Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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illness and disheartened by the death of his wife, resigned as Prime Minister of Israel and was succeeded by his Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Other leaders consolidated their power. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl led their conservative parties to huge electoral victories, Thatcher's Tories triumphing by the biggest British landslide since 1945. Pope John Paul II made moving pilgrimages to war-torn Central America and to Poland, where crowds of a million turned out daily to receive the native-born Pontiffs blessings.

Revolutionary terrorism and religious fanaticism shed more blood in the Third World, and this time some of the blood was American. U.S. troops went into combat for the first time since 1975, invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and overturning a clique of hard-line Marxists who had murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, a milder Marxist. Suicide truck bombers, presumably Islamic Shi'ite zealots who share Iranian Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's belief that the U.S. is "the Great Satan," blew up the American embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, as well as the headquarters of the U.S. Marine peace-keeping force at the Beirut airport, a shocking attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen.

But the U.S.-Soviet rivalry colored, when it did not dominate, nearly all these seemingly disconnected events. Thatcher and Kohl defeated opponents who had made the acceptance of American missile emplacements a major issue. In the U.S., Democrats are decrying what they view as Reagan's excessively hard-line policy toward the Soviets. Even the Pope's travels were overshadowed by new, although inconclusive, evidence that Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist who shot the Pope in 1981, had been aided by the Bulgarian secret service, presumably backed by the Soviet KGB—which was at the time headed by Andropov.

Violence in the Caribbean Basin and the Middle East brought the superpower confrontation into still sharper focus. The invasion of Grenada, Reagan claimed, prevented Marxists from turning that island into a Soviet-Cuban colony. Elsewhere in the region, however, no such quick or decisive victory for Administration policy seemed in sight. U.S. aid to the conservative government of El Salvador in its fight against a leftist insurrection, and to the contra rebels battling the Marxist-led government of Nicaragua, did little more than sustain grim guerrilla wars. Just as the U.S. did after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, the Soviet Union volubly denounced the U.S. moves but did not so much as hint at military action in retaliation. This underlined a rule of U.S.-Soviet competition that neither side will ever acknowledge publicly: each has a sphere of interest that the other respects.

In the deadly quagmire of the Middle East, the spheres did collide. The bombing of the U.S. Marines apparently was carried out by terrorists striking from portions of Lebanon occupied by Soviet-armed Syria. Unable to bring about a Syrian withdrawal by diplomatic pressure, the U.S. at year's end was trying to forge a closer alliance with Israel. In December, a U.S. naval armada off Lebanon sent carrier-based planes to strike Syrian antiaircraft batteries that had fired on an American reconnaissance flight; two planes were shot down, the