“Great people” are around us all of the time. But they don’t generally tend to get into politics, because that is not something that generally attracts “great” people. On the other hand, sometimes people who are in politics are thrust into positions that require them to be great, or they perish or are quickly replaced.
For a little while in the late 1930s, for example, people thought Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, was great because in a time of increasing political tension across Europe he managed to meet with Hitler in Munich, Germany in 1938, when it seemed that war between Britain, France and Germany was imminent – and he came back with an agreement from Hitler that he didn’t want to annex any more territory than he already had, that things in Europe would be cool from then on, and he loudly and proudly boasted, “Peace in our time!” No one would have to fight! Wasn’t that great?
A year later the shooting war started, Chamberlain was thrown out of office, and soon afterward Winston Churchill came to power. It can be argued – and has been argued – how “great” Churchill was. Some of his biography amounts to hagiography, while some of his better-spoken and more reasonable detractors still manage to portray him as Satan’s first cousin. In any case, he gave great speeches and managed to keep Britain’s spirits up during some desperate years until WWII was finally ended. So, “great enough”, in that regard.
Similar stories apply to Lincoln, FDR, Truman and others who led the US government through years of war. (It’s doubtful whether history will have such fond memories of Bush, who started an optional war, or Obama, who more or less silently fought a war that he claimed to have ended years earlier, but you get the picture.)
“Greatness”, therefore, is not something that a person generally aspires to. No one wakes up one day and says, “I’m going to be great!” (Other than a megalomaniac such as Hitler, that is, or Alexander the Great, perhaps. Watch out for people who – like Trump, as a good example – proclaim their greatness.) Greatness is a function of the job that one has and one’s ability and willingness to do it the right way – whether or not anyone even finds out about it – and regardless of the ultimate reward, or people’s opinion. You only tend to hear about the “great people” who lead governments (or overthrow some, or greatly modify some aspect of bad ones, such as MLK, Jr.) to popular acclaim. But great people are still all around you. What’s lacking in most cases is the conditions to thrust them into positions of prominence and the desperate need to have the mentality and perseverance that only a great person could provide – or else. That, and the publicity machine that builds up around that person when he or she is in government or other spotlight. Talk to someone who just does an honest job competently for an expected reward, and you can start to get an idea of what greatness really is. Just because it’s not widely recognized and promoted doesn’t make that person less great, only less well known.
Those people are everywhere. You’ll never know most of their names, and that’s how they would prefer it.
Anyway, if you read the biographies of even the great people that you know of, those written by honest reporters, that is, you’ll find that they’re just regular people, for the most part, caught up in extraordinary events. Even great people make mistakes – sometimes lots of them, and with calamitous results – and they have the same foibles as the rest of us: greed, ambition, lust, pride – all of it – but they manage somehow to rise above their shortcomings and do what has to be done when it has to be done … and get noticed doing it.
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