US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
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RICE: By the way there was quite a bit of violence in Birmingham, too. Just in, in response, it's not as if Bull Connor and the establishment in Birmingham went down lightly to passive resistance. And, so —
KEARNS-GOODWIN: Absolutely.
RICE: — I think that is sometimes forgotten about the early '60s in Birmingham.
ROSE: Let me just throw this to a broader perspective. You'll see up here we're going to talk about builders and titans later, artists and entertainers, over here scientists and thinkers and then there are heroes and inspirations, all about persons of the century but ideas. Someone may have mentioned this earlier, the founder of television. There's — we don't know, I don't know who, in fact, founded computers, but there is Henry Ford. A lot of people will look at the influence in this century and say, Henry Ford has had a profound influence on this century. How do we [unintelligible] people who have been outside the political or the religious arena as having a larger impact and shaping our time more than more visible political leaders?
RICE: I would actually like to object on the same grounds that Irving Kristol objected about greatness. I think that there's a problem in conflating people who, however important the discoveries of the things that they invented, what leaders do, political, religious and others, to, to get back to a point that Governor Cuomo made, is they speak to a soul somehow. They speak to a larger self, a larger set of aspirations, whether it's in war time, as with Churchill, or peace time as is the Pope. I, I have a little bit of trouble understanding how to equate those two. This is not to diminish the importance of the great scientists, the great inventors, but they speak to something else. And it may be for that reason that we don't generally remember their names.
RATHER: See, I think we're at some risk of going the other way with all respect. To say, first of all, I think there's an immense danger of taking ourselves too seriously here, in which case we risk doing little more than qualifying as ourselves for most self-important person of the century.
[Laughter]
RATHER: But since Tom, Peter and I have pretty much cornered the market on that nomination —
RATHER: — a long time ago I want to keep the field as narrow as possible. But if we try to, what used to be called, jump out of the box, get away from the obvious political leaders and statesmen, I am going to depend on you, Governor Cuomo, not to laugh, you could take someone such as Louie Armstrong. He's not a political leader. He's not a statesman. His influence on the 20th Century, he was revolutionary, he had a long-lasting effect. I'm not saying he invented Jazz, but he helped popularize Jazz and he made, made, he helped an awful lot of people of this century begin to think about many things in a whole different way. And I know we have a whole area for artists in this but there is some danger of getting caught up — I fault myself, first and foremost — with the Winston Churchills and the Ronald Reagans and Franklin Roosevelts, for that matter the Mahatma Gandhis of the world, and tend to forget that people and things such as the arts could be enormously influential. Marcel Proust made a, his influence on the century runs strong. Sigmund Freud's influence, first to really concentrate on the interior workings of the mind. It's just I would like to see us consider more people than those politicians —
KEARNS-GOODWIN: Oh, absolutely and you could add Alexander Fleming. I mean the whole discovery of antibiotics changes the whole way in which we can deal with illness. I would add Jackie Robinson. I mean here's somebody who broke the color line in baseball but more than that had a dignity that helped us, the Brooklyn Dodgers, win the World Series.
[Laughter]
KEARNS-GOODWIN: But more importantly allowed people, blacks and whites, to see the talent that the African Americans had and opened up the whole sports phenomenon to black Americans. I think you're right, there are ways of looking outside this thing, it's just that we're caught up right now. And there is something different about a public leader engaging his public as the whole nation that gives it a scope that this may not quite fit into.
ROSE: Let me take some questions from these and if anybody from the audience would like to get involved, let me know and I will try to get to you. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that part of the reason why we are having problems settling on people, either domestically or internationally, is because we're using floating criteria. And I think that we're talking about whether it is the idea versus the action or I think that what we need to do is characterize how we see the century. And if you see it's whether, if you see it's good versus or hope versus evil, then you don't really have a problem deciding whether or not you can include good guys versus bad guys. And my hope is that when you look at the century there's a whole lot more good than bad. And though, because of who we are, we tend to concentrate on the bad, I'd like to think that there is a lot more hope going into the new Millennium and that's why I think while we can't forget about the bad guys, we should definitely concentrate on the good guys.
ROSE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And women.
ROSE: Thank you very much. Yes, right here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was actually really surprised to hear so much talk about Mao, Stalin and Hitler and I was wondering where does leadership cross over into demagoguery and why would we reward a demagogue? Do any of those people we've discussed qualify?
ROSE: Professor Kristol, music to your ears, isn't it?
KRISTOL: Oh, I think we should let the governor answer that one.
[Laughter]
CUOMO: Ooh.
ROSE: Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We're talking about leaders and revolutionaries here and one of the foremost revolutionaries of this century is Fidel Castro and I haven't heard him mentioned. I just wanted to know what the panel thought about Mr. Castro and his influences?
[Simultaneous conversation]