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(MENAFN- Asia Times) In 1943, Sidney Hook published The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility, a book that remains controversial but fascinating. Hook wanted to know just how vital a hero is to a nation's history. There is no simple answer.

In the US, we have had many heroes including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But Washington could have lost the Revolutionary War had he failed at Trenton and Monmouth, after he was defeated in New York and Harlem Heights. And Lincoln's generals could have seized Washington and put Lincoln in jail, splitting the US in half. Even short of a coup, Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election to General George McClellan, who would have cut a deal with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his former colleague, Robert E. Lee.

Great scientists can also be heroes but are not always well-treated. The cryptographic genius Alan Turing, whose work decoding Nazi encrypted messages helped win World War II, should have been honored. Instead, he was convicted of homosexuality in 1952 and sentenced to harsh chemical treatments to“cure” him of his“disease.” The brutality of the so-called cure aside, his self-esteem was crushed.

Alan Turing building the first computer called the Turing Machine.

He took cyanide and died in 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, testifying.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, another top scientist, assembled one of the greatest scientific and industrial teams at Los Alamos.

But he was persecuted by the Atomic Energy Commission on grounds that he had communist associations (which he did) which rendered him unreliable (never proven).

The fact that his work gave the US the atomic bomb, which saved tens of thousands of American lives, was disregarded. Oppenheimer lost his security clearances and was humiliated and his service to his country ended.

The truth is that Oppenheimer was an opponent of building a hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the Super. Pulling Oppenheimer's clearances got him out of the way.

Heroes with social and political problems are nothing new.

Werner von Braun, the brilliant German rocket scientist, ran the Nazi V-1 and V-2 operations at Peenemunde during World War II. As the Tom Lehrer song laments,“The widows and orphans in old London town owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.” Von Braun was a Nazi, and he ruthlessly employed slave labor at Peenemunde and elsewhere to build his weapons.

Von Braun at Peenemunde.

He was recruited as part of the notorious Paperclip program to the United States and became the key Army rocket scientist at the US Army Redstone Arsenal. Later he headed NASA's Saturn V rocket development. He thus was a hero for the Nazis and a hero for the Americans.

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