(See Cover) I saw at close hand the faces of millions . . .
—Dwight Eisenhower in his homecoming speech
The faces of people reflected the biggest news about the world in 1959.
The faces belonged to the thousands of thousands who massed along the streets of Ankara, Karachi, Kabul and New Delhi, of Athens, Madrid and Casablanca. The faces were of all shapes and shades. But as they turned toward the smiling, pink-cheeked man who had come among them, they held in common a look—a look of thirsting for the good things that the modern world seemed to promise.
That thirsting, as many of their slogans and leaders made clear, was less for the things themselves than for the kind of life where the good things could be attained. In 1959, after years of hostile Communist propaganda, spectacular Russian successes in space, threats of missiles and atomic war, the throngs of Europe, Asia and Africa cast a durable vote for freedom and liberty. The faces were turned to the U.S. and to the man who had become the nation's image in one of the grand plebiscites of history—Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the U.S., and Man of the Year.
Names Making News. Behind Eisenhower's in 1959 came other names familiar to the cold war, and the news they made was dramatic evidence of freedom's vital toughness on many fronts. Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, challenger for Man of the Year, led his Conservative Party to a crushing third straight election victory, an unprecedented feat; in booming Britain his triumph buried the socialist dogma of the 59-year-old Labor Party as an effective political force. Under Konrad Adenauer, Man of the Year in 1953, the resurgent economic strength of free Germany posed such intolerable comparisons that Communism tripped from threat to entreaty in its attempt to reduce German influence. France's Charles de Gaulle, Man of the Year in 1958, set himself to the task of restoring French pride, tried to bind up the debilitating wounds of Algeria, chipped away at NATO's supranational foundations; but the problems raised by De Gaulle's France were at least and at last those of national purpose, not political paralysis. Just a hot breath away from the Red Chinese dragon, Japan's Premier Nobusuke Kishi, Man of the Year in the Far East, opted for conservatism, free enterprise and closer ties with the U.S., won a thumping victory in elections for the upper house of the Diet, routed Socialists who campaigned for an alliance with Peking and Moscow.
Of all foreign leaders the one who did most to prove freedom strong—by confronting it with its sternest tests—was the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev. In 1957 Khrushchev's Sputniks made him Man of the Year. In 1959 he scored even greater successes in space: on Jan. 2 the U.S.S.R. sent a 3,245-lb. package into sun orbit as the first man-made planet; eight months later, a Soviet rocket smacked the face of the moon, and on Oct. 4, two years to the day after Sputnik I, the Russians launched a rocket that passed around and photographed the moon's hidden far side.