Four Who Also Shaped Events

A Rough Apprenticeship, a New Beginning

He had passed through a difficult apprenticeship, plummeting in public esteem at one point to a 30% favorable rating. He was being regarded at home and abroad as a nice enough fellow but one without much flair for leadership or talent for using the formidable powers of his office. Then Jimmy Carter began to turn things around at Camp David, not during the deservedly acclaimed summit in September with Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat, but at a far less visible conference in April with Cabinet members and top White House advisers.

At that session Carter gave Chief Aide Hamilton Jordan authority to coordinate policies and pull policymakers into line. The President began concentrating on only the most important issues, dropping the original every-thing-at-once strategy that had spread him far too thin and exasperated Congress. As U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young put it, "In the early days Carter felt that he could force Congress and history and everything else to work according to his flow chart. He has learned that it doesn't happen that way."

By fall, Carter had run up an impressive string of victories on foreign and defense policies: ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, sale of high-performance jet fighters to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, an end to the Turkish arms embargo, abandonment of the Navy's plans for a fifth nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

At year's end Carter came close to achieving a triple crown in foreign policy: he established normal relations with mainland China and seemed to have a breakthrough on strategic arms limitations with the Soviet Union. But he failed to get Egypt and Israel to sign a peace pact, even though he had, almost singlehanded, brought them closer to peace at the Camp David summit than they had been in 30 years. His achievements were also somewhat diminished by the U.S. inability to help bring calm to Iran.

Some political scientists were troubled that most of Carter's successes were in foreign affairs. Observed Seymour Martin Lipset of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif: "Carter is in the same boat as Nixon, looking good abroad while facing a sea of domestic troubles." But the President did salvage some gains: a truncated energy bill despite the Administration's confused and uncertain performance of a year earlier, Civil Service reform and a veto of wasteful water projects.

Carter is still an enigmatic leader of uncertain political philosophy. He is not inspirational by nature, and is not likely ever to be a charismatic commander. This failing could make him vulnerable to a challenge. Much will depend on how he handles two issues that loom in 1979: ratification of SALT II by a Senate suspicious of Soviet motives and of Carter's seeming willingness to accommodate Moscow; and reducing inflation, on which he is steering a conservative course that will be attacked by the liberals. Both battles promise to be bruising, and their outcome will largely determine whether the new beginning that Jimmy Carter made in 1978 will carry him to a second term in 1980.

Rugged Activist for a Troubled Church

He was 58, "too young" to be electable. More important, he was not an Italian, and not since the time of Martin Luther had a "foreigner" been placed in the Chair of Peter. Yet in an astounding election that capped an astounding year for the Vatican, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla became spiritual leader of the world's 700 million Roman Catholics. His Soviet-bloc homeland of Poland, fervently Catholic for a millennium, was engulfed in a tide of exultation and pride.

John Paul II called his election "an act of courage" by the Cardinals, but his credentials were superb. As pastor, professor of ethics, bishop and Archbishop of Cracow, he displayed spiritual depth, pastoral skill, rare intellectual stature, facility in seven languages and political shrewdness. There was more to recommend him: an outdoorsman's stamina; a felicitous pen that has produced poems and plays as well as philosophical treatises; courage, displayed in his work to save Jewish families from the Holocaust. Wojtyla has experienced life in ways unknown to most of the modern Popes. Because he did not choose his vocation until he was a young adult, he dated girls, acted and directed in the theater and worked as a factory hand.

He will need all his vigor, for the papacy in the last years of Pope Paul VI's 15-year reign was uninspiring and remote. When Paul died on Aug. 6, the Cardinals chose as his successor a man known for his pastoral qualities and popular touch: Albino Cardinal Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, who took the name John Paul I to signal continuity, not only with his immediate predecessor, but also with the beloved John XXIII.

Luciani's death after a 33-day reign brought Wojtyla (pronounced voy-tih-wuh) to the papacy, and in his first utterances he signaled a policy of consolidation. Since the reform-minded Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the church has suffered crisis after crisis. John Paul II's goal appears to be a church that can once again offer a solid faith in a sea of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. Thus he has implicitly ruled out women priests or any change in the celibacy rule, and warned against priests developing "an exaggerated interest in temporal problems." Nor is he expected to tinker with Paul's widely unpopular ruling against all artificial methods of birth control.

Despite these conservative tacks, there is nothing remote, academic or gloomy about John Paul II. His style is a rugged activism, lifting children high over his head, helicoptering to Assisi, pressing the flesh in working-class districts, donning priest's clothing so he can slip away to visit a friend, getting his clerical clothing torn in a mob of adoring nuns, clocking two hours of exercise a day. He hints that he will travel extensively, starting with visits to the Latin American bishops' conference in Mexico in late January, and to his native Poland in May if the regime permits it. The policies of this pontificate are still taking shape, but the man at its center is already making a mark. Said one worldly wise Vatican prelate: "He is a tremendous, dominant figure who fills up the whole screen."

A Proposition Taxpayers Couldn't Refuse

Steel-rimmed glasses keep sliding down his nose. His sagging jowls perpetually threaten to sweep over the knot of his tie. His voice is booming, raspy, grating. By most standards of political image making, Howard Jarvis, 76, a retired home-appliance manufacturer, is an unlikely prophet. Yet in 1978, after 16 years of trying, he caught the crest of a national wave of discontent and succeeded spectacularly in selling his tax-slashing ideas. Working 18 hours a day, Jarvis fervently addressed every audience he could find--crowds in high school auditoriums, civic luncheons, Jaycee meetings --and gathered 1.5 million petition signatures for his Proposition 13, which required chopping California's property taxes by 57%, or about $7 billion. On Election Day, voters by 2 to 1 approved Proposition 13, making it one of the most important political and sociological events of the year, and transforming Jarvis into a national symbol of middle-class Americans' mounting anger with expensive government programs that yield too few benefits, big budget deficits and intrusive government regulations.

Long considered a nuisance, a nut, or both, Jarvis was suddenly a celebrity. Traveling 150,000 miles, he carried a beguiling message to taxpayers: "The only way to cut the cost of government is not to give them money in the first place." U.S. politicians, from the local level right up to Congress, reacted by making taxes the major issue of the 1978 elections. Yesterday's political big spenders became today's penny pinchers, embracing schemes to cut budgets across the board by 10% or 20% or 30%. A bewildering variety of referendums, the offspring of Proposition 13, sprouted on the ballots of 16 states; 80% of the measures passed. Observed James Savarese, director of public policy analysis for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a vitally affected group: "There's a clear message. Voters want value for the dollar."

Though the message from U.S. voters was clear, governments were slow and grudging in responding. Jimmy Carter and Congress cut federal taxes by $18.7 billion; yet Americans' taxes will actually go up in 1979 as a result of inflation and the immense new bite from their paychecks for Social Security. In most states, the cuts in taxes or spending that voters approved in November will not take effect until 1979. Even in pace-setting California, many bureaucrats reacted vengefully to Proposition 13 by threatening drastic cuts in the most essential services and blaming a lack of money for any and every governmental foul-up. When brushfires swept through Malibu Canyon in the fall, officials hinted that they could have fought the blazes better if they had not had to lay off fire fighters because of budget cuts. Many local governments started charging fees for some public services that used to be financed from tax revenues. A few residents of high-income Palm Springs were so angry about the bills they began receiving for trash collection that they secretly dumped their garbage in the desert. Nonetheless, California managed to soften the blow by passing on to local governments $5 billion from its huge $6.6 billion budget surplus. While nearly 26,400 local government employees in California were initially laid off because of Proposition 13, almost 10,000 were back on the job by year's end.

The antitax movement's initial impact may have been modest, but it illuminates very well a new and testier relationship between the citizen and his government. Says Jarvis: "Bureaucrats are going to use every method known to man to keep from cutting back. But this movement is going to restructure the tax system of the Federal Government, of the states and of a lot of foreign countries." At the very least, American politicians will long be feeling the reverberations of what Proposition 13 stands for. Few will want to be associated with that old New Deal maxim coined 40 years ago by Harry Hopkins: "We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect."

In a Far Jungle, a "White Night" of Death

There was little in his Indiana background, except perhaps his bizarre habit of conducting ritualistic funerals for neighborhood pets, that prefigured Jim Jones' horrifying moment on history's stage. In retrospect, those who knew him after he left his home town of Lynn (pop. 1,360; principal industry: casket making) to start a church in Indianapolis recall a certain cynicism and self-absorption, an inclination to use religion as a means of acquiring personal power over others. "Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me!" he once yelled, slamming his Bible to the floor. But even after he moved his flock to California and began demanding fanatic devotion from his followers, politicians courted him and social agencies sent children to be wards of his Peoples Temple.

His transformation into a megalomaniacal Emperor Jones was gradual but inexorable. He began fancying himself the new Jesus, then the reincarnation of Lenin, and finally God himself. When he sensed that the world outside his self-made universe was growing hostile, he and more than 1,000 of his followers fled from San Francisco to an isolated Guyanese jungle. But the world threatened to close in on him even in that remote spot. There was a court order demanding custody of a child he claimed, an inquiring Congressman, some newsmen, photographers. He plunged finally from self-delusion into murderous madness.

On one mind-numbing Saturday in November, Congressman Leo Ryan, a woman hoping to leave Jonestown with him, and three journalists were slain. Jones, who demanded celibacy of others, had sex with at least four women and two boys on his manic last day, and then ordered a "white night" of suicide. Some temple members lined up like zombies to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, and feed it to their screaming children. Many more had poison forcibly squirted down their throats or injected into their arms. Gun-toting guards barred escape. Before most of the world had even heard of him, James Warren Jones, 47, lay dead amid the bodies of 912 people who had believed in him.

Jonestown: the name of the commune is destined, like Watergate and Viet Nam, to pass into our vocabulary as a synecdoche, a symbol for something larger. The victims cannot be dismissed as mere crazies: many were poor, elderly blacks, but a number were well-educated younger people from seemingly comfortable backgrounds. What united them was partly a fear of freedom, partly a defect in will that led them to surrender blindly to any powerful leader, any strong faith -- things they somehow were not able to find in U.S. society and so rejected it. They did so even though the leader was a charlatan, and the faith insane.

Jim Jones used the cloak of the First Amendment to deprive his followers of the very things that it was designed to guarantee: their freedom to worship and speak as individuals. That so many would shut off their minds and abdicate their roles as questioning, feeling, thinking beings was a stark reminder that, after centuries of what rationalists would like to think of as progress, in 1978 the line dividing civilization from savagery was still tragically fragile.

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