Final Finale

With the early morning death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the last of the three great Western leaders of the 1980s who helped dismantle Soviet and Eastern European communism leaves the world stage.

Writer and former Thatcher aide John O'Sullivan argued in a 2008 book that she, with U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, helped craft a political and social stance against what Reagan once called the "Evil Empire." Their efforts, O'Sullivan said, played a large role in the end of that system in the late 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the most iconic event of the collapse.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, played a role as well, albeit not nearly as willingly. His attempts to loosen the totalitarian character of his system gave the people who wanted to end it room to work against the party and helped bring it down. At 82, Gorbachev is the only one of the major players of the Cold War endgame still living.