The front or theback?

I´ve often wondered, when teaching my history, why certain characters get so much attention and are made to look as if they really mattered.
Take Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein. Why, if they were such mad men, did they get to where they got?
I mean, there are loads of mad people around but they do not murder thousands of people and neither did those three. Most dilusional persons are either locked up or on medication.
So certainly a mad person with big dreams of world domination and so on can be found in many places. The problem islooming if they can build up a following.  Ghaddafi does not seem like a good guy but if his ministers walk away, and his army refused to should the rebels, he'd be rather badly off wouldn't he? That is what happened to Gorbatjov and he always appeared to be a nice guy!
We can take any good or bad leader. Roosevelt, Christ, Cesar, Louis XIV, Catherine the Great, Robin Hood. None of them would have mattered if not for the people behind them. The ones that spread the cause, the ones that gain power by using their names and so on. I mean Louis XIV allegedly said something like I am the state, (only in French obviously - „L'État, c'est moi“), - and then he probably did not...  The person behind Louis's power was probably Cardinal Richelieu.
The people responsiible for Christianity are the ones who spread the word, wrote the books, formed the congregations. The Bible talks of many phrophets and there were many more.
I think that the case is demonstrated.
I just hope Obama's men got the guy that mattered. For all  our sakes.. Let's remember that one thing great religions have in common is to remember martyrs. Even if some of them had very strange ideas and borderline interpretations of those religions!