(See Cover) Appearing and disappearing with bewildering rapidity, the scenes that flashed across history's screen in 1958 often had the disjointed quality of a surrealist movie. Some were dramatic portents of a world to come — missiles trailing a fiery glow as they took off for deep space, bearing with them a gadget that, when asked, sent back the recorded voice of the President of the U.S., another that reported wondrously complicated readings on radiation far beyond the atmosphere.
Some reflected the temper of the times —a shock-haired Texan receiving a Broadway ticker-tape welcome for winning a piano competition in Moscow, a limber Australian methodically breaking records for the mile. Still other scenes were charmingly sentimental — the heir to an ancient throne promising himself in marriage to a commoner he first met on a tennis court, the new, young head of a populous religious sect resuming his daily classes at Harvard.
But as the show went on, great stretches of it proved to have a grim sameness. Time after time the screen was filled with shots of rampaging mobs with hate in their eyes, or of steel-helmeted troops fanning out through a tense capital in the fateful hours before dawn. For 1958 was another year when men from Caracas to Khartoum lost patience with the established order, a year when nations abruptly smashed familiar institutions and sent their onetime idols off to political oblivion — or violent death.
Few established leaders or governments emerged from this year of shattered patterns with enhanced prestige. Nikita Khrushchev, 1957's Man of the Year, had commanded the scientific resources to produce a Sputnik, but for all his promises and boasts, he could not solve or begin to solve his country's continuing agricultural crisis. In Red China, faced with his own agricultural crisis, Mao Tsetung launched 1958's most audacious political act, ordering his 650 million subjects into human anthills called "people's communes." But at year's end he was compelled to retreat, not because of popular resentment (which did not bother him), but because his scheme was not working at all well.
For the U.S. Government it was a year of holding operations. The economy recovered its health; the vexed question of racial integration lay unsolved beneath the surface, but did not erupt into violence. A nation's youth went hula-hooping its uncomplicated way, and science, medicine and industry explored new breakthroughs. But the stones cast at Richard Nixon in Latin America and the Democratic sweep in the congressional elections made manifest a widespread discontent with U.S. policy, foreign and domestic.
To the credit of the Eisenhower Administration was the fact that by firmness at Quemoy and the prompt dispatch of marines and soldiers to Lebanon, it had prevented dramatic deterioration of the international position of the U.S. And it was a U.S. victory of sorts that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who began 1958 by triumphantly merging Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, found himself at year's end at last aware that his Communist ally was a concealed enemy.