THE HISTORY ESSAY
“If Winston Churchill had died when he was knocked down by a car in New York in 1931, would any other British politician have resolved to stand up to Hitler?” 19th century have been the same without Karl Marx? There were many variants of socialism, but through his work and his powerful intellect he created a theory so all-encompassing that it influenced politics for the next century. Or what road would Germany have followed if Hitler had been killed, as he nearly was, in the First World War? Other radical nationalist leaders shared his racism and his ambition to dominate Europe, but it is hard to imagine that Goebbels or Goering could have mesmerised the German people as Hitler did, or would have been prepared to see the German nation perish rather than surrender. In Soviet Russia, the Bolshevik leadership believed that collectivisation of the farms was the necessary first step towards industrialisation, yet it took Stalin to force it. If Winston Churchill had died when he was knocked down by a car on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1931, he could not have become prime minister in the spring of 1940, the darkest days of the Second World War. Would any other leading British politician – Neville Chamberlain, for example – have determined that Britain must not attempt to make peace with Hitler’s Germany, that it must fight on, even in the face of likely defeat? It is hard to imagine anyone other than Churchill taking that stand.
BRIDGEMAN/REX FEATURES
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ometimes the character of the man or woman in power really does matter. As the crisis of 1914 reached its culmination in late July, two men could have stopped the slide to war: Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany. Each had to sign the order for his country’s general mobilisation; each hesitated in the hopes of maintaining the peace; and each gave way to pressure from his advisers (both were afraid of appearing weak). President John F Kennedy faced similar pressures in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Many of his top military advisers told him that he had to get tough with the Soviets and demand the removal of their forces from Cuba, even at the risk of nuclear war. Kennedy opted for a combination of blockade and negotiation. Perhaps it helped that he had just read Barbara Tuchman’s history of how Europe blundered into the First World War. Individuals are swept along for the most part by the currents of history, but we need to be aware that sometimes there are those who ride and steer those currents and, occasionally, turn them in another direction altogether. In every society there are some who are more daring, ambitious or simply more restless than the rest of us. Such people will go up in balloons, climb unconquered peaks just because they are there, or go into space even though they know that they are risking their lives. In the great age of exploration, they set off in tiny ships across uncharted waters or walked across unmapped continents. Entrepreneurs and inventors, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, will persist in the face of failure. Martin Luther defied the might of the Catholic church and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the Soviet government. Richard Nixon’s time as president will always be marked by Watergate, the scandal that destroyed him,
A historic handshake: would the Sino-American rapprochement of 1972 have happened if Richard Nixon hadn’t been president?
when he used the powers of his office against his opponents. Yet he was also a statesman who took a risk in re-establishing American relations with China. At a time when anti-communist feeling still ran deep in the United States and memories of American troops fighting Chinese ones in the Korean War were still vivid, he took a considerable political gamble when he went to Beijing. His trip paid off, not right away perhaps, but in the longer run. Not only did Nixon’s opening of relations with China put the United States back in the centre of world affairs, but it made possible a more stable Asia. It helped that, on the Chinese side, Mao Zedong had also decided that China needed the United States as a friend. The two countries had strong reasons for coming together, but it took Nixon and Mao to make it happen. Still other personalities in history stand out for me simply because of who they were. They might be witty and amusing like the Duc of Saint-Simon at the court of Louis XIV, who noted down all the court gossip and the damning details about the king, whom he greatly disliked. Perhaps, like Madame de la Tour du Pin in the French Revolution, they encountered adversity bravely. She went from being a privileged member of the French court to living on a farm in New York state. Others still set out on improbable adventures, stepping out boldly in the face of obstacles and minefields. Edith Durham, from a prosperous upper-middle-class family in London before the First World War, was miserable looking after an invalid mother. When the doctor advised that she take some holidays every summer, Durham chose to explore the wilder parts of the Balkans, often on her own. In time she became a leading authority on Albania. What all such people have in common is curiosity, about the peoples and places they encounter. When BaSome individuals, like former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in the field of technology, are capable of changing the course of history
BBC History Magazine
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