The Time cover that didn’t appear
Rummy declined honor as ‘Person of the Year’
It isn’t often that someone turns down an offer to be Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” especially when that someone is as important as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But that’s what Rumsfeld did when he learned that Time was planning to honor him in its year-end issue last month.
Rumsfeld told guests at a holiday party that in this year of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military deserved the honor more than he did, which is why Army Sgts. Marquette Whiteside and Ronald Buxton and Spc. Billie Grimes turned up on Time’s Dec. 29 cover.
Time Managing Editor James Kelly appears to confirm Rumseld’s self-effacing act, if only obliquely, in an editor’s note recounting that when he and several other editors “met with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in November to talk about the war, [the Defense Secretary] made the pitch, unsolicited by us, that the Person of the Year should be the American soldier. (Or as he put it, the American volunteer.)”
Kelly also noted that Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy and senior correspondent Mark Thompson were working on a profile of Rumsfeld in preparation for the issue, but set it aside to help two fellow Time journalists who were injured in Iraq. (The profile appeared in the Person of the Year issue.)
