Table of Contents
1 The Death of a Pope
2 Early Years
3 The Road to the Papacy
4 The Polish Pope
5 Bringing an End to Communism
6 Traveling Pope
7 Crisis in the Church
8 Final Years

Foreword: On Leadership
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Chronology 97
Bibliography 101
Further Reading 102
Index 104
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
On Leadership
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eadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world
go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage; but
love is a private transaction between consenting adults.
Leadership is a public transaction with history. The idea of lead-
ership affirms the capacity of individuals to move, inspire, and
mobilize masses of people so that they act together in pursuit
of an end. Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, some-
times bad; but whether the end is benign or evil, great leaders
are those men and women who leave their personal stamp

on history.
Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition
that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never
been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day,
eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the
agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the gods and goddesses
of the ancient world or, in the modern era, race, class, nation, the
dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit of the times, history itself.
Against such forces, the individual dwindles into insignificance.
So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Tolstoy's
great novel War and Peace offers a famous statement of the case.
Why, Tolstoy asked, did millions of men in the Napoleonic Wars,
denying their human feelings and their common sense, move
back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? "The
war," Tolstoy answered, "was bound to happen simply because
it was bound to happen." All prior history determined it. As for
leaders, they, Tolstoy said, "are but the labels that serve to give
a name to an end and, like labels, they have the least possible
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connection with the event." The greater the leader, "the more
conspicuous the inevitability and the predestination of every act
he commits." The leader, said Tolstoy, is "the slave of history."
Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determin-
ism of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of
men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deep-
est human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of
human freedom-the assumption of free choice that underlies
every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we
think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is
manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are
by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently
by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this them-
selves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.
More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make
no difference. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth
Avenue in New York City between 76th and 77th streets around
10:30 p.m. looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down
by an automobile-a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast,
a world aglare: "I do not understand why I was not broken like an
eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry." Fourteen months later an
American politician, sitting in an open car in Miami, Florida, was
fired on by an assassin; the man beside him was hit. Those who
believe that individuals make no difference to history might well
ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same
had Mario Constasino's car killed Winston Churchill in 1931
and Giuseppe Zangara's bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.
Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in
1895 and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916.
What would the twentieth century have looked like now?
For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference.
"The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anony-
mously," wrote the philosopher William James, "is now well
known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing
save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small,
"ON LEADERSHIP" 7
FOREWORD
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and imitation by the rest of us-these are the sole factors in