The Editor's Desk

Newsweek, March, 2007 by Jon Meacham

Whenever Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who died last week at age 89, was asked whether individuals or abstract forces play the larger role in shaping history, he would propose a speculative scenario. In the early 1930s, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt both nearly died. Churchill was struck by a car on a New York street in December 1931; FDR was almost shot to death in Miami in February 1933. If either or both men had been killed, Schlesinger would say, what would have happened had there been no Churchill to stand alone against Hitler and no Roosevelt to maneuver a largely isolationist America into the fight against Nazism? Without Churchill and Roosevelt, Arthur concluded, we would be living in a radically different world.

Napoleon had it wrong when he said...

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