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<text>
<title>
Man of the Year 1971: Richard M. Nixon
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Man of the Year
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
January 3, 1972
Man of the Year
Nixon: Determined to Make a Difference
</hdr>
<body>
<p> He reached for a place in history by opening a dialogue
with China, ending a quarter-century of vitriolic estrangement
between two of the world's major powers. He embarked upon a
dazzling round of summitry that will culminate in odysseys to
Peking and Moscow. He doggedly pursued his own slow timetable
withdrawing the nation's combat troops from their longest and
most humiliating war, largely damping domestic discord
unparalleled in the U.S. in more than a century. He clamped
Government controls on the economy, causing the most drastic
federal interference with private enterprise since the Korean
War. He devalued the dollar, after unilaterally ordering changes
in monetary policy that sent shock waves through the world's
markets, and are leading to a badly needed fundamental reform
of the international monetary machinery.
</p>
<p> In doing all that--and doing it with a flair for secrecy
and surprise that has marked his leadership as both refreshingly
flexible and disconcertingly unpredictable--Richard Milhous
Nixon, more than any other man or woman, dominated the world's
news in 1971. He was undeniably the Man of the Year.
</p>
<p> Sharp Break. Each of the U.S. President's momentous moves
was only a start--and each could fail. In fact, rarely have
there been so many large ventures in mid-passage so late in any
presidential term. Still uninspiring in rhetoric and often stiff
in style, for the first time during his presidency he emerged
as a tough, determined world leader. Finally seizing firm
control of his office, he was willing to break sharply with
tradition in his privately expressed desire "to make a
difference" in his time. Should all his ventures succeed,
history will indeed record not only that he made a difference
but that 1971 was a year of stupendous achievement. Even now,
with matters only well begun, few modern Presidents can boast
of having done so much in a single twelve-month span--perhaps
Lyndon Johnson with his great flood of legislation in 1965,
certainly Harry Truman with the Marshall Plan and the Truman
Doctrine in 1947 and Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal heyday
of 1933.
</p>
<p> There were, of course, others with prime roles on the world
stage. Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath, with whom Nixon
met in Bermuda last week, scored a decisive and deserved victory
in persuading the House of Commons to approve Britain's entry
onto Europe's Common Market in 1973. He thus ended an often
bitter ten-year struggle, bringing a step closer Jean Monnet's
grand vision of a united Europe. West Germany's Chancellor Willy
Brandt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his continued efforts to
reach a reconciliation between his nation and Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union, an Ostpolitik whose initiation helped make him
TIME's Man of the Year in 1970.
</p>
<p> Only Chou. In the nervous Middle East, Israel's Prime
Minister Golda Meir and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat clung to
a precarious cease-fire and flirted warily with proposals to
ease tensions, while talking as pugnaciously as ever. Whatever
the merits of their long-range goals, Pakistan's President Agha
Mohammed Yahya Khan (now deposed) and India's Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi brought more suffering to the subcontinent, he by
turning his troops loose in a murderous rampage against
rebellious Bengalis in East Pakistan, she by reacting with full-
scale warfare to carve out the new state of Bangladesh.
</p>
<p> In the U.S. a hitherto obscure former Pentagon analyst,
Daniel Ellsberg, became famous overnight; he illuminated the
nation's Viet Nam policy process and precipitated a classic
clash between press and Government by releasing most of a 47-
volume secret Pentagon study of the war. The Nixon
Administration's Justice Department, under the President's
closest personal advisor, Attorney General John Mitchell, acted
swiftly in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent newspaper
publication of the papers, then moved to prosecute Ellsberg. It
was Mitchell, too, who decided to bring conspiracy charges
against Roman Catholic Priest Phillip Berrigan and several
others for, among other things, an alleged plot to kidnap
Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger as a means of dramatizing
opposition to the war.
</p>
<p> If anyone could challenge Nixon's ranking as the year's
dominant figure, it was China's wily Chou En-lai. He not only
strengthened his own hand in a Peking power struggle, but
succeeded in his policy of pushing China on to the world's
diplomatic stage. Despite forlorn efforts by the U.S. to keep
Taiwan in the United Nations as China was finally admitted,
Chang Kai-shek's government was expelled. It was Chou, as well
as the remote Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who responded to Nixon's
overtures and opened the Forbidden City to Henry Kissinger, who
had some claim of his own to be considered diplomacy's Man of
the Year. But only a U.S. President could take the first steps
toward rapproachment, and perhaps only a Republican President
named Richard Nixon could have brought it off with so little
conservative outcry.
</p>
<p> It was a year in which the nation's perception of its
President shifted sharply. In the early months, still fresh was
the memory of his strident 1970 campaign, which exploited fear
and tried to connect Democrats with rising crime and unrest.
This approach was rejected by the voters and gave Nixon's most
likely 1972 opponent, Senator Edmund Muskie, a priceless chance
to appear cooler and wiser in an Election Eve broadcast.
</p>
<p> Overstated Views. Apparently stung, Nixon took a loftier
route in 1971, although there were some lapses. To protect his
political right flank, he recklessly intervened in the case of
Lieut. William Calley, Jr., who was convincingly convicted of
mass murder at My Lai; Nixon had to be reminded by an eloquent
Army prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel III, of the higher legal
and moral issues at stake. He again attempted to make the
Supreme Court into a haven for conservative mediocrity; before
getting two solid nominees approved, he considered a list of
people so undistinguished that the American Bar Association
found some of them "not qualified."
</p>
<p> He hurt himself in earlier years by overstating his old
views and now overstated his new ones, like a man who has
learned a new lesson and repeats it too vehemently. Exaggeration
continued to be one of the less attractive traits of Nixon's
rhetoric in 1971. Thus he claimed, without the slightest
qualification, that "Vietnamization has occurred." He offered
the sweeping opinion that "I seriously doubt if we will ever
have another war." When he devalued the dollar, he declared it
"the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the
world."
</p>
<p> Nixon remains a tempting target for satiric attack, such
as Novelist Philip Roth's scatological book Our Gang, about the
insane career of President Trick E. Dixon, and the Emile de
Antonio movie Millhouse, in which Nixon newsreels old and new
are played in counterpoint. Yet this type of thing has been done
to Nixon for so long that a certain fatigue set in; unless he
provides a great deal of fresh ammunition, Nixon-hating will
become a bore. If he still has a problem inspiring complete
trust, it is no longer a simple matter of the old Tricky Dick
image. He is still suspected of timing his major moves for
political advantage, but perhaps not much more so than most
other Presidents.
</p>
<p> Even as the President threw his own energies into world
affairs, the problems at home continued to cry out for attention
and a further reallocation of national resources. The so-called
Nixon Doctrine proclaimed at Guam aimed at reducing other
nations' dependence on the U.S. for maintaining peace abroad,
and his exaggerated protectionist trade posture immediately
after the freeze contributed for a time to the introspective
mood. The Senate's initial rejection of the Administration's
foreign aid authorization bill symbolized the national
detachment, though stopgap funding was finally voted. The
President continued to brood about this apparent trend toward
isolationism, He was worried that the mood might become
permanent in the national revulsion over the Viet Nam conflict.
</p>
<p> Overall, concludes TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey,
"it was a singular journey through the twelve months of 1971.
His style is one of sheer doggedness. He outlasts the street
people, the park preachers, the student revolutionaries, the
Senate critics. He just stays in there, ducking, weaving,
changing when the pressure gets too bad. Yet there was something
about his Presidency that nudged the country along and raised
hopes, set the stage for a change in mood in international
affairs and headed the economy off in a new direction."
</p>
<p> The President's extraordinary year encompassed four major
areas of activity:
</p>
<p>I: The War
</p>
<p> Even on Viet Nam the President's performance in 1971 was
a surprise--because of what he did not do. Repeatedly, the
advance billing of his announcements on troop withdrawals fed
speculation that he was about to pull U.S. soldiers out at a
dramatic rate or specify a date for the total end of U.S.
involvement. Yet each statement revealed only a slowly
accelerating withdrawal timetable. From its high point at the
time of the Cambodia invasion and the killing of four students
by National Guardsmen at Kent State in the spring of 1970, the
antiwar movement had faded. But with the U.S.-supported invasion
of Laos in February and March of 1971, it briefly threatened to
regain its fervor.
</p>
<p> Even the White House conceded that the sight of South
Vietnamese soldiers clinging to the skids of helicopters in
flight from Laos had turned its claims of a military success
unto a "public relations disaster." Whether the Laos incursion
was worth it may remain one of the many unanswered questions
about the war; the Administration still insists that it helped
take the pressure off Saigon and reduce the level of fighting
within South Viet Nam. In April some 200,000 protesters massed
peacefully in Washington. At the same time, one of the war's
most moving demonstrations took place. Quietly, some on crutches
and wearing tattered uniforms, 700 U.S. veterans of the war
stepped up to a wire fence in front of the Capitol Building and
threw their painfully earned Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and
other decorations into a glistening rubbish pile of ribbons and
medals. "To President Nixon. I send you greetings." said one
youthful vet as he tossed his ribbons into the air.
</p>
<p> Momentum Lost. But when a second wave of some 50,000
demonstrators vowed to "stop the Government." Washington police,
federal troops and the Justice Department got tough. Carrying
out mass arrests, most of them illegal, they pushed some 12,000
protesters into buses and locked them up. Most were soon
released for lack of evidence or improper arrest procedures, but
the Government still functioned and the movement's momentum was
lost, perhaps permanently.
</p>
<p> By year's end, American deaths had fallen to fewer than ten
a week. While no end to the death of Vietnamese, Laotians and
Cambodians was in sight, Nixon had withdrawn nearly 400,000 U.S.
troops, leaving a force of his longer-lasting Phase II machinery
three months later.
</p>
<p> First the freeze, then the flexible guidelines, produced
considerable confusion. In the first month of Phase II, some
377,000 calls flooded Internal Revenue Service offices, which
had been hastily pressed into service to answer questions from
the public.
</p>
<p> Connally, meanwhile, rushed into meetings with foreign
finance ministers, dropped any pretense of charm, and freely
used the 10% surcharge as a club to demand monetary concessions
from the astonished officials. Worried about the global and
domestic repercussions, Kissinger and Burns eventually asked
Nixon to soften Connally's approach. Japan and Canada in
particular were incensed at the trade penalties, since they rely
so heavily upon U.S. markets. But the U.S. at year's end struck
a good bargain. The deal was taking shape: a shift in the
balance of world currencies in exchange for devaluation of the
dollar and the dropping of the import surcharge.
</p>
<p> In sum, Nixon acted belatedly but well on the domestic
economy. Labor has won some big concessions from the Wage Board
and removed some of the psychological tautness from the
guidelines, thus diminishing the original sense of urgency
created by the Administration. Nevertheless, many experts are
optimistic about the ultimate effectiveness of the program, and
TIME's Board of Economists is predicting solid economic recovery
for 1972. The question remains whether the recovery will come
quickly and widely enough to keep the economy from hurting Nixon
in the election.
</p>
<p> On the foreign economic front, Nixon and Connally played
a daring and sometimes crude game of economic brinkmanship that
at times seemed to threaten the entire fabric of U.S. relations
with its friends and trading partners. While no one could
foretell the long-range psychological effects and the
resentments that might linger, by year's end Nixon and Connally
had plainly cleared the way for the grinding task of
renegotiating the Western world's trade and monetary system.
</p>
<p>IV: The U.S.
</p>
<p> Except for his action in the economy, Nixon has failed to
convey any feeling of urgency in his attacks on domestic
programs. The "New American Revolution" that he sketched last
January in his State of the Union speech never resembled John
Mitchell's overblown description: "The most important document
since they wrote the Constitution." But it did include some
highly commendable ideas. None has yet been acted upon.
</p>
<p> His "six great goals," except for his action on the
economy, are all stalled. Welfare reform, revenue sharing,
reorganization of the Executive Branch, improved health care and
eliminating environmental pollution have been introduced in
various forms but remain in limbo, only partially approved or
ignored. Congress did vote $1.6 billion over three years for a
concerted research drive against cancer and the Senate passed
a far tougher water pollution bill than he sought.
</p>
<p> Quiet Price. Nixon's weak domestic record suffered further
from the jolting defeat by Congress of his proposal to develop
a supersonic jet transport aircraft. The event seemed to say
that Americans are not only concerned about the environment, but
no longer automatically buy the notion that the U.S. must always
be first in everything.
</p>
<p> Although a President is relatively powerless to reduce
crime, Nixon had campaigned hard on a pledge to do so, and gave
the impression that merely replacing Attorney General Ramsay
Clark with a man like John Mitchell would work wonders. It did
not; crime is still rising. While blacks have not been rioting,
Nixon has done little to make them feel in the mainstream of the
nation's life. Three times in the past year the watchdog U.S.
Civil Rights Commission attacked his enforcement of civil rights
legislation, once describing it as "less than adequate." Nixon
repeatedly made plain his opposition to busing to achieve school
integration, even as the courts often continued to encourage it.
The President perhaps has a majority of Americans behind him in
that view, but the fact remains that in many cities no other
tool seems to exist to break up all-black schools. But the Nixon
Administration takes quiet pride in its work in finishing the
demolition of the dual school systems of the South, and also in
encouraging craft unions, via the Philadelphia Plan, to admit
and train minority members.
</p>
<p> The Civil Rights Commission's chairman, the Rev. Theodore
M. Hesburgh, said that "the Federal Government is not yet in a
position to claim that it is enforcing the letter, let alone
the spirit, of civil rights laws." Blacks see Nixon, claimed
Clifford Alexander Jr., former chairman of the Equal Employment
Opportunities Commission, as "actively against her goals." The
National Urban League's Harold Sims charged that under Nixon
"the nation is still in he grip of a not silent but selfish
majority."
</p>
<p> Part of the problem with the New American Revolution is
that many of Nixon's proposals are structural or procedural
reorganizations--hardly the stuff of revolution. Besides, most
social programs are harder to bring off than moves on the
international chessboard. To succeed at home, a President must
be able to move the nation as well as Congress. As for the
nation, it remains in doubt whether he can indeed move it and
(as he himself said he wanted to do) rekindle the Spirit of '76.
As for Congress, Nixon does not relish the sweaty rituals of
persuasion and blandishment that are necessary to marshal
support on the Hill--especially when facing a Democratic
majority. Indeed, one of the continuing surprises of Nixon's
presidency is that Nixon, regarded as a master politician, is
not very good at dealing with the politicians in Congress, even
those of his own party.
</p>
<p> Looking to 1972. As he heads into an election year, Nixon
has the vast advantage of incumbent and of his own spectacular
actions of 1971. His strategy will probably be to appear the
cool and seasoned diplomat, the man grappling with lofty issues.
</p>
<p> If the economy rebounds, the democrats will be stuck
largely with attacking Nixon's failure to solve social problems
and deploring his personality. But a campaign based primarily
on the President's personality will be difficult for any
Democrat to carry off, and may backfire by building sympathy for
a man who is clearly dedicated, clearly serious and hard-
working, and who has surmounted formidable personal and
political handicaps.
</p>
<p> In 1971 President Nixon helped cool national passions. He
made his bid for a historic niche on the issues of war and peace
and in the business of keeping his nation economically solvent.
Perhaps his major accomplishment was simply helping the U.S. to
catch up. On the war, on China, on welfare reform, on
devaluation, he moved the country to abandon positions long
outdated and toward steps long overdue. In so doing, he also
destroyed some once sacrosanct myths and shibboleths. The result
in the U.S. was a greater sense of reality and of scaled-down
expectations; given the temper of the times he inherited, that
was mostly to the good. The ultimate judgement of his presidency
will depend on how he manages to live within the new reality he
himself tried to define--and on whether history accepts his
definition.
</p>
<p> Yet the standards he has set for his tenure is high. As
NIxon mused one recent evening: "Nobody is going to remember an
Administration which manages things 10% better." At the moment
his adrenaline is flowing: his ambitions are large. Asked
recently by an aide which of the earlier Presidents, exclusive
of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, he most admired, Nixon
ticked them off: Jackson, because he set the economy right;
Lincoln, because he held the nation together; Cleveland, because
he reasserted the strength of the presidency trough his use of
the veto; Teddy Roosevelt, because he busted the trusts; Wilson,
because he fought for a noble dream; Franklin Roosevelt, because
he changed the nation's social fabric. "They all made a
difference in their time," said Richard Nixon, who is determined
to do the same, and in some areas already has.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>