The list of nominees for greatest man of the 20th century is as short as it is extraordinary.
Franklin Roosevelt is the obvious American candidate. He guided the United States safely through the century's gravest traumas, the Great Depression and World War II. His indelible New Deal imprint still shapes America today.
The British would surely nominate Winston Churchill, the charismatic wartime prime minister who saved his nation from the Nazis.
Let us not forget giants of science like Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison. Or certainly Mohandas Gandhi, whose strategy of peaceful resistance shucked India's colonial yoke and inspired Martin Luther King Jr.
But the list would not be complete without the name of Nelson Mandela, the remarkable South African who died Thursday at 95. It's hard to name anyone, anywhere, in any time whose life is quite a match for his.
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Like King and Gandhi, Mandela led his people to freedom, ending the apartheid rule of South Africa's brutal white-minority regime. But neither of those men, nor the others mentioned here, was put to such an extraordinary personal test.
All you need to know to grasp the uniqueness of Mandela is this: He spent 27 years in prison, most of them in solitary confinement pounding rocks at the notorious Robben Island prison. He was given no hope and allowed little contact with the outside world. Yet instead of yielding to his plight — or betraying his cause by speaking a few words that could have set him free — he persevered, leading in absentia against all odds and emerging victorious, a leader of such stature that his oppressors could not stand against him.
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