IT was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia and China, of a uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the President, of hopes raised and lately dashed for peace in Viet Nam. Foreign policy reigned preeminent, and was in good part the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S. foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork of two people: Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs. For what they accomplished in the world, what was well begun—and inescapably, too, their prolonged and so far indecisive struggle with the Viet Nam tragedy—the two are Men of the Year. They constitute in many ways an odd couple, an improbable partnership. There is Nixon, 60, champion of Middle American virtues, a secretive, aloof yet old-fashioned politician given to oversimplified rhetoric, who founded his career on gut-fighting anti-Communism but has become in his maturity a surprisingly flexible, even unpredictable statesman. At his side is Kissinger, 49, a Bavarian-born Harvard professor of urbane and subtle intelligence, a creature of Cambridge and Georgetown who cherishes a never entirely convincing reputation as an international bon vivant and superstar. Yet together in their unique symbiosis—Nixon supplying power and will, Kissinger an intellectual framework and negotiating skills—they have been changing the shape of the world, accomplishing the most profound rearrangement of the earth’s political powers since the beginning of the cold war. The year contained vast promise, tidal changes, a movement from a quarter-century of great power confrontation toward an era of negotiations. But if Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in opening the gates to China, in urging a new détente with Russia, in pressing forward the SALT talks and a dozen other avenues of communication between East and West, it was also, in its final days, a year of devastating disappointment. In October, Kissinger euphorically reported to the world that “peace is at hand” in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America’s longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called “a full generation of peace.” But at year’s end, the design remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seemed no early exit. Other themes and other figures, of course, also preoccupied the world in 1972. While Nixon and Kissinger projected their visions of order, political terrorists kept up a counterpoint. In May, three Japanese gunmen hired by Palestinian guerrillas opened fire at Tel Aviv’s crowded Lod airport, killing 26 travelers and wounding 72 others. Then in September eight Palestinians invaded the Israeli Olympic team’s dormitory in Munich. Twenty hours later, 17 men, including eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, were dead. The shadow of the gunman still hung over Northern Ireland. This year alone more than 450 people died in the terror. A bomb blast in downtown Dublin killed
