I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
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Having read a couple of Cold War histories, most recently Tony Judt's excellent Postwar, I learned that what's often missing from American pop-level summaries is the work put in by the people behind the Iron Curtain to bring it down -- for examples, the Polish Catholics and union members, and the Czech dissidents such as Vaclav Havel.
Generally American pop-level accounts like to emphasize American agency in what happened.