Who Were History's Great Leaders?

What makes a great leader?

Throughout history, who qualifies? TIME asked a variety of historians, writers, military men, businessmen and others for their selections.

MORTIMER ADLER, U.S. philosopher: In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually. By this definition, Pericles of Athens was a great leader.

Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, or almost any of the founding fathers --Adams, Madison, Washington. Perhaps Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well.

GIOVANNI AGNELLI, Italian industrialist: There are at least two kinds of leadership. One is leadership that cannot be challenged, the other is democratic leadership. The most representative leader of the first kind is the Shah of Iran, who rules over a country where he has absolute powers and has transformed his country into a modern state. At the opposite extreme is the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, whose opposition has reached 50%. His country represents the maximum of social evolution.

RAYMOND ARON, French historian: If you want to name a great conqueror, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. If you want a legitimate king who was at the same time a statesman and a military commander, Frederick II of Prussia (1712-86).

CORRELLI BARNETT, British military historian: Greatness has nothing to do with morality. A leader gets people to follow him. Napoleon led the French to catastrophe, but they followed him almost to the end. Marlborough and Wellington had greatness. And Hitler, unfortunately. Al Capone was a leader in a primitive environment.

LUIGI BARZINI, Italian author: Three Italian leaders, fused into one man, could be useful today. The greatest is Julius Caesar, penniless patrician, demagogue, traitor to his class, brilliant lawyer, writer, invincible general, creator of an empire. After him, Lorenzo de' Medici, banker, merchant, poet, who ruled Florence with a firm hand. He invented the balance of power to keep the quarrelsome Italian states at peace. Then Camillo Benso di Cavour, farmer, financier, journalist, businessman, who turned tiny Sardinia into the kingdom of Italy in a matter of months.

OMAR BRADLEY, U.S. general: George Marshall. He had the imagination and foresight and leading genius to prepare this nation for war. Franklin Roosevelt --a great President. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle--he pulled France through. I did not agree with him on many points, but he was all Frenchman.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, U.S. columnist and editor (National Review): Lincoln comes always to mind, because with all that we know now about his flawed historical perspective, the rhythms of his spirit took the soldiers and the poets through the crises of a Civil War. I wish we had, too, some of the Whiggish optimism of Theodore Roosevelt. It may not be our manifest destiny to conquer Khe Sanh, but it ought to be ours to cultivate liberty and subdue the state.

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER, U.S. historian: Washington and Jefferson. Both had character and intelligence, and people had confidence in them. Leadership is intangible. You can't define all the parts.

MARTIN DIAMOND, U.S. political scientist (Northern Illinois University): In the last 200 years, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and James Madison. Lincoln proved that the highest grace can be attained by a person of ordinary origins. Churchill showed that a person from the aristocracy who excelled in all ways could become a servant of democracy. Madison, a 126-lb. weakling with no charisma, framed perhaps the most incredible document of our time: the U.S. Constitution. Until Madison, no famous or thoughtful person--from Socrates to Montesquieu, from Plato to Hobbes--had ever endorsed democracy.

JAMES GAVIN, U.S. lieutenant general (ret.): Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through the ages, I would consider Mohammed, Jesus Christ, maybe Lenin, possibly Mao. As for a leader whose qualities we could most use now, I would choose John F. Kennedy.

ALEXANDER HEARD, U.S. educator (chancellor, Vanderbilt University): No concept of leadership is complete without the element of zeal and fervor, an almost spiritual element. Martin Luther King had it. Adolf Hitler had it, so did Gandhi and Nehru. The Old Testament prophets had it. It's commitment, it's a kind of self-confidence which can be egotistic and arrogant. But a degree of it has to be there. The leader must have a belief in what he is doing, almost a singlemindedness.

IRVING KRISTOL, U.S. writer, professor and editor (The Public Interest): Abe Lincoln is the prototype--the leader who is uncommon but not beyond emulation by the common man. He's not a Napoleon. This is American democratic politics. You don't want a world conqueror. In latter days John Kennedy had that uncommon-common quality; so did both Roosevelts, T.R. and F.D.R., although they were distinctly below Lincoln.

ROBERT JAY LIFTON, U.S. psychohistorian (Yale): Mao was able to articulate, live out and connect with the aspirations of the Chinese people at a time of crisis. Like most great religious and political leaders, he had some relation to a holocaust (the disintegration of Chinese culture, the warlords, Japanese invasion).

ARCHIBALD MacLEISH, U.S. poet: In my own experience, the man who most obviously possessed the quality of leadership was General Marshall. He was a man of enormous moral authority.

GOLO MANN, West German historian: Marcus Aurelius, emperor and philosopher, valiant pessimist and warm philanthropist, was good for his own age. In our time, vacillating between two very different types, Franklin Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer, I choose the former because his achievements had greater significance for world history. His demagoguery was tempered by humanity; he could not hate. He was fearless and had humor, two virtues that Bismarck, too, possessed; he radiated hope and meant well by people, which Bismarck did not.

JULES MASSERMAN, U.S. psychoanalyst: Leaders must fulfill three functions --provide for the well-being of the led, provide a social organization in which people feel relatively secure, and provide them with one set of beliefs. People like Pasteur and Salk are leaders in the first sense. People like Gandhi and Confucius, on one hand, and Alexander, Caesar and Hitler on the other, are leaders in the second and perhaps the third sense. Jesus and Buddha belong in the third category alone. Perhaps the greatest leader of all times was Mohammed, who combined all three functions. To a lesser degree, Moses did the same.

MARSHALL McLUHAN, Canadian communications philosopher: The late Siegfried Giedion, Swiss art historian and author of Mechanization Takes Command (1948). He was a student of formal structures in the man-made world and instituted the study of forms in everyday life. His book is a study of the death wish in modern man, with specific application to the mechanization of bread baking and meat packing. His most exciting moment was his discovery of the American barber chair.

WILLIAM McNEILL, U.S. historian (University of Chicago): If you measure leadership by impact, then you would have to name Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, the great prophets of the world. Among political leaders, Alexander may have been the greatest. He brought the Greek and Oriental civilizations together, and it's hard to conceive of this happening without his personal intervention. Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, who set the terms for political discussion. But both pale before two 19th century intellectual giants, Sigmund Freud and Lenin's own mentor, Karl Marx, the secular prophets of our time.

JEAN-FRANC,OIS REVEL, French author (Neither Marx nor Jesus): A great leader has original ideas and succeeds in having them accepted by millions or billions. These ideas can be wonderful or dreadful. Thus I have chosen the Athenian philosopher Epicurus and Adolf Hitler--the best and the worst. Epicurus because he defined a model way of life that was followed and is still followed today by many billions of people, which makes them happy without hurting anyone. Hitler because he had as much influence, although of an evil sort, through his ideas, which meant misery and destruction for millions.

C.P. SNOW, British author: I don't believe much in great leaders. Great leaders emerge from circumstances and normally don't create them. Very occasionally one or two produce a difference. If Lenin had not existed, it is hard to see how the Russian Revolution could have succeeded. Further back, Augustus Caesar brought order out of chaos and created the imperial peace.

WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON, U.S. historian-mystic: Gandhi. For a society to be healthy, it must seek centers of authority and leadership that do not necessarily derive from political or economic power but from cultural and spiritual values as well. Mao recognized this; he did try to give up his power and lead through the authority of his Little Red Book--but he abandoned this effort because of the chaos that resulted from the Cultural Revolution.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE, British historian: Chinese Emperor Kao-Tsu (founder of the Han dynasty in the 2nd century B.C.) and Roman Emperor Augustus each gave to millions unity and peace that lasted because their policies were based on moderation which won consent. Thus they repaired the breakdown of the coercive unity briefly imposed by their unsuccessful predecessors, Shih Wang-ti and Julius Caesar.

BARBARA TUCHMAN, U.S. historian: George Washington. He did a marvelous job, achieving his objective, surmounting incredible opposition and obstacles of lethargy and cowardice.

YU YING-SHIH, Chinese historian: Gandhi, a religious saint of the highest moral principles, but also a political leader who worked for the rights of the depressed and disinherited classes. He had no personal greed for power but cared rather for the welfare of the people, using persuasion instead of violence, never allowing expediency to justify a deviation from the truth.

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