The Best Biographies of 20th Century Leaders

You’ve been studying world leaders who had a big impact on the 20th century and investigating to what extent individuals—as opposed to broader forces—determine the course of history. After looking at these eight leaders, what was your ultimate conclusion?

History is made by the encounter of individuals with great historical forces. But what I argue in my book is that the first half of the 20th century was the era in all of history when individuals could have maximal impact. The reason for that is that the first half of the 20th century was the era of the two World Wars, the Great Depression and the beginning of decolonization. These epochal trends acted collectively as a giant bulldozer, knocking down existing political and economic structures and giving individuals a greater opportunity than they’ve had before or since to build new political and economic structures on the ruins.

The eight individuals whom I discuss in The Titans of the Twentieth Century did precisely that—for better, and sometimes very much for worse.

Today we’re going to be talking about biographies of some of these individuals, both the good and the bad. Your book is not a group biography, but you do provide some biographical detail, before going on to your analysis, is that right?

Yes. In each chapter, I have an introductory section that gives a brief overview of the main features of the individual’s life, “The Life.” This short section is in no way a comprehensive biography, but it does remind people—or tell them if they don’t know—what the main features of the person’s life were, so that they can appreciate the analysis that follows in the other four sections, on “The Times”, “Leadership” “The Personal Imprint and “The Legacy”.

I enjoyed your comment in the book’s introduction about how everybody’s talking about leadership these days as an admirable quality—but the fact is sometimes leadership is not good at all and leads to disaster.

Yes, I wanted to make clear at the outset that the book was not in any way a leadership manual. It is not a book on how to be a leader. There are many such books, directed mainly to people in business, but also to would-be politicians. I am not trying to teach anybody how to be a leader, and if I understood the key to becoming a Lenin or a Hitler or a Mao, I would certainly not publish it. The last thing the world needs is more leaders like those three.

So did you become interested in this topic from reading War and Peace and Tolstoy’s arguments about the limited impact of ‘great men’ versus the forces of history? I think you mentioned you’ve been thinking about the book for 50 years.

When anybody asks me how long it took to write one of my books—and I’ve now published 18—my answer is always ‘my entire life up to the point of publication’, because every book you write builds on everything else you’ve ever learned and all the other books you’ve written.

I had a particular purpose in writing this book. I am, by training, a political scientist, and thus a social scientist. In my previous books, I have come at the understanding of (or attempt to understand) politics and history from the standpoint of broad historical forces. Most of my books deal with how broad historical forces have affected political life. I thought it would be interesting to look through the other end of the telescope and investigate the impact not of these broad historical forces—although I do mention them in each chapter—but from the standpoint of the individual. So that is what I’ve done, and why I’ve done it.

Let’s turn to the biographies you’ve recommended. Let’s start with the American leaders. The first chapter of your book is about Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Tell me in what way he made history and why you recommended the biography by John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.

Woodrow Wilson’s great contribution to history was to put on the global agenda a set of ideas about the proper organization of international political and economic life—which in the United States are sometimes called Wilsonianism—which emphasize international organizations, democracy, arms limitation and free trade. None of them was original with Wilson, but they became collectively identified with him because he put them squarely on the world’s agenda after World War One. The world has never fully adopted Wilsonian principles, but in the 100 years since his death in 1924 these ideas have become increasingly influential—so influential that I think it’s fair to call it the Wilsonian century.

John Milton Cooper is an American historian who has written a great deal about Woodrow Wilson. This is his one-volume biography, and it recommends itself to me, not only because he’s a good historian and a good writer, but because there is an emphasis on what I think is most important about Woodrow Wilson, namely his international ideas. Wilson has become increasingly notorious in the United States for his domestic ideas. A recent book by Christopher Cox takes him to task for his reactionary domestic views and politics. People on the right of the American spectrum do not like him because they see him as the father of big government. The Cooper book, however, deals mainly with his ideas about the world, and those, I think, are his most important contribution to world history.

Wasn’t he also a proponent of national self-determination?

Yes, Wilson put national self-determination on the global agenda as the basis for apportioning sovereignty in the world, to replace multinational empires. That idea has gained enormous traction. In fact, it’s what we might call hegemonic: it’s now regarded as the only legitimate basis for sovereignty. Now, of course, Wilson didn’t invent this idea that states should be composed of nations. It stems originally from the French Revolution, and in the 19th century, Germany and Italy created states on that basis. But it was Wilson who made it a universal principle.

Let’s briefly mention Franklin D Roosevelt, US president from 1933 to 1945, who appears in chapter 5 of your book. What would you say his legacy to history is, and what’s the biography you recommend if somebody wanted to find out more about his life?

FDR guided America through the Great Depression and was commander-in-chief—and, in my view, a very good one—for the United States when it formally entered World War Two.

FDR made a series of decisions that were controversial at the time, but that in retrospect, I think can be seen to have been the correct ones. It is perhaps not fully appreciated, but in the interval between the fall of France in June 1940 and the formal American entry into World War Two (after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941) the American public wanted Germany to be defeated but did not want to do the fighting itself. Franklin Roosevelt found a way, against domestic skepticism and opposition, to send military and economic assistance, first to Great Britain and then, after June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, to the Soviet Union.

American public opinion was very anti-communist, so it was difficult for Roosevelt to put these measures through, but the assistance that the United States gave, first to Britain and then to the Soviet Union, enabled these countries to keep fighting. That was crucial for the ultimate outcome of the war.

And the biography you recommend about him is the Ted Morgan one, FDR?

There are many biographies of FDR. Probably the standard one is the multi-volume work by Frank Freidel. I like the Morgan book because it’s a single volume and it’s very well-written. It’s not by a professional historian, but by a journalist who does, however, use documents. So for a manageable—although not short—one-volume biography, the Morgan book is a good one.

Let’s turn to the biographies of the communist leaders now, starting with Vladimir Ilich Lenin. In your analysis, how did Lenin change history? And why the biography by Robert Service?

Lenin has some claim to being the most influential person in all of the 20th century. Without Lenin, there would have been no Russian Revolution. It was he who insisted, against the initial resistance of his Bolshevik colleagues, that the Bolsheviks seize power in the then capital of the Russian Empire, St Petersburg. They did that in 1917 and consolidated it in a bloody civil war thereafter.

Without the Russian Revolution, there would have been no Chinese Revolution and no communism in power anywhere. Now, by some estimates, communism in power resulted in the premature deaths of 100 million people. So Lenin’s great influence on the 20th century cannot be said to have been benign.

The book that I found most useful is a biography by the British historian Robert Service, who is an expert on the Soviet Union. He has written a number of books, knows all of the literature about Lenin, and has written a relatively compact single-volume biography. It shows Lenin warts and all, and there were lots of warts.

But even if it ended in all those deaths, that wasn’t what Lenin set out to do.

There is a view that Lenin intended something much more benign for the Soviet Union, and it was Stalin who twisted it in the wrong direction. In the chapter on Lenin I argue that that is wrong. Stalin used to call himself the best Leninist, and that’s accurate. What the Soviet Union became and what Stalin did had clear precedent in Lenin and his life and works. Stalin was the contractor of the Soviet Union, but Lenin was the architect. All of that can be found in the Robert Service book.

Let’s turn to the Chinese Revolution now. Can you say a bit about Mao Zedong and his importance, and why, of the many biographies, you like Philip Short’s Mao: The Man Who Made China?

Mao was arguably the most powerful person of the 20th century because he had absolute power for most of the years between the Communist conquest of power in China in 1949 and his death in 1976.

Mao had a penchant for unleashing massively destructive campaigns across China. In the 1950s there was the Great Leap Forward, whose aim was to have China surpass the Western industrial states in industrial output. It didn’t achieve that, but it did trigger a famine, which was the worst famine in the long history of a country that has seen many famines. An estimated 40 million people may have died.

Then, in the 1960s, came the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The ostensible goal was to remove what Mao considered to be the principal obstacles to what he defined as communism in China. One of the obstacles he cited was the Communist Party itself, and he purged, persecuted, and sometimes murdered or had murdered, many, many people, including men with whom he had worked closely for decades. The Cultural Revolution turned into a kind of civil war with an estimated 2 million casualties, many lives turned upside down, and the economic and political structure of China devastated. Mao visited on his own country the kind of destruction that generally only comes from the worst kinds of wars imposed by hostile powers.

Philip Short is a British journalist and has written a very good one-volume biography of Mao. It’s not short, but Mao’s was a long life. Mao is a difficult person about whom to write a biography. Firstly, not all the facts are known: this is, after all, still a communist country. A lot is known, but the records are not available.

Secondly, Mao has been surrounded by so many myths that it’s difficult sometimes to penetrate them. Some of the biographies of Mao, including the one by Jung Chang and her husband, Michael Halliday, are indictments. It’s not that they’re inaccurate, but they’re written mainly to highlight the monstrous qualities of Mao, which were there in abundance.

Short is not writing an indictment—though an indictment of Mao is certainly possible to construct from his volume.

Hasn’t Short written a biography of Pol Pot as well?

Yes, he has. He writes very long biographies. This one, which is the only one I’ve read closely, is very well done.

Let’s turn to Adolf Hitler now. Will you say briefly why Hitler is significant to world history?

Hitler came to power legally in 1933, but he imposed a brutal dictatorship on Germany. He was responsible for starting World War Two in Europe, which was the worst war ever fought on a historically war-torn continent.

Any German leader would have tried to revise the post-World War I political settlement that had been devised by Woodrow Wilson and others at Paris in 1919, but it doesn’t seem likely that a different German leader would have gone about it the way Hitler did.

Then, of course, Hitler was responsible for history’s greatest crime, the murder of 6 million European Jews, which is known as the Holocaust. Hitler didn’t like to speak about the Holocaust and didn’t take a personal hand in the murder of Europe’s Jews, but there’s absolutely no doubt that he authorized it and that it would never have happened had Hitler not been the leader of Germany.

It’s also worth noting that Hitler has a distinction among the eight titans whom I depict in my book, which is that almost immediately after his death, virtually everything he had said, done, or built was discredited and discarded. Hitler left no living legacy.

Now there are many very good biographies of Hitler, among them Ian Kershaw’s two volumes. For the full story of Hitler’s life, the Kershaw book is very good.

But I would single out a volume by John Lukacs called The Hitler of History. John was a Hungarian-American historian who wrote a lot about the 20th century and a great deal about Churchill. His book deals with the historical controversies about Hitler and what historians have made of major questions, such as ‘What was the origin of Hitler’s murderous antisemitism?’ It’s a relatively short book, and it really isn’t necessary to know the full story of Hitler’s life in order to benefit from it.

What was the source of Hitler’s antisemitism?

I conclude—based on Kershaw, Lukacs, and all the other reading I’ve done on Hitler—that we will never know. It’s sometimes said that he acquired his antisemitism during his years as a kind of vagrant and frustrated artist in Vienna. But that doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts. It does seem to be the case that it was an idea that seized him when he moved to Germany.

John Lukacs has a speculation that because Hitler hated his father and he suspected that his father had Jewish ancestry (which was not true, I think), therefore he hated what he hated about his father. That’s just a speculation: John doesn’t suggest that this is in any way documented.

What I say is that the answer to that question resided in the psyche of one individual, and that psyche shut down forever with Hitler’s suicide in April 1945. So we’ll never know.

I’ve just been reading Richard Evans’s book, Hitler’s People, and got the sense there was quite strong antisemitism around in German society at the time, blaming Jews for the disaster of World War One. After reading it, I felt that the antisemitism was less individual to Hitler than I had believed.

There was a fair amount of antisemitism in Germany, especially in the wake of World War One. Antisemitism increased as you went east in Europe and was probably at its high point in Czarist Russia.

The major plank of Hitler’s political platform was overturning the settlement that was made in 1919 and he blamed that settlement—without any evidence—on the Jews.

But two qualifications need to be added. One, Hitler never got above a third of the popular vote in German elections and there were four or five elections in 1933. In those elections, the Nazi vote totals peaked and then declined. So he was on a downhill slope politically when German conservatives foolishly—and in some cases suicidally—made him chancellor.

The other thing is that there’s a difference between ordinary antisemitism and annihilationist antisemitism, and it was only with Hitler that the first turned into the second.

Let’s try to feel better about the world by turning to Mohandas Gandhi. Tell me about Gandhi’s significance to history, and also about the two-volume biography you recommend.

Gandhi was a person of powerfully held ideas, and many of those had to do with individual conduct. He founded several communes, first in South Africa and then in India, to pursue the style of life that he believed was physically and spiritually most healthy and he had acolytes who joined him. In that sense, he was a religious rather than a political figure.

But he was also a political figure, and he had two major accomplishments. First, he turned the Indian national movement, the Indian National Congress, into a mass movement capable of putting enough pressure on the British to cause them to leave after World War Two. Before Gandhi joined the Congress movement at the end of World War One, it consisted mainly of a small group of wealthy individuals, most of them high caste Hindus, whom the British could easily manage. Gandhi made it a mass movement with which they were ultimately unable to cope, which, in conjunction with a number of other factors, brought about the end of British rule in India.

His second great accomplishment was a technique that he pioneered in his years in South Africa and then applied to put pressure on the British in India. That was nonviolent protest. Nonviolent protest was adopted by other people in other places at other points in history, notably the American Civil Rights movement of the early and mid-1960s. Gandhi was the father of modern political nonviolence.

The book I recommend on him is a two-volume biography by Ramachandra Guha who’s an Indian historian. Gandhi has fallen out of favor in India now because the dominant political party, the BJP, is descended from groups that opposed Gandhi in his lifetime, one of whose members actually assassinated him. So the high standing that Gandhi had in the aftermath of his assassination in 1948 and in the decades thereafter has now dipped a bit, I think wrongly so. Guha—who is an admirer, although not an uncritical admirer—restores Gandhi to the place in history that is appropriate.

The other advantage of Guha’s two-volume biography is that the first volume is dedicated to his years in South Africa, where he went soon after returning from Great Britain, where he had qualified as a lawyer. It was in South Africa that his political personality and his spiritual personality were really formed. So in order to understand Gandhi, you need to understand the South Africa years and Guha devotes an entire volume to them.

Now we’re at David Ben-Gurion, who is the least familiar person on this list, at least to me. Tell me about him and the biography about his life you’ve recommended. A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion was the father of his country, the George Washington of the state of Israel. He was the leader of the Jewish national movement in the ancestral Jewish homeland, which between the two World Wars was the British Mandate of Palestine. He rose to leadership not because of what are ordinarily thought of as leadership skills—he was uncharismatic—but because he was a ferociously effective bureaucrat and headed the Zionist movement, and because he had an uncanny ability to anticipate the future.

Ben-Gurion understood earlier than others in the Zionist movement that war was coming, and that however it turned out, the British would be forced to leave Palestine. He saw that that would create the opportunity for the long-sought goal of proclaiming a Jewish state but, also, that once the Jews proclaimed their state, they would have to fend off the assaults of their Arab neighbors. And, indeed, five Arab governments attacked Israel immediately after its UN-sanctioned declaration of independence in 1948. In order to ward off those assaults, Ben Gurion recognized that the Jews would need a proper army, something that they had not had for almost two millennia, and he set about building one. More than anyone else, he is the father of the Jewish armed forces, the Israel Defense Forces or IDF, which have kept Israel independent for the last 76 years.

Ben-Gurion was also the first prime minister of Israel, between 1948 and 1963, and he was more responsible than anyone else for making and keeping Israel a democracy: to this day, the only one in the Middle East.

The single volume that I recommend is by Tom Segev, an Israeli historian. He’s associated with the so-called ‘New Historians’ of Israel, most of whom have been very critical—in my view, unfairly so—of Israel’s founding.

This book is non-partisan and straightforward. It tells you everything about Ben-Gurion and the title expresses the theme of his life, which was to secure a Jewish state no matter what had to be done. That meant no matter what compromises had to be made. During the Mandatory period, there was a proposal for a Jewish state being floated that gave the Jews very little territory, and the leader of the Zionist movement in Europe, Chaim Weizmann, said Jews would accept a state even if it was only the size of a tablecloth. Ben-Gurion was willing to accept a state much smaller than the Balfour Declaration had suggested and that other members of the Zionist movement wanted. He was focused on how to defend it and how to make it a democracy and a success—and in that he succeeded.

Do you think there’s anything he could have done to avoid the terrible situation we’re in now?

I think the answer is no. First of all, the Zionists did not want to expel Arabs who were living in the territory that the UN designated as Israel. They asked them to stay, but local Arab leadership urged them to leave on the grounds that the Arab armies would defeat the Jews. Then the local Arabs could come back and claim their possessions. Arabs became refugees because their leaders urged them to leave and there was a war. After the war, the Zionist movement was unwilling to readmit every Arab who had left for fear of a fifth column.

Also, during the war for independence, while the Zionists started at a great disadvantage, they gradually turned the tables on the Arab armies. Ben-Gurion was told by his commanders that they could capture all of Mandatory Palestine up to the Jordan River (which was the territory that Israel did capture as a result of the Arab attacks in the 1967 war). And Ben-Gurion refused. He did not want to expand Israel all the way to the Jordan River, even though it was militarily feasible, because he didn’t want to have a large Arab minority. He was always willing to negotiate with the Arabs, but they were never willing to negotiate with him, and that refusal extends to the present day.

The Israelis have offered one generous peace plan after another. The Arabs and now the Palestinians have never accepted them, and have made clear, from what they say to their own people in Arabic, that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state.

So I don’t think Ben-Gurion could have done anything to prevent the Arab-Israeli conflict, although he did what he could. I’m not sure that anyone other than the Arabs and now the Palestinians themselves can bring it to an end.

We’re on our last leader now, which is Winston Churchill. What did he achieve?

Churchill had a remarkably full life, but his world historical achievement was to keep Britain fighting after the fall of France in June 1940. Thereafter, there was an offer from a representative of Mussolini to mediate between Britain and Nazi Germany: Hitler would allow the preservation of the British Empire in exchange for Britain dropping out of the war and giving Germany a free hand in Europe. And influential figures in Britain, including in Churchill’s cabinet, notably Lord Halifax, were inclined to accept that offer. Things looked hopeless for Britain militarily so there were logical reasons to accept it, but Churchill was adamantly opposed to it. Through some deft political maneuvering in the cabinet and his eloquence and determination, he kept Britain fighting until first the Soviet Union and then the United States joined the fight.

Great Britain could not have won the war by itself, but it could have lost it, and it would have lost it, if not for Churchill.

There are a lot of biographies to pick from. Why have you picked Geoffrey Best’s Churchill: A Study in Greatness?

There are many good biographies of Churchill. The definitive one is Sir Martin Gilbert’s multi-volume work, which he has also condensed to a single volume. Of the recent ones, the one by Andrew Roberts is excellent. And if you want to read a negative view of Churchill, Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s recent book, Churchill’s Shadow, can give you one.

I like Best because it’s shorter than the others. It’s well written. It covers the main issues and, as you can tell from its title, it addresses the issue of most interest to me in writing The Titans of the Twentieth Century, and that is Churchill’s greatness.

Can you expand on that?

Churchill was a remarkable character. He was a great man, I would say, for two reasons. One, as I said, is his achievement in preventing a Nazi victory on the European stage in World War Two, thereby sparing Europe a prolonged period of unparalleled barbarism.

The other is his personal qualities. While historical achievements may fade, personal qualities are eternal. He embodied characteristics that are valuable in any circumstance, in any era, including resilience. Churchill suffered many setbacks during his long career, but he always bounced back. He suffered political defeats of various kinds, and yet he never gave up. He was available when Great Britain needed him as other men having suffered the same setbacks probably would not have been.

The other characteristic, the most important one that Churchill embodies, is courage. Churchill himself thought it the supreme virtue. He was physically brave. For example, in World War One, when he was not reappointed to the cabinet after Lloyd George became prime minister, he went to France and was in the trenches for a few months, exposing himself to real danger. He wanted to be part of the fight. He was in his 40s then and had no reason other than courage—combined with a sense of honor and duty—to do that.

He also had moral courage. He stood by his beliefs, even when they were unpopular. Now sometimes, in retrospect, that was not an admirable quality, as in the case of his attitude toward the British Empire in India. Churchill was adamantly opposed to any concessions during the 1930s, even though they were being made by a Conservative government. That was one of the reasons that he was kept out of the cabinet until World War Two. But the most important courageous stance he took was against Nazi Germany and Hitler, in the face of all the reasons to give up. He kept to his conviction, and he managed to convince the British people. That had extraordinary—and extraordinarily beneficial—global consequences.