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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1953

Woman of the Year:Queen Elizabeth II

Defender of the Faith



    The first Man of 1952 was a Danish-born sea captain named
Henrik Kurt Carlsen. As the New Year rolled in and all the world
watched, he fought alone for the life of his ship Flying
Enterprise against the fury of January seas in the North
Atlantic. For twelve days he fought, but in the end the Flying
Enterprise went down. Captain Carlsen rejected the inevitable
Hollywood contract and modestly disappeared, and the world was
left still searching for a hero.

    In 1952 the world badly wanted a hero as dramatically poised
as the captain to rescue it from an engulfing ocean of doubt.
There were heroes aplenty on the bloody battlefields of 1952, but
their heroism served only to give a sharper sting to the
frustration that already lay on the world. For 1952 was a year in
which the world was officially at peace, but still waged bloody
wars it hopefully called "small" and half-heartedly armed against
the danger of one it would have to call "big." It was a year of
frustration in which the peace talks begun so hopefully in a tent
at Panmunjom were moved to a permanent building -- made to last,
if necessary, for years.

    A-Bombs & a Blonde. The U.S., carrying the main burden of
the war in Korea, was still in 1952 the richest and strongest
nation on earth, richer and stronger than it had ever been, but
even its great strength was not enough. The U.S., like the rest
of the world, was tired of the incubus of permanent crisis, tired
of high taxes, tired of a war that was never done and never won,
tired of the peace dove that was only a clanking phony made in
Moscow. For all its might & main, the U.S. could find no quick
way out.

    At home, the U.S. flexed its great muscles, put everyone to
work, paid them more money, built them more and better houses,
more and fancier cars. Its enterprising suburb builders raised up
almost overnight a new Levittown beside the Delaware River,
bigger at birth than the pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania cities of
York and Lancaster. Its patient medical researchers found drugs
that gave promise of conquering TB and polio. Its impatient
newspaper readers doused themselves inside & out with another
wonder drug, chlorophyll, and followed the Wars of the Roses --
Eleanor and Billy.

    The U.S. cheered the Yankees as they won the World Series,
and Decathloneer Bob Mathias as he shattered his own world record
in the Olympics. It turned a bored ear to science's biggest bang
--the explosion of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific--and sighed in
disillusion when Frank Hayosteck, the note-in-a-bottle Romeo of
Johnstown, Pa., journeyed all the way to Ireland to find his
Breda O'Sullivan and then came home again -- alone. In 1952, the
U.S. rediscovered sports cars and discovered Marilyn Monroe.

    The Man of the Hour. But one event alone occupied the major
attention of the U.S. in 1952. When General Eisenhower, an
authentic hero both at home and abroad, resigned his job as head
of NATO's armies to enter the U.S. political arena, many innocent
Europeans (as well as many informed Americans) took it for
granted that he had been appointed 1952's Man of Destiny, almost
by acclamation. Only a few formalities seemed necessary before
the discredited Truman retired and Ike took over. But Europeans
reckoned without the modes and manners of U.S. politics. Their
best overseas reporters were totally unable to convey to them the
nuances of a campaign in which the Republican candidate was
darkly accused of being a Republican and the Democrat damned for
supporting a Democratic administration.

    In 1952, Americans, too, were getting a new perspective on
their political practices. Seen for the first time through the
pitiless magnifying glass of TV, the business of nominating and
electing a U.S. President was an overwhelming sight, often
stirring, frequently entertaining, sometimes appalling. It was a
new kind of lesson in civics, and a good one. Perhaps it lasted
too long, and shouted too loud. Yet when the sound & fury were
done, and the passion spent, firm stands had been taken and
issues freely debated. Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower,
both able, earnest and sincere candidates, had conducted their
own campaigns on a high level. In the age of the airhop and the
fireside telecast, both candidates had traveled farther and had
been more searchingly inspected by more people than in any other
election in history. On Election Day, Ike piled up the biggest
landslide victory since that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.
Dwight Eisenhower's election was the major news event of 1952. As
a military commander, he had been Man of 1944; in his new
political role, he had every opportunity to become undisputed Man
of 1953.

    Small Maybe. In Western Europe a handful of brave and
patient politicians did their best to fill the bill for 1952 --
Italy's sere and aging Alcide de Gasperi, still holding his
pastepot coalition government together in the face of the largest
Communist parliamentary opposition in Europe; Britain's Winston
Churchill, fighting now not on the beaches and in the hills, but
in the factories and in the shops, to bestir Britain's trade;
Germany's flinty and determined Konrad Adenauer, desperately
fighting to tie his country's destiny to the West: France's busy
Bookkeeper Antoine Pinay, standing bulldog guard for 9 1/2 months
on the national budget like a Normandy farmwife, before at last
giving up.

    Western Europe in 1952 was eating better and keeping warmer.
The Schuman Plan to pool its coal and steel industries was at
last under way. Its defenses at year's end were still a good 10%
below what the generals in charge thought a "vital minimum," but
they had advanced far beyond the paper armies of two years ago.
"Certo it is," said one Italian laborer last week, between talk
of a football lottery and the price of bread, "that war is no
nearer this year than it was last, and maybe -- I say it with the
smallest of maybes -- it is farther away."

    In many ways, 1952 might be called the Year of the Generals.
The entrenched ones, like Stalin and Franco and Mao and Tito,
held their familiar sway. Others came to power; in coups d'etat
(Egypt's Naguib and Cuba's Batista) or in honest elections
(Greece's Papagos and in the U.S., Eisenhower). The generals held
the headlines; so much so that, to the hurried reader, the manner
of a nation's defense too often seemed more important than who
and what was being defended. The rise of the generals reflected a
felt need for decisiveness and a longing, often unstated, for
something to put one's faith in. In such a time, the Man of the
Year had to be one who could restore lost faith to a troubled
people, and to serve (perhaps longer than generals can) as
custodian of that faith. In 1952, such a symbol of faith was not
a man at all, but a woman: a shy, dedicated, determined 26-year-
old who came to the throne of Great Britain in February.

    Magical Power. It was not the fact of her being Queen that
made Elizabeth II the Woman of 1952. That year had no more
respect for the governance of kings than for the government of
politicians. It saw one king, Egypt's fat and frolicsome Farouk,
bundled unceremoniously off his throne without a single subject
to raise his hand in protest. It saw another, King Paul of
Greece, resoundingly rebuked at the polls for daring to oppose
his people in their choice of a new Prime Minister.

    1952 also saw the well-meaning but ineffectual Shah of Iran
hissed by his subjects and hamstrung by the wizened old weeper
Mossadegh, who had done his best (or well-intended worst) to
bring the whole world to a standstill in 1951. It saw Elizabeth
herself succeed to a throne long since shorn of its last vestige
of political power, to reign over a Commonwealth whose only union
was in tradition and assent.

    What, then, was Elizabeth's significance? It was no more --
and no less -- than