which gives you a Karl Marx number of 8, since he and Lenin had Vera Zasulich as a mutual acquaintance. Not sure if Frederick Engels corresponded with Zasulich as well, so you’ve got Engels at a firm 9 and a possible 8.
Damn, people are stealing my thunder. So much for my Hitler connection being even remotely thread-winning… 
Napoleon Bonaparte in 5 or maybe 4. My ex’s great grandfather taught Napoleon III (the Napoleon’s nephew) to ride. The uncertaintly comes because I’m not quite sure how to work out the family connection.
I’ve met George Martin’s son, which gets me to the Beatles and a lot of music people in 2
My best, maybe even a thread winner … Ghandi in 2. My next door neighbour when I was a kid was a nanny working in the village where he stayed on his visit to England. One day she was out with her charge in its pram when she met him walking and he stopped to look at the baby and chatted to her.
Another one I forgot:
2
Paul McCartney
which makes a whole lot of people 3.
You want politicians, I got politicians.
You cover the Hill and the White House in the 90s and just the interviews alone will get you to most of the power bases in the world.
So I am 2 degree, through this stuff, to Clinton, Reagan, GHWB, and GWB.
I am also directly connected to Carter but NOT through covering politics but through a bird watching magazine I worked at that he wrote an article for. Nice guy on the phone.
Ford I’m 2 degrees from as my father sat on a corporate board with him for a few years. Therefore I’m connected at level 3 with Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman.
It goes back forever.
I’m also at level two with Adlai Stevenson as he’s my cousin and my grandmother spent quite a bit of time with him as a child. That opens up a whole new chain.
But my favorite is this one.
My Great Grandmother Stevenson, of Illinois, when she was in her early 80s, married a man born in 1898 (this would be in he 80s, remember). In speaking with him at a get together I learned that HIS grandfather knew Robert E. Lee after the war in Virginia. So I am 3 separations from Robert E. Lee and therefore 4, at most, from all of those historical players in the Civil War.
AND, through Lee’s father, only six from George Washington and a great chunk of the founding fathers.
Six degrees is, let’s face it, a LOT.
hm, i would have to spend some quality time thinking about it, but off my head, my father supplied money in the 50s to Dr Chang to be used as bribes to get people out of communist China, so which ever political prisoners got snuck out by those monies. He had met Patton on several occasions, and a number of other assorted general staffers including MacArthur. Through his political associations I have actually met most republican presidential candidates wandering through NY between 1970 and 1990.
I have had lunch and dinner with Dr Paul Berg, hung out with Dr Ruth Westheimer, Marlin Perkins of Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom, John Glenn, through assorted Boypower functions I was arranging for my dad, entertainment committee at the university and a series of scientific seminars my boss of the time was responsible for at Rochester Institute of Technology.
I grew up with a man who knew a man who worked for George Washington as a page when he was a small boy.
Edited to ad that my room mates mother is the granddaughter of Charles Mcnary - senator from Oregon and vice presidential running partner of Wilkie.
Hitler is a 4 on my list.
Come to think of it, I’m three degrees removed from Chiang Kai-shek in a couple of different ways, and from there four degrees from Mao Zedong. I’m probably three degrees removed from Emperor Hirohito (assuming that former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui (2 degrees) had an audience with the emperor, which he probably did).
I’ve met Prince Philip (he didn’t insult me - I was gutted) so I’m two steps away from a very large number of people.
I’ve met Princess Anne a couple of times, and know an Earl (not best buddies or anything 
) who was a page to the Queen when he was a lad, so I’m a couple of steps away from the same very large number of people. A Stalin number of 4?
You can’t just leave this unexplained!
I attended Walter Mondale’s High School graduation as a toddler.
My daughter was an employee of Jesse Ventura’s campaign manager and was asked to cook for him in the Governor’s mansion. (She declined.)
My uncle, William Homer Genaust, was the Marine photographer who shot the second flag raising on Iwo Jima. But I didn’t get to talk to him as he died there.
A cousin was married to the daughter of the President of the World Health Organization in the Seventies so I’ve got a five with the shoe lady of the Phillipines, Imelda Marcos!
I have met (>5 minutes in a small room) with the following people:
Ronald Reagan
George Schultz
Edward Teller
Jim Stockdale
Carl Albert (Speaker of the House during LBJ)
So those get me to a LOT of people easily.
My grandfather served on Macarthur’s staff, and played bridge with the royal family of Japan during the post wars years. That gets me Hirohito two steps away.
My great uncle worked in the White House, and his retirement plaque is signed by Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. He started under JFK and continued on through Reagan. He also worked with General Bradley, and most of the other WWII American Generals in his Army days.
A professor of mine was Israeli intelligence, and would tell stories of Golda Meir at the pub.
I just shuffled past Ho Chi Minh’s lifeless body last month. Do corpses count? If so, that’s a 1.
I have an Edison number of two - he spanked my grandfather (as a young boy, my gf chased an errant ball into Edison’s yard, and Edison spanked him for it).
If the implication is that Queen Elizabeth met Adolf Hitler, then I’m 3 from Adolph via two independent pathways. Maybe that makes my Hitler number the square-root of 3!
Now, in the spirit of overcoming ignorance, when did Queen Elizabeth meet Hitler, or am I frightfully confused here?
What’s to explain? My mother went to prison in FL for money-landering. While there, she met Escobar’s mother-in-law (he was married to a Miss Colombia or something like that). She told my mother that Escobar became insanely paranoid before he was killed.
My mother also met a little old lady in there who told her “My husband always told me he was going to leave me and go home to his mother. So one day, I sent him to her!” It turned out she’d chopped her husband up with an axe and mailed him to his mother. :eek:
A nurse who’d been ‘mercy-killing’ some of her patients was also in there with her, but Mama didn’t know her well and I have no idea if that nurse was particularly famous or not.
My neurologist was previously neurologist to the Saudi royal family, so that’s going to put me two steps from them and three steps from a whole passel of royalty and political figures. He’s got pictures in his office of him in his younger days with Saudi princes, one with him and Ronald Reagan, one with him and Margaret Thatcher, etc. The most confusing part is exactly who he pissed off to go from “diagnosing Saudi royal ailments” to “holding court in a basement office in suburbian Buffalo.”
Just about everybody at Jesus College, Oxford has a story about Harold Wilson, of course, so I’m three steps from everyone in British politics, and two from some others like the new PM David Cameron (through his former supervisor, Vernon Bogdanor, who I met twice or so). Then there’s everybody my college advisor Niall Ferguson knows, including GW Bush, that I’m two steps away from. This whole “steps from” gets fairly massive in a hurry.
Oh it gets better.
My grandmother’s boss in the 1960’s and 1970’s was very well connected. He was also a nice man and bought me liquorice and Crackerjack, and on at least one occasion brought me across the street to get an ice cream. So I know him directly, right? We will call him Mr T, cause that’s his initial.
He was well aquainted with C.D. Howe, “Minister of Everything” during WWII and the cabinets of Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King. Hving one degree of separation from ole CD gives me connections, among others to Julia Ward Howe and the suffragist /abolition movement. But wikipedia doesn’t proclaim how CD was connected to JW Howe, so I will for the moment skip that one. Lets follow WLM King for the moment.
Mona Lisa Simpson–Mr T, business Man–CD Howe–William Lyon MacKenzie King. I count that as a 3 degree separation from WLMacKenzie King, wartime PM of Canada.
That gives me a Winston Churchill of 4.
WLM King also is the grandson of William Lyon MacKenzie. William Lyon MacKenzie, activitist, journalist, politician in Upper Canada, first mayor of Toronto, is also a 4. From there I am within a 5 or 6 of every Prime Minster of Upper Canada, Canada West, and every father of Confederation. I am thru the MacKenzie connection 4 degrees from Sir John A MacDonald.
But it gets goes deeper. William Lyon MacKenzie met, among others, President Andrew Jackson Having a 5 degree separation from Old Hickory gives me I believe a 6 to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and I believe to George Washington. If not a 6, a 7.
I figure that the connection to CD Howe puts me within 6 of almost every US president and Canadian Prime Minister and British Prime Minster in the past 240 years.
My math might be out by a degree here or there. But it boggles the mind.
Well, I can take two degrees off of you, then, because I knew one of WLMK’s cabinet ministers directly!
Which just goes to show the ridiculousness of it all. But it’s still fun!