TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84hist

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                                                                                January 7, 1985

MAN OF THE YEAR

They Also Made History


Two won elections, one broke the gender barrier, one continued
to spread terror


RONALD REAGAN

A Grand Hurrah For the Gipper

Sweeping, overwhelming, historic -- Ronald Reagan's 1984
landslide merited all those terms. But one thing it could not
be called was unexpected. In January, White House polls showed
Reagan to have a chance of carrying nearly every state; by
midyear, national surveys put his lead over Democrat Walter
Mondale near the final margin of 18 percentage points.

If not unexpected, however, Reagan's electoral dominance in
1984 ranks as one of the more improbable phenomena in the
history of American politics. Who, even two years ago, would
have bet that an intense conservative often accused of
partiality to the rich would win a majority among voters earning
between $12,500 and $25,000 a year?  That the candidate whose
presidency gave birth to the term gender gap would carry the
women's vote by a thumping 57%?  That the oldest President ever
would reap 59% of the ballots cast by voters ages 18 to 24?

One explanation is that most voters simply judged Reagan's
policies to be working. Early in 1984, the nation was enjoying
its highest rate of economic growth in 34 years, its lowest
inflation rate in twelve years and a rapid drop in unemployment.
Reagan boasted that in four years the Soviets had not added an
inch to the territory under Communist control. After four
successive presidencies widely regarded as disappointing,
Americans strongly approved a White House tenure that could be
described, for the moment at least as a success.

But there was more to Reagan's triumph than that. The President
has proved himself more adept at reading, and manipulating, the
popular mood than any Chief Executive since Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Sophisticates might have sneered at his TV
commercials depicting an America of Norman Rockwell prosperity
and harmony, at the chants of "U.S.A.!" that carried over from
the Olympics to rock Reagan rallies. But the President correctly
divined that Americans were yearning to experience once more the
emotions of pride and patriotism.

Reagan is now running for his place in the history books. Over
the past year he has markedly softened his once strident
rhetoric toward the Soviets; Reagan wants to be remembered as
the President who achieved a verifiable agreement reducing
nuclear weapons. Domestically, the deficit Reagan ignored during
the campaign is continuing to swell. To shrink it, Reagan is
proposing cuts in Government spending even more drastic than
those he achieved in 1981 while remaining adamant that the
military gets virtually everything it feels it needs. He will
require help on Capitol Hill if he is to win those budget cuts,
but the Republican Party was unable to convert the President's
electoral triumph into any significant strengthening of its
representation in Congress. Before long, in any case, the
G.O.P. will be divided by a battle for the 1988 nomination.

Above all, under the 22nd Amendment Reagan's second term must
be his last. To succeed as a lame duck, he will have to revise
some familiar assumptions about presidential power and its
exercise. But then, he has spent four years doing exactly that.

--By George J. Church


--------------------------------------------------------- THE
TERRORIST

"We Have Only To Be Lucky Once"

He is the Hydra of our day, a multiheaded monster whose many
faces, all different, all grotesque, pop up around the globe
without hint of their coming. Defined broadly, the terrorist
is the perpetrator of political violence, one who, to paraphrase
Clausewitz, seeks to extend war by other means. Rarely does the
crime itself fulfill the terrorist's dream; it is usually
designed to achieve revenge, publicity, leverage or anarchy.
The year saw savage terrorists in all their guises, but 1984
also witnessed a clamorous debate over whether and how a
government should strike back.

Perhaps the most chilling image was the truck bomb, with its
driver and vehicle wired to explode to kingdom come. In
September, the rig cam hurtling at the U.S. embassy annex in
East Beirut, but a well- aimed shot by a bodyguard caused it to
blow up short of its main target and kept casualties low.
Religious fanaticism played a part in the hijacking of Kuwait
Airways Flight 221, when gun-toting youths, their eyes staring
coldly out of paper masks, riveted the world's attention on a
Tehran tarmac for six days. Affiliations were never declared,
but the hoodlums were believed to belong to the Hizballah (Party
of God), the shadowy Shi'ite group blamed by some U.S. officials
for the Beirut annex assault and the 1983 attacks against the
U.S. Marine barracks and the main U.S. embassy in Lebanon.

The ugly episode illustrated how terrorism so easily can feed
on itself:  the hijackers' demand was for the release of 17
fellow terrorists held in Kuwaiti jails. As proof that they
were deadly serious, the men killed one American before the
answer came; once their ultimatum was rejected, they killed
another American. The suspicion still lingers that Iran
colluded in the crime or at least did not act swiftly enough to
end it.

Religious hatred of another sort claimed Indira Gandhi, who was
gunned down by two of her own Sikh guards in her
tamarind-scented garden on a sunny October morn. She had just
bid her guards "Namaste," the gracious Indian salutation
accompanied by the crossing of hands before the face.
Assassination may be the most invidious of terrorist acts, since
the consequences can ricochet disastrously through a country and
beyond. Mrs. Gandhi's death produced such a tragedy:  some
2,000 Indians perished in the flames of sectarian violence that
followed.

Fortune proved kinder to Margaret Thatcher, who had just left
her bathroom in a Brighton hotel when an I.R.A. bomb demolished
four floors of the hotel and damaged the spot where she had been
standing minutes before. Terrorism came of high-tech age that
night; the explosives had apparently been planted under the
floorboards weeks earlier and detonated by a microchip timer.

There were other blinding flashes of fear:  diplomats cut down
on fashionable European streets, mines strewn in the Red Sea,
even the awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prizewinner Bishop
Desmond Tutu disrupted by a bomb threat. From the elegant
Libyan embassy on a leafy London square, a mad spray of gunfire
aimed at marching dissidents killed a young British policewoman.
Muammar Gaddafi's murderous schemes embarrassed him when
Egyptian authorities faked the death of a former Libyan Prime
Minister marked for extinction by Tripoli. Gaddafi took
responsibility for the assassination that never was.

Frustrated by Washington's paralysis in the face of terrorism,
Secretary of State George Shultz advocated retaliatory strikes
against bomb throwers and gunmen, lest the U.S. become the
"Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to
respond." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger preached
caution, likening a counterattack to shooting a gun into a
crowded theater in the hope of hitting the guilty. That debate
is likely to intensify in 1985. Meanwhile, the continuing threat
forces leaders into ever tighter cocoons and inflicts on
ordinary citizens the alarming realization that all are
potential targets for a crazed few.

Terrorism kills moderation, trust, courage. It poisons society
and invites the response of repression, which can breed further
wanton violence. Could there be a scarier pronouncement for
1985 than the one made by the I.R.A. after the failed Thatcher
murder?  "We have only to be lucky once. You will have to be
lucky always."

--By James Kelly


--------------------------------------------------------- JOSE
NAPOLEON DUARTE

Beaten and Banished, He Returned to Rule

It is not just that he became El Salvador's first elected
civilian President in half a century. Nor that he began peace
talks with leftist rebels after five years of convulsive
bloodletting. Those achievements, impressive as they are, only
hint at why Jose Napoleon Duarte has come to embody the
desperate hopes of a nation. His singular quality is his
bravery.

Duarte's best moment came in October at La Palma, the
slumbering mountain town where the first meeting with the
guerrillas was held. He spurned the offer of a bulletproof vest
and arrived with only a few aides. No armed guards were
visible:  only Boy and Girl Scouts in shorts and red kerchiefs
stood between the President and his enemies. The sight of
Duarte strolling the cobbled streets of La Palma captured both
the promise and the risk of his presidency. As thousands
cheered, their hands reaching out to touch him, Duarte's face
creased into a smile. He was showing that he was not afraid to
walk among his people unprotected.

Such courage is especially admirable in El Salvador where
50,000 people, one out of every 100 citizens, have been killed
over the past five years. Murder knows no political allegiance:
the right-wing death squads, often linked to the military, have
terrorized the country, as have the rebels. Duarte, moreover,
was already acquainted with his new job's physical risks.
Robbed by fraudulent vote counting of what seemed like certain
victory during his first presidential run in 1972, he was
severely beaten by Salvadoran soldiers before exiling himself
to Venezuela for seven years. His pug face, with its slightly
sunken cheeks, still reflects the maulings that crushed the
bones beneath his eyes.

Duarte not only returned, he returned to run for President
again, this time against Roberto d'Aubuisson, a cashiered army
major with a brutish past and some unlovely friends. The
whispered threats resumed but Duarte persevered through a March
election and May runoff to capture 54% of the vote.

The U.S. proclaimed Duarte's victory proof of El Salvador's
progress toward democracy, but the new President cautioned
against great expectations. "Are we going to arrive at
perfection?" he asked. "It is a satisfying thought, but I think
not. We are human."

From his first day in office, Duarte moved on all fronts. He
proved an able lobbyist in Washington, charming a reluctant
Congress into approving some $200 million in economic and
military aid. He shuffled the command of El Salvador's security
forces, long considered the breeding ground for the death
squads, and watched the number of killings sink from 40 a month
to less than a dozen. He assured businessmen, deeply suspicious
of his left-leaning economic and social policies, that he would
listen to them.

Aware that he could not survive in office without the army's
allegiance, Duarte asserted his control over the military with
the care reserved for a freshly housebroken tiger. He toured
barracks and plotted strategy, but always in consultation with
the beribboned officers who once ran El Salvador.

Basketball may have been Duarte's game in college, but now he
played the high-wire artist, poised between his country's
extreme right and radical left. His dramatic initiative for
peace talks surprised his closest supporters (including
Washington) and elicited more than one death threat. A second
round of discussions produced rebel demands, quickly rejected,
for a new constitution and fresh elections. Progress, if any,
will come by inches, but at the least both sides are speaking
as well as fighting.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day, Duarte's eyes betray an
ineffable sadness. It is as if he alone were carrying the
burden of his country's past and future. No one knows as well
as Duarte how much remains to be done. The economy is still
comatose. The war sputters on, always capable of flaring
suddenly. And in the end, Duarte must cope not just with the
wounds of the past five years but with a tradition of violence
that is as old as the country. "The blood of dead peasants has
not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the
roads," the poet Pablo Neruda once wrote. "A bloody flavor
soaks the land, the bread and wine in Salvador." Duarte slowly,
cautiously, is trying to cleanse his land.

--By James Kelly


---------------------------------------------------------
GERALDINE FERRARO

"Lemme Tell Ya" -- And Did She Ever

Some people, most of them male, wondered what all the fuss was
about, the tears and excitement. How would they have felt, the
men, if the rules had been reversed?  What if, in the 197 years
since the Constitution was written, someone of their sex had
never been considered for the job?  What if, apart from a male
President, they had never seen a male bishop, or chairman of the
board of General Motors?  They would have felt the way women did
before Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to run for Vice President
on the Democratic ticket. Excluded.

The women's movement, stung by the defeat of the Equal Rights
Amendment in 1982, had redoubled its efforts to secure a greater
role for women in the nation's political life. The Democratic
Convention was the spectacular culmination of those efforts.
Women across the country spoke of feeling validated, of being
at last included, of simply being proud. That pride grew as it
became clear that Ferraro was especially suited to her historic
role.

Americans wanted her to be perfect, according to a million
conflicting definitions of perfection, and of course she fell
far short. But she probably came as close to the needs of the
task as anybody could have. Her hair, her glasses, her
polka-dot dress were all part of an intangible and authentic
star quality that transformed a little-known Congresswoman from
Queens into a national celebrity. Above all, it was the set of
her jaw and the firm, conclusive nod of her head following some
statement or other beginning, "Frankly, lemme tell ya," that
showed the strength at her core.

Ferraro's manner did turn off many voters. But in the end, she
went a long way toward convincing all but the most skeptical
that she had the right stuff, not only to become the first woman
and the first Italian American to run on a major party's
national ticket, but to be equal to the stress of being a
heartbeat away from the presidency. Continuously under a
scrutiny more intense than was ever before applied to a
vice-presidential candidate, she made few gaffes and gave no
ground. With her candidacy hanging in the balance, she called
a press conference to explain her unquestionably sloppy
financial dealings and astonished everyone with her grit and
control. In her televised debate with George Bush, she
maintained a cool gravity and delighted the audience by calmly
objecting to the Vice President's apparent condescension.

Her campaign was dogged by innuendoes linking her family to
organized crime, and she did not hesitate to slug it out. When
the tabloid New York Post reported that her parents had once
been arrested on gambling charges, the furious Ferraro said Post
Publisher Rupert Murdoch "doesn't have the worth to wipe the
dirt from under my mother's shoes."  Ferraro's own Roman
Catholic Church attacked her pro-choice stand on abortion, but
she insisted that the decision must be a woman's, not the
state's. When heckled by antiabortion activists, she shot back
with wisecracks learned on the streets of New York. Throughout,
Ferraro remained courageous, tenacious, womanly; she may have
lost her temper now and then but never her sense of humor.

Some successful women leaders, Margaret Thatcher to name one,
are gender neutral:  they do not speak for the hopes and
concerns of women any more than a male leader would. But
Ferraro ran for Vice President as a feminist -- and as a symbol
of the transformation in the lives of American women over the
past 20 years. She realized, as did most American women, that
her campaign was a risk. Was the risk worth it?  The answer
lies not with the result but with the women, and men, who looked
at Ferraro and sensed a limitless future for their daughters.
Whichever way people voted (and, by and large, they voted
against the Democratic ticket, not just 63% of the men but 56%
of the women), whether they liked or disliked Ferraro, her
campaign probably advanced by at least ten years the full
participation of women in the responsibilities and opportunities
of the American dream. When she told women, "If we can do this,
we can do anything," tens of thousands shouted back, echoing her
resolve. Robert Kennedy would quote George Bernard Shaw:  "You
see things; and you say, 'Why?'  But I dream things that never
were; and I say, 'Why not?'" Democracy depends on those dreams,
and on the people like Geraldine Ferraro who are willing to test
the question.

--By Jane O'Reilly