DEAN ACHESON resumed his career as a Washington lawyer in 1953, while being periodically invited to advise successive US governments, and died of a heart attack at home on his Sandy Spring farm in 1971. He was seventy-eight.
HOUARI BOUMÉDIÉNE deposed Ahmed Ben Bella, President of Algeria, in 1965. Ben Bella lived under strict house arrest until 1980 when he was exiled to Lausanne. After a decade he returned to Algeria. He acted as the chairperson of the African Union’s Council of the Wise, before his death on 11 April 2012 aged ninety-three.
RAÙL CASTRO took over the Cuban presidency from the ailing Fidel in 2006, though at the time of writing the latter is still alive too, judging from a private audience in Havana in 2012 with Pope Benedict XVI. An aspirin remains a rare item in Cuba, and mulattos and blacks feel oppressed. Since a BBC journalist wept over the death of Yasser Arafat, one can anticipate the rending of garments and pulling out of hair when Fidel finally shuffles off his mortal coil.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK died in 1975 aged eighty-seven. He and his KMT successors ran Taiwan as a one-party state until the start of the second millennium, although its current multi-party system is being held up as a future paradigm for China’s own democratization. Some have wondered – should Chiang’s and Mao Zedong’s ghosts haunt contemporary China – which of them would be more approving or disapproving of what they saw.
CHIN PENG, leader of the Malayan Communist Party, at the time of writing still lives in unrepentant exile in southern Thailand. A film about his life, The Last Communist, was banned in Malaysia in 2006.
WINSTON CHURCHILL died aged ninety on 24 January 1965 at his home Chartwell in Kent. Following a state funeral in which East End dockside cranes dipped in his honour, he was buried at Bladon, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
ANTHONY EDEN died of liver cancer on 14 January 1977, after retiring with his second wife to Rose Bower at Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. He was seventy-nine.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER and MAMIE retired to their farm near Gettysburg. He died of congestive heart failure on 28 March 1969 and is buried near his memorial library in Abilene, Kansas. His reputation as president has markedly improved as time moves on.
KING FARUQ I, weighing 300 pounds and described as ‘a stomach with a head’, died in exile after choking at Rome’s Île de France restaurant on 18 March 1965. He was forty-five. I have met young Egyptians who are nostalgic for his era, a vibrant time in Egypt’s cultural life.
GENERAL CHARLES DE GAULLE died of a ruptured blood vessel at home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises on 9 November 1970. He had installed an electricity meter and paid for his own stamps and haircuts. He was almost eighty. He has dwarfed all subsequent post-war French leaders.
SAM GIANCANA was shot dead in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1975, while sawn-up pieces of Johnny Rosselli were found floating in a barrel off Florida a year later. Having escaped prosecution one last time in 1986, Santo Trafficante lived modestly in Miami Beach and Tampa, and died peacefully the following year.
PRESIDENT HO CHI MINH died of heart failure aged seventy-nine on 2 September 1969. His body is displayed in a mausoleum on Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honour. United Vietnam would fight China and invade Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The People’s Republic of Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and conducts naval exercises with the US so great are its anxieties about China, which has the autism of all great powers.
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON died of a heart attack on his ranch on 22 January 1973, aged sixty-four, after a lifetime of physical indulgence. It was the day before a ceasefire was declared in Vietnam.
BOBBY KENNEDY was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on 6 June 1968 during his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery near JFK. His murderer remains in prison.
JOMO KENYATTA ruled Kenya until his death from old age on 22 August 1978, when his deputy, Daniel arap Moi, replaced him. Moi ruled, dictatorially and corruptly, until 2002.
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV lived on a reduced pension of 400 roubles a month in Moscow until his death from a heart attack on 11 September 1971. He was not given a state funeral.
KIM IL SUNG died of a heart attack aged eighty-two on 8 July 1994. Despite many North Koreans being dependent on US food aid to avoid starvation, Kim was embalmed and immortalized in the Kumusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang. Visitors enter this on travelators. The monument is estimated to have cost anything between $100 million and $900 million. His young grandson Kim Eun rules North Korea.
MAJOR-GENERAL EDWARD LANSDALE died on 22 February 1987 at home in McLean, Virginia, where he lived with Pat Kelly, whom he took up with again after the death of his wife Helen. A memorial Mass was held in a university chapel in Manila.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on 5 April 1964. He is buried within his own memorial museum in Norfolk, Virginia, where his hundred or more military decorations are displayed.
IAIN MACLEOD died of a heart attack on 20 July 1970, a month after Prime Minister Edward Heath had appointed him chancellor of the exchequer.
HAROLD MACMILLAN, FIRST EARL OF STOCKTON, died aged ninety-two on 29 December 1986 at home at Birch Grove. His last words were ‘I think I will go to sleep now.’ Some claim greatness because of the housing he built.
MAO ZEDONG ruled China until his death aged eighty-two on 9 September 1976. He was succeeded by the reformer Deng Xiaoping. The ruling Communist Party still venerates Mao’s legacy, though not the 100 million deaths he caused, which are said to be the 30 per cent he ‘got wrong’.
ROBERT McNAMARA served as president of the World Bank, 1968–81, and died aged ninety-three on 6 July 2009, having very publicly repented of his former ways.
ROLANDO MASFERRER was killed by a car bomb in Miami in 1975.
GENERAL JACQUES MASSU retired from the French army in 1969 and lived at Conflans-sur-Loing until his death on 26 October 2002.
MOHAMMED MOSSADEQ died of cancer on 5 March 1967; Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, was deposed in 1979 and, after covert treatment for cancer in the US, died in Cairo in 1980, where he is buried in a mosque next to his brother-in-law King Faruq.
PRESIDENT GAMAL ABDUL NASSER OF EGYPT died suddenly of a heart attack in Cairo on 28 September 1970. A lifelong heavy smoker, he was aged fifty-two. An estimated five million people attended his funeral, including a weeping Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who fainted twice.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU died of a ruptured aorta on 27 May 1964, after years of hypertension and chronic overwork. India remains the world’s largest democracy. He built it.
KIM ‘KERMIT’ ROOSEVELT died on 8 June 2000 in a retirement home in Maryland. His memoirs were controversial within the CIA.
MOBUTU SESE SEKO ruled Zaire as a brutal kleptocracy until 1997, when he was driven into exile. He died later that year in Rabat, Morocco, and is buried in a Christian cemetery called Pax. The full name he awarded himself translates as ‘The all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’. ‘Thief’ would be shorter.
LUIS TARUC, the Huk leader, was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, but was pardoned in 1968 by President Ferdinand Marcos, whom he thereafter supported. He died of a heart attack aged ninety-one in 2005 in Quezon City.
FIELD MARSHAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER died of lung cancer and pneumonia in London on 25 October 1979 after a final pink gin had put him to sleep.
MOSHE TSHOMBE, the Katangan separatist, was exiled to Spain after Congolese independence, while Mobutu’s courts tried and sentenced him to death in absentia. In June 1967 his plane was hijacked to Algeria, where he was kept under arrest until his death ‘from heart failure’ in 1969. Who was responsible for the hijacking has never been clarified.