two-term governor of California. Though not given to hard work, especially not past 5 pm, it was Reagan who pulled America out of its Carterite malaise and moroseness--who not only proclaimed a new "morning in America", but made it happen with his lopsided grin and infectious optimism. Can anybody imagine Messrs. Chirac and Schršder delivering "It's morning again in France/Germany" speeches that would drag their countries from despondency and morositŽ?

The Euromissiles played a staring role in the final act of the Cold War. Militarily, they were but pawns in a nuclear world defined by 10,000 strategic warheads on either side. But on the Cold War's central chessboard, they looked like kings and queens that would complete the irresistible thrust of Soviet power launched in the 1970s. One Soviet surrogate, North Vietnam, had beaten the United States in Southeast Asia. Another, Cuba, had anchored Soviet-bloc power in the darkest heart of Africa, in Angola. America had just lost Iran to the Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini, and with it, one of Washington's key allies in the Middle East. Finally, as Carter's America was being humiliated by Iranian hostage-takers and held up to ridicule by botched rescue gambits, the Soviets were forging into Afghanistan--as Alexander the Great had done on his imperial march to India. To complete the degradation of America, only two key allies--Turkey and West Germany--heeded Washington's call to boycott the Moscow Olympics of 1980. And the economy was wallowing in stagflation.

What would have happened had Western Europe finally buckled, had it refused to station INF? Moscow's boldest dream would have come true: to separate Western Europe from its transatlantic protector, to create zones of inferior security and, thus, to end up dominating the entire continent. Detente and Ostpolitik had already driven a sizeable wedge into the Atlantic Alliance, pushing Western Europe, and especially West Germany, closer toward the Soviet orbit. Now imagine that hundreds of Soviet ss-20s and Backfires had remained unmatched and unbalanced. Posing a separate threat, they would have consecrated Soviet strategic superiority on the Old Continent while silently reminding the West Europeans to remain on their best behavior. NATO would have collapsed de facto right then and there, and not twenty years later, when Berlin and Paris joined with Moscow in 2003 to try to derail the American war against Saddam Hussein.

Unlike Paul Nitze and the arms controllers in the State Department, Reagan focused not on the scholastics of deterrence or the frailties of European will, but on the chunkier issues of power--how it is kept, expanded or lost. According to Reagan's biographer Edmund Morris:

"Nothing . . . deflected him from what he was convinced was his double mission: at home, to restore the American entrepreneurial spirit after fifty years of federal paternalism, abroad to display such a resolute contempt for Marxism-Leninism that it would follow Nazism onto the 'ash-heap of history.' Both conceits were perceived as laughably naive in 1981, at least in those Chardonnay-fragrant areas of Manhattan and Marin County where political issues are always described as 'complex.' [After eight years], the "evil empire" began to self-destruct, just as he had said it would."

Can causality--and historical greatness--be so casually assigned? Reagan's detractors and especially Europe's Ostpolitikers have sullenly pooh-poohed Reagan's role, locating history's mighty hand in their own pliancy toward Moscow (aka "detente") and the farsighted generosity of Gorbachev. Of course, we can never allot precise weight to history's many agents. But we can sift among contending explanations by way of elimination.

Did detente turn around history? This fitful policy of arms control and accommodation cannot bear the causal weight attributed to it by Reagan's gainsayers. Detente and thaws have been around since the 1955 great-power summit in Geneva. But the "Spirit of Geneva" was blown away one year later by the suppression of Poland and completely forgotten by the time Nikita Khrushchev issued his Berlin Ultimatums (1958) or banged the rostrum at the UN General Assembly (1960). The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 produced an earnest attempt to tame the nuclear menace, but only a scant three years later, rapprochement was overwhelmed by escalation in Vietnam. There was more detente in 1967, when President Johnson met with Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New York; yet the much-touted "Spirit of Glassboro" was brutally dispelled by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Another stint of great-power detente accompanied German Ostpolitik from 1969 to 1972, complete with salt agreements and Nixon-Brezhnev embraces. That phase came to an end in 1973 when Moscow threatened nuclear strikes during the Yom Kippur War while dispatching its Cuban pawns to Africa. Nor did the much-celebrated Carter-Brezhnev summit in Vienna in 1979, where another strategic arms agreement was signed, keep the Soviets from invading Afghanistan a few months later. This record hardly vindicates the dŽtentists. Detente was the foreign policy equivalent of Carly Simon's "killing me softly" song. It would de-fang and then subvert Soviet power by propitiating it. Alas, this lovely theory cannot explain Moscow's capitulation in the Cold War when there was much detente and so little surrender during the three decades prior to Ronald Reagan.

So on whom or what do we bestow the title of the "evil empire's" killer? Was it Mikhail Gorbachev himself who pulled down what Lenin and Stalin had built up? It is tempting to finger Gorbachev, but this would ascribe too much wisdom and foresight to a man who wanted merely to reform, but not to relinquish, the empire. At no point, however, did Gorbachev want to yield Moscow's pride of place as the number two superpower. And he was blissfully confident that the risks were tolerable: "There is no reason to fear the collapse or the end of socialism", Gorbachev assured Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu three weeks after the Berlin Wall had been breached and three weeks before the Romanian dictator was executed by his own people.

Leaders who know what they are doing or who have wittingly decided to give away the imperial store do not talk this way in their memoirs or anywhere else, unless they are either benignly naive or blind to the fearsome dynamics they themselves have unleashed. Perhaps it was this naivety that joined Gorbachev and Reagan at the hip in the final years of the Cold War: their childlike faith in a world without nuclear weapons and their blessed belief in the transcendentality of history. But it will not do to invoke a surfeit of innocence (or ignorance), at least not by equal measures. Naive or not, Reagan was made from far sterner stuff than was his Soviet counterpart. His genial grin and wise-cracking demeanor concealed a spine of steel when push came to shove.

Ronald Reagan, after all, had fired 11,000 traffic controllers, even though their union was one of the few that had supported him in 1980. He fired them because he said he would if they walked off their jobs. Concerning Gorbachev, Reagan said, soon after their first summit in Geneva in 1985, that he "grew to like him more" as the meeting went on because he "could tell jokes about himself and even about his country." Yet at their next meeting in Reykjavik in 1986, where Gorbachev would not budge on the "Star Wars" question, Reagan was decisive and unforgiving. He recalls in An American Life how he stood up from the table to proclaim that the meeting was over. Then he turned to his Secretary of State: "Let's go, George. We're leaving." Like any good diplomat, Shultz was crushed by so much roughness, but Reagan was completely unfazed. Later on, he explained: "I went to Reykjavik determined that everything was negotiable except two things, our freedom and our future."

The American economy was also made from sterner stuff than Gorbachev's collapsing command economy. After the faux prosperity of the 1970s, fueled by skyrocketing oil prices and infusions of Western loans, the Soviet economy went into a terminal tail spin while its U.S. counterpart turned on its afterburners: super-Keynesian deficit spending and accelerated micro-economic reform, a seemingly bizarre, yet triumphant combination that riled the conventionalists in both camps. The supply-siders were upset by the heavy government spending, the Left by the government's retraction from the economy through deregulation. Miraculously, growth returned after the stagnation of the 1970s while inflation did not.

How could the Soviet Union keep up, now that its European missile gambit had failed while Reagan's "Star Wars" strategy threatened to devalue its last superpower badge: a bloated arsenal of intercontinental nuclear weapons? Note that there is no straight causal line between SDI and the Soviet Union's self-dissolution. Reagan did not go for Edward Teller's illusionary claims about "Star Wars" because he wanted to use SDI as the final nail in the Soviet coffin. For Reagan, SDI spelled out the promise of transcendence, if not salvation. A nuclear abolitionist at heart, he believed truly that the missile shield would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The idea was not to dispatch the Soviet Union, but to liberate both superpowers from a death-dealing curse. Nor is there any conclusive evidence in the Politburo record, as available today, that would confirm the SDI-as-empire-killer theory so beloved by Reagan boosters.

Gorbachev and the Politburo did not suddenly decide to fold and quit because they thought Reagan held an unbeatable hand full of laser cannons and "brilliant pebbles." Even those mesmerized by American prowess could hear what their scientists told them: SDI in the 1980s was a Rube Goldberg contraption cluttering up the labs in Los Alamos and Livermore. Even if SDI worked, it could be overwhelmed with relatively cheap and unsophisticated countermeasures. And so it remains, twenty years and many billions of taxpayers' dollars later.

To labor these obvious points is not to belittle Reagan's history-transforming role. It is rather to make a plea for a more complex rendering of events. First, there is always an element of serendipity--a favorable constellation of forces, events and personalities. While Reagan's America was on a roll, propelled by rapid economic growth and ballooning self-confidence, Gorbachev's Soviet Union was grinding to a halt. When he came to power, defense expenditures were claiming up to 20 percent of GDP and rising. As the economy stagnated, Siberian oil production began to decline in 1983, and world oil prices, having risen twelvefold in the 1970s, began to plunge in the mid-1980s.

It must have become clear even to the Politburo's most doctrinaire blockheads that the Soviet Union could no longer service its key national interests: provide a decent standard of living to its population, keep up with Reagan's armament juggernaut, and subsidize an ever more demanding bunch of indigent clients from Czechoslovakia to Cuba. This was his serendipitous moment, but there was more to his fortune than a favorable constellation of the stars.

Fortuna, as Machiavelli reminded us, is not just good luck, but strength, foresight and will. Though the Soviet system was doomed to die, Reagan brought the reckoning closer by doing exactly what George Kennan had prescribed was necessary in his famous Foreign Affairs article forty years earlier. Later, Kennan would abandon his previous convictions by preaching an accommodationist line, yet his original containment doctrine was Reaganite to a fault:

"[The] United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet power must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection . . . and in this way to promote tendencies, which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."

Precisely. Euromissiles, massive aid to the Afghan rebels, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the arms build-up, the INF deployment, the demonstrated willingness to use force (Libya), support for Poland's Solidarity moment and Soviet dissidents--these all added up to what Kennan termed an "unalterable counter-force at every point" while Reagan's even-keeled leadership minimized "indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country" (notwithstanding the less grandiose moments of Reagan's watch, like the withdrawal from Lebanon after the massacre of 241 Marines in 1983 and the unforgivably reckless Iran-Contra affair).

But there was more than pure power politics in the ways of the early Kennan. Call it the metaphysics of politics: the moral message that transcends mere interest and advantage and resonates in men's souls at the right time and in the right place.

Few modern American presidents had that gift; in the 20th century, only the two Roosevelts and Kennedy come to mind. Ronald Reagan, though dismissed by Europeans as a second-rate actor and fondler of cue cards, possessed that magic faculty that separates run-of-the mill politicos from history-molding leaders. "I didn't understand", recalls Time's Joe Klein, "how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anti-communism was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987." He continues with a seemingly trivial vignette. Attending the Bolshoi Ballet, he was nudged by his minder: "'Ronald Reagan. Evil empire', he whispered with dramatic intensity and shot a glance toward his lap where he had hidden two enthusiastic thumbs up. 'Yes!'"

When an American president manages to pluck the soul strings of those who have been raised to fear and despise what he represents, he surely deserves the honorific 'great.'

Let us not in the end ignore a final factor that has flummoxed believers and belittlers alike. Both camps have portrayed Reagan as a simple, one-dimensional soul--as heroic slayer of Bolshevik dragons or as mean-spirited Cold Warrior. Had he been just one or the other, he would not have entered history as a great president. Truly simpleminded men do not change; they remain slaves to their prejudices. Yet Ronald Reagan did change, even though he loved to glory in his sancta simplicitas by proclaiming: "There are simple answers to many of our problems--simple but hard."

Assume Reagan had remained Reagan in his second term. Assume that he had stuck to his iron-fisted anti-communism, that he had cornered and humiliated Gorbachev at every twist and turn. Imagine that he had not offered wholesale cuts in strategic and intermediate-range weapons, overtures that, in 1987, culminated in a complete ban on ss-20s, cruise missiles and Pershings. Posit, finally, a relentlessly fire-breathing Ronald Reagan instead of the genial summiteer who would flatter and embrace Gorbachev, allowing him to bask at home in the warm glow of recognition abroad. Would the general-secretary have released Andrei Sakharov in 1986? Would he have proclaimed glasnost in 1987 or withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1987? Or would Gorbachev have come out fighting like a wounded animal?

The point here is not to preach the wondrous effects of detente Uber alles, but to stress Reagan's uncanny sense for timing. Had he not raised taxes in 1982 and 1983, turning against his own revolution? And thus with the Soviet Union. He had made his point with a full-court press, and now was the time to temper strength with generosity. Yes, he did practice detente, but on his own terms and at his own time, not for its own sake. To know when to stop and to exchange the mailed fist for a helping hand is surely an element of what the Greeks called phronesis, prudence or political wisdom. Is this what "cowboys" do, as the derogatory epithet has it? Come to think of it, this is precisely the code of the West: Fight for what is right, don't shoot the unarmed, assist the weak, don't gloat over the fallen, offer magnanimity in victory.

Reagan had been out of office for ten months when the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Empire died a peaceful death during the watch of his former vice-president, George H. W. Bush. Still, the honor for this singular achievement must go to Ronald Reagan. How did he pull it off? His biographer Edmund Morris recalls a conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which the latter spoke about Reagan's "balance." He used the Russian word ravnovesie "in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium." Morris muses that Reagan "telegraphed a larger force that came of a lifetime of no self-doubt." Perhaps the key to Reagan's "amazing and mysterious life" is as simple and complicated as this most fitting of epitaphs.

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