Clinton Leads Gala Honoring Time

NEW YORK —  President Clinton, joining an extraordinary gathering of achievers Tuesday night to help Time magazine celebrate its 75th anniversary, invoked the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and called on the nation to expand the reach of freedom in the 21st century.

“The next century is barely 700 days away,” the president told the stellar audience from fields as diverse as science, business, the arts, politics and sports that packed Radio City Music Hall for the celebration.

“It [the next century] will be an era in which the very face of our nation will change,” Clinton said, calling for Americans to pay tribute to Roosevelt by working to secure prosperity at home and peace abroad.

Clinton, who was accompanied by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Roosevelt personified the American Century. Today’s generation could learn from the Depression-era leader as the millennium approaches, he added.

“More than any other 20th-century American, FDR fulfilled the mandate of our founders,” Clinton said. “When everything was on the line, he pledged our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the preservation of liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the creation of a more perfect union.”

Clinton went out of his way to praise U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for his recent peacemaking efforts with Iraq.

Clinton’s speech capped an evening that included a series of toasts to some of this century’s most celebrated figures.

Tom Cruise saluted boxing legend Muhammad Ali; Kevin Costner toasted Joe DiMaggio; Tom Hanks hailed John Glenn and John F. Kennedy Jr. lifted a glass to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

Each of the honorees rose to applause.

The toasts preceded a series of more formal tributes by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to the Wright Brothers, Steven Spielberg to film director John Ford, Mary Tyler Moore to Lucille Ball, Nobel Laureate James Watson to double Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling, Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mikhail Gorbachev to a series of political leaders.

But the star of the evening was the evening itself, an eclectic and prominent gathering of movers and shakers of this generation.

Ninety people who graced Time Magazine’s covers were in the audience, including such figures as former Chrysler head Lee A. Iacocca, singer Jewel and Jack Kevorkian. The show business contingent included Lauren Bacall, Sharon Stone, Spike Lee and Sophia Loren.

“In many ways, the history of Time is the history of the 20th century,” said Bruce Hallett, Time’s president.

One of the most successful publishing ventures of the century began modestly when two young Yale graduates resigned as cub reporters at the Baltimore News.

Judged by today’s standards of fragmented, specialized media, their idea was simple, and in retrospect, perhaps even quaint.

Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, who co-founded Time Magazine, believed a weekly publication that presented “every happening of importance” in an organized, compartmentalized fashion could capture busy people.

“To keep men well-informed, that first and last, is the only ax this magazine has to grind,” Luce and Hadden wrote in the prospectus they showed investors.

In 1927, Time began its Man of the Year cover.

The aviator Charles A. Lindbergh was the first honoree in a list that grew to include Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman, Queen Elizabeth II, Anwar Sadat, Ted Turner, Peter Ueberroth and Clinton.