It was a year of retrenchment and reappraisal. In the midst of a worldwide recession, people learned how to make do with less and not to hope for too much more. While the lowering of expectations brought frustration and confusion, it also seemed to prompt a new realism. Sporadic acts of terrorism kept much of the world on edge, but steps were taken toward peace in significant areas. For the time being at least, moderation was in the air.
In this atmosphere, leaders did not so much lead as grope and listen intently for signals that were slow in coming. The wise chief of state was the one who did not move too far ahead of people in no mood for rash undertakings. It was not a period in which a single Man of the Year could decisively emerge.
There were, however, many also-rans. President Ford ranked among them. For the first few months of the year, his popularity grew as he showed that he could live easily with power without resorting to the imperial pretensions and devious actions of his predecessors. Generally, his high-level appointments were impressive. After enduring the humiliation of the collapse of Southeast Asia, he directed a spirited if overdramatized rescue of the Mayaguez from the Cambodians. Since then it has been downhill, as he was perceived by many as just not being up to the job. Trying to improve his standing in November by shifting key lieutenants and firing Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, he looked like a fumbler. Confronted with massive if badly led Democratic majorities in Congress, he could not overcome the opposition to many of his domestic and foreign policies. In the end he was forced to accept clumsy compromises: an energy bill that would reduce oil prices in the short run and allow them to rise in the long run, a tax bill in which Congress gave a nonbinding promise to limit spending. In many respects, Ford's record was better than his critics allowed. But none of his conservative moves seemed to appease his party's truculent right wing, and its candidate, Ronald Reagan, passed him in the polls.
Henry Kissinger dominated world affairs as the most remarkable Secretary of State in modern times, but the magic was fading. The tenuous peace he had engineered in Viet Nam, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1973, unraveled when the Communists triumphed in Southeast Asia. Kissinger's laboriously constructed policy of détente was showing considerable wear as critics at home and abroad—not least of them the great Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn—complained that the Russians were exploiting the arrangement. But his critics were unable to present cogent alternatives to detente, and much of the opposition was based on unrealistic assumptions about what détente should or could achieve.