A bit more than 20 years later, I was having a drink with Timothy Garton Ash in the Glasnost Café, as the coffee shop of the Marriott Hotel in Washington had been renamed while it hosted the joint press conferences of the Reagan and Gorbachev summit. Outside, right-wing Republican nuts wearing Reagan masks were angrily flourishing umbrellas, in order to compare him to Neville Chamberlain in Munich. I said: “Well, we’ve lived to see it. The end of the goddam Cold War.” Within a much shorter time, the Berlin Wall had gone, and I could verify from the people who had written Reagan’s celebrated “tear down this wall” speech that he had insisted on the insertion of these words over the objections of many “realists.”

It was extraordinary that, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan was dealing with a man who knew that the Soviet Union could not sustain the arms race and a man who was out of patience with the satraps of East Germany. To Gorbachev goes an enormous share of the credit. But if I run the thought experiment and ask myself whether Walter Mondale would have made a better interlocutor in 1987, I cannot make myself believe it. This does not involve un-saying any of the things about Reagan that his admirers would prefer us to forget. But it does acknowledge the distinction between a historic presidency and an average one. Reagan’s friend Margaret Thatcher once said that the real test of her success was the way that she had changed the politics of the Labour Party. By that standard, the legacy of Reagan in permanently altering the political landscape is with us still.