great leaders, who are your favorites? - Page 2

People from Lord of the Rings don't count.

Cromwell

I agree with both listed, in addition I would like to add Churchill, FDR and Mandela.

In no particular order

George Bush
Jimmy Carter
Jagoff Running Iran
Hugo Chavez
Idi Amin
Ghaddafi
Castro
Nancy Pelosi
Barbara Boxer
Musharaff
Ayatolla Khomeini
Kofi Annan
Yasser Arafat
Bashar Al-Assad

Are you being serious? If yes, no comment, because we're entitled to our opinions.

Gandhi, not Ghandhi.
Mandela
MLK
Churchill
Lincoln

Warren Buffett.

Jon.

Its me !

churchill
WT Sherman
US Grant
attaturk
Thedore Herzel

Boy, I have had this disccussion many times. I would argue that Lee was not such a great miiitary man. he was a great gentleman, but if I had to send my son to servie with Grant or Lee, I would chose Grant any day of the week. I'd prefer Sherman though, if given a chance.

Lee was a fantastic 1820 general fighting a war in 1862. Sherman was a 1940 General fighting a war in 1862.

care to eleborate?

Well...Lee was a master at strategic operations. He lost the war on tactics attempting to pursue the only winning strategy open to him.

He did infinitely more with substantially less than anyone could have been expected to do. Virtually no one at the time understood the technological impact on tactics. Longstreet did, and Lee can be faulted for overruling Longstreet on any number of occassions (Picketts charge being of course the most important and decisive).

But if we're going to play whose is bigger with Generals in that war, my vote has to go to Jackson. That he died early in the war may be the principal reason the North was able to come back and win.

Lincoln's great contribution as a president in the civil war was his management of his general staff. The one he inherited was seriously flawed and it required him to nearly completely turn it over before the end of the war to find a formula for victory. He found it in Grant and Grant brought with him Sherman. That was the key. A lesson our current president would have been well served to learn much earlier in his term.

Jesus

actually, to be fair that is probrably an extremly accurate way of putting it. I think that one of Lee's biggest constraints was simply the culture of the people he was leading, and the economic structure of the South at the time.


I would suggest that both grant and sherman did, and for almost exactly the same reason why so few of the southern generals did. Both Grant and sherman had spent stretches in civillian lives as managers (and both were very familiar with railroads). Sherman has spent a large chunk of his time studying the geography and culture of the south, and had lived there for a period of time.

That's a little erroneous. Certainly his mother wanted to manipulate him, but she initially found herself with less power than under Claudius (where she orchestrated the death of many). Then she ended up dead with an anniversary to mark the joyous occasion. As far as I am aware, young as he was, he was his own man. If he had been easily manipulated by the political system, the Senatorial class would not have held him in such contempt. Everyone loves a puppet. Instead, he slaughtered them, and that's why they hated him. He also chose his people carefully. The reason Vespasian survived to be emperor was because he was a nobody. Nero was not worried about him, wherease he moved against others. Also, senators wrote the histories, and their bias is reflected in them. It should be noted that the majority of his executions were contained to that very small group of people.

It also doesn't mean that he was not an effective ruler in other ways. Even Tacitus will concede that he administered laws quite fairly, did much to extend road networks, repair infrastructure, keep up the grain supply, etc. And although he was a bit of a spendthrift, who can blame him for being a patron of the arts? :P

Anyway, I only put him in to rile conne, but he's not as bad as he's made out to be.