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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, 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 overemphasized his influence.