Others Who Stood in the Spotlight

Launching a Domestic Counterrevolution

It was a virtuoso performance. Exploiting the stunning election victory that made him TIME’S Man of the Year for 1980, Ronald Reagan launched a conservative counterrevolution, changing the direction of American government more drastically than any other President in half a century. Not even the bullet from a would-be assassin’s gun that pierced his left lung on March 30 could slow his initial momentum.

Reagan conceived, lobbied for and won huge budget cuts, slowing the growth rate of federal spending and shrinking some social programs that had been expanding irresistibly since the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He also won a startling 23%, three-year cut in income tax rates. Reagan exerted the greatest mastery over Congress that any President has displayed since Lyndon Johnson. The Great Communicator skillfully convinced the public on TV, and legislators in one-on-one chats, that only by reducing the size of government and stimulating productivity in the private economy could inflation be curbed and healthy economic growth resume. Democrats and liberals wailed that Reagan’s program was savaging the poor and unduly rewarding the rich, but they could not come anywhere near mustering the public support that the President commanded.

It remains to be seen whether Reagan has devised the right combination for the economy. Inflation is abating somewhat, but the nation has stumbled into a recession that Reagan admitted he had not foreseen. The combined impact of the recession and the tax cuts threatens disastrous budget deficits that Reagan has not yet found any persuasive way to shrink.

Though Reagan dominated domestic affairs, the same cannot be said of his handling of foreign policy issues. His strident anti-Soviet rhetoric increased cold war jitters. Using all his political wile the clout, the President won grudging Senate assent for the sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia. The victory staved off what would have been a humiliating public defeat but did little to advance any coherent U.S. strategy for bringing peace to the Middle East.

The Administration’s most imaginative proposal, embracing the “zero option”. in talks with the U.S.S.R. on reduction of nuclear arms in Europe, may not survive the Polish crisis. At home, the troubles of Budget Boss David Stockman, National Security Adviser Richard Allen and Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan pointed up the thinness of talent in the Administration: the supporting cast is not of the same caliber as the star.

Looking ahead to 1982, Reagan still has the initiative in dealing with the disorganized congressional Democrats. But, to use a show-biz term that the President would appreciate, his own whirlwind first year has given him a tough act to follow. He may not be able to top it.

Inspiring a Ravenous Curiosity

She uttered no sweeping pronouncements or stern warnings; she neither applauded nor deplored. She kept her views on the age’s pressing problems to herself. She simply said, “Yes, quite promptly,” one day last February, and much of the world immediately fell in love.

Lady Diana Spencer’s sudden, glittering celebrity was achieved, of course, with a little help from her friend. Prince Charles’ intended could have looked like a dog’s breakfast and still become famous. But from the moment the engagement was announced, it was obvious that the Prince had chosen a young woman who would not just glow with the pale reflected fire of the British royal family. Lady Diana, in brief, was a scene-stealing showstopper. She had terrific bone structure and good enough breeding, an exfoliating family tree that linked her; at varying removes, to kings and nobles, Sir Winston Churchill and eight U.S. Presidents, including George Washington. Something old, something new: glowing skin, feathered, backswept hair. She looked like a pinup, but one that demanded an ormolu frame and a place in the drawing room, above the mantel and next to the shelf of leather-bound first editions.

And then there was The Dress, a black silk-taffeta affair, strapless, cut very, very low. Shy Di wore it on her first formal appearance as fiancee of the Prince of Wales; as she bent over to get out of a Rolls-Royce limousine, flashbulbs popped, spectators gasped and gravity hung, for an instant, in the balance.

That may have been the point at which intense public interest turned into ravenous curiosity. In any case, nothing has yet satiated it, not the spectacular July wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral, not the long and largely secluded honeymoon, not the announcement that the Princess of Wales is pregnant. Diana remains “the Top of the Royal Pops,” the best newspaper-circulation draw in Britain. She sat next to the throne at the formal opening of Parliament last November, and the assembled M.P.s only had eyes for her.

Photographers have not yet actually elbowed the Queen aside in pursuit of the Princess, but as she watched one typical paparazzi-like scramble, Elizabeth II was overheard to remark, “I know who you want.” Mused Daily Mirror Feature Writer John Edwards over the monarchy upstaged: “Some day this is going to get embarrassing.” In December, the Queen tried to put a damper on Dianamania. In an unusual move, she invited Britain’s top news executives to Buckingham Palace and urged them to curb intrusive photographers. The royal motive was not jealousy but motherly concern; a daughter-in-law from a quiet, sheltered background was being hounded out of her rightful remaining privacies.

A compromise will take time and, given the surviving habits of British civility, will probably succeed. Diana should some day be able to pop out to a sweets shop and buy a tube of fruit gums without making the front page of a tabloid. In the meantime, she is putting a distinctive personal stamp on her public appearances. Morning sickness forced her to cancel a few, but when she appears, she is poised, gracious, increasingly at ease and dressed to kill. She favors ruffles, plumed hats, capes, rich colors that might have been lifted from a medieval tapestry. Age cannot wither, nor the British monarchy frump, her infinite variety.

That, at least, is the hope and a major part of her appeal. In the course of eleven months she changed from single girl to engaged woman to bride and Princess to wife and mother-to-be of an heir to the throne: a fresh, enchanting face pledged to the long future of happily ever after. She brought youth and beauty and class to a year that needed them all. Most important, she came to stay.

Wounding Society’s Sense of Order

Assassination: no other crime so thoroughly wrenches the world to attention. The killer squeezes a trigger (the gunfire always surprising bystanders with its weightless pop! pop!), and civilization itself seems to scramble hysterically before him. For an instant, the assassin’s life of brooding impotence is stood on its head: he has at last obliged the powerful to take him into account.

The year’s attacks on world leaders came with almost seasonal regularity: before time had diminished the shock of one shooting, another occurred. First, on a mild spring afternoon in Washington, John Hinckley fired his pipsqueak’s .22 at Ronald Reagan for reasons meaningful only to himself; then, in the sun of St. Peter’s Square, Mehmet Ali Agca, forging a new category of hatefulness, gunned down Pope John Paul II; finally, during an autumn celebration of Egypt’s military might, four Islamic fanatics ran from out of the orderly pomp toward President Anwar Sadat, grenades and automatic fire flying.

Those three shocking assaults had an almost theatrically pat iconography: Reagan in a business suit, the very picture of the political order; John Paul in his papal robes of immaculate white; Sadat, the erect warrior, in a field marshal’s gold-braided blue uniform. All the victims were over 60; each was attacked by a man in his 20s. Raised in suburban ease, Hinckley had just drifted away, aimless and alone, gorging on fast food in rented rooms and fantasizing a love affair with a teenage movie star. It was to command this dream girl’s attention that he shot the President. Awaiting trial early this year, at which his lawyers will plead insanity, Hinckley, alone in a Maryland stockade cell, now has only himself to hurt; twice he has attempted suicide. Agca, after a boyhood of rural Turkish poverty, attended two universities and eventually joined a gang of young fascist thugs in Istanbul. In their thrall he became a practiced assassin two years before his descent on Rome. Agca’s motive was nominally political (“A protest against imperialism,” he claimed) but had only the hermetic coherence of the demented. Said the Italian prosecutor of Agca, who is now serving a life sentence in a provincial prison: “We peered into his heart for a sign of humanity, but found none.”

The four killers of Sadat were fanatics, but not loners. Twenty other Muslim fundamentalists went on trial with them, and possibly hundreds more conspired. The West grieved, perhaps more than his countrymen did, for the loss of Sadat’s vision and will. Yet the peace process he began, with an act of statesmanlike courage, struggles on under his discreet, cautious successor.

That telling fact appears to justify Benjamin Disraeli’s seemingly callous judgment that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” Yet even the unsuccessful killer wounds society’s sense of reason and order.

Lives are lived amid the crackle of news, not in the dispassionate wash of history; big-picture reassurance cannot buffer the jolt of that next, frantic bulletin.

And there were other bulletins, of assassinations tried and of some that succeeded. Italy endured 23 political murders. The much loved President of Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, was gunned down by disgruntled soldiers. Ireland’s burned-out firebrand, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, was shot seven times and lived. In West Germany, a state economics minister was shot as he slept, and died. In December, there were worldwide alerts about hit men contracted to kill Reagan by Libya’s unfathomable Muammar Gaddafi. Assassination jitters seemed epidemic. After such a year, it was easy to understand why.

Blazing the Way to the High Frontier

Not often do machines, in themselves, capture the imagination of mankind. But shortly after dawn on Sunday, April 12, Americans shared a moment of pride and wonder as a spaceship, unlike any other ever built, rose from its Florida launch pad with a dramatic roar, its twin, solid-fuel rockets belching pillars of fire. Snub-nosed and stubby-winged, the strange, 122-ft.-long craft was Columbia, the world’s first space shuttle. Nearly ten years in the making, three years behind schedule and 30% over budget, the $10 billion machine’s maiden flight was nonetheless the technological feat of the year.

Nothing quite like “the marvel,” as U.S. astronauts nicknamed the shuttle, had ever flown before. Not the Apollo moon ships, not the cavernous scientific outpost called Skylab, not the increasingly sophisticated space stations lofted by the Soviets. The shuttle is a hybrid, a cross between a rocket ship and a winged aircraft. After looping the earth 36 times, it did not splash into the sea, never to be used again. Under the control of its computers and the skilled hands of its bespectacled commander, John Young, then 50, a veteran Navy test pilot, it glided to a breathtakingly smooth landing on the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Seven months later, the good ship Columbia climbed into orbit again, becoming the first spacecraft to fly more than once.

To a remarkable extent, the nation shared in the success of the astronauts and the thousands of technicians and engineers who helped put together the world’s most intricate flying machine. In classrooms, offices and factories, work virtually ceased as all eyes focused on every available television set. Columbia seemed almost propelled by shouts of jubilation and encouragement. Humbled by the assaults on their vaunted manufacturing skills by a made-in-Japan flood of fuel-efficient cars and dazzling electronic gadgetry, Americans saw in the shuttle, along with last year’s spectacular flyby of Saturn by the robot Voyager 2, reassuring evidence that the U.S. was still supreme in at least one area of high technology: the new frontier of space.

What made the shuttle so significant is that it is the world’s first space cargo ship, capable of lofting into low-earth orbit up to 65,000 lbs. of satellites, scientific and military hardware and, perhaps most important of all, components for permanent bases in space. The shuttle makes it possible to move beyond the exploration of space to its exploitation for the world’s benefit. Columbia ‘s distant successors, for example, might help set up gravity-free factories or large solar arrays that convert sunlight into electricity for earth. Said NASA’s new boss, James Beggs: “With the shuttle and the other extensions of our intelligence that we have sent into space, we have begun a voyage of discovery that may never end.”

None of these things will come easily. Throughout its long development, Columbia was plagued with troubles. The main engines failed repeatedly during test firings; many of the shuttle’s 31,000 silica tiles, designed to shield the orbiter against the fiery heat of re-entry (up to 2,300° F), fell off during nothing more perilous .than the shuttle’s piggyback cross-country ride atop a 747.

During the countdown for the second mission, some waxy gunk clogged two crucial auxiliary power units (NASA, it turned out, had neglected to change the oil). Then, shortly after another flawless takeoff, one of Columbia’s three electrical generators developed a hitch. NASA cautiously curtailed the stay in space from a scheduled five days to only two.

In the end, all that was irrelevant. Columbia had flown. And Americans, witnesses to another landmark event in the 20-year history of man in space, could share the enthusiasm of Astronaut Bob Crippen, as he watched the earth recede:

“What a feeling! What a view!”