Man of the Year
A visionary has the power to
imagine what the world can be, and a revolutionary has the power to make it so.
Very few men are either. Our 1997 Man of the Year is both. Ideas have
consequences, and it is in 1997 that we have seen the consequences of his. With
his pinwheeling, hopscotch creativity, he has changed the nation's center of
gravity, reinventing commerce, art, science, technology, and faith. His
animating spirit--a pragmatic, idealistic humanitarianism--is rapidly becoming
the ethos of the age. His passing comments roil financial markets from Bangkok
to Bond Street. Hollywood moguls make pilgrimages to his seaside home. Bill
Gates seeks his counsel. So does Stephen Hawking. He is, it is said, the only
man who plays golf with Bill Clinton and doesn't let him cheat.
Still, he
is not yet a household name and may not be for some time. He is an unassuming
man--a thatch of sandy hair, a pair of inquisitive brown eyes, a slight shadow
of beard at all hours of the day. In a year of spectacular emotion, his was a
quiet triumph. He lacks the press savvy of Clinton. He doesn't touch the heart
as Princess Diana did, or the conscience as Mother Teresa did (or the
pocketbook as Alan Greenspan does). But while other people make headlines, he
is making history. When they chronicle our time, it should be his name that
appears on the roll of honor.
But only if ... His vision and his revolution are
high-risk gambles. If they fail--and no one can predict if they will--our world
will be a more dangerous place, a darker, poorer place, a world untethered from
the kind of stability we have come to cherish. And if he succeeds? "Every so
often God blesses us," says his close friend and confidant the Dalai Lama, "and
he is such a blessing."
To understand him, to
understand both his leathery toughness and his gentle soul, follow U.S. Route
44 west from Lubbock, Texas, for 50 miles. Here, 50 miles from Lubbock and 50
miles from nowhere, is a one-stoplight town called Poseyville. And here, up the
block from the River Diner--though there's no river for miles--is a three-room
cabin. It is in this cabin, five decades ago, that his mother came, alone, a
young widow trying to start over with her 2-year-old boy. That little house was
his crucible. They grew up together, mother and son. They studied together on
the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, beneath the only electric light in the
house. He learned his ABCs; she slowly, slowly earned her degree via
correspondence. And when the lessons were over, she instilled in him the
homespun wisdom that her parents had instilled in her: "The power is the word,
not the sword." "There is no difficulty so great that it cannot be overcome, no
triumph so great that it cannot be destroyed." His mother still lives in the
same house, but electric lights are everywhere now. He phones her every day, at
noon sharp. (Once he excused himself from an audience with the pope to
call.)
"From the
time he was a boy," she confides, "I knew that destiny had reserved him a
seat." If destiny had indeed reserved him a seat, it was in the very front of
the classroom. He was an A student at Poseyville High. He was also a
three-sport star and "the most ferocious competitor I've ever seen," his coach
says today. Even as a teen-ager, he showed signs of his independent-mindedness.
His friends mowed lawns; he climbed mountains. They took piano lessons; he
taught himself the trombone and busked for dimes on Main Street.
"Adversity," wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke,
"is the seedling of courage." And adversity came. He headed east for college on
scholarship. His mother, alone again, fell ill. School was a struggle. Midway
through his freshman year, he gave up, hitchhiked home, and told his mother he
was back for good to take care of her. That night, they went out for a walk on
the plains. "It was," he says, "a clear, moonlit night. We walked by an old
ranch house, and I could see the barbed wire and the old brands glinting in the
moonlight. All of a sudden I thought of when the world was young and growing
and full of hope. And I wanted to make it so again." The next morning, he
hitchhiked back East.
His mind
burns with a bright, clear flame, and his professors soon recognized his
genius. He earned his degree in three years and went to work. He astonished.
"He could see around corners," says an old colleague. He overturned
conventional wisdom, and preached heresy. In the beginning, he was dismissed as
a crackpot--at best an eccentric, at worst a threat. But steadily his fame and
power and influence grew. He was not an intellectual, and he had no time for
ideology, but he had the American genius for common sense. His own powerful
ideas rooted themselves in society's cracks and began to sprout in all
directions. And sprout. And sprout.
Today, despite his fame, he remains a startlingly humble
man. Every morning, while he's in the bath, he tries to answer his dozens of
personal letters. He's never missed a high-school reunion, and he still finds
time to eat dinner with childhood friends twice a week. "When he got famous, I
was sure he'd forget us," says one old playmate, "but he hasn't." His charm is
legendary. So is his equanimity. When his aides panic over some nugget of bad
news, he calms them down by quoting his sages: Lao Tzu, Euripedes, Toynbee,
Covey.
Every day, he says, he
receives a letter or two urging him to run for president. He laughs the idea
off. The president is a captive. He is a free man, and in freedom is true
power. This is, he says, only the beginning of his crusade. In the third
century, after the invention of the fulcrum and lever, Archimedes wrote, "Give
me where to stand, and I will move the earth." It is now the cusp of the
millennium. The Man of the Year has two feet planted squarely on the ground.
And the earth is moving.
