The Players
The men who were present as the seeds of the Cold War were planted – and who presided over its conclusion

Josef Stalin
His country having borne the bulk of the fighting the Nazis, Stalin had gained Western acquiescence to the idea that Eastern Europe would be recognized as a Soviet sphere of influence. And when his Red Army swept into Berlin to accept Germany's surrender, it set the scene for the beaten country's division into the communist German Democratic Republic and the pro-Western Federal Republic of Germany. In 1945, Moscow set about imposing its own political and social system on all the countries occupied by the Red Army, and Berlin quickly became a flash point, with the Soviets launching a crippling blockade of the Western half of the city in 1948. By the time of his death in 1953 at age 73, he had succeeded, as Churchill put it, in drawing an "iron curtain" across Europe. It was the fall of the Berlin Wall that symbolized the opening of that curtain.

Harry S. Truman
Truman entered the Oval Office after Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, and it was left to him to stand up to the Soviets in the postwar battle for Europe. Fearing that social turmoil in the shattered remains of Western Europe would see its people turn to communism, Truman went to bat for the Marshall Plan on the principle that to contain the march of communism it was essential to rebuild Western Europe. Truman was reelected in 1948, and saw the creation of NATO as well as policies that brought West Germany squarely into the Western camp. He retired in 1952 and returned to private life in Missouri, where died in 1972.

Konrad Adenauer
A former mayor of Cologne, Adenauer was interned in a prison camp by the Nazis until 1944. After the war he founded the centrist/conservative Christian Democratic Union and became the first chancellor of the new West German state. He shepherded his country into the Western camp, presiding over a foreign policy that persuaded France, Britain and the U.S. to end the Allied occupation of his country and normalize relations with it in 1954. Widely credited with authoring Germany's post-Hitler rebirth in the community of nations – and its considerable economic success – Adenauer was forced into retirement in 1963 after his party had lost its majority two years earlier. He died in 1967, at age 91.

Nikita S. Kruschev
Kruschev, a veteran of the Bolshevik Revolution, won a power struggle to replace Stalin after the dictator's death in 1953. He denounced Stalin's crimes and vowed greater openness and reform. He also engendered the concept among the Soviet leadership of "peaceful coexistence" with the West rather than a fight to the finish. At the same time, though, Kruschev ordered the brutal suppression of dissent against Soviet rule in Eastern Europe during the '50s, most notably the bloody crackdown on the Hungarian revolt of 1956. In that spirit, he endorsed the East German communists' request to build the Berlin Wall in order to stop people from fleeing to the West. Kruschev was considered too reformist for many Soviet apparatchiks, however, and he was ousted by a conservative group led by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964. Kruschev died in 1971.

Walter Ulbricht
A long-serving German communist who became politically active in 1908, Ulbricht worked in the underground against Hitler and then escaped to the Soviet Union, where he spent most of the war. He was returned to Germany by the Soviets to build the Socialist Unity Party, which took power in the Russian zone as a loyal servant of Moscow. In 1961, with thousands of Germans seeking to flee into the Western zone, he convinced the Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev that he needed to wall off West Berlin in order to stabilize East Germany. He was forced to retire in 1971 when the Soviets became more interested in improving ties with Willy Brandt's West Germany, and died two years later at age 80.

Erich Honecker
The East German leader who built the Berlin Wall, Honecker had been a communist activist in Germany before the war and was imprisoned for eight years in Nazi concentration camps. He supervised the wall's rapid construction in August 1961. In 1971, he took over the leadership of East Germany from Walter Ulbricht and maintained a hard-line policy against crossing the wall that resulted in hundreds of shootings by border guards. Honecker opposed Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization of communism after 1985, and was deposed by reformers in his own party a few months before the wall went down. Although German prosecutors wanted him in the dock over shootings by border guards, he was allowed to flee into exile in Chile in 1993, where he died a year later.

John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy came to power promising a tougher stand than his predecessor against the Soviets, although he suffered an early setback in the Bay of Pigs debacle when Fidel Castro's troops routed a U.S.-backed invasion force of anti-Castro exiles. Kennedy responded with more restraint to the building of the Berlin Wall, denouncing it and offering hope to the beleaguered residents west of the wall in his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. His approach of standing firm at the same time as defusing tensions – such as in the Cuban Missile Crisis – became a hallmark of successive U.S. administrations in dealing with the Soviets.

Willy Brandt
The socialist mayor of West Berlin when the wall was erected, Brandt was on the front line of the struggle between NATO and the communist bloc. He was Germany's chancellor from 1969, and his pioneering "Ostpolitik" policy recognized the reality of Germany's division into two states and sought to reduce the risk of war by engaging pragmatically with the East. Although a spy scandal in his office forced Brandt to resign in 1974, his policy laid the groundwork for a smooth reunification after the wall collapsed. Brandt died in October 1992.

Ronald W. Reagan
President Reagan's staunch anticommunism was a hallmark of his political career, and he took office in 1980 vowing to get tough with the Soviets. But while his arms buildup kept the pressure on Moscow, after Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Kremlin in 1985 Reagan also began to pursue far-reaching negotiations with the Soviet leadership over arms control and other security issues. The combination of toughness and engagement was epitomized by Reagan's famous 1987 challenge to the Soviet leader to prove he was serious about liberalizing the Eastern Bloc, standing at the Brandenburg Gate and exhorting, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Two years later, with the tide of history having turned decisively against communism, Gorbachev complied. Reagan left office early in 1989, and ill health has kept him out of public life.

Helmut Kohl
As Germany's longest-serving chancellor, Kohl authored the reunification of the two Germanys after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Coming to power in 1982, he maintained a centrist coalition government that became Washington's key ally in Europe and the main player in attempts to formalize European unity. Even as other Western and Soviet leaders were caught somewhat off-guard by the speed with which communism collapsed in 1989, Kohl moved deftly to establish the mechanisms that completed German reunification at breakneck speed. But the economic downturn that followed reunification, and the resulting failure to realize its promise in the East, resulted in his defeat in the 1998 election. Still regarded as the continent's elder statesman, he is expected to play a leading role in European Union institutions.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev
More than any other single event, it was Gorbachev's ascent to power in Moscow that made possible the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Hoping to revive his country's moribund economy and society, the policies of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring) he pursued after 1985 finally loosened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and emboldened the people of the countries seized in 1945 to press for independence. Where his predecessors had sent in the tanks, Gorbachev allowed the Soviets' unwilling partners to leave the Eastern Bloc without a shot being fired, which created the impetus for the wall being torn down. Soviet hard-liners saw this as treason, and as the Soviet Union itself began to break up under nationalist pressure in 1991, they seized power in a coup, imprisoning Gorbachev. The coup was confounded by street protests led by Boris Yeltsin, who as president of the Russian republic presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union at the end of that year. Gorbachev was left in the political wilderness, where he remains to this day.

George H. W. Bush
President Bush had a solid grounding in foreign affairs even before becoming Ronald Reagan's VP, having served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and liaison to China, as well as having been CIA director. The cautious pragmatism with which he responded to the turbulence of 1989 is credited with having helped ensure a smooth landing for an Eastern Bloc in a potentially dangerous state of collapse. Bush avoided posturing triumphantly as the Berlin Wall fell, to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, which still had almost 400,000 troops in East Germany at the time. He is credited with having gained Soviet consent to NATO membership for the reunified Germany, which would have once been unthinkable for Moscow. President Bush was voted out of office in 1992.