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Martin Luther touched the Vatican with such a blunt but deftly accurate hand that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was forever fragmented. Several centuries later. Pope John XXIII surprised the world, and the cardinals who elected him, by transforming the church. Jesus Christ himself was the model of surprise: his teachings, especially in the Beatitudes, contradicted a whole world of customs and values. U.S. Ministers Robert Livingston and James Monroe abruptly accepted Napoleon's offer in 1803, bought the Louisiana Territory and thereby doubled the size of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt told the American people that they had nothing to fear but fear itself and then proceeded to change substantially the working premise of the nation's Government. Richard Nixon, a coelacanth of American antiCommunism, dismantled all of his earlier rhetoric and flew to Peking.
In the most creative excursions into the unthinkable, there is always a question of whether it is inspiration or the demand of circumstances that prompts the deed. Charles de Gaulle dramatically withdrew France from Algeria in 1962, risking tremendous internal eruptions. It was inspired statecraft, but may also have reflected the Hegelian idea that freedom is the knowledge of one's necessity. France more or less had to abandon its colonial enterprise. Similarly, it might be said that Egypt's domestic problems—poverty and overpopulation—virtually propelled Sadat toward some accommodation with Israel. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight was no suddenly inspired stunt but the almost necessary culmination of his career as a flyer. The Israeli rescue at Uganda's Entebbe Airport last summer was a brilliant act of desperation. So too, perhaps, was Spartacus' slave rebellion of 73 B.C.
The key to challenging the inviolable may lie in the difference between vertical thinking and lateral thinking. Vertical thinking is deductive, systematic, eminently useful and always necessary. Lateral thinking is a crackling arc of association: the mind scans apparently unrelated events and facts and locates new meaning where none seemed to exist before. Great inventions and great alliances have been born from such mental flashes. From the first hominids to use tools or cook meat to the first man who thought to consume an oyster ("He was a bold man that first eat an oyster," said Jonathan Swift), human minds have been engaged in overcoming determinism—unless, of course, one believes that even the most audacious intellectual leaps are themselves predestined. The irony is that many of the bravest innovators could not have thrown themselves into the unimaginable unless they believed they had no choice. That may be the deepest fatalism of all.
All ventures into the unthinkable depend crucially on timing. Without it, the potentially great statesman is merely a visionary. In 1968 Eugene McCarthy challenged all prevailing political custom by starting his solitary race against the sitting President, Lyndon Johnson; for better and for worse (L.B.J. capsized, Bobby Kennedy murdered, Richard Nixon elected), McCarthy can be said to have made all the difference that year; at least he set it all in motion.