Jonathan Zimmerman: Obama's Secret: Good Luck

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.

Bold. Decisive. Courageous. Resolute. Such words have been used to describe President Obama since he ordered the fatal strike against Osama bin Laden. But I'd like to add one more adjective that nobody is using: Lucky.

There, I said it. But so did Obama during his interview on 60 Minutes last weekend. Remarkably, he admitted that his intelligence team was only 55 percent sure that bin Laden was even present at the compound in Pakistan where U.S. forces killed him. He also acknowledged that the mission could have gone awry in any number of ways, and that he would have been blamed for it - just as surely as he's being lauded now.

And that's precisely the problem. Americans like to think their leaders are in full control of the nation's fate, and hence fully responsible for whatever befalls it. But that leaves no room for luck or contingency, which operates in all human endeavor. And denying that makes all of us less human.

Take Jimmy Carter. In April 1980, Carter approved an equally daring mission to free 52 American hostages being held in Iran. Like the recent attack on bin Laden's compound, Carter's plan relied on helicopters. But the helicopters suffered mechanical failures at a refueling station in the Persian desert, en route to Tehran, and the commander of the mission recommended aborting it. Back in Washington, Carter reluctantly agreed.

And if the story had ended there, Carter might have won a second presidential term that fall. But one of the retreating helicopters collided with a plane, causing both to burst into flames. Eight Americans died; the rest flew away on another plane, leaving their helicopters - and their comrades' bodies - behind. That all but sealed the fate of Jimmy Carter, who lost to Ronald Reagan in the November election....