We are getting some great responses from this, and it leads us to a perhaps
more interesting, and certainly more challenging question: who was Duke's
Man/Woman of the Century? Regardless of your feelings about him, it's hard
to argue with Nixon, who graduated from Duke Law and changed the geopolitical
balance profoundly. Then there's Kenneth Starr and Liddy Dole from the political
world, but there are lots of others as well. Tell us who you think
The Dukie of the Century is
Rob Hines
I hate to go with the trend, but I have to give a serious vote to the
American soldier. If you consider where our country has come in 100 years,
it is remarkable the impact that the American GI had on it...The names are
abundant, Normandy, Pearl Harbor, the trenches of Europe, the war in the
Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, So many men have given their life to make the U.S. the
world's only superpower to date, and I think that it warrants serious
consideration. They took the U.S. from a budding country at the start of
the 20th century and transformed it into (arguably) the biggest power ever seen
on the planet.
Runner-up has to go to Martin Luther King Jr., who changed life for blacks
everywhere and managed to do so in a peaceful and meaningful way.
Unfortuanately, his life was ended by the hate he fought so hard against, but he
redefined our way of thinking.
After that, you can go either way, Roosevelt, Truman, Lenin
Scott Dyche
Ronald Reagan. The policies that he initiated that were ridiculed by
the left and the media at the time (and are still downplayed) such as SDI
bankrupted the Soviet Union and won the Cold War. The tax cuts under his
administration provided the capital that has fueled the current economic
prosperity. A true leader, and a great man.
Don McCracken
If you want to take this historical thing to extremes, let me nominate
one-time Bosnian /Serbian student Gavrilos Princep (probably garbling
this spelling: it's been a few years...).
This was the guy who
assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July of 1914, which set off the
First World War, and from that you can attribute virtually every
important historical change of the 20th Century: the demise of the
Austrian and Ottoman empires (particularly sticky point in the last few
years), ultimately the demise of the Russian empire which in turn gave
birth to the first actual socialist state, which turned into the first
real totalitarian state, the birth of Nazism as a direct result of
Germany's defeat in WWI, which led to....WWII, the weakening of all
European powers along with the rise of nationalism among European
colonies worldwide which would result in the end of colonialism
throughout Africa and Asia (c.f. Viet Nam, ex-French Indochina {did you
know that Ho Chi Minh actually attended the Versailles peace conference
in 1919 looking for Vietnamese independence?}).
European burnout also (grudgingly) pulled the US into super-powerdom as well. Economic
disruption from the war ultimately brought about the Great Depression
(sort of). Technology (airplanes, submarines, the wristwatch and cool
trenchcoats) all spun out of WWI as well. The novel, music, art, etc.
were all irrevocably changed, too, while we're counting things. And I'm
sure I'm forgetting things, but this is my lunch break.
Anyway, Winston Churchill, Joe Stalin, Hitler,Mao, Gandhi, FDR all might well have been
marginal people if not for Mr. Princep. Love the DBR, by the way, and
just thought I'd toss this out for comment. Personally I'm not that much
of a Churchill fan, but he did resurface at a pretty damned good time.
FDR might make a better claim. How about Werner von Braun and the
astronauts? Well, maybe not.
Rich Friedman
Hey, I'm no history expert, or even buff. But there is significant
evidence that FDR knew of the atrocities that were going on in Nazi Germany well
prior (years prior!) to his decision to enter the fray known as WW II.
That is enough for me to take him off any list of mine.
William Donnelly
"G.I. Joe" as an embodiment of the hundreds of thousands of American
servicemen and women who have died this century fighting in the name of the
United States, and the millions who have served. We either helped stop or
stopped virtually by ourselves the Japanese, the Italians, the Germans, the
Communist Koreans, the Soviets and the Iraqis in their respective campaigns
to overthrow legitimate soveriegn countries by force. We protected lives
and personal property in Panama, Haiti, Northern Iraq, China, Kosovo,
Lebanon, Bosnia and Somalia, when those lives were threatened by armed
conflict. I submit that no other human, or group of humans, has, in the
entire history of mankind, made the impact that the United States serviceman
and woman have made in this century.
(as an aside, this century has another 375 days, as per the following:
When Is the New Millennium? mil*len*ni*um \ \ n, pl -nia or -niums: a period
of 1000 years
The end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third will be
reached on January 1, 2001. This date is based on the now globally
recognized Gregorian calendar, the initial epoch of which was established by
the sixth-century scholar Dionysius Exiguus, who was compiling a table of
dates of Easter. Rather than starting with the year zero, years in this
calendar begin with the date January 1, 1 Anno Domini (AD). Consequently,
the next millennium does not begin until January 1, 2001 AD.
US Naval Observatory - www.usno.navy.mil
Anonymous
Rush Limbaugh