The 75th Anniversary Of Person of the Year

One of the hallmarks of the newsmagazine format that Henry Luce and Briton Hadden created in 1923 was a penchant for telling stories through people. Carlyle defined history as "the biography of great men." Similarly, Luce and Hadden's TIME showed that journalism, the rough draft of history, could illuminate momentous events by profiling the gifted and powerful personalities who helped shape them. Nowhere more so than in TIME's selection of a Person of the Year, which has been a highlight since 1927. These iconic figures--statesmen, visionaries, tyrants, unexpected heroes like New York City Mayor RUDY GIULIANI--were singled out because they put a stamp on their world and expressed the great themes of their times. The vivid fascination and significance they represent can be appreciated in a multimedia exhibition, "TIME's Person of the Year at 75," which has traveled to three U.S. cities in the past year and is on view in Chicago through Jan. 5. Open the following pages for a sampling of the absorbing, inspiring and provocative figures featured in the exhibition.

1928 WALTER P. CHRYSLER The son of a Kansas locomotive engineer, Chrysler learned about cars by taking them apart and reassembling them. He showed the same ability with companies. By the end of 1928 his innovative Chrysler Motors was turning out not only its namesake models but also Plymouths, Dodges and DeSotos, mounting a challenge to automotive giants Ford and General Motors. Chrysler, wrote TIME, "had become one of the chief U.S. industrialists." But he was not through building. In this same year he announced plans for the 77-story Chrysler Building, whose graceful Art Deco structure remains one of the signature profiles of the Manhattan skyline.

1937 GEN. AND MME. CHIANG KAI-SHEK He was the leader who had unified most of China under a reformist government. She was a daughter of the eminent, Western-oriented Soong family who became his effective propagandist in the U.S. Though they had been forced to flee the Japanese invasion in 1937, TIME saluted them for forging a Chinese "national consciousness.

1938 ADOLF HITLER Hitler was the first malign figure to be selected as POY, and his evil only grew during the next several years. Hitler's ruthless domination of Europe was, said TIME, "the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today." The 1938 Munich pact confirmed it: he won a hands-off promise from Britain and France, and the stage was set for his pursuit of World War II.

1947 GEORGE C. MARSHALL Named POY first as a man of war--in 1943, when he was Chief of Staff of the Army--Marshall was chosen again as a man of peace: the Secretary of State who conceived the Marshall Plan, which promised to underwrite the economic recovery of postwar Europe's democracies. Through his bold scheme, said TIME, "the U.S. people, not quite realizing the full import of their act ... took upon their shoulders the leadership of the world."

1952 QUEEN ELIZABETH II As a "shy, dedicated, determined 26-year-old" ascending Britain's throne, Elizabeth II, said TIME, represented "all that [her people] hold best in the British way of life." She managed to be "regal without arrogance, glamorous without extravagance, gracious without familiarity." This year, as she celebrated her half-century jubilee, Elizabeth still mostly held that balance. Her family was shadowed by tragedy and beset by scandal, but she remained, as TIME wrote in 1952, "a reminder of what was old and splendid, and also a fresh, imperative summons to make the present worthy of remembrance."

1967 LYNDON B. JOHNSON In a departure, TIME named a POY who was engulfed in a sea of troubles. President Johnson, a landslide winner in 1964, was in 1967 besieged by turmoil over civil rights, poverty and the war in Vietnam. TIME compared him with Shakespeare's King Lear, praised him for his fortitude and stubbornness, and predicted that as the 1968 election neared, he would show "signs of a readiness to move ... toward leadership." But no. Three months later, he yielded to his critics and announced that he would not seek a second term.

1968 WILLIAM ANDERS FRANK BORMAN JAMES LOVELL Marco Polo. Captain Cook. Lindbergh. To this list of legendary pioneers, TIME added the three astronauts of Apollo 8, the first humans to travel around the moon. (It was left to Neil Armstrong, six months later, to be the first to set foot on it.) In a mission of "dazzling skills and Promethean daring," the astronauts glimpsed "not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man's view of himself and his destiny."

1973 JOHN SIRICA The nation was suffering through Watergate, its worst political scandal. The saga shook the top levels of government, even President Nixon. Stability was restored by this little-known federal judge with rugged courtroom common sense. Sirica doggedly pursued links to the higher-ups in the case. He required Nixon to turn over White House tapes and documents. In so doing, wrote TIME, Sirica showed that Presidents are not above the Constitution and reaffirmed "the primacy of the rule of law."

1974 KING FAISAL A crippling wave of energy crises, inflation and recession swept the world largely because of this dour, devout ruler of Saudi Arabia. Under Faisal, nationalization of his nation's vast oil properties began. Faisal also unified the other OPEC countries in a campaign to use the supply and price of oil as a weapon against the big industrial societies that had so long exploited them. TIME acknowledged the justice of Faisal's drive for wealth and power but deplored the angry clash of global interests: "The guiding policy must be ... cooperation and conservation." That proved a vain hope. Faisal was assassinated in 1975, and although the world's energy markets have become more stable today, the mix of oil, politics and money in the Middle East remains as volatile and perplexing as ever.

1985 DENG XIAOPING The leader of 1 billion Chinese launched his Great Leap Outward--a staggeringly ambitious attempt to modernize China and make it a world power--in 1978, a move that made him POY. In 1985 TIME named him again, saying his reforms had "changed the daily lives of his nation's citizens to a greater extent than any other world leader." Indeed, wrote TIME, his blend of state ownership and private property, of central planning and competitive markets, of political dictatorship and limited economic and cultural freedom, holds "promise for changing the course of history."

1988 ENDANGERED EARTH For the second time, the magazine selected a thing rather than a person: Planet of the Year (the first time: 1982, when the computer was Machine of the Year). The choice, prompted by mounting environmental crises, was a call to arms. TIME saw mankind in "a war for survival" of not only the overpopulated, polluted and neglected earth but also the human species itself.

1990 GEORGE H.W. BUSH Does this sound familiar? A President named Bush who scored high in foreign policy by confronting Saddam Hussein and mobilizing an international alliance but who seemed to pursue "deliberate drift" on the economy and other domestic issues. TIME chose Bush senior because he was the person who had the greatest impact on events both "for better and for worse."

1994 POPE JOHN PAUL II John Paul, wrote TIME, has "the world's bully-est pulpit," and few of his predecessors over the past 2,000 years had spoken from it as often and forcefully as he. In the punishing travels he undertook despite deteriorating health, he cast his message wide. His flock and the world listened, not always liking what they heard. The Pope strictly applied church doctrine, noted TIME, "to trouble the living stream of modernity," to excoriate self-indulgent and often tawdry secularism. He took unpopular stands on such issues as abortion and the ordination of women. Nonetheless, his unyielding rectitude made him "a moral compass for believers and nonbelievers alike."

2000 ALBERT EINSTEIN Twice before, TIME had widened the sphere of the POY--in 1949, when it designated Winston Churchill Man of the Half-Century, and in 1989, when it named Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Decade. Now, at the millennium, it was time to pick the figure who towered over the entire 20th century and laid the groundwork for the 21st. The choice: "the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe," whose work transformed all the key fields in our age of science and technology. Einstein's "humanity and extraordinary brilliance made ... his name a synonym for genius."