A Letter From The Publisher, Jan. 5, 1959

IN THE 31 years since TIME'S editors I picked their first Man of the Year (Charles Augustus Lindbergh), their selections have been as various as the world itself. In 1930 the choice fell on India's Mohandas Gandhi, then in a British jail, and in 1936 on Wallis Warfield Simpson, better known today as the Duchess of Windsor. Not infrequently, the Man of the Year has been a villain rather than a hero —Hitler in 1938, Stalin in 1939. But always he has met one criterion: who, during the year, did the most to change the news, for better or for worse.

Over...

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