Kaminer, who is the author of books on women's equality and a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, named Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liber- ties Union, as her choice for person of the century.

"He fought to make civil liberties for most Americans a fact of life and not just an ideal," Kaminer said.

After the discussion Kaminer said she did not name a woman precisely because she thought people expected her, as the only female panelist, to name a woman.

"It's also a sad fact of history that when we think of the great names, they tend to be men," she said. If she had chosen a woman of the century, Kaminer said, she might have selected Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Leyner, for all his comedic flair, chose the only explicitly evil person of the evening: Adolf Hitler.

"I'm choosing Hitler as my millennium figure because in a personal sense...as an impresario of evil, he cut my daughter's century from her millennium by destroying the Polish Jews, the central European Jews," Leyner said. "This individual created a temporal schism for a lot of people. There's no returning to what was destroyed."

Leyner also picked a figure of the century--the fictional Joseph K. from Franz Katka's The Trial who is accused of a crime he cannot comprehend.

Patterson, the author of seven books on racism and poverty, hearkened the farthest back in time for his choice of Martin Luther, the German who in the early sixteenth century posted his 95 theses attacking abuses in the Catholic Church and launched the Protestant Reformation, as his person of the millennium.

"I say this not as someone who is necessarily an actively religious person,...but because I think Luther's influence, both directly and indirectly, had a more transforming effect on Western civilization than anyone else that I can think of," Patterson said.

After each person made a presentation, the panelists engaged in good-natured argument over their choices.

Galbraith observed that the thrust of historical circumstance is often more important than the actions of any one person.

Fifty years ago, Galbraith said, he spent the summer interrogating the high ranking Nazis None of them were particularly impressive.

"Our collective judgment on these people who had been brought to the front by the force of history was that on the whole, they were a bunch of drunken thugs," he said.

The evening's discussion proved stimulating enough that moderator Kovach proposed a marketing idea even Galbraith could appreciate:

"It may be the next great parlor game if we can figure out a way to package it," he said.

And Leyner elicited laughter when he raised the antithesis of the night's question.

"I first of all came up with the most unimportant person of the century," he said. "There may be some debate about this--I think not. I chose Sonny Bono."

"I came to, I think, a stunning realization," Leyner continued after the crowd quieted. "Only in the late twentieth century have unimportant people become so important.