TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0654> <title> 1984: They Also Made History </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1984 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 7, 1985 MAN OF THE YEAR They Also Made History </hdr> <body> Two won elections, one broke the gender barrier, one continued to spread terror RONALD REAGAN A Grand Hurrah For the Gipper Sweeping, overwhelming, historic--Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide merited all those terms. But one thing it could not be called was unexpected. In January, White House polls showed Reagan to have a chance of carrying nearly every state; by midyear, national surveys put his lead over Democrat Walter Mondale near the final margin of 18 percentage points. If not unexpected, however, Reagan's electoral dominance in 1984 ranks as one of the more improbable phenomena in the history of American politics. Who, even two years ago, would have bet that an intense conservative often accused of partiality to the rich would win a majority among voters earning between $12,500 and $25,000 a year? That the candidate whose presidency gave birth to the term gender gap would carry the women's vote by a thumping 57%? That the oldest President ever would reap 59% of the ballots cast by voters ages 18 to 24? One explanation is that most voters simply judged Reagan's policies to be working. Early in 1984, the nation was enjoying its highest rate of economic growth in 34 years, its lowest inflation rate in twelve years and a rapid drop in unemployment. Reagan boasted that in four years the Soviets had not added an inch to the territory under Communist control. After four successive presidencies widely regarded as disappointing, Americans strongly approved a White House tenure that could be described, for the moment at least as a success. But there was more to Reagan's triumph than that. The President has proved himself more adept at reading, and manipulating, the popular mood than any Chief Executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sophisticates might have sneered at his TV commercials depicting an America of Norman Rockwell prosperity and harmony, at the chants of "U.S.A.!" that carried over from the Olympics to rock Reagan rallies. But the President correctly divined that Americans were yearning to experience once more the emotions of pride and patriotism. Reagan is now running for his place in the history books. Over the past year he has markedly softened his once strident rhetoric toward the Soviets; Reagan wants to be remembered as the President who achieved a verifiable agreement reducing nuclear weapons. Domestically, the deficit Reagan ignored during the campaign is continuing to swell. To shrink it, Reagan is proposing cuts in Government spending even more drastic than those he achieved in 1981 while remaining adamant that the military gets virtually everything it feels it needs. He will require help on Capitol Hill if he is to win those budget cuts, but the Republican Party was unable to convert the President's electoral triumph into any significant strengthening of its representation in Congress. Before long, in any case, the G.O.P. will be divided by a battle for the 1988 nomination. Above all, under the 22nd Amendment Reagan's second term must be his last. To succeed as a lame duck, he will have to revise some familiar assumptions about presidential power and its exercise. But then, he has spent four years doing exactly that. -- By George J. Church THE TERRORIST "We Have Only To Be Lucky Once" He is the Hydra of our day, a multiheaded monster whose many faces, all different, all grotesque, pop up around the globe without hint of their coming. Defined broadly, the terrorist is the perpetrator of political violence, one who, to paraphrase Clausewitz, seeks to extend war by other means. Rarely does the crime itself fulfill the terrorist's dream; it is usually designed to achieve revenge, publicity, leverage or anarchy. The year saw savage terrorists in all their guises, but 1984 also witnessed a clamorous debate over whether and how a government should strike back. Perhaps the most chilling image was the truck bomb, with its driver and vehicle wired to explode to kingdom come. In September, the rig cam hurtling at the U.S. embassy annex in East Beirut, but a well- aimed shot by a bodyguard caused it to blow up short of its main target and kept casualties low. Religious fanaticism played a part in the hijacking of Kuwait Airways Flight 221, when gun-toting youths, their eyes staring coldly out of paper masks, riveted the world's attention on a Tehran tarmac for six days. Affiliations were never declared, but the hoodlums were believed to belong to the Hizballah (Party of God), the shadowy Shi'ite group blamed by some U.S. officials for the Beirut annex assault and the 1983 attacks against the U.S. Marine barracks and the main U.S. embassy in Lebanon. The ugly episode illustrated how terrorism so easily can feed on itself: the hijackers' demand was for the release of 17 fellow terrorists held in Kuwaiti jails. As proof that they were deadly serious, the men killed one American before the answer came; once their ultimatum was rejected, they killed another American. The suspicion still lingers that Iran colluded in the crime or at least did not act swiftly enough to end it. Religious hatred of another sort claimed Indira Gandhi, who was gunned down by two of her own Sikh guards in her tamarind-scented garden on a sunny October morn. She had just bid her guards "Namaste," the gracious Indian salutation accompanied by the crossing of hands before the face. Assassination may be the most invidious of terrorist acts, since the consequences can ricochet disastrously through a country and beyond. Mrs. Gandhi's death produced such a tragedy: some 2,000 Indians perished in the flames of sectarian violence that followed. Fortune proved kinder to Margaret Thatcher, who had just left her bathroom in a Brighton hotel when an I.R.A. bomb demolished four floors of the hotel and damaged the spot where she had been standing minutes before. Terrorism came of high-tech age that night; the explosives had apparently been planted under the floorboards weeks earlier and detonated by a microchip timer. There were other blinding flashes of fear: diplomats cut down on fashionable European streets, mines strewn in the Red Sea, even the awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prizewinner Bishop Desmond Tutu disrupted by a bomb threat. From the elegant Libyan embassy on a leafy London square, a mad spray of gunfire aimed at marching dissidents killed a young British policewoman. Muammar Gaddafi's murderous schemes embarrassed him when Egyptian authorities faked the death of a former Libyan Prime Minister marked for extinction by Tripoli. Gaddafi took responsibility for the assassination that never was. Frustrated by Washington's paralysis in the face of terrorism, Secretary of State George Shultz advocated retaliatory strikes against bomb throwers and gunmen, lest the U.S. become the "Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger preached caution, likening a counterattack to shooting a gun into a crowded theater in the hope of hitting the guilty. That debate is likely to intensify in 1985. Meanwhile, the continuing threat forces leaders into ever tighter cocoons and inflicts on ordinary citizens the alarming realization that all are potential targets for a crazed few. Terrorism kills moderation, trust, courage. It poisons society and invites the response of repression, which can breed further wanton violence. Could there be a scarier pronouncement for 1985 than the one made by the I.R.A. after the failed Thatcher murder? "We have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." -- By James Kelly JOSE NAPOLEON DUARTE Beaten and Banished, He Returned to Rule It is not just that he became El Salvador's first elected civilian President in half a century. Nor that he began peace talks with leftist rebels after five years of convulsive bloodletting. Those achievements, impressive as they are, only hint at why Jose Napoleon Duarte has come to embody the desperate hopes of a nation. His singular quality is his bravery. Duarte's best moment came in October at La Palma, the slumbering mountain town where the first meeting with the guerrillas was held. He spurned the offer of a bulletproof vest and arrived with only a few aides. No armed guards were visible: only Boy and Girl Scouts in shorts and red kerchiefs stood between the President and his enemies. The sight of Duarte strolling the cobbled streets of La Palma captured both the promise and the risk of his presidency. As thousands cheered, their hands reaching out to touch him, Duarte's face creased into a smile. He was showing that he was not afraid to walk among his people unprotected. Such courage is especially admirable in El Salvador where 50,000 people, one out of every 100 citizens, have been killed over the past five years. Murder knows no political allegiance: the right-wing death squads, often linked to the military, have terrorized the country, as have the rebels. Duarte, moreover, was already acquainted with his new job's physical risks. Robbed by fraudulent vote counting of what seemed like certain victory during his first presidential run in 1972, he was severely beaten by Salvadoran soldiers before exiling himself to Venezuela for seven years. His pug face, with its slightly sunken cheeks, still reflects the maulings that crushed the bones beneath his eyes. Duarte not only returned, he returned to run for President again, this time against Roberto d'Aubuisson, a cashiered army major with a brutish past and some unlovely friends. The whispered threats resumed but Duarte persevered through a March election and May runoff to capture 54% of the vote. The U.S. proclaimed Duarte's victory proof of El Salvador's progress toward democracy, but the new President cautioned against great expectations. "Are we going to arrive at perfection?" he asked. "It is a satisfying thought, but I think not. We are human." From his first day in office, Duarte moved on all fronts. He proved an able lobbyist in Washington, charming a reluctant Congress into approving some $200 million in economic and military aid. He shuffled the command of El Salvador's security forces, long considered the breeding ground for the death squads, and watched the number of killings sink from 40 a month to less than a dozen. He assured businessmen, deeply suspicious of his left-leaning economic and social policies, that he would listen to them. Aware that he could not survive in office without the army's allegiance, Duarte asserted his control over the military with the care reserved for a freshly housebroken tiger. He toured barracks and plotted strategy, but always in consultation with the beribboned officers who once ran El Salvador. Basketball may have been Duarte's game in college, but now he played the high-wire artist, poised between his country's extreme right and radical left. His dramatic initiative for peace talks surprised his closest supporters (including Washington) and elicited more than one death threat. A second round of discussions produced rebel demands, quickly rejected, for a new constitution and fresh elections. Progress, if any, will come by inches, but at the least both sides are speaking as well as fighting. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, Duarte's eyes betray an ineffable sadness. It is as if he alone were carrying the burden of his country's past and future. No one knows as well as Duarte how much remains to be done. The economy is still comatose. The war sputters on, always capable of flaring suddenly. And in the end, Duarte must cope not just with the wounds of the past five years but with a tradition of violence that is as old as the country. "The blood of dead peasants has not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the roads," the poet Pablo Neruda once wrote. "A bloody flavor soaks the land, the bread and wine in Salvador." Duarte slowly, cautiously, is trying to cleanse his land. -- By James Kelly GERALDINE FERRARO "Lemme Tell Ya"--And Did She Ever Some people, most of them male, wondered what all the fuss was about, the tears and excitement. How would they have felt, the men, if the rules had been reversed? What if, in the 197 years since the Constitution was written, someone of their sex had never been considered for the job? What if, apart from a male President, they had never seen a male bishop, or chairman of the board of General Motors? They would have felt the way women did before Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to run for Vice President on the Democratic ticket. Excluded. The women's movement, stung by the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, had redoubled its efforts to secure a greater role for women in the nation's political life. The Democratic Convention was the spectacular culmination of those efforts. Women across the country spoke of feeling validated, of being at last included, of simply being proud. That pride grew as it became clear that Ferraro was especially suited to her historic role. Americans wanted her to be perfect, according to a million conflicting definitions of perfection, and of course she fell far short. But she probably came as close to the needs of the task as anybody could have. Her hair, her glasses, her polka-dot dress were all part of an intangible and authentic star quality that transformed a little-known Congresswoman from Queens into a national celebrity. Above all, it was the set of her jaw and the firm, conclusive nod of her head following some statement or other beginning, "Frankly, lemme tell ya," that showed the strength at her core. Ferraro's manner did turn off many voters. But in the end, she went a long way toward convincing all but the most skeptical that she had the right stuff, not only to become the first woman and the first Italian American to run on a major party's national ticket, but to be equal to the stress of being a heartbeat away from the presidency. Continuously under a scrutiny more intense than was ever before applied to a vice-presidential candidate, she made few gaffes and gave no ground. With her candidacy hanging in the balance, she called a press conference to explain her unquestionably sloppy financial dealings and astonished everyone with her grit and control. In her televised debate with George Bush, she maintained a cool gravity and delighted the audience by calmly objecting to the Vice President's apparent condescension. Her campaign was dogged by innuendoes linking her family to organized crime, and she did not hesitate to slug it out. When the tabloid New York Post reported that her parents had once been arrested on gambling charges, the furious Ferraro said Post Publisher Rupert Murdoch "doesn't have the worth to wipe the dirt from under my mother's shoes." Ferraro's own Roman Catholic Church attacked her pro-choice stand on abortion, but she insisted that the decision must be a woman's, not the state's. When heckled by antiabortion activists, she shot back with wisecracks learned on the streets of New York. Throughout, Ferraro remained courageous, tenacious, womanly; she may have lost her temper now and then but never her sense of humor. Some successful women leaders, Margaret Thatcher to name one, are gender neutral: they do not speak for the hopes and concerns of women any more than a male leader would. But Ferraro ran for Vice President as a feminist--and as a symbol of the transformation in the lives of American women over the past 20 years. She realized, as did most American women, that her campaign was a risk. Was the risk worth it? The answer lies not with the result but with the women, and men, who looked at Ferraro and sensed a limitless future for their daughters. Whichever way people voted (and, by and large, they voted against the Democratic ticket, not just 63% of the men but 56% of the women), whether they liked or disliked Ferraro, her campaign probably advanced by at least ten years the full participation of women in the responsibilities and opportunities of the American dream. When she told women, "If we can do this, we can do anything," tens of thousands shouted back, echoing her resolve. Robert Kennedy would quote George Bernard Shaw: "You see things; and you say, `Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, `Why not?'" Democracy depends on those dreams, and on the people like Geraldine Ferraro who are willing to test the question. -- By Jane O'Reilly </body> </article> </text>