A TIME 100 Symposium

(12 of 17)

KEARNS-GOODWIN: I agree with you. I think the difficulty if you look at different countries is you're going to find a leader of each country whether it's China or whether it's India, but what Gandhi does is to transform all of that because the ideology that he provides becomes a rallying cry for all sorts of people and will continue to be so. I mean I think that [unintelligible] Martin Luther King that nonviolent resistance against established power to make justice happen is something that keeps ideology going. To go back to a thing, and this is one of those big questions between does an idea transform a century or is it the practical reality to it? If you added Marx to Lenin, Marxism-Leninism then I do think that that wins out over Stalin. The difficulty about making that choice is that Stalin is there for half a century. Longevity helps in a certain sense, unless you get one of these idea guys. I mean remember Bobby Kennedy one time was worrying that John Kennedy wouldn't be remembered because he'd only been in there for three years and somebody trying to make him feel better said, yes, but Julius Caesar was only there for that amount of time. And then Bobby Riley said, yes, but it helps to have William Shakespeare write about you. [unintelligible]

RATHER: By the way, governor, as long as we are considering [unintelligible] how long was the Pope, Pope John Paul the 23rd, how long was he in?

KEARNS-GOODWIN: He's got only three years, too.

[Simultaneous conversation]

CUOMO: Not nearly long enough but he laid the groundwork for the Second Vatican Council and he opened Christianity in a dramatic way with just a few gestures, you know, travelling to the prison and liberating Taird de Chardin who was a great, great intellect.

ISAACSON: Well, let me ask, John Paul the II or John the 23rd, if you had to pick one as the most influential? I know you are —

CUOMO: Well, now, you're getting ethnic on me, see —

ISAACSON: You're picking Popes for us.

CUOMO: Well, well, John Paul was one of the first Polish Popes —

[Simultaneous conversation]

CUOMO: Well, John Paul, John Paul the II there is a great book by Jonathan Quitney just out on John Paul the II, the Man of the Century. And Quitney wrote, I guess for the Wall Street Journal and I did a blurb for him after reading the book. And what I liked most about John Paul is he's regularly thought of as the Pope who brought back a kind of rigorous approach to dogma, Catholic dogma and does it against all the odds and all the improbable places. And he is all of that and I give him that. But he's much more than that. He was one of the activist political people in the church long before he was a Pope, in Poland. He fought communism on a, on a regular basis and, and did a fine job of it and goes to Cuba, you know, very, very intelligently. I mean Castro looking to make a score. I think for a Polish Pope it was just marvelously subtle.

CUOMO: —in that, that move.

ROSE: Irving Kristol, I want to give you an opportunity.

KRISTOL: I don't want to say anything against Gandhi who was a very noble leader or Martin Luther King, of course, but look, I mean to talk about showing the potential of passive resistance to establish human rights or whatever. Yeah, against the British Government Gandhi could practice passive resistance and be successful. In the United States Martin Luther King could practice passive resistance, civil disobedience and be successful. There were people in Russia who tried to practice civil disobedience under Stalin, you never heard any more about them. It all depends on the circumstances. I don't think one wants to generalize too much. I think for their country, certainly, Gandhi is a national founder, as Mandela is in South Africa, and certainly for American blacks, Martin Luther King is their 20th century hero. But let's not exaggerate the virtues of passive resistance.

CUOMO: But he was more than passive resistance, I, I think. The Mahatma I guess means good soul. I mean that was the, the, the nickname they gave to him.

KRISTOL: [unintelligible] Catholic, I don't know that.

[Laughter]

CUOMO: And, of course, he was [unintelligible], I guess, is what he was about, his religion. He was about the dignity of all man. It was much more than nonviolence. Martin Luther King, Jr., is much, much, more than nonviolence. He's telling you you're supposed to love one another as though you were equals and you're supposed to do that politically as well. And you're supposed to actively follow this commitment to a universal brotherhood. That's what he was talking about. And that's very important. It's still an important idea. The great challenge for us is how you maintain liberty in a society and still work together for the good of everybody in that society? We're nowhere near achieving a really excellent result there. We, we describe our current situation most politicians implicitly as this is as good as it gets and don't mess with it. God forbid. Most of the people in this country are not doing as well as they could do with a little more effort. So, I, I am with Dan on Ghandi, one of the great, great — and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mandela. I, I, I think they, they speak a very, very important lesson to us.

KEARNS-GOODWIN: And just to add on to that, I mean I think you would argue that Martin Luther King was not simply a hero to African Americans, but indeed to whites and blacks alike for he made those whites in America understand what that moral problem was with segregation in the South, helped to get them active in the civil rights movement, helped to make them make an America that was inclusive that makes them feel more a part of a nation. I mean whites gained as well as blacks in making our nation a better place than it was under that sordid regime of segregation.