THE MAN AND THE MAGIC

By NORMAN PEARLSTINE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

One of the most rewarding events in TIME's calendar is the selection of our Man of the Year. We begin each January wondering who will capture our imagination. By Labor Day our staff members begin submitting nominations. Then the arguing starts, in the form of extended, mostly civilized debates over the relative merits of a lengthy list of individuals, each of whose accomplishments or notoriety demanded our attention.

This year's list of nominees was typically eclectic. Should we honor the Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut and his immortal cloned sheep Dolly? What about Tiger Woods' thrilling 350-yd. drives into history? Or Alan Greenspan's steady-on-the-tiller stewardship of America's ongoing economic boom? Or--of course--the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales?

In the end, however, we were pulled toward silicon as if it were magnetic. In a year filled with world-shaking events, the overriding story was the economy, but the driving force behind the economy has clearly been technology. And no one has done more to further technology's long march than our 1997 Man of the Year, Andrew Grove, the 61-year-old high-tech impresario who came to America a penniless refugee and went on to make Intel the Silicon Valley powerhouse whose microprocessors run 90% of the world's personal computers.

As with last year's selection, AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho, our choice is less a nod to one striking year than an acknowledgment of the culmination of an ongoing process. Intel's chips have been around for nearly three decades, but 1997 was the year Grove's life's work reached full flower. It was the year cell phones, Websites and E-mail became ubiquitous, the year the global economy, for good and ill, became an undeniable reality. Intel chips hum at the center of everything from coffee machines to Hollywood's special effects to Wall Street's trading desks.

Grove gave TIME unprecedented access to his life and work. He spoke with startling candor about such experiences as the Holocaust and the scarlet fever that left him hearing impaired. He also shared his wit and warmth with TIME editors at dinner at his rambling ranch house. Sitting around the table was Intel's past, present and future: Grove's wife Eva, who fell in love with him when he was working as a busboy; Gordon Moore, Intel's first CEO and Grove's mentor; Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist who underwrote the company in 1968; and Craig Barrett, Intel's president, who will probably succeed Grove.

To write the cover story, senior editor Joshua Cooper Ramo visited Intel chip plants on three continents and spent weeks studying the company, including two days traversing the valley with the peripatetic executive (after some Stanford students mistook the clean-cut journalist for a security man, Grove referred to his chronicler as "Agent Ramo").

Grove's selection echoes two previous honorees: we recognized his countrymen in 1956 by selecting the Hungarian Freedom Fighter, and his business in 1982, when the computers that Intel's chips were already enabling were named "Machine of the Year." This week's issue also caps a year in which TIME's commitment to the digital era bore richer fruit than ever. We consider the computer revolution one of the defining stories of our time. Our coverage in 1997 ranged from managing editor Walter Isaacson's groundbreaking profile of Bill Gates of Microsoft to that company's bailout of Apple and AOL's acquisition of CompuServe.

Our goal for Man of the Year is, as ever, to illuminate our world through one example that is both timely and timeless. Andy Grove embodies both the energy of the business and technology industries that are shaping society today, and the vision and creativity that have always typified the American Dream.

I first met Grove 17 years ago while working at the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's management was proud of its resistance to technology in those days, so reporters and editors worked with manual typewriters, carbon paper and No. 2 pencils. As we were walking through the newsroom, Grove stopped to peer into the wire room, a small area overstuffed with fax and teletype machines, and exclaimed, "This is absolutely incredible equipment! In fact, it should be in the Smithsonian." That and subsequent conversations with Andy over the years taught me to appreciate his wit and his wisdom and sensitized me to the power of the chip and its role in our lives.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology," wrote Arthur C. Clarke in the early 1960s, "is indistinguishable from magic." One lesson of our Man of the Year's life is that while technology lets us produce ever more astounding machines, it has little to say about how we might use them. For that we rely on the likes of Andy Grove. What Intel's chairman has inside is magic too.