| King of the Mountain |
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BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Arnold M. Ludwig, author of "King of the Mountain," what is a professor of psychiatry doing writing about world leaders? ARNOLD LUDWIG, AUTHOR, "KING OF THE MOUNTAIN: THE NATURE OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP": Well, actually, that's a good question. The -- even the more pertinent thing is why politics. I think in the book, I state that even though I take a general interest in politics, I've taken pride in never having been elected to any office in my life. And the few times that I have moved up the ladder, they've been more appointments rather than elections. So you're right, why -- why interested in it? Actually, this book derives from a prior study that I did some years ago having to do with the most creative people in the 20th century. And that book eventually -- well, was published and that was called "The Price of Greatness." I dealt with 18 different professions in that book. Politics was one of them, but there were many other professions -- science, art, musical composition, dance, and so forth. And even though I looked at a very large number of people in that study, one of the professions that puzzled me the most was politics because there were a number of great leaders there. And after I completed that project, I got wondering more and more what is political greatness. In almost all the other professions, there's something tangible you can go on. A scientist does research. He publishes his work. An artist performs. An athlete performs. A businessman makes money, products, and so forth. What is it that a politician actually does? And you know, they -- they -- what is the product, the work product? And in many instances, some people will say this political leader is great, and in other instances, they'll say he's terrible. So how do you measure political achievement? What is political greatness? That's how I started the study. And what I did was to look at all of the world leaders in the 20th century of every single country in the world... LAMB: That's 1,941? LUDWIG: Right. Good for you. Yes. And 199 countries. LAMB: That's 1,941 leaders in the 20th century. LUDWIG: That's correct. LAMB: You looked at all of them. LUDWIG: I looked at all of them, and I collected information on all of them. But what I did was to home in on a sub-group of them, as well, 377 about whom there was much more information available about their personal lives, about their achievements, about how they gained power, how they lost power, about their families, that type of thing. And from that information, the book evolved. … {mospagebreak}LAMB: Give us a couple. LUDWIG: Well, before I give them to you, I really need to explain how I came to these conclusions. When I first started this study, I had no idea at all that I would be making a comparison between political leaders and other types of primates -- chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys, so forth. But as I got into my work more and more, a number of questions began emerging that I could not answer, that puzzled me. For example, why was it that there were so few women rulers in the 20th century? LAMB: How many have there been? LUDWIG: There were a total of 27 out of 1,941, which the percentage was 1.4 percent. And of those, half of them -- at least half -- were either wives of some famous politician, they'd borrowed their husbands' charisma, or daughters of him. And so that left -- if you look at just women who have made it on their own, that was about .75 percent. So the chances of a woman becoming a ruler in the 20th century were less than 100-to-1 odds, over 100-to-1 odds against it. That puzzled me. And the reason it puzzled me was there are very many very brilliant, competent women, and surely, many, many more should have been able to have maneuvered themselves into positions of power despite a lot of social constraints and cultural constraints and that type of thing. So that was one thing. Another thing that puzzled me as I looked at many of the world leaders, and I -- this was a surprising finding -- was that one could become a leader, the most powerful position in the country, not being very bright. Many of them were illiterate. Many of them were frankly crazy. And even a number of them were demented. And by that, I mean brain-damaged. So here is the most powerful position in the world, in a way, the most powerful position in the nation. How can people get there, and why? Another interesting finding I came across had to do with how many political leaders prior to coming to power had demonstrated their physical prowess as a way of gaining power. They were involved in wars, coups, rebellions. Along the way, they were jailed for demonstrations, things along these lines. So part of the process of becoming a ruler for many, many countries had to do with demonstrating some type of physical prowess, some type of courage, some type of heroic behavior. Why? Why would that be necessary, rather than wisdom, accomplishments in -- in certain areas, business, the arts?. Why did having military accomplishment -- why was that so important? Another puzzling finding had to do with -- as I looked at many of the rulers, I was struck in many countries with how many women they consorted with. For example, how many wives they had compared to others, how many children they produced. … LAMB: And what was your goal? What do you -- what do you want people to do with this? LUDWIG: I believe that this is the most comprehensive, complete study on human rulers that have ever -- that's ever been done. It has more information about political leaders than any other book I've encountered. And my hope with it all is, aside from the thesis that I developed to explain a lot of their behavior, that in my last chapter -- my last chapter in the book is titled "Warmongers and Peacemakers." It's my deep hope that people can look at this and study it and look at alternative ways to stop war and stop aggression. One of the things that struck me along the way was how much aggression, how much violence there's been not only over time, in the 20th century. I've asked other people to make estimates about the numbers of dead. They don't even come close. There have been, as the result of either wars started by these leaders or disastrous social policies initiated by these leaders, over 200 million deaths in the 20th century. That to me is shocking and frightening, and particularly as we develop even more powerful weapons of destruction. LAMB: You say in your book that it was 1996, the first time in the 20th century or maybe first time, obviously, in history that there are more democratic countries in the world or more people under democratic rule than -- than there are -- that aren't under democratic rule. LUDWIG: That -- that is correct. LAMB: This a good sign? LUDWIG: Yes. I say it's a good sign. However, I do make the caution -- I do in the book talk about different types of democracy. What certain people mean by democracy is not necessarily what you might mean or what I would mean by democracy. I believe it is a good sign. It's a good sign for a number of reasons. What I found in my studies was that dictators, as compared to democratic leaders, were far more likely to be involved in war than democratic leaders. I believe 74 percent of all dictators had been involved in some type of war -- civil rebellion, something -- during their term in office. That's compared to 37 percent of democratic leaders, twice as many. Still too much -- 37 percent is an awful lot. But it's half of -- of what you might find among dictators.
LAMB: But for 18 years, you read 1,200 -- during that time, 1,200 biographies. LUDWIG: Yes. LAMB: And you came up with the "Political Greatness Scale." LUDWIG: Yes. LAMB: Which is in the book. And I may be wrong about this, but I found, in looking through it, that the number one -- looking at all the numbers, the number one leader you found in the 20th century, from your political greatness scale, was Ataturk. LUDWIG: Yes. LAMB: And after him, Mao. Right after him, FDR. They're very close. LUDWIG: Yes. LAMB: I mean, on your point scale, Ataturk had 31, Mao 30, FDR 30, Stalin 29, Lenin 28, Ho Chi Minh 27, De Gaulle 27, Deng -- Deng Xioping 27, Tito 25, Suharto 25. I can go on. LUDWIG: Yes. LAMB: But why Ataturk? LUDWIG: Well, let -- first let me put those numbers in context. Those numbers are not engraved in stone. I would say that probably -- that if you wanted to group people, you'd take maybe a 5 to 7-point swing and include them kind of all together. It just so happened that Ataturk did come out first. Why Ataturk? The political greatness scale -- I guess I need to say word about that, if I may, first. LAMB: Your invention. LUDWIG: Yes. Yes. I didn't want to invent it. When I first started the study, I was looking for some type of measure to evaluate political greatness. As I mentioned before, I was puzzled about this phenomenon, and I looked to others. I looked to political scientists. I looked -- searched the literature. I could not find any actual scale that measured political greatness cross-culturally. Of course, people rated the American presidents, this kind of thing, but nothing cross-cultural. So then the question came to me, how do you go about evaluating political -- what is political greatness? And then I had a kind of "Eureka" experience. Well, why not look at those people who are acknowledged by almost everyone as being great political leaders? Who are the famous names in history over time that come to mind when somebody says "Mention a great political leader"? People who come to mind are people like Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Alexander the Great, Bismarck... LAMB: These are -- the immortals. LUDWIG: The immortals, the political immortals. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, people along those lines. And I came up with 26 of those people. OK, these -- I think almost everybody would say these are the political immortals. And then I asked the question, "What do these immortals have in common?" Are there any common denominators? And lo and behold, I found a number of common denominators. Almost every single one of them had these characteristics. And I then used these characteristics, 11 of them, in developing the political greatness scale and tested the scale in terms of its reliability, in terms of its validity. It was interesting that the scale correlated extremely highly -- extremely highly -- with the amount of words allotted to these individuals in the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Encyclopedia Americana. So it had a validity to it. So this is the political greatness scale, 11 items on it. LAMB: What are some of the items? LUDWIG: One item -- unfortunately, several of them have to do with conquests, unfortunately. But this is how people evaluate political greatness. Military victories, more territory, social engineering, changing the very nature of the society, economic prosperity, moral -- being a moral exemplar, in a way -- people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, for example. LAMB: So it doesn't have anything to do with whether you feel warm and fuzzy about somebody. LUDWIG: No. It has to do with accomplishments, political achievement. LAMB: Is there any comparison with what you've done with political greatness scale to the "Time" magazine "Person of the Year," where people get outraged when they see Hitler on the -- on the cover, and they think that they're naming him a great person? LUDWIG: Yes. I think that's an excellent kind of comparison. By "greatness" I mean nothing about how you feel toward the -- you know, do you admire this person? I mean, some of these people are despicable. They're horrible people. However, their achievements, political achievements, are monumental. LAMB: Let me just show -- we'll put this on the screen, and I'll read down the American presidents, so people can see how you fit on the scale. If 31 was the top at Ataturk, and FDR was the top of all American presidents. You then have Truman at 23 points, Theodore Roosevelt 23, Ronald Reagan 22, William McKinley 20, Dwight Eisenhower 18, LBJ 18, George Bush the first 15, John F. Kennedy 15, Bill Clinton 15, Jimmy Carter 14, Calvin Coolidge 14, William Howard Taft 12, Gerald Ford 11, Herbert Hoover 10 and Warren Harding 9. Those are presidents in the 20th century. …Go back to why Ataturk on top of all these people. LUDWIG: OK. Let's look at what Ataturk did. And again, mind you, take this in the context of some of the other great leaders that -- some of the immortals I've mentioned. Ataturk created -- started Turkey. He dismantled the Ottoman empire, which was in existence at the time. He not only was the founder of the country, creating a country, but he caused a profound social change in Turkey. He introduced democracy into Turkey, somewhat a militant type of democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. He separated -- he was one of the -- first time in history to kind of separate church and state. In fact, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country, it's one of the few ones where certain types of freedoms are permitted. And in fact, the military is obliged to intervene if there's any threat to the democracy in any way. So at every single level, Ataturk had an incredible effect, and his achievements were remarkable. …Copyright National Cable Satellite Corporation 2002. |
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