Alan Greenspan
If you believe that the booming American economy is the story of the 1990s, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gets my vote as Person of the Decade. The American economy will mark its longest period of uninterrupted expansion this February. During the past nine years, the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 4.1%, the lowest level in three decades, while inflation has remained under 3% and interest rates have remained relatively low. The stock market remains at record levels, and productivity grew twice as fast in the 1990s as it did in the 1980s. No one person, of course, can claim credit for this performance, but over the past dozen years, Greenspan's quiet confidence and masterly control of the nation's money supply have done much to convince consumers and Congress that the investment-driven economic growth is real. Although Chairman Greenspan will be 74 when his third term expires next June, the job remains his for the asking. As presidential contender John McCain suggested earlier this month, the one sure way to continue America's economic prosperity is to have Greenspan stay on, whether he is alive or dead. "If Mr. Greenspan should happen to die, God forbid... I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him."
--Norman Pearlstine
Madeleine Albright
The echoes of her past could be heard in every statement of uncompromising purpose, each insistence that her war was just. In her third year as the country's first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, a child of Europe's dark century, pushed and prodded the U.S. and its allies to punish the Continent's latest ethnic cleanser. It was a career-defining event: the NATO campaign to drive Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's forces out of Kosovo became known as Madeleine's War. Through 78 days of bombing, Albright kept wavering allies on board, until Milosevic finally backed down. There were no U.S. combat deaths. NATO jets failed to stop Serbs from killing 10,000 Kosovars and driving an additional 700,000 out of the province, but Albright declared victory--and the refugees returned. At a time of disquiet about U.S. interventions in the world, Albright evoked an earlier moment in the American Century, when the U.S. did not shrink from sending its soldiers abroad to right wrongs and battle tyrants. "We're getting used to the idea," she told TIME, "that there are different ways of exerting American force."
Tiger Woods