Ataturk's Children

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: Am I right about that?

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...