One of the hostages, seventy-five-year-old Dora Bloch, who had been admitted to hospital in Kampala before the Israeli raid, was not rescued. She was subsequently dragged from her bed on Idi Amin’s orders and murdered by two Ugandan army officers.
In 1979, with Uganda’s economy and society having all but collapsed and Amin deeply unpopular at home, he sought to divert domestic attention by invading Tanzania. It proved to be a fateful decision. In response, Tanzania mounted a counter-invasion. Amin’s army collapsed and he fled—eventually settling in Saudi Arabia. He would live on in exile until finally dying, peacefully in his bed, in 2003.
THATCHER
1925–
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher first entered Parliament in 1959, making her maiden speech a year later. Interviewed in 1970, by that time education secretary, she said, “It will be years before a woman either leads the Conservative Party or becomes prime minister. I don’t see it happening in my time.” Nine years later she succeeded Labour’s James Callaghan as prime minister and went on to spend 11 years and 209 days at 10 Downing Street, during which time she transformed the British political, economic and social landscape. She was the longest-serving prime minister for more than 150 years and the first woman to hold the post in Britain.
Born Margaret Roberts in 1925, daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper who was also a Methodist lay preacher and a town alderman, she was grammar-school-educated and middle class. After a scholarship to Oxford and a brief career as a research chemist (during which she helped to develop the first soft ice cream), she trained as a barrister. She took the Conservative seat of Finchley in the 1959 election, encouraged by Denis, her shrewd, wealthy businessman husband, who steadfastly supported her career. The very qualities for which the company ICI had criticized her in a post-university interview, reporting that “this woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated,” surely aided her swift ascent at Westminster.
Emerging to lead the party in 1975, as the dark horse challenger to the then leader Edward Heath, she was at first conciliatory but gradually moved toward radical free-market policies in opposition, as the country under the Labour government succumbed to waves of industrial strikes, culminating in the so-called Winter of Discontent. This was enough to win the Conservatives the general election of 1979, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Britain then was rotten and enfeebled, the sick man of Europe, but she rejuvenated the country.
With the Labour Party beset by extremism and in disarray, Thatcher’s brand of nonpaternalistic Conservatism appealed to aspirational working-class voters, and she would win two more elections.
“The lady’s not for turning,” she declared famously at her party conference in October 1980, when all around her were encouraging compromise. She unhesitatingly broke with what she saw as political defeatism in the years since 1945, and successfully injected a new Churchillian pride and vigor into national life. She privatized badly run state industries, trying to roll back state involvement in the economy and people’s lives. Her declaration that “there is no such thing as society” is frequently taken out of context. But, nonetheless, she staunchly believed that the individual should bear the burden of responsibility for his or her welfare.
When the Argentine military junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, it seemed impossible that Britain could launch a war across 8000 miles of ocean; but Thatcher ordered the creation of a task force, inspired the nation to defeat tyrannical aggression, and reconquered the Falklands.
Her political partner abroad was Ronald Reagan, US president 1981–9, a genial unintellectual ex-actor, much mocked in Europe, though he was a superb orator. Ironically, with his clear, big ideals and gentle charm, and despite the folly of the Iran Contra scandal, he turned out to be one of the greatest modern presidents, his hatred of Soviet totalitarianism—the “Evil Empire”—leading to the arms race that won the Cold War and in turn to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Reagan died in 2004, but his diaries attest to his close partnership with Thatcher. She shared Reagan’s anti-Sovietism, earning the nickname the Iron Lady from the Soviet press, which she relished. (French President François Mitterrand once described her as having the “eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,” a unique mixture of aggression and femininity that was frequently caricatured by satirists.) Reagan and Thatcher engaged with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she called “someone we can do business with,” encouraging his reforms and retreat from oppression and empire.
In 1984–5 she was faced with the miners’ strike, launched in response to plans to close many pits. This strike, which she regarded as an attempt to topple her government, was quelled by wearing the miners down, breaking the grip of trade unionism, and mobilizing police and army to control rioting strikers. It was a test of her leadership but also the final attempt by undemocratic trade unions to dominate the British government using strikes as blackmail.
But later her new Community Charge (dubbed the Poll Tax) caused riots. Her opposition to closer cooperation within the European Community undermined her credibility at a point when her chancellor had already resigned. When her deputy, Geoffrey Howe, resigned, his speech triggered a 1990 Conservative leadership election. She was overthrown by a palace coup, abandoned by almost all of her cabinet, and left Downing Street in tears. Baroness Thatcher took her seat in the House of Lords, her late husband receiving a baronetcy.
With President Reagan, Thatcher was instrumental in engineering the triumph of capitalist democracies over communism in the Cold War; she helped to draw back the Iron Curtain and gave freedom to millions. She won a seemingly impossible war, transformed sclerotic Britain into a healthy and reinvigorated country, made London Europe’s financial center, broke the power of the unions, and became a global political star. There was no one else like her. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted he was, in many ways, her heir. And if you live in Britain today, the society around you is in no small part a creation of Margaret Thatcher, the greatest British leader since Churchill.
ANNE FRANK
1929–1945
I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
Anne Frank (July 15, 1944)
The diary of a Jewish girl in hiding during the Second World War has become a totemic symbol of the Holocaust, a monument to the 6 million Jews killed and a talisman for victims of persecution across the world. But Anne Frank was far more than a symbol. She was a teenager whose refusal to be broken by fear or despair in the face of the blackest persecution is a triumph of humanity, the mark of a truly heroic soul. She also became, in spite of her youth, a great writer, an observer and recorder of the terrible events of her dark time and her family’s struggle to survive. Hers was not the only such diary to emerge, but it was the finest—an immortal classic.
On July 6, 1942 Anne Frank, her parents Otto and Edith, and her elder sister Margot left their house on the Merwedplein in Amsterdam. Wearing layers of clothes and carrying no suitcases to avoid arousing suspicion, they made their way to Otto Frank’s office building on the Prinsengracht. At the top of the stairs there was a door, later concealed behind a false bookcase. It led to what Anne named the Secret Annex—four rooms where the Franks, with another family, the van Pels, and a dentist called Fritz Pfeffer, would hide for the next two years.