An Uncertain Year for Leaders

As economic prospects darkened in 1974, cries for leadership were heard on all sides, yet the leaders themselves were in a state of turbulence. Seldom had so much political power changed hands in so many nations, except in the aftermath of a major war.

TIME'S Man of the Year is the person who--for good or ill --has most shaped the news and influenced the course of history. In other circumstances, that man might well have been Richard Nixon. More than two years after the Watergate burglary, after months of scandal that left the nation divided and depressed, Nixon became the first American President to resign. Yet no matter how dramatic the denouement, Nixon's role was essentially passive and self-destructive; his Administration was at last overtaken by the slow, relentless working of the U.S. Constitution, the Congress and ultimately the public conscience. Nixon's departure was a strange and absorbing spectacle, but the great damage had been done by the months of accusation and uncertainty, not by the resignation itself. The end was greeted mostly with relief as the beginning of recovery.

Nixon gambled desperately on releasing his transcripts; it was not much of a gamble though, with the Supreme Court, 8 to 0, forcing the issue. The tapes, even in edited form, revealed an atmosphere of startling moral squalor in the White House, a spirit of callousness and contempt for law that repelled even Nixon's steadiest allies. The House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings showed to a nation skeptical about Congress a group of earnest men and women trying to achieve fairness in a historic and profoundly disagreeable job. At last Nixon was forced to yield up what became known as "the smoking gun"--a previously deleted passage of the transcripts in which the President flatly ordered an FBI-CIA cover-up of Watergate; it contradicted his repeated solemn assurances of his innocence and condemned him to at least a charge of obstruction of justice.

A few days later, on Aug. 9, faced with the arithmetic of votes against him, the certainty of his impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, Nixon withdrew; he admitted no real wrong but cited only his loss of a "political base" in Congress. In the wreckage of his Administration, 16 of his aides and other operatives went to jail; John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell and H.R. Haldeman, once three of the most powerful men in the nation, spent the fall shuttling to the Washington courtroom where they were on trial for conspiracy.

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Nor was the Man of the Year Gerald Ford, the first President to comeunelected to the Oval Office. Though he began his stewardship buoyed by immense popular good will, Ford disillusioned many Americans with his sudden unconditional pardon of Nixon. For all his fall campaigning at home and his ventures abroad to Tokyo, Seoul and Vladivostok, Ford did not seem quick to assert the firm and imaginative leadership that the U.S. so badly needed. Still, at year's end, Ford had been in office only 144 days, and that was plainly too short a period to tell how effective his presidency might ultimately be.

At least during the first half of the year, Henry Kissinger again seemed a candidate for Man of the Year. He remained a pre-eminent world figure. In the spring, his prolonged painstaking negotiations won an Arab-Israeli disengagement. But the Middle East has proved itself less susceptible than ever to peacemakers; today, Kissinger's patented, step-by-step approach seems to have bogged down. Detente proceeded fitfully; the U.S. and Russia agreed broadly on limitations of offensive nuclear weapons, but it was uncertain how effective these ceilings might ultimately be in preserving peace. After months of controversy about Soviet policy toward Jews wishing to emigrate, Congress passed a trade bill granting Russians most-favored-nation status.

A kind of Kissinger revisionism has set in, much of it for petty reasons, some of it for more serious ones. Among other things, he came under strong attack for complicity hi the CIA'S efforts to "destabilize" the regime of Chile's Salvador Allende. But there was a broader, more basic criticism: to many it seemed that Kissinger has dangerously concentrated and personalized the nation's capacity for making foreign policy. Yet he still held the unique esteem of the powers he had to deal with, including the Soviet Union and the Middle Eastern nations; in the U.S. he faced perhaps not a real decline, but simply a more realistic appraisal contrasted with the earlier, exaggerated view of him as a miracle worker.

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Other figures might have been chosen as Man or Woman of the Year. Yasser Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organization to a position of power that has radically changed the circumstances of war and peace in the Middle East. Some might regard Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the Man of the Year for his extraordinary defiance in the Soviet Union and his exile from his homeland. Yet none could match the changes and the problems that the men from the oil powers brought to the world.

Elsewhere, leaders hardly stayed in place long enough to be in the running as Men of the Year. Governments changed with what seemed a manic rapidity. Israel's Golda Meir left office, replaced by Yitzhak Rabin. Japan's Kakuei Tanaka resigned amid scandal, with Takeo Miki succeeding him. Western Europe seemed beset by Fraktionspolitik. Great Britain deposed Edward Heath and reinstated Harold Wilson. France's Georges Pompidou died in April and was replaced by the progressive conservative Valery Giscard d'Estaing. West Germany's Willy Brandt resigned in the shadow of a spy scandal, and was succeeded by moderate Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt. Italy lost its 31st government of the postwar era. Portugal deposed Marcello Caetano, the dictatorial heir of Salazar. Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie was stripped of hereditary power going back 2,500 years and trundled off to house arrest by a military junta.

All summer, the Greeks and Turks fought over Cyprus; the best that could be said for the island war was that it brought down the seven-year-old regime of the junta in Athens that was led by Brigadier General Dimitrios Ioannides. Former Premier Constantine Caramanlis was summoned back from self-imposed exile to form a new government.

Almost two years after the American withdrawal, the dead on both sides in Viet Nam were numbering more than 1,000 a week. The troubles in Northern Ireland seemed no closer to settlement (see THE WORLD). The year, however was dominated not by actual warfare but by ominous premonitions --anxiety over another Middle East war, an overriding fear of global depression. At least some of the changes in national leadership reflected a restive search for figures capable of guiding the world into a future that looked like a darker, more dangerous business than it had in some years.

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