Special Section: 50 Faces for America’s Future

It has become an almost universal complaint that the tribe of leaders has died out. That is true in one sense:

those Olympian figures who dominated earlier decades of the century are gone. But leadership has not vanished; its character has changed. So have the styles and opportunities of leaders, along with the perspectives, needs and expectations of the led.

Despite new hazards and constraints, there is no shortage of talent; leaders are continuing to emerge across the U.S.

Here and on the following pages, TIME identifies some of them. The 200 young leaders of five years ago were all 45 years old or younger. This time the age limit remains the same. But only 50 leaders were sought, not because of a diminished pool of talent but because many of the previous 200 would once again qualify—they still have not reached 45.

In May, TIME correspondents and editors began gathering suggestions from Congressmen, religious leaders, educators, politicians and prominent citizens in every part of the nation. TIME tried especially to find leaders on the local and regional levels. As North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt remarked: “I think we’ve got the attitude in this country that Government has to do everything for people. My whole approach is ‘Let’s try to do it for ourselves on the local level.’ ” The magazine sought figures of integrity who have exerted a significant social or civic impact, regardless of politics or ideology. Boston College President J. Donald Monan expressed an instructive distinction: “Most of the leaders I am acquainted with are not technicians. They have large souls and a sense of values.”

TIME’s portfolio of promise is more a sampler of outstanding leadership than an effort to pick the 50 who obviously and definitively lead all the rest. There were too many excellent candidates to make any such specific claim; inevitably, the choices were in part subjective! Some of the 50 were picked more for potential than for present accomplishments; they are just starting out, but TIME’s editors liked where they are heading. The list does not include many outstanding Americans who lead in the arts. The visionary architect, the composer, the actor, for example, may all make distinguished contributions to the quality of American life. But TIME was looking for people whose effect upon the society was—and will be—more tangible and direct.

Our search found a diverse and exciting group: educators, politicians, administrators, scientists. More than half are only in their 30s—which is an encouraging sign.

The list shows how times have changed; women and minorities are better represented than they were five years ago. All those on the list share one characteristic, the sense of boldness that remains the prime prerequisite for leadership in any era.

Herewith, TIME presents 50 faces for the future.

1. David Aaron, 39. At the first meeting of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. SALT negotiators nearly ten years ago in Helsinki, the atmosphere was frosty until a U.S. representative impulsively struck a match to light a cigarette for a Soviet negotiator. The tension eased, and Aaron, then a junior aide, has been making sparks ever since. Now, as deputy to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, he exercises powerful influence in the White House. A moderate on U.S.-Soviet affairs, he is one of the top American experts on arms control, and has played a key role in the SALT n negotiations. After graduating from Princeton University, Aaron became a State Department officer and later was a protege of then Senator Walter Mondale. Says Aaron: “I chose government because I felt it offered the most opportunity to participate in history.”

2. William M. Agee, 41, wasted little time imposing his style of leadership on the giant Bendix Corp. (1978 sales: $3.6 billion). Shortly after he succeeded Michael Blumenthal as chairman and chief executive officer in 1977, Agee began instituting his theories of “participatory management.” He expanded the top decision-making group, encouraged freewheeling discussions on corporate objectives, and sought to loosen the hierarchy with a series of gambits: opening up the executive dining room, tossing the intimidating teak table out of the conference room and abolishing the pecking order in the parking lot. Born in Boise, Agee attended the University of Idaho, and was at first turned down before being admitted by the Harvard Business School. He signed on with Boise Cascade, rose to become chief financial officer, and then joined Bendix in 1972 at the age of 34. He believes in young leaders. Says he: “I think a person my age can be a constructive agent of change.”

3. Dr. Joseph C. Avellone, 30, is on the threshold of a promising career in a brandnew field: helping, he says, “to bridge the gap between those who make health policy and those who practice medicine. The decision makers don’t know enough medicine, and the medical profession doesn’t know enough economics and management.” A surgeon, Avellone interrupted his medical studies to get a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Last year he wrote a report, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, that analyzed how a probe by the Federal Trade Commission would hamper the medical profession’s power to set standards and to pass on a doctor’s qualifications. Now practicing in New Hampshire, where he is also planning a study of the state’s system for handling trauma victims, Avellone hopes eventually to work as a policymaker for federal health programs. Says Boston’s noted surgeon Francis D. Moore: “Avellone is a pioneer.”

4. Marion S. Barry Jr., 43, the mayor of Washington, D.C., holds the highest elected post attained by any of the black activists of the turbulent ’60s. Son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Barry abandoned work on a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Tennessee to join the civil rights movement. As the first national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, he was often jailed for taking part in protests. In Washington, D.C., he founded Pride, Inc., a job-training organization for young people, and turned into a skillful politician working as a member of the city council and chairman of the school board. The city’s black and white middle class swept the former militant into the mayor’s office last year. Barry admits his role has changed with the times. “I always knew it was better to make policy than to influence policy,” he says. “I think integrity is the most important quality for a leader. People have to believe you won’t sell them out.”

5. Mikhail Baryshnikov, 31, is a man of grands jetés. His first leap was his 1974 defection from Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet to the American Ballet Theater. Baryshnikov, who is becoming a U.S. citizen, is a classical dancer of genius. He performed more than 26 roles with the A.B.T. and choreographed two successful productions of The Nutcracker and Don Quixote. He soared as ballet’s sexy superstar when he won an Oscar nomination for his role in the movie The Turning Point. In 1978 Baryshnikov joined George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, a company that emphasizes its ensemble, not its stars. But in 1980 he will jump again, returning to the A.B.T. as its artistic director and leading dancer. Baryshnikov is expected to inject new energy and choreography into the company. Says A.B.T. Executive Director Herman Krawitz: “He has the mind of a leader in an intellectual and poetic sense, and he also has a long-range corporate understanding.”

6. Carol Bellamy, 37. Colleagues joke that she has never had an anxiety attack, and, indeed, Bellamy has brought calm self-confidence, efficiency and integrity to every job she has tackled, from three terms as a New York Democratic state senator to her present position as president of the New York City Council. Bellamy has taken a rather insignificant office and turned it into a position of substance by directing investigations of citizen complaints about utility costs, sanitation services and real estate abuses. In her collateral position on the city’s main budget-making body, the Board of Estimate, she has pressed Mayor Edward Koch for deeper cuts and even wrested precise figures from his office by filing for them under a freedom-of-information law. Born in New Jersey and educated at Gettysburg College and New York University Law School, Bellamy seems to have her sights set on the Governor’s mansion in Albany, where the incumbent is a fan of hers. Says Governor Hugh Carey: “She improves daily.”

7. Mary Frances Berry, 41, HEW’S Assistant Secretary for Education and acting commissioner of education, is a champion of educational opportunity for what she calls the “underserved.” Berry fought Carter’s budget cutters this year and got a $263 million increase in funds for the disadvantaged, including $15 million in fellowships for members of minorities and women who want to go to graduate school. Born in Nashville and a graduate of Howard University, Berry holds both a Ph.D. in history and a law degree from the University of Michigan. She has written several books on the Constitution and civil rights law. Formerly chancellor of the University of Colorado, the highest major university post ever held by a black woman, Berry is a candidate for a top job if Congress creates a Department of Education. Known for her accessibility, Berry says: “The various publics who have an interest in what you’re doing have a right to tell you how they feel about it.”

8. David L. Boren, 38, was the youngest Governor in Oklahoma’s history (33) and the youngest Senator (37). The industrious, chubby Democrat is already impressing his colleagues as what he calls a “maverick conservative,” backing tax cuts and proposing streamlined reforms of the regulatory agencies, welfare and health care. Son of a Congressman from Oklahoma, Boren graduated from Yale and went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before getting his law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He has a knack for country-style campaigning: while running for Governor, he flourished a broom, vowing to sweep the “Old Guard” out of state government. He also spurned campaign contributions from organizations. An early Carter backer, Boren, who is also a born-again Christian, has since become disillusioned with the President’s energy policies; the Senator from the oil state would like to deregulate gasoline prices and is strongly opposed to the Administration’s windfall profits tax proposal. But the single most important problem that the country faces, cautions Boren, “is overregulation and the fact that the regulators have no accountability to the American public.”

9. Leon Botstein, 32, is one of the nation’s most forceful advocates of an often neglected cause: the small liberal arts college. Although he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard, Botstein believes that in an increasingly complex world the traditional college can provide a vital educational function quite different from that of large, research-oriented universities. He has buttressed his argument with an impressive performance. In 1970, at the age of 23, he became one of the youngest college presidents in American history when he took over and briefly revived New Hampshire’s failing and nonaccredited Franconia College. At 28, Botstein, the son of two Polish refugee doctors, became president of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. In addition to expanding the curriculum, Botstein intends to turn Bard into a valley cultural center. An accomplished violinist, Botstein has occasionally been invited to conduct the Hudson Valley Philharmonic.

10. Arvln Brown, 39, was fresh out of the Yale University School of Drama and just 24 in 1965 when he helped start the Long Wharf Theater in a converted warehouse in New Haven, Conn. Becoming artistic director in 1967, he set about making the Long Wharf one of the best and boldest regional theaters in the nation. Broadway dares not take many chances, but Brown does, and the result is a series of plays staged first in New Haven and then moving on to New York: The Changing Room, Streamers, The Shadow Box, The Gin Game and a revival of Ah, Wilderness! Brown, who has already branched out into television and is planning to go into movies, is not talking idly when he says: “We’ve become equally proficient with Broadway in overall quality.” A year ago the Long Wharf won a Tony Award for its “extraordinarily high level of performance and aspiration.”

11. J. Hyatt Brown, 42. While he plotted the coup that would make him speaker of the Florida house of representatives, Brown kept a clipping of the Israeli lightning raid on Entebbe pinned to his office wall to remind him of the value of surprise. Surprise he did. While the incumbent speaker and supporters were feasting at a dinner, Brown’s cohorts, known as “the dirty dozen,” collected legislators’ signatures on a petition that changed the house’s voting rules and enabled Brown to call for an immediate vote that gave him the gavel. Since then the Republican, a former insurance salesman from Daytona Beach, has reformed the ramshackle procedures of the house, cut school taxes and held down property taxes. Brown, who stands for efficiency and economy in government, is a likely contender for Governor or U.S. Senator in the early 1980s.

12. Jane M. Byrne, 45, shocked Chicago when she defeated Mayor Michael Bilandic and the Democratic machine in a primary and then went on last April to become mayor of the city where she had been born and raised. A protégée of late Mayor Richard Daley, Byrne had spent ten years as Chicago’s commissioner of consumer sales and served one year as co-chairman of the powerful Cook County Democratic Central Committee. She is a scrappy reformer who is out to rechannel the Democratic machine’s energies into delivering services for Chicago’s neglected neighborhoods, especially for the blacks and latinos who supported her. Her tough stand in suspending city supervisors who fail to show up for work has pleased taxpayers and set the city bureaucracy on nervous edge. Yet her use of patronage powers in appointing people of unquestioned loyalty—while firing holdovers from the previous administration—has made her the target of criticism. Says Byrne: “I dedicate this administration to bringing a new renaissance of neighborhood life and community spirit.”

13. Joan B. Claybrook, 42, spent seven years as a Nader Raider before Carter put her into the driver’s seat of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During the past two years, she has ordered a record 15.6 million automobiles recalled for safety checks and changes. Her biggest victory: forcing Firestone to take back 8.7 million “500” radial tires, a move that so far has cost the company $147 million. She has also established tough fuel economy standards (27 m.p.g. by 1984) and stuck to them despite protests from manufacturers. Some of her former consumer-rights colleagues claim Claybrook was too lenient in postponing the deadline for airbags; Ralph Nader has called her an “accommodator” and demanded her resignation. Detroit wants her to go for other reasons: the Georgetown-trained lawyer is known in the industry as the Dragon Lady. Says Claybrook: “I think that having critics is just a part of accomplishing something. It is also part of democracy.”

14. William J. Clinton, 32, is sometimes lampooned in political cartoons in Arkansas as a brat furiously pedaling a tricycle. No one, however, can deny that the nation’s youngest Governor is making progress on an uphill path. Instead of cutting taxes, like everyone else, Democrat Clinton persuaded the assembly to raise them by $47 million. With the funds, Clinton will give the public schools their largest rise in state aid in history (20%), increase teachers’ salaries (now among the nation’s lowest), and improve care for the elderly. A Georgetown and Yale Law School graduate and a Rhodes scholar, Clinton has also regained power for the Governor’s office that had been usurped by the legislature. Limited by law to two terms, Clinton is expected eventually to run for Congress.

15. Philippe de Montebello, 43, was born into an artistic Parisian family. When his family moved to the U.S., de Montebello studied art history at Harvard and took up painting. “You have talent but not genius,” his father told him. So in 1963, de Montebello joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a curatorial assistant. He was tapped for the directorship of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1969, and in four years built up the museum’s reputation and staff and amassed a $2 million endowment for acquisitions. A naturalized citizen, de Montebello returned to the Met in 1973 and worked on some of the blockbuster shows (“Treasures from the Kremlin,” “Monet at Giverny”). Named director of the Met in May 1978, de Montebello plans to downplay the role of special events and make the museum’s treasures more routinely accessible. Says he: “I want people to get used to the idea of dropping in to see familiar objects they love.”

16. Alan M. Dershowitz, 40. The student editors of the Harvard Law School Bulletin seldom lavish praise on the faculty, but for Dershowitz they made an exception. As the Bulletin put it, “He energetically attacks discrimination, represents criminals and defends the rights of others to defend themselves.” The onetime boy wonder from Brooklyn (he was a full professor at Harvard at 28) admits to being “an extremist” on civil liberties. His credo: “If there is discrimination against anybody, there is discrimination against everybody.” He has fought for the rights of American Nazis to speak and assemble, and successfully defended Actor Harry Reems, the lead in Deep Throat, against obscenity charges. Though a Jew and an ardent Zionist, Dershowitz has criticized Israel for establishing settlements on the West Bank. For that, he says, “my mother really gave me hell.”

17. Robert Embry, 41, successfully guided Baltimore’s redevelopment program from 1968 to the mid-1970s—using low-interest mortgages to attract middle-income residents to downtown and turning the blighted inner harbor area into a showplace of refurbished row houses and new businesses. He caught the eye of Carter, who appointed him Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. As the Administration’s point man on urban distress, one of the toughest jobs in town, Embry created the Urban Development Action Grant program that is helping to save 327 distressed urban areas by encouraging private investment. To qualify for UDAG, a mayor must prove that his proposal has local business support and will create jobs. In the past two years, HUD has paid out $700 million in seed money that in turn has generated an investment of $4.1 billion in private funds. An unflappable official, the Baltimore born and bred Embry plans to return to local government after HUD. Says he: “The oldest cities may be the newest frontier.”

18. Martin Feldstein, 40, his colleagues predict, is some day bound to reach the pinnacle of their profession: chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Feldstein is already perhaps the most influential young economist in the nation, the leader of a group of “new conservatives” who are arguing that the Government should meddle less in the economy. Feldstein heads the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, a private organization financed by grants from foundations and corporations, highly respected in the profession for its study of economic cycles. The cure for what ails the American economy, argues Feldstein, is more capital investment, helped by tax incentives. He believes the Government should lower Social Security taxes to encourage private savings and make unemployment benefits taxable to remove incentives for remaining jobless. Notes Feldstein: “Government policy has not only failed to eliminate the problems that it was designed to solve, but has also frequently exacerbated those very problems.”

19. Wallace C. Ford, 29, is executive vice president of Amistad Dot Venture Capital Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based investment company, backed by black private capital, that helps set up small businesses run by members of minorities. Although former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton is chief executive officer of the fledgling company, founded in March, Ford is responsible for much of the daily operations. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, Ford at 27 became the youngest president of the Harlem Lawyers’ Association. Onetime speechwriter for Sutton, Congressman Charles Rangel and Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Ind., Ford commutes between Washington and New York City, where he is head of NOVA (New Opportunities for Voter Action), aimed at harnessing political clout for blacks. Says Sutton: “Ford has poise, balance, intelligence and is ‘relevant’ … He’s a comer.”

20. A. Bartlett Giamatti, 41. The Yale faculty cheered last spring when a humanist was chosen to lead the institution during its days of austerity. A man who loves the Red Sox and Renaissance literature, Giamatti is a true blue (class of ’60 and teacher since ’66). The youngest president of Yale in 200 years, Giamatti faces the challenge of reducing a $19 million deficit without sacrificing the quality of education. So far, he has begun a complete review of operating costs and instituted stiff cutbacks in the nonacademic staff. “I hope to see a Yale College with fewer students, a curriculum with fewer courses and more structured breadth, and a college seminar system that engages retired faculty so that their dignity and wisdom and expertise are not lost to us all,” says Giamatti. Another main concern: the stifling Government interference that accompanies financial aid and research grants. Notes Giamatti: “Private institutions will be forced to become more adept at pressuring for their principles.”

21. Marcia Ann Gillespie, 35, went for a job interview at Essence magazine in 1970 and ended up being hired as managing editor. She took the floundering publication for black women and gave it an audience, ad revenues and an editorial raison d’être. Serious service articles on health and careers replaced slick travel and fashion pieces. One of her big victories: persuading advertisers to use black models in ads for black consumers. “I wanted to show what black women really are: beautiful, courageous and incredibly vital people,’ says Gillespie. Born in Rockville Centre, N.Y., and schooled at Lake Forest College, Gillespie, now editor in chief, is in demand as a speaker about the aspirations of black women, and Essence, with a circulation of 600,000 has set a high standard of editorial quality.

22. Gary Hart, 41, relishes the role of maverick. Says the Democratic Senator from Colorado: “It is difficult to put me in a category. I strike out on my own.” In his first term, Hart is already an influential member of three key committees: armed forces, environment and budget. An independent on most issues, he strongly supports SALT II and favors tighter federal control over nuclear power plants. But he also favors less federal control and regulation of the economy. Says he: “If you want the Government off your back, get your hand out of the Government’s pocket.” Handsome, lean and angular, Hart received a bachelor’s degree from the Yale Divinity School, plus a Yale law degree. The role that brought him political attention, if not success, was directing Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. Today he is gaining favor in the Senate. Says conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Hart: “You can disagree with him politically, but I have never met a man who is more honest and more moral.”

23. William Hensley, 38, an Eskimo, grew up in northwest Alaska living as a nomad. After catching the attention of teachers in the town of Kotzebue, he boldly set out for the nation’s capital, where he got a degree in political science from George Washington University. In 1966 Hensley returned to Alaska to lead the struggle for native rights. As a state legislator, he flew to Washington more than 100 times to help keep the land claims issue before Congress. In 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that gave Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts nearly $1 billion and 40 million acres of land. Hensley now heads the influential development arm of the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), one of 13 regional corporations created by the act to manage Alaskan native assets. Under his tenure, NANA has built rural schools, offices, rescue stations and even owns a reindeer herd of 4,200 head to provide meat to northwest natives. Hensley, who speaks English, Russian and Inupiaq (an Eskimo language in western Alaska), lost a bid for his state’s sole House seat in 1974, but is often introduced by Alaskans as “our next Senator.”

24. The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, 37. “Down with dope! Up with hope!” shouts Jackson to a crowd of 10,000 enthusiastic teenagers. His mission is to inspire ghetto youngsters to change their lives by studying hard. A former aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson has spent the past three years taking his Chicago-based PUSH-EXCEL program to schools across the country. PUSH-EXCEL requires teachers to assign homework, students to study two hours a night, and parents to provide support. Follow-up programs are sometimes weak and the long-range effectiveness remains to be seen, but some PUSH-EXCEL programs have produced lower absentee rates and higher morale. Says Jackson: “Affirmative action is a moot question if you don’t learn to read and write.” And at graduation, he wants voter registration cards handed out with diplomas.

25. Hamilton Jordan, 34, wrote a shrewd, sensitive 72-page memo sketching out in brilliant detail in 1972 the course Candidate Jimmy Carter had to follow from Plains, Ga., to the White House. Carter seldom wavered from Jordan’s plans. Ever since, Jordan has been the President’s top political strategist, and this month was officially named White House Chief of Staff—even though critics claim Jordan embodied some of the Administration’s most serious managerial flaws. Jordan has a swift, conceptual mind, reads political moods and trends skillfully, and although he is personally disorganized is highly imaginative. Jordan looks and sometimes acts like a fraternity boy—though he has lately switched from khakis and boots to pinstripe suits—and in the past his inattention to administrative detail has tarnished his image. He is now determined to bring discipline to his creativity. Says Jordan: “One of my strengths is that I know my weaknesses.” Both are formidable.

26. Amalya Kearse, 42, the daughter of a postmaster and a doctor, graduated from Wellesley College and edited the law review at the University of Michigan, where a professor called her “the best student, male or female, to come down the pike.” In 1970 she became the first black woman partner of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, a major Wall Street law firm. Praised by her colleagues for her analytical abilities, Kearse handles antitrust, stockholder and merger cases. An expert bridge player, Kearse edited the most recent volume of the Official Encyclopedia of Bridge. Last month Carter named her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in New York, often considered to be the most important court below the Supreme Court.

27. Elizabeth T. Kennan, 41. “Women have become important in America because of women’s colleges,” insists Kennan, who last fall completed the chain of female command in the Seven Sisters colleges by becoming president of Mount Holyoke, her alma mater. A medieval scholar with degrees from Oxford and the University of Washington, Kennan has spent her first year fielding all the modern problems facing private liberal arts schools: overtenured faculty, inflation and increasing government regulation. Her main mission, though, is to maintain an academic environment that will produce women of competence and confidence. To help keep women’s colleges in the vanguard of educational opportunity, she favors continuing education for older women and professional internships. Says she: “Mount Holyoke was founded in the uncompromising belief that women could do anything they wanted.”

28. Charles F. Knight, 43. “Public responsibility goes with my job and position,” says the chairman and chief executive officer of Emerson Electric Co., a St. Louis electronics firm that ranks 137 on the FORTUNE 500 list. As an executive, Knight is a rigorous cost cutter who has shut plants and furloughed workers in order to maintain acceptable profits. As a citizen, he has acted boldly to solve community problems. Three years ago when he learned from his children that St. Louis was going to cancel its athletic programs because of a budget deficit, Knight—a former football end at Cornell—organized a fund-raising drive that brought in $250,000 to save high school sports. This year Knight helped stop a divisive school strike by raising $600,000 from the business community to guarantee the city’s first-year commitment to teachers’ raises —and the children’s return to the classroom.

29. Fred J. Kroll, 43, was working at 15 “at all kinds of lousy jobs,” but his labors have made him president of the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (B.R.A.C.) and enabled him to become the youngest member of the AFL-CIO’S ruling executive council. In 1977, after Kroll edged out the son of retiring B.R.A.C. President C.L. (“Les”) Dennis for the union leadership, young Dennis and his cronies beat him up so severely that he was hospitalized. Since taking over the 200,000-member union, Kroll, the son of a Philadelphia factory worker, has been trying to make the labor movement more attractive for younger workers by encouraging greater initiative at local levels. Says Kroll: “We have to get away from the image of the baseball bat, T shirt and tattoo.” He says he has “the greatest respect” for George Meany, 84, the autocratic AFL-CIO president, but that “maybe the leadership is not in touch with younger people.”

30. Vilma Martinez, 35, the daughter of a San Antonio carpenter, worked her way through the University of Texas and Columbia Law School. After concentrating on civil rights for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund and the New York State division of human rights, she moved to San Francisco in 1973 to become the president and general counsel of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. There she has fought skillfully for the rights of 8 million Mexican Americans. Martinez, who herself grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, won a 1974 case before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that guaranteed the controversial right of bilingual education to all non-English-speaking children in public schools.

31. Carole McClellan, 39, is something of a lone star among big-city mayors. A former civics teacher and school district trustee, she oversees not only the 353,400 people and 120 sq. mi. of her home town of Austin but also a household of four sons, aged eleven to 16. McClellan starts the morning with a dawn breakfast followed by car-pool duty to get the children to school, works all day with Austin’s city manager and six-member council, and hurries home to cook dinner for her children (she is a divorcee). She then returns to city hall for more paper work. Since taking office in 1977, McClellan has got voter approval of bond issues totaling $141 million for remodeling the city and continuing Austin’s participation in a nuclear-power venture. She is persuasive: she won the nuclear-power bond issue by 53% just ten days after the Three Mile Island incident.

32. Anthony Toby Moffett, 34. “What happens when a Nader Raider comes to Congress?” mused the Connecticut Democrat in 1975, shortly after his election. Four years later, Moffett admits: “I’m trying to find the fine line between screaming all the time and being a member of the club.” Last January he outmaneuvered three senior Representatives to win the chairmanship of the powerful Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources. A second-generation American with Lebanese grandparents, Moffett, who studied government at Syracuse University and Boston College, is a longtime defender of consumer rights. He has spoken out against high energy costs and opposes President Carter’s decontrol of domestic oil prices, despite arguments from those who feel that Americans will waste gasoline until prices go up. “Government programs are still wanted,” he says. “My job is to cut out the waste and the junk, and to be a leader of the programs that work well.”

33. Sister Elizabeth Morancy, 38, wore the traditional black habit of the Sisters of Mercy and taught government in a parochial school until a few years ago. Last fall she was elected by a landslide to the Rhode Island state legislature from her home town of Providence. A graduate of Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I., she represents the Spanish-speaking, black, Laotian and blue-collar white residents of the city’s 18th district, which includes a dilapidated, arson-scorched section where she directs a community center. Since taking office she has pushed through the Rhode Island house two housing bills designed to cut down on arson and evictions. Well before Three Mile Island, she initiated legislation that would outlaw nuclear power plants in Rhode Island until waste disposal problems are solved. Says Morancy: “Issues involving the quality of people’s lives affect generation after generation.”

34. Robert Muller, 34, was an idealistic undergraduate at New York’s Hofstra University when he enlisted in the Marines and went to Viet Nam as a lieutenant. In 1969 he was shot in the spine and left paralyzed from the waist down. The disillusioning war and shabby treatment accorded the men who fought it turned him into a crusader. As executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Muller is fighting for jobs, better benefits and respect for the 3 million Americans who served in Southeast Asia. Now a lawyer, he is a moving orator when addressing Americans about the war: “Your guilt, your hang-ups, your uneasiness made it socially unacceptable to mention the fact that we were Viet Nam veterans. We fought hard and we fought well.”

35. Mark Ptashne, 39. In 1967 the Harvard molecular biologist detected a molecule, called a “represser,” that regulates the way a gene functions, possibly a key in the study of cancer. Ptashne was majoring in philosophy at Reed College in Portland, Ore., when he became fascinated by a theory about represser molecules and switched to chemistry in his senior year. During the Viet Nam War, Ptashne was deeply involved in antiwar politics at Harvard and went to the extent of lecturing at the University of Hanoi. But he became disillusioned with leftist politics in 1976 when some radicals and others tried, unsuccessfully, to force the Cambridge, Mass., city council to deny Harvard and M.I.T. the right to conduct recombinant DNA experiments. Ptashne helped lead the campaign to allow the experiments to take place.

36. Frank Shorter, 31, has often set the pace. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Yale graduate became the first American in more than 50 years to win the marathon, and the attention he received helped quicken interest in the running boom. In 1976 Shorter came back to win a silver medal in Montreal. His 140-mile training weeks left him little opportunity to support himself as a lawyer, however, so he challenged the Amateur Athletic Union’s rules prohibiting sports-related income. In a precedent-setting case that has helped other athletes, Shorter convinced the A.A.U. that his manufacturing of running gear should not affect his amateur status. Shorter is also drumming up corporate support for amateur athletes. “In the old days the A.A.U. required that an athlete build his name and then retire to reap what benefits he could,” says Shorter. That is obviously not his plan: Shorter is training hard to make the 1980 U.S. Olympic team.

37. Eleanor Smeal, 39, took charge of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1977, doubled the membership to 100,000 and raised dues and contributions from $700,000 annually to $2.6 million. The first housewife to head NOW, as well as its first full-time paid president, Smeal is a native of Erie, Pa., and a Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University. She discovered feminism through reading works of the early suffragists. In 1970 she helped form a NOW chapter in Pittsburgh and led the fight to get equal opportunity in scholastic sports and physical education for girls in Pennsylvania. In 1978 Smeal headed a successful effort to get Congress to extend the time limit for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She has also directed campaigns that prevented ten states that had passed the ERA from rescinding their positions, and is organizing grass-roots efforts in the down-to-the-wire fight to pass the amendment in three more states. Says Smeal: “The ERA is primarily an economic issue—of security for the homemaker and jobs for the average woman.”

38. David A. Stockman, 32, has in three years earned a reputation on Capitol Hill for effectively delivering his moderate to conservative views. One device: sending detailed letters to colleagues, including one that helped defeat Carter’s standby gas rationing plan (“It doesn’t do what you think, but it does a lot you never imagined”). The bachelor Republican, who was graduated from Michigan State University and attended Harvard Divinity School, is known in his southern Michigan district for opposing excessive regulation of the auto industry. Last year he helped defeat Carter’s complex hospital cost-containment bill because he felt it was “a cure worse than the disease.” Stockman’s main goal is to reduce the role of the Government in society and to chip away at “the social pork barrel—the tremendous pressure of parochial, narrowly defined interests.”

39. Brandon Stoddard, 41, is the ivy League whiz kid who proved that networks can do better-quality programming and get high ratings at the same time. A senior vice president at ABC, Stoddard invented the mini-series back in 1974 with his presentation of QB VII. Since then, Stoddard has pulled good Nielsens with topical and historical programs: Friendly Fire; Rich Man, Poor Man; Washington: Behind Closed Doors; and, of course, Roots, the most watched program in television history. “We are trying to offer something unique and compelling. True events are rare these days,” says Stoddard, who will also begin making films to be shown in theaters. On such subjects as civil rights and Viet Nam, Stoddard’s shows have had a substantial impact on mass opinion.

40. Edward Stone, 43, is the chief scientist for the highly successful Voyager 2 space probe that last month sent back invaluable data on the ring around Jupiter. A cosmic ray physicist born in Iowa and educated at the University of Chicago, Stone teaches at Caltech and directs 100 scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is now working on a 1983 “solar-polar” mission that will orbit two satellites in opposite directions around the sun’s poles. The aim: to learn more about how energy flows from the sun and affects the earth’s environment. Says Dr. Bruce Murray, director of the J.P.L.: “It’s hard to say where we’ll be in 1986, but Ed Stone will be one of the key people in the leadership.”

41. Barbara Boyle Sullivan, 42, criticizes the affirmative-action policies of corporations—and they pay her for it. Her consulting firm, Boyle/Kirkman Associates, which she founded with Colleague Sharon Kirkman Donegan in 1972, originally specialized in locating patterns of discrimination against women in large companies. Since then the firm has focused on affirmative action in general: recruiting and developing the talents of women, minorities, youth and the aged. “Companies have hired women and minorities in entry level jobs, and now it is a question of solving the upward mobility problems,” says Sullivan. A Philadelphia native who lives in California, Sullivan spends three weeks out of four traveling. Although Boyle/Kirkman now has yearly revenues of more than $1 million and 45 clients, the majority of which are FORTUNE 500 companies, affirmative action is progressing slowly. Observes Sullivan: “This is not just a sprint—this is a marathon.”

42. Paul E. Tsongas, 38, a cool, darkly handsome man with an unruly shock of hair, has a touch of Kennedy about him. Indeed, it was John F. Kennedy who inspired Tsongas (pronounced Song-as) to spend two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia before getting his law degree at Yale. Tsongas opened his practice in his home town of Lowell, Mass., where his Greek emigrant grandfather had settled, and won his first election to Congress in 1974, by defeating Republican Edward Brooke. Considered to be one of the party’s rising young liberals, Tsongas has strongly supported the Kennedy-Waxman national health plan and has sharply criticized both Carter and the Congress for failing to develop an adequate energy program. Says Tsongas: “The U.S. is going to have to make serious attitudinal adjustments toward lifestyle on the energy issue, and it will not do so without leadership.”

43. Ted Turner, 40, acts as boldly as he talks, which is saying a great deal. As the brash owner of the Atlanta Braves, Turner was once formally reprimanded by National League President Charles Feeney; he has irritated the game’s purists with several of his promotional ploys. In 1977 he took on the gentlemen of the yachting world and earned the chance to defend the America’s Cup. Turner and Courageous won. His latest target: the nation’s major television networks. His “superstation,” WTCG in Atlanta, now reaches 4 million households in 46 states by broadcasting via satellite. Now the three major networks are trying to force the FCC to limit retransmission consent. Turner is spoiling for the fight. “The networks have had 30 years to upgrade television and haven’t done it yet,” he says. “They need competition to make them better.” His plans include educational shows, limited commercial time and a news program with Daniel Schorr as anchor. He hopes to reach 7 million homes by 1980. Turner’s newest yacht: Tenacious.

44. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., 35, has established himself as one of the most irreverent pundits of the new right. Back in 1966 when radicals briefly took over Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, Tyrrell, then a graduate student, launched a paper called the Alternative (“to mainstream liberalism and the radical movement”). With a burgeoning list of contributors that included William F. Buckley Jr., and Irving Kristol, the iconoclastic monthly went national in 1970, changed its name to the American Spectator, acquired 22,000 subscribers and earned a reputation among intellectuals for good writing and biting humor. In his latest book, Public Nuisances, a collection of his editorials, Tyrrell fulminates against such targets as Jimmy Carter (“a grinning dunce”) and women’s lib (“the most successful pestilence since Prohibition”).

45. Richard A. Viguerie, 45, a prime mover of neoconservatism, has rediscovered an old means of communication to further his causes: direct mail. Viguerie circumvents the media with his two IBM computers and a treasure of mailing lists, including a 5,000-name “hit list” that can produce, almost overnight, $115,000 in contributions for conservative causes. He can flood a Senator, Representative or state Governor with 50,000 letters in a single delivery. Viguerie helped lead the heated battle against the Panama Canal Treaties, anathema to many middle-of-the-roaders—and lost narrowly. Now he is cranking up a major effort against the ratification of SALT II. Viguerie, who studied political science at the University of Houston in his home town, is a dedicated conservative who helps shape the movement’s strategy. “We’re still a bit on the sidelines,” he says, “but our time will come.”

46. Jim Wallis, 31. “If there ever was a time when the radical nature of the Bible needs to be lived out courageously, it is now,” says Wallis, a Protestant religious leader and the editor of an evangelical magazine. A Detroit native and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Wallis was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements a decade ago. Then he turned to religion. After studying at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill., Wallis founded Sojourners in 1975, a religious community now totaling 60 people who live together in a poor section of Washington, D.C. Sojourners runs day care centers, shelters for the indigent and a free clinic, and publishes a monthly magazine with 40,000 subscribers. Says Wallis, who spends nearly half his time lecturing throughout the country and abroad: “We’re trying to live our vision.”

47. Sarah Weddington, 34. “I want to see to it that women are not cut off from power positions,” says Carter’s special assistant on women’s issues. A graduate of the University of Texas Law School and a Texas state legislator for five years, Attorney Weddington worked to reform the state’s sexual abuse laws and equalize commercial credit requirements for women. In 1973, at the age of 28, she won the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Since Weddington replaced Midge Costanza last November, Carter has increased the number of women in top Administration spots; former Attorney General Griffin Bell raised female federal judgeships from 6% to 17%. “My purpose is to put women into the mainstream of life,” says Weddington, which is precisely where she is.

48. Eliot Wigginton, 36, began in 1966 with 140 children and $440 in donations from the residents of Rabun Gap in the north Georgia mountains. Wigginton, who grew up in Georgia and was educated at Cornell, wanted to teach young people about the glories of the area’s independent mountain folk. He named the project Foxfire, after a Georgia lichen that glows in the dark, and set up a course of study, which includes photography, folklore and music. The students interview elderly people about their lives and write stories for the Foxfire magazines and books. Published by Doubleday since 1972, the books have sold more than 4 million copies. Now the Foxfire program has 300 students each year, with 19 employees and 25 log cabins for a base. Wigginton’s ultimate goal: to develop jobs and leaders to revive communities in Appalachia.

49. Mark Willes, 38, is the youngest of the Federal Reserve’s twelve regional bank presidents. He is also the most independent and outspoken. As chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which oversees the North Central states, Willes has frequently been at odds with the other Fed regional presidents and the Fed’s former chairman G. William Miller. A Utah-born Mormon who attended Columbia University, Willes argues that forecasts about the impact of new economic policies are so imprecise that the Fed should resist trying to make constant short-term adjustments by changing the money supply. Instead he advocates a new hands-off approach known as the theory of “rational expectations,” which contends that longterm, stable monetary policies encourage public confidence and hence lead to increased economic growth. Though Willes has had little influence on the Fed’s thinking, his arguments are reaching businessmen and commercial bankers.

50. Garry Wills, 45, is a writer and columnist who defies tidy labeling. He carefully disengages himself from the right wing in America, which he claims is simply an “amalgam” of individualism in economic affairs. He is skeptical that the political system can produce beneficial change and looks instead to forces “from the principled minority.” Wills, who spent six years in a Catholic seminary, says that “the Gospel’s concerns are the ones that seem to me to be conservative in the right sense: concern for the poor, concern for peace, concern for social harmony.” A humanities professor at Johns Hopkins and a classics scholar, Wills has written scathingly of Richard Nixon (Nixon Agonistes) and brilliantly of Thomas Jefferson (Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence). His latest work: Confessions of a Conservative. Wills’ column appears in 70 newspapers.