Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Leadership can be developed and improved by study and training," General Omar Bradley once told a class at the Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kans. "But don't discount experience. Someone may remind you that Napoleon led armies before he was 30 and Alexander the Great died at 33. Alexander might have been even greater if he had lived to an older age and had had more experience. In this respect, I especially like [the] theory that 'judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment...
CORRELLI BARNETT, British military historian: Greatness has nothing to do with morality. A leader gets people to follow him. Napoleon led the French to catastrophe, but they followed him almost to the end. Marlborough and Wellington had greatness. And Hitler, unfortunately. Al Capone was a leader in a primitive environment...
...Lies Here? (Putnam; $6.95), Author Thomas G. Wheeler picks bones of a more literal sort. His quite confident contention is that Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides never contained the body of the Emperor. The corpse reburied there in 1840 was a look-alike named Eugène Robeaud. This impostor, an infantryman chosen by Napoleon's secret police to stand in for the Emperor at various ceremonial and public functions, was eventually smuggled onto St. Helena in 1818 and substituted for the exiled Napoleon as a British prisoner. According to Wheeler, Robeaud soon died of arsenic poisoning...
Much of Wheeler's argument is based on folk legend, alleged intrigues and half-formed plots to free Napoleon yet another time. But what is convincing is Wheeler's enthusiasm for a subject in whose name nearly as much ink has been spilled as blood...
MICHEL PONIATOWSKI, 52, Minister of State and Minister of Interior. "Ponia," as he is known everywhere, is Giscard's closest friend and crony in or out of the government. A patrician with royal Polish ancestry-one of his forebears was a marshal in Napoleon's army-Ponia-towski has known Giscard since student days, and he is distantly related to Giscard's wife. He helped Giscard set up his Independent Republican Party in 1966. Well before Pompidou's death, Poniatowski had worked quietly to line up the centrist parties' support that proved so crucial...