MAN OF THE YEAR: We Belong to the West

(See Cover)

On a mild morning last April, a band of dignitaries gathered before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. In the place of honor stood a tall old man whose somber mask of a face looked stiffly ahead. Before him, stretching to the hilltop, was an array of granite pillars, blocks and crosses — the graves of Americans who had died in two wars with Germany. Behind him fluttered the black, red and gold flag of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The U.S. Army band sounded The Star-Spangled Banner. Then it broke into the measured strains of Deutschland über Alles. “This,” murmured the old man, “is a turning point in history.”

More dramatically than headline or speech or essay, the music symbolized an amazing story. In 1953, only eight years after the shame, horror and impotence of defeat in mankind’s bloodiest war, Germany came back. It was a world power once more. More than any other, the person who brought this about was the stolid old man who stood in Arlington, visibly moved by the strains of his national anthem echoing among the tombstones. He was Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the West German Republic, apostle of United Europe, 1953’s Man of the Year.

Konrad Adenauer had already guided the hated land of the Hun and the Nazi back to moral respectability and had earned himself a seat in the highest councils of the Western powers. Though she still lacked a formal peace treaty, and the Iron Curtain fenced her off from half her land and from 18 million countrymen, Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany last year emerged as the strongest country on the Continent save Soviet Russia.

Her conquerors wooed her for her favors. Neighbors who had helped defeat her so short a time ago talked fearfully once more of her new strength and her even greater potential. Her economy glowed with health. Her products cascaded into the world’s markets. In September came an election which the whole world nervously watched, to see whether the oil of democracy could mix with the vinegar of German authoritarianism. The West German voters swept all their Communists and Nazis out of national office and overwhelmingly put their faith in the dedicated, firm-handed democrat, Konrad Adenauer. No longer the passive object of other forces, Germany in 1953 was again one of the formidable forces of history and Konrad Adenauer one of history’s makers.

“This year,” said the Man of the Year, “is the year in which the re-emergence of Germany . . . changed the world picture.”

Exhilaration in the Valleys. It was a year to alter the riverbanks of history. A cease-fire without victory quieted Korea, but it was still the quiet of the dormant volcano. Mankind’s greatest tyrant died; his death touched off a lupine scuffle for succession in the Kremlin and opened a new and unpredictable era for the tyranny Joseph Stalin fixed on half the globe. Radioactive dust particles borne east in a cloud from Siberia told the outside world that Russia, too, had plumbed the secret of the thermonuclear bomb and could now visit instantaneous death on the obscurest cranny of civilization. Yet somehow, in the year in which he learned that a mere handful of chemicals could blast his world to smithereens, the average man of the free world seemed to conclude that the peril of general war had lessened.

It was also a year in which a white man and a brown man, held together by a light nylon rope, climbed the highest mountain. In this feat of the New Zealand beekeeper, Edmund Hillary, and the sinewy Sherpa tribesman, Tenzing, millions down in the mundane valleys felt a vicarious exhilaration—the reminder that by valor and dedication man may surmount his Everests.

In the streets of East Berlin, a camera shutter caught for posterity the proof that man of 1953, on city streets and against the odds, would risk everything for freedom: two brave youths fought off Soviet army tanks with stones. It was June 17—the day East Germans rose up against their Communist oppressors across their barbed-wire land, the day that showed that the Red monolith might some day crack.

In the U.S., the Big Change came—after 20 years. The Democrats packed out and the Republicans moved in. Dwight Eisenhower rode down Pennsylvania Avenue and into the White House on a surge of immense popularity and high hopes. His popularity continued high throughout 1953, but he did not choose to invoke it openly, and it remained in reserve, like troops uncommitted to battle. His major achievement (whose effects will be measured in 1954) was in the field he knew best: a vast readjustment of the U.S. military to the age of the atom. In practical politics, a field he knew less about and felt a soldier’s distaste for, he had yet to make his mark. He had yet to harness the divergent wills and pressures within the Republican Party, and command them, but the signs at 1953’s end were that he was prepared. His task was made more difficult, perhaps postponed, by the death in July of Ohio’s Robert A. Taft, the Republicans’ great Senate leader and selfless counselor of the man who had defeated him for the presidential nomination.

Not for what he accomplished, but for the noise he made, Senator Joe McCarthy was the most discussed man of 1953. His name became an epithet to millions, a cheer to countless others. In 1953, McCarthyism crossed the twelve-mile limit and became an international word, widely understood around the world to mean a cynical exploitation of genuine fears, a studied contempt for fair play, a cunning talent for concealing failures by loudly baying after new victims. Too many abroad, urged on by a U.S. press that would leave no word of McCarthy unrecorded—no matter how outlandish—took him as their image of the American statesman and overemphasized his influence.

Rollin’ Along. The republic, though, was in condition to survive McCarthy and McCarthyism. Though business pulses slowed a bit here & there, never had production been so high or prosperity so great. The American of 1953 was still living on top of the world, and, as the song says, just rollin’ along. In this age of managers and machines, of complexities and coordinators, this was the achievement of many, not one (see BUSINESS).

It was also the 50th anniversary of man’s first powered flight, and it was celebrated by two Americans, first Scott Crossfield, flying at 1,327 m.p.h., then the Air Force’s Major “Chuck” Yeager, ripping through the substratosphere at more than 1,600 m.p.h., 2½ times the speed of sound. In sport, Casey Stengel of the New York Yankees became baseball’s first manager to win five consecutive World Series championships. Native Dancer, a big grey horse with the legs of a champion and the inbred ham of a Barrymore. teamed with TV to make horse-racing fans out of millions who did not know a fetlock from a padlock. The year brought reminders of previous champions: Jim Jeffries died; so did Bill Tilden and Jim Thorpe. Handy Earl Sande, 54, and hard up for eating money, cinched on a saddle and tried for a comeback (but booted home only one winner). And in the biggest sweep since Bobby Jones’s “grand slam” in 1930, Ben Hogan wrapped up the three big titles of golf, to become sport’s Man of the Year.

It was also the year of 3-D, Cinema-Scope, Cinerama, big screen, stereophonic sound and other technical tricks designed to make Marilyn Monroe look 64 feet long (couchant) and intended to lure back, by sheer gigantism, the public that had been lost to 17-inch TV screens. This too was sometimes called progress.

The year’s obituary list, not even counting Joe Stalin and Bob Taft, was forbiddingly distinguished: Eugene O’Neill, the greatest playwright the U.S. had produced; Welshman Dylan Thomas, the best young poet in the English language; Sergei Prokofiev, Russia’s great composer; General Jonathan Wainwright, hero of Bataan; Mayor Ernst Reuter, hero of the cold-war battle of Berlin; Saudi Arabia’s fabulous King Ibn Saud; Britain’s redoubtable Queen Mary.

Empire Troubles. Asia, with its short-fused peace in Korea, its seemingly unwinnable war in Indo-China, and its tendency to fear a dying colonialism more than an expansive Communism, remained the hot battlefield of the cold war. Appropriately, it had not one Man of the Year but three—men diverse in almost every respect: Jawaharlal Nehru, the exasperating high priest of neutralism; Ramon Magsaysay, the young and dynamic, U.S.-loving man of action who became President of the Philippines; wrinkled old Syngman Rhee of Korea, the angry ally of the West. Syngman Rhee’s intractability towards his allies, and his ruthless quelling of domestic rivals, led many to dismiss his great claim to distinction: without his half-century fight for liberty and his stouthearted hatred of Communism, there would have been no South Korea to save.

The British Commonwealth crowned its Queen in elegance that momentarily revived a great past and lifted spirits. But the vast realm over which she reigns trembled again with the ague of disintegration—the Sudan broke away, all colonial Africa throbbed with the presence or possibility of violence and shouts for independence. The Queen was Britain’s Woman of the Year; Britain’s Man was clearly its great, aging, political chieftain, newly knighted Sir Winston Churchill.

The new Red Empire quavered uncertainly at the change of rulers. The cerebral hemorrhage that killed Stalin—if that is what did it—assuredly left behind the man of some future year. Perhaps he was Georgy Malenkov, the suety, waxen-faced Great Russian who donned the dictator’s mantle. But perhaps it was another, Nikita Khrushchev, Marshal Zhukov, or some figure still invisible to the eye of the outside world. One it was not: Lavrenty Beria, b. 1899, d. 1953 at the hands of the executioner.

Communism’s Men of 1953 were not its leaders, but its subjects. At home the Kremlin was harassed by the restlessness of the Soviet masses and a serious crisis in agriculture. Abroad, it suffered sharp setbacks—an armistice that acknowledged its failure in Korea, the uprisings in East Germany, a rash of troubles in the other East European satellites, the stunning psychological defeat in the explanation tents of Panmunjom.

Creatures of Destiny. It was a year in which the so-called big powers, Eastern and Western alike, seemed less the shapers of destiny than its creatures. The change in the hands which governed the two greatest powers brought a strange sense of indecisiveness to world affairs. The strain of the cold war brought hesitations and serious arguments to the Western Alliance. The dawning of the thermonuclear age, with its talk of megaton bombs (equal to 1,000,000 tons of TNT), cast great and sudden doubt on the validity of the thinking and the plans of statesmen and diplomats and soldiers. Both sides were caught in a sort of pause, to re-examine and to retool. It was in this atmosphere of confusion, holding back and reassessment that the unhesitant, unconfused, unswerving re-emergence of West Germany made its mark on 1953.

Energy, Ambition, Work. Like so many turning points, it was a long time in the reaching, but it was a shorter time than even the most sanguine German had a right to expect when he crawled from the smoking rubble one day in 1945 to learn that the Nazi Reich was no more. And, as with most great, historic turns, it was made possible by countless events. There was the decay of the wartime Alliance, Russia’s shortsighted intransigence in the German occupation. There was the West’s decision to form one unified country of West Germany without waiting for a peace treaty. There was the Berlin blockade, which jolted the West into the urgency of rearmament; the Korean war, which shocked it into the decision that it needed German troops as well. There was some $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Germany. There was the privilege of concentrating on building industries and markets while West Germany’s conquerors bent to the ordeal of arming themselves. There were the uprisings in East Germany. Above all, there was the happy combination of energy, ambition, and respect for work which distinguishes the German.

In this mixture of happenstance, deliberate policy, improvised decisions and national persistence can be found the explanation for the speed of West Germany’s comeback. But the ideas and leadership of Konrad Adenauer explain, more than anything else, the character of the comeback.

When the Western Allies stumbled upon him right after V-E Day, Konrad Adenauer was just an old man in a high, starched collar, stern and vigorous and proud, already well into the twilight of his life. In his three-score-and-ten, his homeland had soared and sunk through two great historical phases and entered a third. Two of these phases Konrad Adenauer had lived out in a routine of efficient ordinariness and relative obscurity. He was born (Jan. 5, 1876) in the age of Bismarck; he was already 42 when the Kaiser fell. Through the sad days of the Weimar Republic and the ugly early days of Naziism he was respected as veteran mayor of Cologne and a wily politician, until he was forced out of office by the Nazis, for whom he showed nothing but flinty scorn. Had he died at 70, he would not have rated a paragraph in most U.S. newspapers.

He lived not only to see a third phase of German history, but to mold it.

He Will Have It. “I remember a meeting of the Cologne municipal council in 1918,” Adenauer wrote recently. “As mayor, I wanted to see the old fortifications circling the city replaced not by factories or houses crowded together, but by a refreshing green girdle of parks. No one on the council agreed. I began to feel that I would have to capitulate. Then … I went all the way in marshaling my data . . . After I had presented the facts at several meetings, all the councilmen but one were convinced. Finally, that one rose and said: ‘Let him have his way—he will have it anyhow!'”

Germans, Western occupiers and Russian antagonists have all since learned to know how that lone Cologne holdout felt. To the occupiers, Adenauer has proved a rugged bargainer—tireless, insistent, all but immovable. “We are not an African tribe,” he snapped one day, “but a Central European nation proud of its country.” On another occasion: “It was the German army and not the German people that capitulated, and this the world had better remember.” One day in 1949, when Adenauer visited U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, the two men fell into a Gaston & Alphonse routine at the door. “After you, Chancellor,” said McCloy, “I’m at home here.” A chill smile flickered on Adenauer’s flat, leathery face. “No, no,” said he, “after you, Mr. McCloy.”

To Germans he also talked sternly. When they complained of occupation pressures, or of the slowness of Allied decontrol, he stopped them with one indignant question: “Who do you think won the war?” He preached: “We must part with concepts of the past. When you fall from the heights as we Germans have, you realize it is necessary to break with what has been. We cannot live fruitfully with lost illusions. I do not believe in fairy tales.”

Christians Hold Together. What Adenauer does believe is the key to the strategy he has followed to reconstruct Germany and to promote the construction of Europe. He believes that:

¶ A Christian civilization must hold together politically or perish before Communism.

¶ West Germany would be swallowed up as a Red satellite if it tried to remain neutral and play Russia against the West.

¶ West Germany must some day be reunited with the German land east of the Iron Curtain, but that day will come only when the Western world stands strong enough to force—without war—a Soviet withdrawal from Central Europe. He refuses to recognize the Oder-Neisse frontier, but is ready to promise not to cross it with troops.

¶ West Germany must earn the West’s trust and confidence by demonstrating that its lesson has been learned in the two disastrous German adventures of the 20th century.

¶ Germany still cannot be trusted to rearm by itself. “It is no secret,” said a close associate, “that he considers Prussians savage and dangerous.”

¶ Nevertheless, the rearmament of Germany is inevitable; if it is not armed as a part of a supranational army, with controls on its size and use, then it will be armed with a new national Wehrmacht.

¶ Far greater than the need for German troops is Europe’s need to unite—politically, militarily and psychologically—those historic antagonists in war, Germany and France.

“I deem it false … to speak of German rearmament,” Adenauer said not long ago. “This is an expression which has no place in those new forms toward which we are striving. We want nothing of the old. We do not want to restore a national army.”

By “those new forms,” Adenauer means the European Defense Community. The idea came, providentially, from France. Germans could not propose it without risking the impression that it was simply a cunning maneuver to unlock the occupation shackles and revive the Wehrmacht. But when the enemy from across the Rhine proposed it in 1950, Konrad Adenauer could more easily champion it.

The Dream Fades. The U.S. made EDC the core of its European policy. Britain supported it. Italy could hardly wait to approve it. The Benelux countries got behind it.

But by 1953, the clear dream had clouded over. The sharp-beaked vagaries of politics tore at the men who did most to shape and promote the EDC idea. First, down went Good European Robert Schuman, France’s longtime Foreign Minister. He was thrown aside because France, tortured by division and illusion, turned in confusion and fear from its own brain child. Next went Good European Alcide de Gasperi, and Italy’s ratification became questionable. The death of Stalin, and Churchill’s insistence on sounding out the dictator’s successor, gave the French more opportunity to haggle and hesitate. The EDC idea was close to dying.

Then came West Germany’s time to decide. EDC meant several unpalatable things to Germans. Two disasters in half a century had been enough; thousands wanted never to bear arms again. On the other side, Nationalists balked at joining hands with the French, and oldtime professional soldiers seethed at the “disgrace” of banning for good the Wehrmacht and General Staff. Joining in with the West, they argued, might turn the East-West German boundary into a 38th parallel and Germany into another Korea. It might seal off forever the Communist-held lands to the East. Would it not be smarter, more comfortable, less dangerous, to stay uncommitted and play off the fears of both sides?

Across West Germany, tireless, graven-faced Konrad Adenauer campaigned bluntly on the issue of United Europe. His main opponents, the Socialists, bluntly campaigned against it. Germans had a clear-cut choice. “Our country,” said Adenauer, “is the point of tension between two world blocs . . . Long ago I made a great decision: we belong to the West and not to the East . . . Isolation is an idea created by fools. It would mean that the U.S. would withdraw its troops from Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, the moment that happens, Germany will become a satellite.”

On Sept. 6, the people of West Germany walked up to two doors to the future. Which would they choose? Western diplomats, disheartened by the fall of Schuman and De Gasperi, guessed timidly that Adenauer and the dream of Europe would squeak through—but barely. But the old man in the high, starched collar simply rode up to his Rhondorf home, went off to Sunday Mass, left orders not to be disturbed, and at day’s end turned in for a long night’s sleep.

The Flag of Europe. The results astounded even composed Konrad Adenauer. From the historic election, no party was left strong enough to challenge Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, and no person or bloc within the Christian Democrats was left strong enough to challenge Konrad Adenauer. When his followers gathered at the Chancellery steps next morning to salute him, Adenauer smiled his thoughtful, deep-frozen smile. “Perhaps,” said he, “we have won by a little too much.”

Adenauer’s victory was a victory for Europe, and the West’s big cold-war success of 1953. When the striped German flag was raised in post-election triumph above the Chancellor’s Palais Schaumburg, the green and white flag of European unity was run up alongside it. “The elections,” said Konrad Adenauer, “have decided that Europe will come about, that the EDC will come about, and that the cold war is lost for Russia.”

By 1953’s end, his certainty was not so widely snared. France might or might not ratify EDC. But Germany’s vote had saved it from death in 1953, and kept alive the hope that in 1954, Europe might yet be born.

If the European dream does come true, Adenauer will go down in history as one of its creators. If it fails, his efforts will still have served West Germany well. He has won her respectability.

At the Big Three’s Bermuda conference, the absent, uninvited Chancellor of West Germany was even more a participant than France’s ailing Premier, who spoke scarcely a word. Before dispatching to Moscow their agreement to a Big Four conference in Berlin, the Big Three leaders solicited Adenauer’s approval. When Prime Minister Churchill suggested it might be wise to consider some alternative to EDC for Germany’s rearmament, President Eisenhower dismissed the proposal with a wave of his hand. The U.S. will not consider alternatives, said the President, and besides, “EDC is what Adenauer wants.”

Decisive Events. West Germany has won this place at the council table despite the fact that it is still nominally an occupied country, and has yet to arm a single soldier, build a plane or roll out a tank.

Seated one day last week in his huge office in the Palais Schaumburg, Chancellor Adenauer made a temple of his fingers and, chatting with TIME Correspondent Frank White, allowed himself the luxury of some mild self-satisfaction. “I cannot avoid smiling a little when, as chief of an occupied country, I sit down with the leaders of the occupying nations, such as Mr. Eden and M. Bidault. In spite of the fact that Germany hasn’t yet full sovereignty, its economic and political impact is fully felt in world affairs.”

Adenauer had his own list of “the decisive events” of the year: “The clear and determined attitude” of the U.S. to take the lead in the struggle against Communism, the uprisings in East Germany, his own election victory, and President Eisenhower’s atomic pool proposal, which Adenauer believes “may well be the beginning of real understanding between East and West.” Stalin’s death, he says, was “not a factor of major importance.” It did not increase the chances for peace. “Stalin had the power and prestige to alter the course of Kremlin foreign policy. His successors have not.”

Adenauer has some advance worries for 1954: “There is wind in the air, and the sky is not without clouds.” Biggest clouds: indecision in France, the approaching four-power conference on Germany, the state of mind of the U.S. Congress.

As for France: “. . . The French people have a much clearer conception [of EDC] than does the French Parliament … I am convinced the French will finally agree to the formation of an integrated Europe.”

On four-power negotiations: “The hope that the Soviets have altered their course is unfounded. Their strategy for the Berlin conference is mainly that of delay . . . The three [Western] ministers must maintain an undivided front. Russia will attempt to weaken the French will to ratify EDC. If successful … it would be Russia’s greatest triumph.”

On Congress: “I fully understand that there should be impatience. I confidently hope, however, that as much as they dislike what happens, they will be wise enough not to stop giving [moral] assistance and [financial] support at this critical moment, when final success is in sight.”

“The first six months of 1954 will be decisive.”

Near the Heart. As far as it went, the story of Germany’s rise in 1953 was good for the democracies and bad for Communism. But other years and other men will determine whether there will be a happy ending. Konrad Adenauer is 78 this month. In the frost of his rigid, imperious command over machinery of both party and government, few sprouts of leadership have been able to grow. “How long I can hold my present office no one can tell,” he said. “Even I cannot. My health and strength are excellent. Nothing, however, is nearer my heart than that before I go … I shall have brought Germany securely into the community of free and democratic peoples of the Christian West . . .”

The question mark of the future intrudes like a brooding outsider on the encouraging spectacle of a West Germany healthily revived, strongly and democratically led, dedicated by its electorate to a United Europe as well as to a new Germany. “We never question Adenauer’s sincerity when he talks of Franco-German agreement,” said a top French diplomat. “He is truly European . . . But we don’t forget another German, Stresemann, who wanted good relations with France. Six months after he died [1929], what happened? His party and policy collapsed.”

Konrad Adenauer himself has also seen the brooding outsider. If the dream of Europe collapses, there is, he fears, the possibility of a revival of German militarism. “I never minimize this possibility if Europe fails,” said he last week. “If France refuses to accept reconciliation with her former enemy, how we would accept the effect of such a reversal I do not know . . . The whole population would be affected. We cannot say what would happen. But we have had experience in the past.”

“Perhaps I had better not die yet awhile,” said Konrad Adenauer. “There is still too much to do.”