



Saddam Hussein's ignominious capture in a "spider-hole" adds another page to the lengthy historical album of fallen tyrants and freebooters who, having strutted their hour on the world stage, topple off its edge at last.

Some land on spikes, others on eiderdown.

For every despot who ends up murdered, butchered, a suicide, in flames or on the gallows, there are others who retire to comfortable villas in exile, to live off their loot and write their memoirs.

And, of course, some never fall at all, but play out their full string.

Mao Tse-tung, whose purges and political campaigns may have taken the lives of nearly 30 million Chinese, died peacefully in bed in 1976, and his wrinkled corpse, pickled by Vietnamese embalmers, is still on display under glass in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Japan's emperor Hirohito, who was almost certainly complicit in his army's expansion into China in the 1930s and whose name was a battle cry for his troops throughout World War II, was allowed to keep his throne and died peacefully, mourned by millions of Japanese, in 1989. His son, Akihito, is emperor of Japan today.

Mystery surrounds the death of Joseph Stalin, who departed this life 50 years ago last March 5.

Stalin, who ruled over the Soviet Union for 29 years, sent more than 20 million of his own people to their deaths. The British Broadcasting Corp. aired a documentary in February that strongly, though circumstantially, suggested that Stalin did not die of a brain hemorrhage but was poisoned by KGB chief Lavrenti Beria, who feared the dictator was about to launch World War III.

Spanish despot Francisco Franco -- who won a bloody civil war with aid from Nazi Germany and whose ruthless bombing of civilians at Guernica was immortalized by Pablo Picasso in a gigantic, stark painting -- died unrepentant, unpunished, on Nov. 20, 1975, and was buried with full state honors at Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caidos.


The 20th century's two most notorious dictators, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, died wretchedly in the closing days of World War II -- Hitler by his own hand, Mussolini by the hand of an Italian partisan later identified as Walter Audisio.

In his 1970 book, The Face of the Third Reich, historian Joachim Fest vividly describes Hitler's last hours:

"Here, protected by 26 feet of concrete as much from reality as from enemy bombs, to the accompaniment of attacks of rage, senseless orders to attack and convulsive weeping, he once more constructed his world of delusions, which included miracle weapons, ultimate victory, and great buildings to go up after the war. His body ruined by drugs, at the mercy of the storms of his temperament, and tortured by distrust, he looked by all accounts like a figure from the kingdom of the shades."

On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, Hitler retired to his private rooms with his mistress, Eva Braun. Fest continues:

"A single shot rang out. The commander of the SS guard, Rattenhuber, who had been waiting with a few others in the corridor, went in and found Hitler lying on the sofa, which was soaked in blood. Beside him lay Eva Braun, an unused revolver in her lap; she had taken poison.

"Rattenhuber had the two bodies taken into the garden, and petrol poured over them, then sent for the mourners; Goebbels, Bormann, General Burgdorf, Hitler's valet Linge, and a few others. A burst of Russian firing drove them back into the bunker and one of those present threw a burning rag on the bodies. As the flames shot up they all stood to attention with hands raised in the Nazi salute. A member of the guard who passed the spot half an hour after the ceremony couldn't recognize Hitler because he was already pretty burnt."

But not entirely combusted. Like many amateurs, the Nazi attendants underestimated the time and fuel required to consume human remains. Modern crematories usually require several hours to process remains in retorts where gas flames burn at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit and grinders pulverize the calcined bones.

So it was that in 2000 a fragment of Hitler's skull, perforated by a bullet hole, went on display in Moscow. Fragments of the Fuhrer's jaw were also said to be in the possession of the Russians, who, by some accounts, happened on the semi-burned remains of the German leader and finished the job, tipping the ashes into a sewer while saving a few fragments as souvenirs.


The body of Benito Mussolini, shot near Lake Como with his mistress, Clara Petacci, in 1945, was strung up with hers at a garage on the outskirts of Milan. Film footage was shot of mobs attacking the corpses, kicking them, spitting on them and firing bullets into them, and postcards were later made and sold of the scene.

Mussolini's remains were later buried at Musocco, a large cemetery north of Milan. But the story doesn't end here. His body was exhumed and kidnapped by Fascist sympathizers in 1946 and recovered 16 weeks later in a small trunk at the famous Certosa di Pavia. He was placed in custodial storage for 11 years, then finally reburied at his birthplace, Predappio, in 1957, where the burial site is still an object of veneration and controversy. In March 1966, the United States returned a small portion of his brain, which had apparently been removed for study, to his widow, Rachele. Records of the brain examination are on file at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

But other dictators have suffered no such humiliation. Ugandan strongman Idi Amin died in exile in Saudi Arabia in August. His successor, Milton Obote, lives in exile in Zambia. Ousted Haitian president "Baby Doc" Duvalier is alive and living in France. Also alive are Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam (living in Zimbabwe); Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (living in Great Britain); Somali warlord Hussein Farrah Aidid (living in Ethiopia); Chadian dictator Hissene Habre (living in Senegal); Sierra Leone dictator Valentine Strasser (living in Sierra Leone); and Liberian dictator Charles Taylor (living in Nigeria).

One of Africa's most lurid dictators, the "cannibal emperor" Jean-Bedel Bokassa, was ousted, exiled, allowed to return to the Central African Republic he ruled, imprisoned, released and finally died quietly in 1996. He was rumored to have slain and eaten children while in power.


The pattern and paradigm of the fate of the fallen potentate are the careers of numerous Roman emperors, men who ruled much of the known world yet who often perished miserably and painfully.

The second to wear the imperial purple, Tiberius, was allegedly suffocated with pillows in bed at the urging of his presumptive heir, Caligula. Caligula in turn was assassinated by his own guards in a tunnel atop the Palatine hill in Rome, which can still be seen today. His successor, Claudius of I, Claudius fame, was said to have been poisoned with mushrooms. Next came Nero, who, after having his own mother killed, was killed by a slave at his own request -- he didn't have the courage to use the dagger himself -- while fleeing Rome. His last words were Qualis artifex pereo, "What an artist is dying!" Nero's three successors were all assassinated within the space of a single year, so that 69 A.D. became known as The Year of the Four Emperors.

Caracalla's death was the most ignoble, perhaps: He was killed while moving his bowels beside the road, or, as historian Edward Gibbon primly puts it:

"Having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance and Martialis approaching his person under a pretence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger. . . . Such was the end of a monster whose life disgraced human nature, and whose reign accused the patience of the Romans."


The last days of a tyrant are presciently described by Plato in the ninth book of his Republic, as a kind of living death. The description rings as true for Hitler as it does for Hussein, even after 2,400 years.

"He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, even as the State which he resembles. . . . He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself; he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men . . . .

"His soul is dainty and greedy, and yet alone, of all men in the city, he is never allowed to go on a journey, or to see the things which other freemen desire to see, but he lives in his hole, like a woman hidden in the house, and is jealous of any other citizen who goes into foreign parts and sees anything of interest. . . . .

"He grows worse from having power; he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as himself."

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