We’re enjoying all these encomiums to President Reagan’s speech calling on the Soviet to tear down the Berlin Wall, which took place 25 years go today. The Wall Street Journal issued a particularly fine piece by Peter Robinson, a one-time speech writer for Reagan who laid out the impact of Reagan’s remarks in Berlin. The New York Times came in today with a piece by an erstwhile speech writer for President Clinton, Ted Widmer, who noted that “Reagan’s inner actor proved shrewder than most who would have counseled realpolitik. His theatrical turn on Berlin’s greatest stage stated a great moral truth, the way the best theater does . . .”

Mr. Widmer gave credit — as Mr. Robinson noted Reagan himself did in his lifetime — to “the young graffiti-painters who protested against the wall for 28 years, and finally liberated themselves.” But Mr. Widmer noted that Reagan “had the good sense to ignore the advice he was given, and read the writing on the wall.” The significance of Mr. Widmer’s piece is that it ran in the Times, which had greeted Reagan’s speech in Berlin with an editorial paean not to Reagan but to Gorbachev and to Lenin. “The world watches Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms with hope and wonder,” it began.

The Times rattled on at some length before ending with a paragraph kvelling about how those who say the Soviet system “is too rigid for reform” should “ponder Lenin’s” new economic program “in which the system accommodated real change without losing its character.” But it can be said for the Times that it was by no means the battiest of the big papers. The London Observer greeted Reagan’s speech at Berlin, and his participation in the Venice Summit shortly before Berlin, with a story headlined “Lame-duck Reagan enters the twilight zone.” It described Reagan as “slowly, laboriously and without any of his usual verve, reading his challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to pull down the Berlin Wall.”

We mention this only to mark the virtue of humility. Few are immune from having been made fools of by history. But there are very few who have been more abjectly mistaken than those who underestimated Reagan. The feature of his personality that stands out in hindsight is his self-conception. Not as a governor, not as an economist, not as a statesman, but as an artist. He was, after all, an actor, and thousands and thousands of appearances, large and small, had given him an unerring instinct in respect of the impact of his lines, an instinct that was better than any of his critics, and what a stage he had that day 25 years ago at Berlin.