Man Of The Year: On the Road to a New Reality

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since the Iron Curtain crashed down. Using West Germany's considerable strategic and economic leverage, he is trying to bring about an enlarged and united Western Europe, which would remain closely allied with the U.S. but would also have sufficient self-confidence and independence to form close ties with the Communist nations. It is a daring vision, full of opportunity and danger, rekindling the dreams of unity that have inspired Europeans from Charlemagne to Napoleon. It may not be realized for a long time, if ever. But by holding it up as a goal for all Europeans, Willy Brandt emerged as 1970'sMan of the Year.

Although the U.S. has been preoccupied for nearly a decade with Indochina and the Middle East, Europe is still the crucial continent, the arena where the great dangers and opportunities exist and where the ultimate balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union may well be decided. Neither Washington nor Moscow could retain its pre-eminence in the world without maintaining close ties with Europe. Despite Japan's surging economic might and China's waxing nuclear arsenal, Europe alone possesses the talented population, economic power, technological skills, and geographic position to rank, along with the U.S. and Russia, in the triad of world powers.

Thus Willy Brandt's role in 1970 had great significance for America.

ODDLY PRIMITIVE. The year was the first of a new decade, a cusp of the future. Yet in the U.S. in many ways, the future seemed to have gone temporarily underground. Nineteen seventy had a certain retrograde quality, nostalgic in its styles, oddly primitive in its politics. Women's fashions reverted to an elaboration of the late '40s, the U.S. presidency in some ways to a modified edition of the '50s, and radicalism either to an older silence or to a black-power Bakuninism of the 19th century. The Women's Liberation movement bloomed, ultimately somewhat damaged by its own exaggerations and excesses.

The political currents alternated between passion and anticlimax. After President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia at the end of April, a spasm of outrage seized the nation's college campuses, and emotion redoubled when the Ohio National Guard killed four Kent State University students. Yet a great many of the U.S. students who so passionately vowed to change the system from within by working in political campaigns never appeared in the fall.

A small group of radicals in the U.S. made explosive gestures that largely alienated them from the sizable force of the nonviolent disaffected. A graffito observed at the University of Wisconsin: RADICALS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN EXCITED MORALISTS. Nine of the 16 portraits on the FBI's expanded Most Wanted List were those of political radicals. The Weathermen were in hiding. Angela Davis was captured at a Howard Johnson's motel in Manhattan. Many leaders of the Black Panthers were on trial, in Algerian exile —or dead. Anger remained, but it became reflective or confused. Celebrants of Woodstock became the survivors of Altamont, the California rock festival that ended in a knifing death, and the depredations of the drug culture clouded Aquarian visions—Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, both cultural heroes for the young, fatally overdosed themselves with drugs. The hippie Camelot promised by Charles Reich in The Greening of America