Titans of History (76 page)

One of the hostages, seventy-five-year-old Dora Bloch, who had been admitted to hospital in Kampala before the Israeli raid, was not rescued. She was subsequently dragged from her bed on Idi Amin's orders and murdered by two Ugandan army officers.

In 1979, with Uganda's economy and society having all but collapsed and Amin deeply unpopular at home, he sought to divert domestic attention by invading Tanzania. It proved to be a fateful decision. In response, Tanzania mounted a counter-invasion. Amin's army collapsed and he fled—eventually settling in Saudi Arabia. He would live on in exile until finally dying, peacefully in his bed, in 2003.

1925–

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end
.

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher first entered Parliament in 1959, making her maiden speech a year later. Interviewed in 1970, by that time education secretary, she said, “It will be years before a woman either leads the Conservative Party or becomes prime minister. I don't see it happening in my time.” Nine years later she succeeded Labour's James Callaghan as prime minister and went on to spend 11 years and 209 days at 10 Downing Street, during which time she transformed the British political, economic and social landscape. She was the longest-serving prime minister for more than 150 years and the first woman to hold the post in Britain.

Born Margaret Roberts in 1925, daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper who was also a Methodist lay preacher and a town alderman, she was grammar-school-educated and middle class. After a scholarship to Oxford and a brief career as a research chemist (during which she helped to develop the first soft ice cream), she trained as a barrister. She took the Conservative seat of Finchley in the 1959 election, encouraged by Denis, her shrewd, wealthy businessman husband, who steadfastly supported her career. The very qualities for which the company ICI had criticized her in a post-university interview, reporting that “this woman is headstrong,
obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated,” surely aided her swift ascent at Westminster.

Emerging to lead the party in 1975, as the dark horse challenger to the then leader Edward Heath, she was at first conciliatory but gradually moved toward radical free-market policies in opposition, as the country under the Labour government succumbed to waves of industrial strikes, culminating in the so-called Winter of Discontent. This was enough to win the Conservatives the general election of 1979, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Britain then was rotten and enfeebled, the sick man of Europe, but she rejuvenated the country.

With the Labour Party beset by extremism and in disarray, Thatcher's brand of nonpaternalistic Conservatism appealed to aspirational working-class voters, and she would win two more elections.

“The lady's not for turning,” she declared famously at her party conference in October 1980, when all around her were encouraging compromise. She unhesitatingly broke with what she saw as political defeatism in the years since 1945, and successfully injected a new Churchillian pride and vigor into national life. She privatized badly run state industries, trying to roll back state involvement in the economy and people's lives. Her declaration that “there is no such thing as society” is frequently taken out of context. But, nonetheless, she staunchly believed that the individual should bear the burden of responsibility for his or her welfare.

When the Argentine military junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, it seemed impossible that Britain could launch a war across 8000 miles of ocean; but Thatcher ordered the creation of a task force, inspired the nation to defeat tyrannical aggression, and reconquered the Falklands.

Her political partner abroad was Ronald Reagan, US president 1981–9, a genial unintellectual ex-actor, much mocked in Europe,
though he was a superb orator. Ironically, with his clear, big ideals and gentle charm, and despite the folly of the Iran Contra scandal, he turned out to be one of the greatest modern presidents, his hatred of Soviet totalitarianism—the “Evil Empire”—leading to the arms race that won the Cold War and in turn to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Reagan died in 2004, but his diaries attest to his close partnership with Thatcher. She shared Reagan's anti-Sovietism, earning the nickname the Iron Lady from the Soviet press, which she relished. (French President François Mitterrand once described her as having the “eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,” a unique mixture of aggression and femininity that was frequently caricatured by satirists.) Reagan and Thatcher engaged with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she called “someone we can do business with,” encouraging his reforms and retreat from oppression and empire.

In 1984–5 she was faced with the miners' strike, launched in response to plans to close many pits. This strike, which she regarded as an attempt to topple her government, was quelled by wearing the miners down, breaking the grip of trade unionism, and mobilizing police and army to control rioting strikers. It was a test of her leadership but also the final attempt by undemocratic trade unions to dominate the British government using strikes as blackmail.

But later her new Community Charge (dubbed the Poll Tax) caused riots. Her opposition to closer cooperation within the European Community undermined her credibility at a point when her chancellor had already resigned. When her deputy, Geoffrey Howe, resigned, his speech triggered a 1990 Conservative leadership election. She was overthrown by a palace coup, abandoned by almost all of her cabinet, and left Downing Street in tears. Baroness Thatcher took her seat in the House of Lords, her late husband receiving a baronetcy.

With President Reagan, Thatcher was instrumental in engineering the triumph of capitalist democracies over communism in the Cold War; she helped to draw back the Iron Curtain and gave freedom to millions. She won a seemingly impossible war, transformed sclerotic Britain into a healthy and reinvigorated country, made London Europe's financial center, broke the power of the unions, and became a global political star. There was no one else like her. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted he was, in many ways, her heir. And if you live in Britain today, the society around you is in no small part a creation of Margaret Thatcher, the greatest British leader since Churchill.

1929–1945

I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again
.

Anne Frank (July 15, 1944)

The diary of a Jewish girl in hiding during the Second World War has become a totemic symbol of the Holocaust, a monument to the 6 million Jews killed and a talisman for victims of persecution across the world. But Anne Frank was far more than a symbol. She was a teenager whose refusal to be broken by fear or despair in the face of the blackest persecution is a triumph of humanity, the mark of a truly heroic soul. She also became, in spite of her youth, a great
writer, an observer and recorder of the terrible events of her dark time and her family's struggle to survive. Hers was not the only such diary to emerge, but it was the finest—an immortal classic.

On July 6, 1942 Anne Frank, her parents Otto and Edith, and her elder sister Margot left their house on the Merwedplein in Amsterdam. Wearing layers of clothes and carrying no suitcases to avoid arousing suspicion, they made their way to Otto Frank's office building on the Prinsengracht. At the top of the stairs there was a door, later concealed behind a false bookcase. It led to what Anne named the Secret Annex—four rooms where the Franks, with another family, the van Pels, and a dentist called Fritz Pfeffer, would hide for the next two years.

The Franks were German Jews who had emigrated to the Netherlands a decade earlier, following Hitler's rise to power. A lively and vivacious girl, Anne was given a red-checked cloth-bound book on her 13th birthday. Addressing her first entry “to Kitty,” she hoped that “I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great comfort and support to me.”

The German occupation of the Netherlands was two years old when Anne began her diary. By 1942 Jews were subject to a curfew and made to wear yellow stars on their clothing. They were forbidden to take the tram, to ride bicycles or to take pictures. On July 5, 1942 sixteen-year-old Margot received papers ordering her to report for transportation to a work camp. At 7.30 the following morning the Franks left their house.

The Annex's occupants had prepared themselves for a long stay. Anne's parents had been making secret trips to the hiding place for months. But nothing could have prepared them for the oppressive reality of hiding away from the world. Their survival was dependent on their “helpers,” four loyal employees of Otto Frank who risked their lives to bring them food, clothes, books
and news. Absolute silence had to be maintained during the day to avoid arousing the suspicions of the workers in the store downstairs. “We are as quiet as baby mice,” wrote Anne in October 1942. “Who, three months ago, would have guessed that quicksilver Anne would have to sit still for hours—and what's more, could?”

Anne was a talented writer, funny, quick and possessed of a somewhat caustic eye. But her diary is also the work of a normal teenager—bright, impetuous, moody and impatient. She struggled between the “good Anne” she would like to be and the “bad Anne” she felt she more often was. She was insightful, unstintingly honest and, increasingly, wise.

“There is no way of killing time,” she wrote in 1943. But she refused to give up hope. “It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” she wrote on July 15, 1944. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Three weeks later the German police stormed the Secret Annex. It is still unknown who betrayed them. The Annex's inhabitants were sent to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz. In October Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. They died of typhus within days of each other in March 1945, just a few weeks before the British liberated the camp.

Otto Frank was the only one of the Annex's inhabitants to survive. When he returned to Amsterdam after the war, Miep Gies, one of their loyal helpers, gave him the diary that she had found scattered on the Annex's floor. Asked later for his response on first reading his daughter's diary, Otto replied: “I never knew my little Anne was so deep.”

While she was in hiding, Anne became convinced that she wanted to be a writer. Anne was not the only Jewish child diarist of the Holocaust. Probably there were many. A gifted Czech boy, Peter Ginz, kept a witty diary in Prague during 1941–2: “When I go to
school,” he wrote, “I counted 9 ‘sheriffs'”—referring to Jews made to wear the yellow star. He was gassed in Auschwitz in 1944. These gifted diarists were not the only ones to turn hell into literature:
Night
by Elie Wiesel (b. 1928) and
If This is a Man
by Primo Levi (1919–87) are the two masterpieces of this European dark age.

A year before she died, Anne Frank wrote of her desire “to be useful or give pleasure to people around me who yet don't really know me. I want to go on living even after my death!”

1931– & 1931–2007

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs
.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The fall of communism, the break-up of the Soviet empire, the liberation of eastern Europe from Soviet oppression and the emergence of a new Russia were the achievements of two rival Russian leaders, both of whom had decent intentions that were ruined by the pressures of real politics. Neither of them intended things to turn out as they did. Both of their careers ended in failure—and both actually produced effects that were the very opposite of their intentions. Indeed the achievements of each were counterproductive—and yet world changing.

A communist believer during his entire active career and indeed a believer in one-party rule, Mikhail Gorbachev, son of a combine harvester driver from Stavropol in south Russia, swiftly entered
the top stream of Soviet leadership: he qualified in law and then climbed the Communist Party hierarchy to become first secretary of Stavropol in 1970. Early on in his life he married Raisa, who was to be his partner and adviser in power: both of their families had experienced Stalin's Terror in their own families—yet neither lost their faith in the party.

By the 1970s, the reign of Leonid Brezhnev had produced economic stagnation, political sclerosis and falling prestige for the communist regime. In a party ruled by octogenarian Stalinist bureaucrats, the dynamic, cheerful and highly intelligent Gorbachev was noticed: in 1979 he was promoted to the Politburo in Moscow and placed in charge of agriculture under the wing of the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, probably the most capable politician in the leadership during the last decades of Soviet rule.

After Brezhnev's death Andropov succeeded to the top post but was too old to reform the USSR. On his death in 1984, Gorbachev did not push for the leadership: the senile and exhausted Konstantin Chernenko assumed power and survived just a few months. With this death it was clear that a new and young leader was needed: Gorbachev became first secretary and took control.

Swiftly he changed both the tone and facts of Soviet rule: he declared
perestroika
—restructuring—and
glasnost
—openness; but as a devout communist committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party on which his power depended, he was no Western liberal democrat. He simply hoped to reform, consolidate and strengthen the Soviet dictatorship but instead unleashed forces he could not control. His economic mismanagement undermined his own achievements: his ban on alcohol deprived a desperate budget of key funds. Gorbachov's tinkering with the command economy produced instant shortages and discontent—he did not understand how capitalism worked.