You need only read the title of John O’Sullivan’s recent book — The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed The World (Regnery, 2006) — to get a sense of its contents.
It’s an interesting exploration of the role the three great leaders played in the world’s political and economic transformation from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
O’Sullivan ends his work with a description of the “spiritual element that best explains them and their achievements”:
All three, in subtly different ways, taught and embodied the virtue of hope. John Paul’s sermons and speeches in Poland were injunctions to people not to despair in the face of overwhelming force, but instead to hope in God and trust their fellow man. Reagan preached confidently of a coming age of liberty that would bring about the end of Communism. Thatcher believed in “vigorous virtues” that, once liberated from the shackles of socialism, would enable the British and people everywhere to improve their own lives. In very different styles, all were enthusiasts for liberty.
