By a considerable margin it was the Russian rather than the American who won the overwhelming majority of votes (over 70 percent of the total). Amongst a group of 500 very bright first-year students, there seemed to be only one correct answer, and that was not Ronald Reagan but, rather, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was of course high on my list of possible candidates and you might say that for a European I made a fairly strong case for him-but to no avail. Indeed, in a recent class I taught at my home institution-the London School of Economics-I asked a simple question about which policy-maker at the time was most instrumental in ending Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe. For a British professor with more than a passing interest in US foreign policy and the role of the United States in ending the Cold War, it is indeed fascinating to observe how deeply divided opinion still remains over the part played in the making of 1989 by one very special American: President Ronald Reagan.
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