British Prime Minister Theresa May will soon be out of office. Having waged a brave struggle on Brexit, having gone on doggedly with her job despite the brickbats coming her way, she will go after three years in office as her country's leader.
There is deep sadness which sometimes darkens the departures from the limelight of men and women who have enjoyed power. Part of it is not. And in that latter category comes Gordon Brown, whose farewell to power before 10 Downing Street was fundamentally the end of good, strong leadership.
There is brilliance in the man, as demonstrated so tellingly by his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is a scholar in him, forever ready with intellectual arguments that will put other, lesser minds to flight. He was not prepared to go. And yet the rules of democratic politics said he must.
Sad was the day Richard Nixon gave up the American presidency in August 1974. But, yes, he deserved to go. With all that opprobrium called Watergate swirling around him and around the country, with the danger that unless he quit it would be the constitution that would be violated, with the very real possibility of impeachment hanging over him, Nixon resigned.
He was the first president in his country's history to do so. Nixon's departure remains one of the saddest moments in modern times, considering especially the huge ambition that had always driven him towards his goals.
Indelible sadness was to come over France when Charles de Gaulle, in keeping with his promise to resign the presidency should voters reject his constitutional reforms proposals, walked away into the twilight. There are a million reasons why the French must be grateful to him; and one of them is the resolute leadership he exercised in the years between 1958 and 1969.
De Gaulle went off, after the referendum defeat in 1969, to his village of Colombey les deux Eglises. A year later he was dead. Speaking of sad farewells, Pakistan's Ayub Khan, one of the most steely of strongmen thrown up by faltering democracies and military conspiracies, governed his country with an iron fist for a decade before a nationwide popular movement against his dictatorship forced his resignation in March 1969.
He was not seen in public after that, though he did make an appearance before the Hamoodur Rahman Commission appointed by his one-time foreign minister (and, at the time, president) Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972 to inquire into the causes of Pakistan's defeat in Bangladesh's War of Liberation the preceding year.
An instance of sadness defining a powerful individual came in Zambia when the country's founding father Kenneth Kaunda was defeated in presidential elections by an idealistic Frederick Chiluba. In a world which reveres those who lead nations to freedom, Zambians had done the unthinkable in their eagerness to show the world how powerfully democracy mattered to them.
And yet, within a few years, Chiluba was presiding over a venal, corrupt government that left Zambians bewildered. Kaunda was set upon by the new political elite, constantly harassed and regularly humiliated. He was not to return to centre stage again.
In October 1964, palace intrigue hatched by Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, Alexei Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov led to Nikita Khrushchev's unceremonious ouster from office. Once a formidable global leader, Khrushchev was soon to be forgotten by his country, by the world.
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