MAN OF THE YEAR: Up From the Plenum

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The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world's night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach.

With the Sputniks, Russia took man into a new era of space, and with its advances in the art of missilery, posed the U.S. with the most dramatic military threat it had ever faced. And with the Vanguard's witlessly ballyhooed crash at Cape Canaveral went the U.S.'s long-held tenet that anything Communism's...