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                                                                              ╚January 4, 1971 

Man of the Year 

Willy Brandt -- On the Road to a New Reality



     The setting: The Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, January 1871:
In the palace of the Bourbons, the rulers of Germany's 25
independent and quarrelsome states gather to savor the fruits
of their victory over France's armies. The Franco-Prussian War
has given the Germans something that eluded them for centuries
-- unity. As the architect of that unity, Count Otto von
Bismarck looks on, gripping the long spike of his Prussian
helmet, while Prussia's King Wilhelm proclaims the establishment
of the German Empire. Historian Thomas Carlyle hails the German
victory in a letter to the Times of London: "That noble,
patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should be at length
welded into a nation and become Queen of the Continent instead
of vaporing, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless
and oversensitive France seems to me the hopefullest public fact
that has occurred in my time."

     The setting: The Old Jewish Ghetto, Warsaw, December, 1970:
His broad, ruggedly handsome face etched with lines of concern,
West Germany's Chancellor Willy Brandt walks slowly to the
simple granite slab that memorializes the 500,000 Jews from the
city's ghetto who were massacred by the Germans during World War
II. For a moment he stands with bowed head, enveloped in silence
except for the soft hiss of two gas-fed candelabra. Then, as if
to atone for Germany's sins against its neighbors, Brandt falls
to his knees. "No people," as Willy Brandt has said, "can escape
from their history."

     Each tableau represents a turning point in the history of
Europe -- and of the world. Contrary to Carlyle's bright hopes,
a united and powerful Germany proved neither noble nor patient.
Twice Bismarck's heirs burst across their borders in cataclysmic
wars that ended with two new superpowers, the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, facing each other across a divided continent --
a division dramatically symbolized by the hideous masonry of the
Berlin Wall. A quarter of a century after World War II, no
European peace treaty has been written, and, in a very real
sense, the results of the war have not been resolved. Willy
Brandt is in effect seeking to end World War II by bringing
about a fresh relationship between East and West. He is trying
to accept the real situation in Europe, which has lasted for 25
years, but he is also trying to bring about a new reality in his
bold approach to the Soviet Union and the East bloc.

     In the East, the situation has been frozen by Communist
leaders who feared that contact with the West would undermine
their hold on their people. In the West, Bonn made detente
impossible by refusing to acknowledge the loss of a huge chuck
of its land to Poland and by stridently insisting that it would
absorb East Berlin's Communist regime in an eventual German
reunification. Willy Brandt is the first West German statesman
willing to accept the complete consequences of defeat: the lost
lands, the admission of moral responsibility, and
acknowledgement of Germany's participation. In the process, he
is also challenging the Communist countries to expand their
dealings with the West, and indirectly, to allow wider freedom
for their own people.

     While most political leaders in 1970 were reacting to
events rather than shaping them, Brandt stood out as an
innovator. He has projected the most exciting and hopeful vision
for Europe since the Iron Curtain crashed down. Using West
Germany's considerable strategic and economic leverage, he is
trying to bring about an enlarged and united Western Europe,
which would remain closely allied with the U.S. but would also
have sufficient self-confidence and independence to form close
ties with the Communist nations. It is a daring vision, full
of opportunity and danger, rekindling the dreams of unity that
have inspired Europeans from Charlemagne to Napoleon. It may
not be realized for a long time, if ever. But by holding it up
as a goal for all Europeans, Willy Brandt emerged as 1970's Man
of the Year.

     Although the U.S. has been preoccupied for nearly a decade
with Indochina and the Middle East, Europe is still the crucial
continent, the arena where the great dangers and opportunities
exist and where the ultimate balance between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union may well be decided. Neither Washington nor Moscow
could retain its pre-eminence in the world without maintaining
close ties with Europe. Despite Japan's soaring economic might
and China's waxing nuclear arsenal, Europe alone posses the
talented population, economic power, technological skills, and
geographic position to rank, along with the U.S. and Russia, in
the triad of world powers. Thus Willy Brandt's role in 1970
had great significance for America.

     Oddly Primitive. The year was the first of a new decade,
a cusp of the future. Yet in the U.S. in many ways, the future
seemed to have gone temporarily underground. Nineteen seventy
had a certain retrograde quality, nostalgic in its styles, oddly
primitive in its politics. Women's fashions reverted to an
elaboration of the late 40's, the U.S. presidency in some ways
to a modified edition of the '50's, and radicalism either to an
older silence or to a black-power Bakuninism of the 19th
century. The Woman's Liberation movement bloomed, ultimately
somewhat damaged by its own exaggerations and excesses.

     The political currents alternated between passion and
anticlimax. After President Nixon sent American troops into
Cambodia at the end of April, a spasm of outrage seized the
nation's college campuses, and emotion redoubled when the Ohio
National Guard killed four Kent State University students. Yet
a great many of the U.S. students who so passionately vowed to
change the system from within by working in political campaigns
never appeared in the fall.

     A small group of radicals in the U.S. made explosive
gestures that largely alienated them from the sizable force of
the nonviolent disaffected. A graffito observed at the
University of Wisconsin: Radicals Are Nothing More Than Excited
Moralists. Nine of the 16 portraits on the FBI's expanded Most
Wanted List were those of political radicals. The Weathermen
were in hiding. Angela Davis was captured at a Howard Johnson's
motel in Manhattan. Many leaders of the Black Panthers were on
trial, in Algerian exile -- or dead. Celebrants of Woodstock
became the survivors of Atlamont, the California rock festival
that ended in a knifing death, and the depredations of the drug
culture clouded Aquarian visions -- Janis Joplin and Jimi
Hendrix, both cultural heroes for the young, fatally overdosed
themselves with drugs. The hippie Camelot promised by Charles
Reich in The Greening of America seemed, if anything, to be
receding over the horizon.

     As Richard Nixon reduced the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam
to 339,200, the war cooled as an issue, to be revived only in
episodes like the raid on the North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war
camp at Son Tay, which called into question the intelligence
procedures of the U.S. military. Americans were much more
preoccupied with a recession-cum-inflation that raised the
unemployment rate to 5.8%, the highest level since 1963, and
firmly resisted Nixon's best monetary and fiscal prescriptions.

The consumer movement championed by Ralph Nader gathered
strength, often in alliance with the year's overriding cause,
ecology.

     In the off-year election campaigns, Nixon invested an
extraordinary amount of his prestige. He commissioned Vice
President Spiro Agnew, already a rhetorical event in American
politics, to go forth as the G.O.P.'s scourge. Agnew's
campaign, calculatedly outrageous, won headlines but not votes,
and ended by alienating and irritating many of the voters. The
Republicans suffered a net loss of 13 governorships and nine
seats in the House, and gained only a probable two seats in the
Senate, where the Democrats reta