This generation of giants

The Times

October 10, 2005

This generation of giants

William Rees-Mogg

As Margaret Thatcher celebrates her 80th birthday, remember the leaders who changed our world

IN 1946 Henry Kissinger, then 23 years old, was serving with the United States Army in Germany; his brother was serving with the Army in Korea. Their father had to go into a hospital in New York for an operation he did not expect to survive. Fortunately, he lived for another 36 years. He wrote a personal letter to his sons, perhaps following the Jewish custom of making ethical wills.

The letter was written in English and included this passage: “Your grandfather Falk, this fine and honest man, used to say ‘Der Mensch muss seine Schuldigkeit tun’.” Dr Kissinger translates that as “a human being must always fulfil his moral obligations”. It comes rather close to John Wayne’s epic line: “A man has to do what a man has to do.” In more highbrow terms, it sounds like Kant’s “categorical imperative” .

On Thursday there will be a great celebration for Baroness Thatcher’s 80th birthday. Like Kissinger, she is an example of the power of the moral will in human affairs. She is 80, Henry Kissinger is 82, and a third leader of the postwar world, Lee Kuan Yew, is also an 82-year- old. As Lady Thatcher has written: “Mr Lee almost single-handedly built up Singapore into one of the most astonishing economic success stories of our times, and he did so in the face of constant threats to his tiny state’s security and, indeed, existence.”

These three, born into different cultures, seem to me to have shared the basic qualities that allow great statesmen to influence the world for the good; qualities that I most admire. They have shown great courage, unending determination and a clearly defined set of beliefs. They are wholly committed to the security and advancement of the countries they have led. All three also have an attractive intellectual gift; they always look far into the possible consequences in the future. They have imagination as well as intellectual force.

I have had the good fortune to be writing about world affairs in the period in which these three have had their greatest influence. I have known Lee Kuan Yew since he lunched at The Times, as Louis Heren’s guest, nearly 30 years ago. I was first introduced to Henry Kissinger when he was President Nixon’s Secretary of State in the early 1970s. I first met Margaret Thatcher at Oxford in the spring of 1946, nearly 60 years ago.

They have been three of the great world leaders of the past half century; for any journalist, it has been good fortune to have been their contemporary. There is, of course, a fourth figure who shared, to an even higher degree, their characteristics of strong belief and strong willpower. That was Pope John Paul II, who would be 85 if he were still alive.

In the week of Margaret Thatcher’s 80th birthday it is interesting to ask this question. How was it that this particular generation produced so strong a group of world leaders? The reasons must be global; the Pope grew up in Poland, Kissinger was a refugee from Germany, studying in America, Lee Kuan Yew was a student at Singapore, and subsequently at the LSE then in Cambridge. Margaret Thatcher (Roberts) was a high school girl in Grantham and a student at Oxford.

To an observer who lived through the same period, the answer is obvious enough, but the implications may not be. The obvious answer to the question is the influence of the Second World War, the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, the Japanese conquest of Singapore, the Holocaust of the Jews, the Blitz on England and the threat of invasion in 1940. The world war broke out in 1939, when the oldest of the group, Pope John Paul II, was 19 and the youngest, Margaret Thatcher, was 13. The war did not end in 1945. The Cold War went on until 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the threat of the Soviet Union was removed.

Other figures played a vital part in winning the Cold War without falling into the Third World War. All the presidents of the United States deserve their credit, particularly Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Reagan. But the four contemporaries sustained the great struggle in its crucial period, after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, and during the precarious years of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. Lee Kuan Yew, in particular, gave the West an understanding that China was different from Russia, and that the political development in China under Deng Xiaoping would not be the same as in Russia. The Pope broke Soviet power in Eastern Europe.

This was also the period when it became apparent that state socialism was an inefficient system that could not compete effectively with liberal capitalism in world markets. Compare China in the 1960s with Japan. If one includes John Paul II’s great encyclical Centesimus annus, one can say that all four came to share Margaret Thatcher’s belief in capitalism under the law, “within a strong judicial framework”, to use the Pope’s words. All four had seen the blighting effects of socialism under the Soviet system, and the waste involved even in benign, democratic socialism.

Of the four, at least two had started as men of the Left. I am not sure exactly what kind of intellectual theorist one would have met if one had come across Henry Kissinger at Harvard in the late 1940s. They all became leaders of the Right, hooted at by the Left. The reason they developed their views was that they were willing to face reality. Socialism did not work — and does not. The world is a dangerous place. Nations need to be strong, with strong allies. Leaders are elected to defend national interests.

Margaret Thatcher’s core belief is in liberty under the law; that, for her, is the basis of freedom and of the good society. But she has always believed that liberty had to be defended. That is the lesson that Hitler, Stalin and Mao taught our generation. We have not forgotten it. I hope Margaret Thatcher will have a very happy birthday.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.