This is not a list of good people
It is a list of people who held power. STALIN oversaw famines and purges that killed millions. FRANCO ruled Spain for thirty-six years after winning a civil war, and the mass graves are still being opened. NAPOLEON reintroduced slavery in the French colonies after the revolution had abolished it.
They are in the same grid as MANDELA, who came out of twenty-seven years in prison and chose not to take revenge. Putting them together is not an accident of alphabetical order — it is the actual shape of the subject. Important and admirable are separate measurements, and history gets a lot easier to understand once you stop expecting the powerful to be the good.
The most surprising thing Washington did was stop
In 1783, having won the war, WASHINGTON resigned his commission and went home to farm. In 1796, after two terms as president, he declined to stand again and left. Neither was required of him; he could comfortably have stayed, and a good many people wanted him to.
King George the Third is reported to have said that if Washington really did give up power he would be the greatest man in the world. The precedent held for 150 years on custom alone, until Franklin ROOSEVELT won four terms, after which it was written into law. The hard part of a republic is not taking power. It is the bit where somebody hands it back.
Cleopatra was Greek, and closer to us than to the pyramids
CLEOPATRA ruled Egypt but descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great, and her family had spoken Greek and largely ignored Egyptian for nearly three hundred years. She is said to have been the first of her line to bother learning the language of the people she governed, along with several others — the diplomacy was the skill, not the eyeliner.
The timeline is the part that stops people. The Great Pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born. She lived nearer in time to the opening of Pizza Hut and the Moon landing than to the building of the pyramid she would have seen from her boat. Ancient Egypt was ancient history to the ancient Egyptians.
Winning a war is no guarantee of anything
CHURCHILL led Britain through the Second World War and lost the general election in July 1945, weeks after victory in Europe, in a landslide. Voters who admired him as a wartime leader did not want him running the peace, and said so. He described it as a blessing very effectively disguised.
The rest of the grid runs from PERICLES in Athens and CAESAR in Rome, through BOLIVAR liberating much of South America and BISMARCK assembling Germany, to the twentieth century: LENIN, TITO, CASTRO, ADENAUER rebuilding West Germany, NEHRU and GANDHI at Indian independence, LINCOLN, TRUMAN, KENNEDY, REAGAN, OBAMA and THATCHER. Roughly half are admired, several are loathed, and which is which depends heavily on where you are standing — see our Ancient Rome page for where a lot of the arguments about power started.