“He has revived the Republican Party, and has garnered high initial hopes, even from many who opposed him, both because of his personal style and because the U.S. is famished for cheer. On Jan. 20 Reagan and the idea he embodies will both emerge from their respective seclusions with a real opportunity to change the direction and tone of the nation.
Reagan is also TIME’S Man of the Year because he stands at the end of 1980 looking ahead, while the year behind him smolders in pyres. The events of any isolated year can be made to seem exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard to find elevating moments in 1980.”
—From the January 5, 1981 issue of TIME magazine
“The deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations to that frozen impasse overshadowed all other events of 1983. In shaping plans for the future, every statesman in the world and very nearly every private citizen has to calculate what may come of the face-off between the countries whose leaders—one operating in full public view, the other as a mysterious presence hidden by illness—share the power to decide whether there will be any future at all. Those leaders, Presidents Ronald Wilson Reagan of the United States and Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, are TIME’S Men of the Year.”
—From the January 2, 1984 issue of TIME magazine