In a sense, the Man of the Year is almost always the President of the United States, no matter who that may be. He accomplishes deeds great and small. He receives credit and blame for things he did not do. He has the most powerful job, the highest visibility and, inevitably, the greatest influence on the news.
That still was partly true for Ronald Reagan in 1987, particularly when he joined Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev this month for the grand rituals of signing away all the world's intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Nonetheless, this was a disappointing year for the President, who turned 76 and underwent three new bouts of surgery. Although he remained in the spotlight, he lingered there largely as a victim, a passive witness to the erosion and disintegration of his own fading Administration.
Just a year earlier, when America blazed with celebrations for the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty, Reagan had seemed the most popular President in years. But after a steady flow of congressional hearings on the Iran-contra arms scandal, of war threats in the Persian Gulf, of huge budgetary and trade deficits, of a declining dollar and a crashing stock market, his own stock fell. A CBS/New York Times poll at the end of November reported that 45% of the citizenry approved of the way Reagan was doing his job, down from 52% only six weeks earlier.
So in TIME's annual effort to evaluate the biggest news stories of the year, the common theme running through the large-type headlines of 1987 was Ronald Reagan. He was there not so much for his accomplishments as for his lack of them. "Terrible, terrible," said Nancy Reagan, herself a victim of cancer, in a year-end interview with the Washington Post. "Overall, I guess the whole year has been the roughest."
At the start, Reagan was full of defiance about the sale of U.S. missiles to Iran. That effort, obviously aimed at winning the release of American hostages in Lebanon, had been an embarrassing violation of his repeated pledges never / to negotiate with terrorist regimes, but Reagan simply denied it. "We did not -- repeat, did not -- trade weapons or anything else for hostages," he said. After a three-month investigation, however, a presidential review board headed by former Texas Senator John Tower found that the "initiative became in fact a series of arms-for-hostages deals."
Reagan cooperated with the Tower commission, but when asked whether he had specifically approved Israeli sales of U.S. missiles to Iran, he first said that he had, then that he had not, then that the "simple truth is, I don't remember." On the basis of such evidence, the Tower commission condemned Reagan's careless "management style" and complained that the "President did not seem to be aware of the way in which the operation was implemented."
The President finally conceded his error. "I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages," he said. "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."