Margaret MacMillan on how personalities have changed the course of history

Revered Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan is the presenter of this year’s Massey Lectures (the final one takes place in Toronto next week). MacMillan has won awards for her history books and is the warden of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, in addition to remaining a professor of history at the University of Toronto. I talked with her about her Massey Lectures book, History’s People: Personalities and the Past. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Historians tend to look at the great events that have changed the world. Your thesis is that human beings — the thinkers, military people, the royals, the politicians — are the ones who wrought the changes. It isn’t merely a sequence of events; it is the peculiarities of our leaders.

Napoleon would not have made an impact if he had lived before the French Revolution. But he came after and he made great change. He had great talent; he was able lead France to dominate Europe. You have to look at who is there at the time.

With Sept. 11, if you had different people in the White House and at Downing Street, history would be different. Another prime minister and president would likely have invaded Afghanistan but I am not sure they would have invaded Iraq. It does matter sometimes who is making those choices. It does matter in history because it is a way for us to connect with the past, to understand it better.

There are other people in the past who don’t change things as much but their voices are worth listening to. These are people who keep the diaries, the people who write the letters. They help to bring the past to us. They witness and describe larger events.

You mention the Restoration period diarist Samuel Pepys, who helped us understand what was going on in London at the time — the Great Plague, the Great Fire.

Madame de Sévigné wrote wonderful letters to her daughter and she talked about the French court of Louis XIV. And there would be something missing if we didn’t have those letters. Vigée Le Brun, a painter who went off to Russia, writes wonderful letters about Catherine the Great. You get a perspective on Catherine which you wouldn’t have otherwise.

You organize your chapters in interesting ways: “Persuasion and the Art of Leadership,” “Hubris,” “Daring,” “Curiosity” and “Observers.” In “Persuasion” you discuss Otto von Bismarck, William Lyon Mackenzie King and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What an odd threesome.

Persuasion is the art of leadership. Bismarck created modern Germany. He had the support of the king, so he could do it.

In a way, the democratic ones are more interesting, because they have to persuade a large number of people. Mackenzie King was really a clever, perceptive and skilled political leader, even though he talked to spirits in his spare time.

But he was really sane when it came to being prime minister. We haven’t had all the dramas that other countries have and we sometimes overlook that Canadian history is a great success story. The English and French and other people with regional interests were brought together into a workable country. The United States had a Civil War.

It was Mackenzie King who helped keep our differences under control during World War II. By the time of conscription, he had managed to keep Quebec on his side. Somehow we managed to get on with it and build a functioning society.

FDR had quite a lot of charm. Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, said you’d go to talk to Roosevelt determined to disagree with him and you’d come out whistling Dixie. One of the things that made both Roosevelt and Mackenzie King good leaders is that they weren’t afraid to have strong people around them.

Your chapter “Hubris” includes Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Stalin and Hitler. What a foursome.

I was interested in this whole question of hubris. When do you reach the point that you don’t listen and you think you are right? It’s more difficult in a democracy because there will be a lot of people who will tell you you are wrong. In a totalitarian system it is more understandable since you have such absolute power. I was interested in how it operated in both.

In my chapter on hubris, it was an effort to find good case studies. I already knew a lot about Woodrow Wilson because of my work on the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson’s failure to get the League of Nations was due to his hubris. Hitler and Stalin are the two great tyrants of the 20th century. Margaret Thatcher was very popular; even political opponents admired her. She arrived at a time when the British economy was in a mess. She reasserted British power through her own hubris, the Falkland Islands War.

Without Hitler, Germany might have had a conservative, nationalist government which may have wanted to revise the terms of the Treaty of Versailles but do this through peaceful means rather than war.

Ideology is dangerous. It becomes more important than people, who are seen as obstacles. Stalin’s hubris destroyed the Soviet economy. Stalin wanted to get rid of his enemies. He had no guilt about creating the gulags. Hitler had been talking about getting rid of the Jews since he wrote Mein Kampf as a young man. What he hadn’t planned in detail was how he was going to do it. That came later.

The character I found most fascinating was Champlain, who is also in the chapter “Daring.” Considering we all studied him in public school, I realized how little we know about him.

I didn’t know much either, even though we are Canadian. I was amazed he made so many voyages across the Atlantic and that he lived among the Indians. He found their ways interesting and he wasn’t judgmental at all.

You ask at the end of your book if history is just a hobby.

I don’t think it is. History allows us to understand others; we may not understand ourselves but we can understand them. How do we understand the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians if we don’t know something about that history?