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                                                                              ╚January 4, 1954

Man of the Year:Konrad Adenauer

"We Belong to the West"



    On a mild morning last April, a band of dignitaries gathered
before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National
Cemetery. In the place of honor stood a tall old man whose somber
mask of a face looked stiffly ahead. Before him, stretching to
the hilltop, was an array of granite pillars, blocks and crosses --
the graves of Americans who had died in two wars with Germany.
Behind him fluttered the black, red and gold flag of the Federal
Republic of Germany.

    The U.S. Army band sounded The Star-Spangled Banner. Then it
broke into the measured strains of Deutschland Uber Alles.
"This," murmured the old man, "is a turning point in history."

    More dramatically than headline or speech or essay, the
music symbolized an amazing story. In 1953, only eight years
after the shame, horror and impotence of defeat in mankind's
bloodiest war, Germany came back. It was a world power once more.
More than any other, the person who brought this about was the
stolid old man who stood in Arlington, visibly moved by the
strains of his national anthem echoing among the tombstones. He
was Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the West German Republic,
apostle of United Europe, 1953's Man of the Year.

    Konrad Adenauer had already guided the hated land of the Hun
and the Nazi back to moral respectability and had earned himself
a seat in the highest councils of the Western powers. Though she
still lacked a formal peace treaty, and the Iron Curtain fenced
her off from half her land and from 18 million countrymen, Konrad
Adenauer's West Germany last year emerged as the strongest
country on the Continent save Soviet Russia.

    Her conquerors wooed her for her favors. Neighbors who had
helped defeat her so short a time ago talked fearfully once more
of her new strength and her even greater potential. Her economy
glowed with health. Her products cascaded into the world's
markets. In September came an election which the whole world
nervously watched, to see whether the oil of democracy could mix
with the vinegar of German authoritarianism. The West German
voters swept all their Communists and Nazis out of national
office and overwhelmingly put their faith in the dedicated, firm-
handed democrat, Konrad Adenauer. No longer the passive object of
other forces, Germany in 1953 was again one of the formidable
forces of history and Konrad Adenauer one of history's makers.

    "This year," said the Man of the Year, "is the year in which
the re-emergence of Germany . . . changed the world picture."

    Exhilaration in the Valleys. It was a year to alter the
riverbanks of history. A cease-fire without victory quieted
Korea, but it was still the quiet of the dormant volcano.
Mankind's greatest tyrant died; his death touched off a lupine
scuffle for succession in the Kremlin and opened a new and
unpredictable era for the tyranny Joseph Stalin fixed on half the
globe. Radioactive dust particles borne east in a cloud from
Siberia told the outside world that Russia, too, had plumbed the
secret of the thermonuclear bomb and could now visit
instantaneous death on the obscurest cranny of civilization. Yet
somehow, in the year in which he learned that a mere handful of
chemicals could blast his world to smithereens, the average man
of the free world seemed to conclude that the peril of general
war had lessened.

    It was also a year in which a white man and a brown man,
held together by a light nylon rope, climbed the highest
mountain. In this feat of the New Zealand beekeeper, Edmund
Hillary, and the sinewy Sherpa tribesman, Tenzing, millions down
in the mundane valleys felt a vicarious exhilaration --
the reminder that by valor and dedication man may surmount his
Everests.

    In the streets of East Berlin, a camera shutter caught for
posterity the proof that man of 1953, on city streets and against
the odds, would risk everything for freedom: two brave youths
fought off Soviet army tanks with stones. It was June 17 -- the
day East Germans rose up against their Communist oppressors
across their barbed-wire land, the day that showed that the Red
monolith might some day crack.

    In the U.S., the Big Change came -- after 20 years. The
Democrats packed out and the Republicans moved in. Dwight
Eisenhower rode down Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House
on a surge of immense popularity and high hopes. His popularity
continued high throughout 1953, but he did not choose to invoke
it openly, and it remained in reserve, like troops uncommitted to
battle. His major achievement (whose effects will be measured in
1954) was in the field he knew best: a vast readjustment of the
U.S. military to the age of the atom. In practical politics, a
field he knew less about and felt a soldier's distaste for, he
had yet to make his mark. He had yet to harness the divergent
wills and pressures within the Republican Party, and command
them, but the signs at 1953's end were that he was prepared. His
task was made more difficult, perhaps postponed, by the death in
July of Ohio's Robert A. Taft, the Republicans' great Senate
leader and selfless counselor of the man who had defeated him for
the presidential nomination.

    Not for what he accomplished, but for the noise he made,
Senator Joe McCarthy was the most discussed man of 1953. His name
became an epithet to millions, a cheer to countless others. In
1953, McCarthy was the most discussed man of 1953. His name
became an epithet to millions, a cheer to countless others. In
1953, McCarthyism crossed the twelve-mile limit and became an
international word, widely understood around the world to mean a
cynical exploitation of genuine fears, a studied contempt for
fair play, a cunning talent for concealing failures by loudly
baying after new victims. Too many abroad, urged on by a U.S.
press that would leave no word of McCarthy unrecorded -- no
matter how outlandish -- took him as their image of the American
statesman and over-emphasized his influence.

    Rollin' Along. The republic, though, was in condition to
survive McCarthy and McCarthyism. Though business pulses slowed a
bit here & there, never had production been so high or
prosperity so great. The American of 1953 was still living on top
of the world, and, as the song says, just rollin' along. In this
age of managers and machines, of complexities and coordinators,
this was the achievement of many, not one.

    It was also the 50th anniversary of man's first powered
flight, and it was celebrated by two Americans, first Scott
Crossfield, flying at 1,327 m.p.h., then the Air Force's Major
"Chuck" Yeager, ripping through the substratosphere at more than
1,600 m.p.h., 2 1/2 times the speed of sound. In sport, Casey
Stengel of the New York Yankees became baseball's first manager
to win five consecutive World Series championships. Native
Dancer, a big grey horse with the legs of a champion and the
inbred ham of a Barrymore, teamed with TV to make horse-racing
fans out of millions who did not know a fetlock from a padlock.
The year brought reminders of previous champions: Jim Jeffries
died; so did Bill Tilden and Jim Thorpe. Handy Earl Sande, 54,
and hard up for eating money, cinched on a saddle and tried for a
comeback (but booted home only one winner). And in the biggest
sweep since Bobby Jones's "grand slam" in 1930, Ben Hogan wrapped
up the three big titles of golf, to become sport's Man of the
Year. It was also the year of 3-D, Cinema-Scope, Cinerama, big
screen, stereophonic sound and other technical tricks designed
to make Marilyn Monroe look 64 feet long (couchant) and intended
to lure back, by sheer gigantism, the public that had been lost
to 17-inch TV screens. This too was sometimes called progress.

    The year's obituary list, not even counting Joe Stalin and
Bob Taft, was forbiddingly distinguished: Eugene O'Neill, the
greatest playwright the U.S. had produced; Welshman Dylan Thomas,
the best young poet in the English language; Sergei Prokofiev,
Russia's great composer; General Jonathan Wainwright, hero of
Bataan; Mayor Ernst Reuter, hero of the cold-war battle of
Berlin; Saudi Arabia's fabulous King Ibn Saud; Britain's
redoubtable Queen Mary.

    Empire Troubles. Asia, with its shortfused peace in Korea,
its seemingly unwinnable war in Indo-China, and its tendency to
fear a dying colonialism more than an expansive Communism,
remained the hot battlefield of the cold war. Appropriately, it
had not one Man of the Year but three -- men diverse in almost
every respect: Jawaharlal Nehru, the exasperating high priest of
neutralism; Ramon Magsaysay, the young and dynamic, U.S.-loving
man of action who became President of the Philippines; wrinkled
old Syngman Rhee of Korea, the angry ally of the West. Syngman
Rhee's intractability towards his allies, and his ruthless
quelling of domestic rivals, led many to dismiss his great claim
to distinction: without his half-century fight for liberty and
his stouthearted hatred of Communism, there would have been no
South Korea to save.

    The British Commonwealth crowned its Queen in elegance that
momentarily revived a great past and lifted spirits. But the vast
realm over which she reigns trembled again with the ague of
disintegration -- the Sudan broke away, all colonial Africa
throbbed with the presence or possibility of violence and shouts
for independence. The Queen was Britain's Woman of the Year;
Britain's Man was clearly its great, aging political chieftain,
newly knighted Sir Winston Churchill.

    The new Red Empire quavered uncertainly at the change of
rulers. The cerebral hemorrhage that killed Stalin -- if that is
what did it -- assuredly left behind the man of some future year.
Perhaps he was Georgy Malenkov, the suety, waxen-faced Great
Russian who donned the dictator's mantle. But perhaps it was
another, Nikita Khrushchev, Marshal Zhukov, or some figure still
invisible to the eye of the outside world. One it was not:
Laverenty Berie, b. 1899, d. 1953 at the hands of the
executioner.

    Communism's Men of 1953 were not its leaders, but its
subjects. At home the Kremlin was harassed by the restlessness of
the Soviet masses and a serious crisis in agriculture. Abroad, it
suffered sharp setbacks -- an armistice that acknowledged its
failure in Korea, the uprisings in East Germany, a rash of
troubles in the other East European satellites, the stunning
psychological defeat in the explanation tents of Panmunjom.

    Creatures of Destiny. It was a year in which the so-called
big powers, Eastern and Western alike, seemed less the shapers of
destiny than its creatures. The change in the hands which
governed the two greatest powers brought a strange sense of
indecisiveness to world affairs. The strain of the cold war
brought hesitations and serious arguments to the Western
Alliance. The dawning of the thermonuclear age, with its talk of
megaton bombs (equal to 1,000,000 tons of TNT), cast great and
sudden doubt on the validity of the thinking and the plans of
statesmen and diplomats and soldiers. Both sides were caught in
a sort of pause, to re-examine and to retool. It was in this
atmosphere of confusion, holding back and reassessment that the
unhesitant, unconfused, unswerving re-emergence of West Germany
made its mark on 1953.

    Energy, Ambition, Work. Like so many turning points, it was
a long time in the reaching, but it was a shorter time than even
the most sanguine German had a right to expect when he crawled
from the smoking rubble one day in 1945 to learn that the Nazi
Reich was no more. And, as with most great, historic turns, it
was made possible by countless events. There was the decay of the
wartime Alliance, Russia's shortsighted intransigence in the
German occupation. There was the West's decision to form one
unified country of West Germany without waiting for a peace
treaty. There was the Berlin blockade, which jolted the West into
the urgency of rearmament; the Korean war, which shocked it into
the decision that it needed German troops as well. There was some
$3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Germany. There was the privilege of
concentrating on building industries and markets while West
Germany's conquerors bent to the ordeal of arming themselves.
There were the uprisings in East Germany. Above all, there was
the happy combination of energy, ambition, and respect for work
which distinguishes the German.

    In this mixture of happenstance, deliberate policy,
improvised decisions and national persistence can be found the
explanation for the speed of West Germany's comeback. But the
ideas and leadership of Konrad Adenauer explain, more than
anything else, the character of the comeback.

    When the Western Allies stumbled upon him right after V-E
Day, Konrad Adenauer was just an old man in a high, starched
collar, stern and vigorous and proud, already well into the
twilight of his life. In his three-score-and-ten, his homeland
had soared and sunk through two great historical phases and
entered a third. Two of these phases Konrad Adenauer had lived
out in a routine of efficient ordinariness and relative
obscurity. He was born (Jan 5, 1876) in the age of Bismarck; he
was already 42 when the Kaiser fell. Through the sad days of the
Weimar Republic and the ugly early days of Naziism he was
respected as veteran mayor of Cologne and a wily politician,
until he was forced out of office by the Nazis, for whom he
showed nothing but flinty scorn. Had he died at 70, he would not
have rated a paragraph in most U.S. newspapers.

    He lived not only to see a third phase of German history,
but to mold it.

    He Will Have It. "I remember a meeting of the Cologne
municipal council in 1918," Adenauer wrote recently. "As mayor, I
wanted to see the old fortifications circling the city replaced
not by factories or houses crowded together, but by a refreshing
green girdle of parks. No one on the council agreed. I began to
feel that I would have to capitulate. Then . . . I went all the
way in marshaling my data . . . After I had presented the facts
at several meetings, all the councilmen but one were convinced.
Finally, that one rose and said: 'Let him have his way -- he will
have it anyhow!'"

    Germans, Western occupiers and Russian antagonists have all
since learned to know how that lone Cologne holdout felt. To the
occupiers, Adenauer has proved a rugged bargainer -- tireless,
insistent, all but immovable. "We are not an African tribe," he
snapped one day, "but a Central European nation proud of its
country." On another occasion: "It was the German army and not
the German people that capitulated, and this the world had better
remember." One day in 1949, when Adenauer visited U.S. High
Commissioner John J. McCloy, the two men fell into a Gaston &
Alphonse routine at the door. "After you, Chancellor," said
McCloy, "I'm at home here." A chill smile flickered on Adenauer's
flat, leathery face. "No, no," said he, "after you, Mr. McCloy."

    To Germans he also talked sternly. When they complained of
occupation pressures, or of the slowness of Allied decontrol, he
stopped them with one indignant question: "Who do you think won
the war?" He preached: "We must part with concepts of the past.
When you fall from the heights as we Germans have, you realize
it is necessary to break with what has been. We cannot live
fruitfully with lost illusions. I do not believe in fairy tales."

    Christians Hold Together. What Adenauer does believe is the
key to the strategy he has followed to reconstruct Germany and to
promote the construction of Europe. He believes that:

    -- A Christian civilization must hold together politically
or perish before Communism.

    -- West Germany would be swallowed up as a Red satellite if
it tried to remain neutral and play Russia against the West.

    -- West Germany must some day be reunited with the German
land east of the Iron Curtain, but that day will come only when
the Western world stands strong enough to force -- without war --
a Soviet withdrawal from Central Europe. He refuses to recognize
the Oder-Neisse frontier, but is ready to promise not to cross it
with troops.

    -- West Germany must earn the West's trust and confidence by
demonstrating that its lesson has been learned in the two
disastrous German adventures of the 20th century.

    -- Germany still cannot be trusted to rearm by itself. "It
is no secret," said close associate, "that he considers Prussians
savage and dangerous."

    -- Nevertheless, the rearmament of Germany is inevitable; if
it is not armed as a part of a supranational army, with controls
on its size and use, then it will be armed with a new national
Wehrmacht.

    -- Far greater than the need for German troops is Europe's
need to unite -- politically, militarily and psychologically --
those historic antagonists in war, Germany and France.

    "I deem it false . . . to speak of German rearmament,"
Adenauer said not long ago. "This is an expression which has no
place in those new forms toward which we are striving. We want
nothing of the old. We do not want to restore a national army."

    By "those new forms," Adenauer means the European Defense
Community. The idea came, providentially, from France. Germans
could not propose it without risking the impression that it was
simply a cunning maneuver to unlock the occupation shackles and
revive the Wehrmacht. But when the enemy from across the Rhine
proposed it in 1950, Konrad Adenauer could more easily champion
it.

    The Dream Fades. The U.S. made EDC the core of its European
policy. Britain supported it. Italy could hardly wait to approve
it. The Benelux countries got behind it.

    But by 1953, the clear dream had clouded over. The sharp-
beaked vagaries of politics tore at the men who did most to shape
and promote the EDC idea. First, down went Good European Robert
Schuman, France's longtime Foreign Minister. He was thrown aside
because France, tortured by division and illusion, turned in
confusion and fear from its own brain child. Next went Good
European Alcide de Gasperi, and Italy's ratification became
questionable. The death of Stalin, and Churchill's insistence on
sounding out the dictator's successor, gave the French more
opportunity to haggle and hesitate. The EDC idea was close to
dying.

    Then came West Germany's time to decide. EDC meant several
unpalatable things to Germans. Two disasters in half a century
had been enough; thousands wanted never to bear arms again. On
the other side, Nationalists balked at joining hands with the
French, and oldtime professional soldiers seethed at the
"disgrace" of banning for good the Wehrmacht and General Staff.
Joining in with the West, they argued, might turn the East-West
German boundary into a 38th parallel and Germany into another
Korea. It might seal off forever the Communist-held lands to the
East. Would it not be smarter, more comfortable, less dangerous,
to stay uncommitted and play off the fears of both sides?

    Across West Germany, tireless, graven-faced Konrad Adenauer
campaigned bluntly on the issue of United Europe.  His main
opponents, the socialists, bluntly campaigned against it. Germans
had a clear-cut choice. "Our country," said Adenauer, "is the
point of tension between two world blocs . . . Long ago I made a
great decision: we belong to the West and not to the East . . .
Isolation is an idea created by fools. It would mean that the
U.S. would withdraw its troops from Europe. Ladies and gentlemen,
the moment that happens, Germany will become a satellite."

    On Sept. 6, the people of West Germany walked up to two
doors to the future. Which would they choose? Western diplomats,
disheartened by the fall of Schuman and De Gasperi, guessed
timidly that Adenauer and the dream of Europe would squeak
through -- but barely. But the old man in the high, starched
collar simply rode up to his Rhondorf home, went off to Sunday
Mass, left order not to be disturbed, and at day's end turned in
for a long night's sleep.

    The Flag of Europe. The results astounded even composed
Konrad Adenauer. From the historic election, no party was left
strong enough to challenge Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats,
and no person or bloc within the Christian Democrats was left
strong enough to challenge Konrad Adenauer. When his followers
gathered at the Chancellery steps next morning to salute him,
Adenauer smiled his thoughtful, deep-frozen smile. "Perhaps,"
said he, "we have won by a little too much."

    Adenauer's victory was a victory for Europe, and the West's
big cold-war success of 1953. When the striped German flag was
raised in post-election triumph above the Chancellor's Palais
Schaumburg, the green and white flag of European unity was run up
alongside it. "The elections," said Konrad Adenauer, "have
decided that Europe will come about, that the EDC will come
about, and that the cold war is lost for Russia."

    By 1953's end, his certainty was not so widely shared.
France might or might not ratify EDC. But Germany's vote had
saved it from death in 1953, and kept alive the hope that in
1954, Europe might yet be born.

    If the European dream does come true, Adenauer will go down
in history as one of its creators. If it fails, his efforts will
still have served Germany well. He has won her respectability.

    At the Big Three's Bermuda conference, the absent, uninvited
Chancellor of West Germany was even more a participant than
France's ailing Premier, who spoke scarcely a word. Before
dispatching to Moscow their agreement to a Big Four conference in
Berlin, the Big Three leaders solicited Adenauer's approval. When
Prime Minister Churchill suggested it might be wise to consider
some alternative to EDC for Germany's rearmament, President
Eisenhower dismissed the proposal with a wave of his hand. The
U.S. will not consider alternatives, said the President, and
besides, "EDC is what Adenauer wants."

    Decisive Events. West Germany has won this place at the
council table despite the fact that it is still nominally an
occupied country, and has yet to arm a single soldier, build a
plane or roll out a tank.

    Seated one day last week in his huge office in the Palais
Schaumburg, Chacellor Adenauer made a temple of his fingers and,
chatting with TIME Correspondent Frank White, allowed himself the
luxury of some mild self-satisfaction. "I cannot avoid smiling a
little when, as chief of an occupied country, I sit down with the
leaders of the occupying nations, such as Mr. Eden and M.
Bidault. In spite of the fact that Germany hasn't yet full
sovereignty, its economic and political impact is fully felt in
world affairs."

    Adenauer had his own list of "the decisive events' of the
year,       clear and determined attitude" of the U.S. to take
the lead in the struggle against Communism, the uprisings in
East Germany, his own election victory, and President
Eisenhower's atomic pool proposal, which Adenauer believes "may
well be the beginning of real understanding between East and
West." Stalin's death, he says, was "not a factor of major
importance." It did not increase the chances for peace. "Stalin
had the power and prestige to alter the course of Kremlin
foreign policy. His successors have not."

    Adenauer has some advance worries for 1954: "There is wind
in the air, and the sky is not without clouds." Biggest clouds:
indecision in France, the approaching four-power conference on
Germany, the state of mind of the U.S. Congress.

    As for France: ". . . The French people have a much clearer
conception [of EDC] than does the French Parliament . . . I am
convinced the French will finally agree to the formation of an
integrated Europe."

    On four-power negotiations: "The hope that the Soviets have
altered their course is unfounded. Their strategy for the Berlin
conference is mainly that of delay . . . The three [Western]
ministers must maintain an undivided front. Russia will attempt
to weaken the French will to ratify EDC. If successful . . . it
would be Russia's greatest triumph."

    On Congress: "I fully understand that there should be
impatience. I confidently hope, however, that as much as they
dislike what happens, they will be wise enough not to stop giving
[moral] assistance and [financial] support at this critical
moment, when final success is in sight."

    "The first six months of 1954 will be decisive."

    Near the Heart. As far as it went, the story of Germany's
rise in 1953 was good for the democracies and bad for Communism.
But other years and other men will determine whether there will
be a happy ending. Konrad Adenauer is 78 this month. In the frost
of his rigid, imperious command over machinery of both party and
government, few sprouts of leadership have been able to grow.
"How long I can hold my present office no one can tell," he said.
"Even I cannot. My health and strength are excellent. Nothing,
however, is nearer my heart than that before I go . . . I shall
have brought Germany securely into the community of free and
democratic peoples of the Christian West . . ."

    The question mark of the future intrudes like a brooding
outsider on the encouraging spectacle of a West Germany healthily
revived, strongly and democratically led, dedicated by its
electorate to a United Europe as well as to a new Germany. "We
never question Adenauer's sincerity when he talks of Franco-
German agreement," said a top French diplomat. "He is truly
European . . . But we don't forget another German, Stresemann,
who wanted good relations with France. Six months after he died
[1929], what happened? His party and policy collapsed."

    Konrad Adenauer himself has also seen the brooding outsider.
If the dream of Europe collapses, there is, he fears, the
possibility of a revival of German militarism. "I never minimize
this possibility if Europe fails," said he last week. "If France
refuses to accept reconciliation with her former enemy, how we
would accept the effect of such a reversal I do not know . . .
The whole population would be affected. We cannot say what would
happen. But we have had experience in the past."

    "Perhaps I had better not die yet awhile," said Konrad
Adenauer. "There is still too much to do."