MAN OF THE YEAR: We Belong to the West

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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: Lavrenty Beria, 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.

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