I was taught that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and gave us the longest lasting economic boom.
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Gorbachev played the critical part. He let the East European satellite states go rather than sending troops to restore status quo. Within the USSR, his reforms gave the democratic opposition some room to breathe. Once Gorbachev's power started to fail, that allowed the opposition to win, rather than the hardliners who attempted a coup.
With another kind of leader on the opposite side, Reagan's policies could have won but not ended the cold war. The USSR could have become something like North Korea, but much bigger. It would have been stable but no longer a global superpower. (That may also be where Russia is headed today, as there are no viable alternatives to Putin's regime.)
Why do you think the key phrase of the end of the cold war is "Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!". Reagan challenged him to dismantle something that they both knew couldn't stand, and that would result in the eventual collapse of the GDR (it was, after all, built to save the GDR from all of its citizens voting with their feet to abandon communism and leave for the west). Ironically, the "domino theory" ended up being correct, but it was the east and the soviets that couldn't sustain the effects of satellite states being lost, not Asia and America.
Gorbachev gets a lot of credit for not behaving like his predecessors had, with violent crackdowns and marching armies whenever the rule of the party was threatened. Most say this was due to Gorbachev not understanding - but I think it's simpler. Gorbachev simply knew that the state could no longer do so - and in fact the one time he tried, it completely failed on him.
Gorbachev also lied (and changed his story) vis-a-vis NATO expansion something that Putin has used to build a "NATO betrayed us story" to justify his invasion of Ukraine much as Hitler used the "stab in the back".
Does that take away from Gorbachev? Maybe not, but Gorbachev was presiding over a failing state the second he took power. He simply rode it out, with as little violence as possible. That's something to be celebrated.
https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-expansion-russia-mislead/312636...
That's a very American perspective. I mostly associate that quote with Civilization V, because it wasn't a big deal at the time, at least in Finland. The speech itself didn't receive that much attention in 1987. When the Berlin Wall fell, the scene that really grabbed people's attention was people breaking the wall with hammers. And if had to choose a single scene to symbolize the end of the cold war, it would be Yeltsin giving a speech on top of a tank.
Applying diplomatic and military pressure to break the Soviet block was not a new thing in the 1980s. The closest it came to succeeding was in 1968. Reforms and the protests didn't lead anywhere at the time, because the USSR had the will and the resources to respond decisively. The situation was different in the late 1980s, thanks to Gorbachev's reforms and Reagan's economic pressure.