After due deliberation around the July, 1999 campfire at Thousand
Island Lake, the following are the Les Pétomanes consensus recommendations
for Time Magazine's Person of the Century:
| Category | Recommendation |
| Statesmen | Franklin Delano Roosevelt (over Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall) |
| Tyrants | Adolf Hitler (over Joseph Stalin) |
| Revolutionaries | Lenin (over Mao Tse-tung and Mohandas Gandhi) |
| Capitalists | Henry Ford (over William Gates and Robert Noyce) |
| Intellectuals | Albert Einstein (over John Maynard Keynes and Alexander Fleming) |
Our overall winner is FDR. (Note, however, that Time chose Churchill as Man-of-the-Half-Century in 1950.)
With the competition limited to women, the overwhelming favorite was
Margaret
Thatcher.
 In December 1999 Time announced that Einstein was its uninspired (if surprisingly apolitical) choice for person of the century. Bill Clinton, in contrast, agreed with us. Hmmmmm. A retrospective at the time of the time capsule recovery will assess who was right. [Ed. 4/4/00] |