From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

It was not all that easy to decide on the Man of the Year for 1991. Two major international stories -- the gulf war and the Second Russian Revolution -- dominated the news, and both of them produced a fairly obvious list of candidates: George Bush, Norman Schwarzkopf, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Boris Yeltsin, among others. On the domestic scene, too, individuals like Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas came to mind. But the more we thought about it, the more compelling it seemed to focus on a theme that emerged time and again as major events unfolded this year: the amazing power of CNN to bind the world into a truly global village.

TIME's Man of the Year tradition began rather casually during a slow week at the end of 1927 when the magazine's editors didn't know whom to put on the cover. Recalling that they had shortchanged Lindbergh after he made the first solo crossing of the Atlantic earlier that year, they named him Man of the Year. The idea caught on, and among Lindy's successors have been such men as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and such women as Wallis Simpson and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

The Man of the Year is not an accolade, however, or our version of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a judgment about news, and specifically about who, for better or worse, had the most impact on the course of history in a given year. The list includes people with indisputable credentials for goodness, like Mahatma Gandhi and the American G.I., but also some of the century's worst despots, like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

% This year's package was produced by several dozen staffers, under the guidance of assistant managing editor Jim Kelly. Associate editor Priscilla Painton, who approaches every subject with tireless zeal, spent a month interviewing Ted Turner's family, friends and associates. "I discovered that there was something new to say about him," says Painton. "He is a changed man not just because he fell madly in love or because he got older, but because he made an emotionally strenuous effort to grow up. There are no trophies in his office commemorating this adventure, but it may be the most courageous of all."