Over the next few months, the Soviets changed their minds. They acquiesced to the surrender of their single most fundamental geopolitical claim. They acquiesced without violence and without getting much of anything in return. In the history of world diplomacy, there has never been a negotiation like this one. That work of negotiation fell not to the eloquent Ronald Reagan but to George H.W. Bush, who never saw a speech he didn’t mangle.

There is no “tear down this wall” clip by Bush. But it was during his presidency that the wall was in fact demolished — and not by some lucky accident but after months of agonizing work by Germans and Americans together.

There’s a saying in Hollywood: “He who will not toot his own horn, his horn shall not be tooted.” George Herbert Walker Bush is an inveterate non-horn-tooter. He did not toot his horn over the end of the Cold War. He did not toot his own horn over his deficit reductions. He believed that horn-tooting risked alienating the very people whose cooperation had made the accomplishment possible in the first place. Very likely, he was right, too.