TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT1697> <title> Dec. 05, 1994: Cover:Leadership-Tomorrow </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Dec. 05, 1994 50 for the Future </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> COVER/LEADERSHIP, Page 48 Tomorrow </hdr> <body> As the November elections stressed anew, America has become vastly suspicious of leaders. Yet it continues to produce them: TIME has picked 50 with the requisite ambition, vision and community spirit to help guide us in the new millennium By David Van Biema One of the satisfactions of American democracy is that after each election, we can imagine a little map on which dozens of tiny dotted lines converge northeast of Virginia, as dozens of Mr. Smiths from all over make their way to Washington. It is gratifying to think of those Smiths; they represent civic responsibility successfully discharged. For one alarming, if heady, moment, the weight of a nation rests directly on our shoulders; then suddenly it is on theirs, and we are proud and relieved to announce our latest set of leaders. Not this last time, however. Or perhaps only in the strictest sense. Because, in truth, Election 1994 was not about sending leaders to Washington; it was about sending a message to Washington regarding how bad we thought our leaders were. It followed a campaign in which a picture of someone alongside Washington's Capitol dome was tantamount to a smear and in which all but the most atavistic incumbents abstained from leaderly chest beating for fear it might mark them as "insiders." If we could have sent no one to Congress, we would have. Those whom we did send, needless to say, were the proponents of "small government"--that is, people promising to deliver us from leadership, which is an ideal under by now prolonged siege. Dante, observed the poet Richard Wilbur, wrote "from the center of a diamond." What Wilbur meant was that Dante's society was aligned in such a way that the sound and sense of his verses could emanate clearly throughout the Italian-speaking world, effectively defining a culture. American leadership enjoyed its own Diamond Age during the decades following World War II. Whatever was performed by the men at the gem's center, which was Washington, was amplified clearly around the country, redefining it. For those ambitious to lead (and those just keeping score), the paths to the center were crystal clear: the two main political parties, the military or Big Business. After the 1950s, one could add the major civil-rights groups. John F. Kennedy's rise through the Navy to Congress to the Senate was typical enough. Nobody needed a road map to find him. That explains why TIME's first list of young leaders did not appear in the '40s, '50s or '60s but in 1974. By then cracks had marred the diamond's surface. "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters," Bob Dylan sang in 1965, coincidentally staking out his own rogue claim to leadership. QUESTION AUTHORITY, added an unknown sloganeer. Vietnam and Watergate further confused and corroded. Nixon was a month from resigning. America, TIME suggested in 1974, seemed plagued by "a sense of unease, not only of giants having departed but also of mere competence being all too scarce." When the magazine repeated the exercise in 1979 during Jimmy Carter's third year (Presidents in trouble seem to inspire us), the trend had accelerated. "It sometimes appears that Americans in the '70s have developed almost a psychological aversion to leading and to being led," TIME wrote. How much worse could it get? Little did we know. Citizens today may be forgiven for thinking that the diamond has splintered altogether, replaced by a thousand cheap disco balls, spinning, oblivious to one another, in the gathering gloom. Multiculturalism, in its separatist aspect, bears some blame: if America's constituent groups no longer acknowledge the primacy of the whole, then they are unlikely to extend allegiance to the whole's leaders. Then there is multiculturalism's Washington twin, special-interest politics: it is impossible to articulate a coherent vision when each new idea instantly generates a spate of negative advertising by lobbyists or pressure groups, burrowing with the single-minded intensity of corn borers. The result is a society in which the only way to lead, it seems, is to pose as an antileader, a society in which term limits outpoll wisdom or service. To take the helm today is to invite invective, nor does it look as though the trend will reverse itself anytime soon. It seems worth asking once more whether the nation has any leaders left, especially young ones, with promise and enthusiasm. After screening hundreds of candidates, time has picked 50 men and women, age 40 and under, who we think will make a difference. The search employed the magazine's 1979 standard of "civic and social impact," which allows for the inclusion not only of political comers such as Evan Bayh, 38, Governor of Indiana, and Election '94 victor Susan Molinari, 36, but also business visionaries like Bill Gates, 39, and influential academics like Jeffrey Sachs, who, at 40, retools the wealth of nations. Athletes and entertainers went unlisted unless, like Oprah Winfrey or trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, their genius extended to activism, evangelism or entrepreneurism. The cutoff age of 40 represents an attempt to balance accomplishment with future promise. It should be stressed that this selection, as always, is intended to be representative rather than inclusive: there are lots more where they came from. As to where they do come from, it is worth noting that the selection process has yielded an unusually large representation of local activists. In 1979 columnist David Broder suggested to TIME that compelling leaders may be scarce because the nation is "between clarifying ideas." Nationally that may still hold true. But there can be no doubt that below the national level, there are at least as many clarifying ideas as there are battling subcultures. Put more cheerfully: the more pieces of the pie there are, the greater the opportunity for people to distinguish themselves serving it up. In fact, some of the most forbidding or inaccessible "locales"--those whose problems national leaders have addressed unsuccessfully or only tentatively--have produced some of the strongest local leaders. An unusually high number of nominees sprang from the country's most notoriously barren ground: they are rehabilitating parts of Los Angeles ravaged by the 1992 riots. It was the urban sprawl of a neighborhood so exotic that it cannot be found on any map that inspired Marc Andreessen to produce an ingenious cybernetic street finder for the Internet. No one can predict whether any of these local leaders will eventually ascend to the national stage or whether that kind of leadership--on the grand scale--has become impossible. One can only cite the hopeful example of Regina Benjamin, a rural physician whose rather modest original goal was to help solve the local doctor shortage in poverty-stricken Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Practicing there for a while convinced her of the need to know something about business. While earning her M.B.A. at Tulane University, she unearthed an obscure federal rule that would provide government money to qualified rural health clinics. Suddenly, in addition to her medical chores in Bayou La Batre, she was performing a wider-ranging function as an adviser to other small, medically underserved towns looking to open facilities. This, in turn, led her to a seat on the Alabama Medical Association's governing board and the state public-health and medical examiners' boards. She presents this progression toward ever greater responsibility and authority matter-of-factly, as if it were inevitable. Which, perhaps, it is. As surely as there are forces organic to today's America that stifle leadership, there are forces within some Americans that cause them to lead nonetheless. Ambition plays a role, as does a desire to do good, but doggedness is essential, as is a sort of questing curiosity. Some local heroes will remain local, which is as it should be. For others, solving one problem will inevitably lead to another and another: until, eventually, the new leaders will be ministering not to a neighborhood but to a nation, perhaps to the world. Assuming that we will let them. SPECIAL REPORT 50 For The Future TIME's roster of America's most promising leaders age 40 and under. TUNDI AGARDY, 37, Marine biologist Ocean biologists tend to pass their careers either exiled on remote islands or marooned in the lab. Tundi Agardy has done plenty of both. She spends two months a year surveying sharks off the coast of western Africa, and her publications boast titles like Kinorhynches, Echinurians, Priapulans, and Sipunculans: How to Manage Them When You Can't Even Pronounce Them. But whether she is studying mud flats on Tanzania's Mafia Island or drafting UNESCO guidelines for coastal conservation in Madagascar, Agardy has a flair for turning raw science into sound stewardship. "She is one of the few people in marine conservation who start with a good scientific base, then go on to policy," says William Eichbaum of the World Wildlife Fund, where Agardy is a scientist. She is also a search-and-rescue diver, pilots powerboats for fun and is taking a lead in setting up marine parks to save endangered ecosystems around the world. HELEN ALVARE, 34, Antiabortion leader Helen Alvare's label for herself--pro-life feminist--is composed of words that rarely sit quietly together. But she sees no contradictions: her feminism and her Roman Catholicism, she says, both arise directly from biblical teachings about the equality of creation and Jesus' treatment of women. A lawyer, Alvare acts as the national spokeswoman on abortion for the Catholic bishops. Growing up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, as one of five kids in a Catholic, Cuban-Irish family, she attended her first pro-life rally in Washington when she was 13. That was when she realized, she says, that she was outspoken, "even a little pushy," a quality that could be put to good use defending those who could not speak for themselves. "How do we treat innocent life?" she asks. "That speaks to the future of America's soul." Her work keeps her on the road 70 days a year, but a flex-time arrangement with the bishops still leaves her time for her husband and baby daughter. MARC ANDREESSEN, 23, Co-creator, Mosaic Big, blond and thoroughly unpretentious, Marc Andreessen had barely come of age when he co-wrote the program that is helping to tame the Internet--the vast, chaotic web of interconnected computers that is the closest thing today to an information superhighway. In the democratic spirit of cyberspace, Andreessen made the program--NCSA Mosaic--freely available on the Net, and it has spread like a virus. Today at least 20 firms are racing to cash in on Mosaic's popularity, the most prominent of which is Andreessen's own company, Netscape Communications. Life in the fast lane of the info highway is vastly different from what it was in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, where only a few years ago, he was staying up nights dreaming of computer programs that could do his math homework. Andreessen is often cited as one of the few people who have a road map for the infobahn. Pressed for directions, he quips, "I hope sleep is part of the plan." EVAN BAYH, 38, Governor of Indiana When people speak of Evan Bayh, they tend to speak in superlatives. They observe that he is the nation's youngest Governor and Indiana's most conservative modern-era chief executive, the man who in 1992 was re-elected to a second term by the largest margin in modern Indiana history. As both Indiana's top Hoosier and chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, Bayh earns high marks for sound fiscal management, keen attention to education programs, strong consensus-building skills and an easy-listening communication style. Admirers say this Friend of Bill will carry the New Democrat torch long after Clinton leaves the White House. While some Friends of Evan are already predicting that Bayh will occupy the Oval Office someday, the son of former Senator Birch Bayh has a more immediate goal in mind: he wants to leave the statehouse in January 1997 with a track record of never having raised Indiana's taxes. DR. REGINA BENJAMIN, 38, Rural health-care provider To her patients in and around the coastal Alabama hamlet of Bayou La Batre (pop. 2,500, now immortal as the town where Forrest Gump made his fortune as a shrimper), it is enough that Dr. Regina Benjamin is a fine doctor in a place where there are few doctors at all. But to get there she needed far more than her medical skills. After training and a volunteer stint, she opened her own practice in 1990, but "it wasn't long until I realized I needed to know about business almost as much as medicine." So she commuted to Tulane, in New Orleans, to earn her M.B.A., which allowed her to analyze red tape as easily as red blood cells. What she discovered was a little-known provision in the 1977 health-clinic law that made extra federal money available for qualified practices. Now other towns consult her about how to open facilities in underserved areas. Her current mission: to clean up the environment that is poisoning her patients' health. HENRY BONILLA, 40, Congressman, Texas As a local television reporter, he moved around the barrios of South Texas with an ease that gave him an edge on the competition. Henry Bonilla's understanding of a community that includes some of the poorest people in the nation, however, would eventually inspire him to do more than chronicle other people's pain. He plunged into Texas politics in 1992 with the aggression of a linebacker and sacked a four-term Democratic incumbent to become Texas' first Hispanic Republican Congressman. When he arrived in Washington from San Antonio, he was assigned to the House Appropriations Committee, a position not held by a Republican freshman for 25 years. "You can have anything you ask for, if you are willing to step forward and work," is how Bonilla sees it. "His future is open-ended," says Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich. "He's tremendously intelligent, very, very competent, very organized." And primed to move up. JOHN BRYANT, 28, Founder, Operation HOPE Inc. John Bryant remembers one compliment distinctly, delivered by Bill Elkins, special assistant to former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley: "John, you're too dumb to fail. You've never been taught what you cannot do." Case in point: just days after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Bryant took scores of bankers on a bus tour of the devastated neighborhoods. Result: millions in loans poured into the area from banks convinced by Bryant that local economies would pick up. Says he: "There is nothing bad about doing well from doing good." Indeed, doing well has been an obsession. As a 10 year old growing up in depressed Compton, he bummed $40 from his mother and bought candy wholesale, then made as much as $300 a week selling sweets to neighborhood kids. Now the president of a bank consulting firm, he teaches a UCLA seminar called Doing Business with Japan. He also has his eyes on politics. Might he fail? Dumb question. WILLIAM BURNS, 38, Foreign-service officer The craft of diplomacy may be likened to the art of creating nouvelle cuisine: balance, presentation and style are as important as the actual ingredients. So it is perhaps fitting that William Burns' boss once compared him to a food processor, a reference to the speed with which the young deputy smoothly churned out assignments during the weeks preceding the 1991 Madrid peace talks. Throughout his string of top jobs, Burns' remarkable performance has belied his age. At 32, he was briefing Ronald Reagan on Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. At 36, he was acting director of the State Department's policy planning staff, a job previously held by the likes of George Kennan and Paul Nitze. Now serving in the Moscow embassy, Burns' brilliant mind, unflappable demeanor and flair for self-effacement in a field where titanic egos often clash make him the fastest-rising career diplomat of his generation. STEPHEN CARTER, 40, Law professor, Yale University "The only thing I can do better than others is put words on a page," says Stephen Carter. His words have led Americans to face uncomfortable issues. Carter's first book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, caused consternation among conservatives and liberals alike by arguing in favor of the affirmative-action programs but against racial preference in hiring. Meanwhile, The Culture of Disbelief, his criticism of liberals, courts and academe for treating "God as a hobby," became the talk of Washington after Bill Clinton offered an unsolicited rave. An Episcopal convert, Carter says, "Each of us is a complex of our ideas and experiences. I am shaped by being an African American. But I am also shaped by being a Christian." Eschewing suggestions that he enter politics or seek a judgeship, he is focusing on a new book. "I am writing about a life in which one works hard to do what most of us don't do often enough, to distinguish right from wrong." SEAN CARROLL, 33, Molecular biologist, inventor If doctors ever acquire an antidote to "killer bee" venom, they will probably have Sean Carroll's fascination with reptiles and insects to thank. With his wife, a biochemist, Carroll founded a medical-biotech company, Ophidian Pharmaceuticals, in 1989; it has already patented an anti-snakebite medicine and is now at work on a synthetic cure for blood poisoning, as well as the bee-venom drug. But the company is just a sideline to Carroll's real work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Wisconsin. His groundbreaking studies of the genetics of butterfly-wing patterns are leading to deep insights into the ways genes direct cell development and trigger evolutionary change, not just in butterflies but in myriad other animals as well. Important though he considers his pharmaceutical work, Carroll sees no need to commercialize everything he does. "I don't think," he says, "that evolutionary biology needs a medical rationale." CHRISTOPHER CHYBA, 35, Planetary scientist Those who fret about the world coming to an end would find Chris Chyba an immensely reassuring fellow. After six years of studying how comets and asteroids work, he concluded that even if the Big One were on a collision course with Earth, it would probably, owing to complex aerodynamic forces, blow up too high in the atmosphere to wipe out life on the ground. His other research interests range from drilling through million-year-old permafrost in Siberia to working on the Voyager spacecraft's imaging team. But Chyba keeps his eye on the ground as well. For a year as a White House Fellow, he studied Chernobyl and other nuclear reactors in the East bloc to review safety regulations and alternative energy sources. Now at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, this honors graduate of Swarthmore has an even more pressing task: helping tighten the security of nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union. JAMES DIMON, 38, President, Travelers Group From his midtown Manhattan aerie, Jamie Dimon can see Queens, where he grew up. Climbing the Wall Street ladder, Dimon has been involved in some of the biggest deals in investment banking. He helped engineer the $4 billion purchase of giant insurer Travelers by Primerica (now Travelers Group), where he is widely assumed to be heir apparent to chairman Sanford Weill. As head of Travelers' Smith Barney brokerage unit (second in size to Merrill Lynch), Dimon ranks as one of the Top 10 figures on Wall Street. Grandson of a Greek immigrant, Dimon has not lost sight of his roots. In 1982 he co-founded the New York Academy of Finance, which prepares inner-city youths for Wall Street careers. Two years ago, he launched a recruitment program at Spelman College to attract more black women to finance. "Jamie's not afraid to act like a leader," says Weill. "He faces it head on; he sticks with it, and he finishes it." CHAKA FATTAH, 38, Pennsylvania Congressman-elect In 1982, at age 25, Chaka Fattah became the youngest person to win a seat in Pennsylvania's general assembly. Since then he has built a reputation in Harrisburg as an articulate spokesman for urban issues. First in the house, then in the senate, he gained standing as an education crusader, designing reading programs, securing state grants and loans for college students and exhorting youngsters to fulfill their potential. He is also credited with leading a $34 million fund-raising effort to keep Philadelphia solvent, sponsoring an employment-opportunity bill that trained 200,000 people for private-sector jobs and championing a program to move Philadelphia's poor from decrepit high-rises to decent, smaller-scale housing. His versatility, energy and determined efforts on behalf of the needy have Pennsylvania Democrats prematurely--but confidently--predicting that this Philadelphia father of a son and a daughter will someday lead the Congressional Black Caucus. BILL GATES, 39, Co-founder, Microsoft Corp. The people who are closest to Bill Gates (those who feel comfortable enough to pull his smudged glasses off his face and polish them for him) thought his marriage early this year might finally slow him down. If so, there is no outward sign of it. The boyish Gates seized virtual control of the computer-software industry through a clever deal with IBM nearly 15 years ago, becoming in the process America's richest man (estimated net worth: $9.35 billion). Since then he has become, if anything, even more powerful. Not content to own operating systems (MS-DOS), interfaces (Windows) and application programs (Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.), he seems intent on extending Microsoft's hegemony into every new medium, from CD-ROMs to digital banking to online services to interactive television. No aspect of life in the information age, it seems, will escape his influence. He's even buying digital reproduction rights to the world's greatest works of art. DR. PEDRO JOSE GREER JR., 38, Advocate for the homeless Greer still remembers the first time he peered through "the window into poverty." He was an intern at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, treating a man who was dying of tuberculosis. The patient's wristband read NO ADDRESS, and Greer hated to see him dying alone. "So I went to different shelters to try to find his family," but with no luck. He has been going back to the city's shelters ever since, becoming one of the nation's leading authorities on health care for the homeless. Greer still makes rounds in his red Jeep, calling on people who live under highway overpasses and in public parks. Camillus Health Concern, one of the four free clinics he founded, now gets about 30,000 visits a year. True reform, he argues, requires careful tailoring. "A diabetic who lives under a bridge won't be able to guard his syringes or stick to a diabetic's diet," he says. "Health care is a very personal thing--a one-size-fits-all approach just won't work." JOHN KALISKI, 38, Urban architect John Kaliski dreams of a time when America's biggest cities will be known not as entrepots of crime and fear, but as places that nurture, shelter and inspire the people who live in them. With the help of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, his private firm is researching the histories of several Los Angeles neighborhoods to shed light on the evolution of urban sprawl--an important step in making city neighborhoods, not just in L.A. but around the country, more habitable. Kaliski, who studied architecture at Yale, wants to redesign cities to reflect "the way people live" by lining urban boulevards with lush parks, safe family housing and extensive community gardens, linking commercial buildings and homes with nature. Assuming he manages to keep from getting run over by a car--his boyish enthusiasm for photographing taco stands and dry cleaners often puts him at the mercy of heavy traffic--he promises to help change the profile of U.S. cities in the next century. JOHN F. KENNEDY JR., 34, Health-care entrepreneur His tabloid image--a hunk, not a rocket scientist--is well off the mark. Intelligent, self-possessed and decent, John F. Kennedy Jr. inherited his mother's sense of privacy and is intent upon pursuing a useful life as much outside the public eye as a Kennedy can. For six years, without publicity, he has led a project called Reaching Up, a program that has created hundreds of education and career opportunities for New York State hospital orderlies, home attendants and nursing aides working in the health-care field. Until last year an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, Kennedy is launching a new magazine called George (as in Washington), which is intended to be a kind of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED of American politics. He too may eventually go into politics (his father, of course, began with a brief stint as a journalist), and if he does, no one doubts he will have as good a chance of succeeding as any of his relatives. RANDALL KENNEDY, 40, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's curriculum vitae is any young scholar's dream. A graduate of the elite St. Albans School in Washington, he won a Rhodes scholarship after Princeton, then took his Yale Law degree to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Unwilling to settle for an ivory-tower life, Kennedy four years ago launched Reconstruction, a journal on African-American politics and culture that has emerged as an intellectual sparring ring for heavyweight thinkers, black and white, such as Stephen Carter and James McPherson. His provocative approaches to social and legal problems are helping reshape the way Americans think about race. He opposes attempts to limit adoptions through race-preference laws, for example, on the grounds that a healthy home environment outweighs the benefits of living in a racially unified family. Social policy, he contends, "should be aimed at putting children in need of adults in the hands of loving adults as quickly as possible." ALAN KHAZEI, 33, Co-director, City Year "I want to see a day when doing a year of public service is just part of growing up in America," says Alan Khazei. Since founding City Year in 1988, he and his former Harvard roommate, Michael Brown, 33, have dispatched hundreds of young people in cities nationwide, where they spend a year working in classrooms and afterschool programs and restoring playgrounds and parks--all for a $125-a-week paycheck, plus a $4,725 bonus for college. Son of an Iranian immigrant, Khazei worked on Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaign. But politics, he believes, has become a dirty word. Khazei prefers "public-service entrepreneurship." Corporations like Timberland and Reebok believe in it enough to contribute to City Year's $16 million annual budget. "I used to call Alan Mr. President," says Jeffrey Swartz, 34, chief operating officer of Timberland. "He turned to me one day and said, `Why would you limit the good that I can achieve?'" RONALD A. KLAIN, 33, Chief of staff to Janet Reno In a city where name recognition is synonymous with success, Ron Klain has made a virtue of being unknown. As Attorney General Janet Reno's chief of staff, he is all but invisible to the public but recognized in Democratic circles as the man to have on your side in a political or legal fight. A rare mix of top-flight lawyer and savvy politician, Klain shepherded the nominations of Reno and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg through the Senate and steered the omnibus crime bill through the turbulent legislative process. An honors graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Law, he clerked for Justice Byron White. Spurning six-figure law-firm offers, he signed on as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a job Justice Stephen Breyer once held on his road to the High Court. Harvard's Laurence Tribe, an admiring former teacher, calls Klain "one of the most politically talented and intellectually powerful students I've ever had"--one destined to lose his anonymity soon. WENDY KOPP, 27, Founder, Teach for America She is perhaps America's most impassioned antislacker. At 21, Wendy Kopp, who graduated from Princeton University, dedicated herself to an ambitious goal: enhancing the image of teaching by drawing the best and brightest to the profession. To that end, she created Teach for America, a national corps of top-notch college graduates who make a commitment to teach in 17 underfunded school districts across the country. "We will never get where we need to be in educating children if we don't recruit the most talented people," says Kopp. "A corporation might have 100 resumes for a position and still go out and recruit the best person. In a school district, that kind of mind-set is extremely rare." Kopp, who funded TFA with a $26,000 seed grant from Mobil and whose current funding is $22 million from corporate sponsors, has had little trouble attracting smart, eager candidates. Each year TFA receives about 3,000 applicants for 500 positions. SAMUEL LABUDDE, 38, Biologist Most environmental activists use megaphones and in-your-face-offs to draw attention to their cause. Not Sam LaBudde. He spies. In 1987 LaBudde spent four months aboard a Panamanian tuna boat secretly chronicling the slaughter of dolphins that were trapped in the vessel's mile-long nets. His video, part of which aired on network news, forced U.S. companies to stop selling tuna caught with dolphin-killing nets. Since then, LaBudde, co-director of the San Francisco-based Endangered Species Project, has used his cloak-and-dagger techniques to expose the destruction of marine life by Asian drift-nets, spearheaded an international effort to halt China and Taiwan's illegal trade in tigers, and documented links between organized crime and wildlife trafficking. "The escalating rate of species extinction," he says, "is the one thing that future generations are most likely not to forgive." WINONA LADUKE, 35, Native American rights activist Her ceremonial name in the Chippewa tongue means "Thunderbird Woman." In her quest to redress wrongs, the Harvard-educated Winona LaDuke doesn't mind ruffling a few feathers. When the state government seized tribal lands from the 837,000-acre White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota because members of the tribe had failed to pay property taxes they neither understood nor could afford, LaDuke stepped in with an aggressive solution: buy it back, one acre at a time. Using $20,000 awarded by Reebok for her human-rights activities, she seeded a fund that has allowed the tribe to repurchase more than 1,000 acres. She was also instrumental in stopping the massive James Bay hydroelectric project, which threatened to destroy four major rivers in Canada. A riveting speaker, LaDuke exhorts Native Americans to take control of their lives by taking back control of their land: "A land base to support our people is essential." MAYA LIN, 35, Sculptor, architect In an era in which so much political art borders on the bombastic, Maya Lin's sculptures speak quietly but always evocatively, reminding Americans of their common bonds. When she was 21, Lin, an architectural student at Yale, submitted the winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which now stands as the country's most moving monument. Since then, she has similarly embraced other historically emotional subjects--creating a Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama, dedicated in 1989, in which names and events crucial in the civil rights struggle were carved into a black granite waterwall and table. Few would argue with Lin's own assessment of her art: "No matter how you see my works, the end scale is a very personal, immediate, human scale." A committed environmentalist currently designing a 200,000-sq.-ft. recycling plant, Lin seems destined to continue imbuing art and architecture with real meaning. RODERICK VON LIPSEY, 35, Major, U.S. Marine Corps A Marine fighter pilot who is also a founding member of the Chamber Chorale of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Rod von Lipsey is a Renaissance soldier with a history of unusual juxtapositions. As a boy in Philadelphia, he studied ballet with the same zeal with which he threw himself into ice hockey. After completing the Navy's Top Gun fighter-pilot school at San Diego's Miramar Naval Air Station, he flew more than 40 combat missions during the Gulf War, then became an aide to General Colin Powell, who, incidentally, says Von Lipsey, "is a great officer, a great Marine; he'll go far." Von Lipsey has a graduate degree in international affairs from Catholic University, and until recently, as one of 17 White House Fellows, he briefed Clinton counsellor Mack McLarty in the areas of foreign policy and security, a position of unprecedented responsibility for an officer of his rank. Senior officers see him becoming one of them before too long. JONATHAN LUNINE, 35, Planetary astronomer "Smaller, faster, cheaper" are NASA's new bywords. Without the money to launch complex probes, the agency must lower its horizons or find a better way. Jonathan Lunine thinks he has some answers: "Most of the problem is that it costs so much to launch even a small payload that you have to get it right the first time." As head of NASA's Solar System Exploration Committee, the University of Arizona scientist is ideally placed to make that happen. He is also supremely qualified: inspired by a close encounter with a Carl Sagan book during high school, Lunine took degrees at Caltech in both planetary science and geophysics. Just three years out of graduate school, he won the 1988 Harold C. Urey prize from the American Astronomical Society for his work on Pluto and the major moons of Neptune and Saturn. In 1993 he joined a NASA team studying the feasibility of a manned trip to Mars. He says it could happen as early as 2030--and who would presume to doubt him? FRANK LUNTZ, 32, Republican pollster and analyst If the Republican Party adopts the so-called big-tent policy to attract more voters from the political center, Frank Luntz will be holding up the flap. A flamboyant campaign strategist in a button-down party, Luntz sees himself as a kind of political Johnny Appleseed, "planting words and phrases for the Republican candidates all over the country." Those messages, shaped with the help of Luntz's focus groups and polls, bore fruit in the G.O.P.'s smashing ballot-box coup in early November. Although his irreverent style has proved off-putting to some G.O.P. stalwarts--Ed Rollins has called him "impetuous"--Luntz's successes speak better of him. His admirers include Newt Gingrich, whose "Contract with America" he helped market; New York City maverick mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose campaign Luntz advised; and the Washington Post, which awarded him its "Crystal Ball" for being the most accurate pundit in 1992. WYNTON MARSALIS, 33, Jazz musician If the Marsalis clan is jazz royalty, then Wynton Marsalis is its prince of wails: he is a prodigiously talented trumpeter, a favorite son of New Orleans and, almost literally, a Pied Piper. Over the years, he has encouraged the careers of trumpeter Terence Blanchard and pianist Harry Connick Jr., among others. Critics and fans alike point to the hegemony of the Marsalis school of jazz, but it is only growing in influence. He has preached the virtues of his music around the country, visiting more than 1,000 schools in the past decade. As the artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, he has introduced programs to teach young people about jazz. "For us to really heal our society, it requires us to expend our own energy and capital on people who are not like us," says Marsalis. "We have to invest in them to keep the whole system working. One of the many ways of doing it is through music." FRED MCCLURE, 40, Corporate consultant Fred McClure has learned to lead from some tough taskmasters--the late Texas Senator John Tower and former White House chief of staff John Sununu--disarming them, when necessary, with a funny story or a line sung in his rich baritone voice. That blend of easy humor and competence has marked his rise from San Augustine, Texas, to become the first African-American president of Texas' Future Farmers of America and of the Texas A& M University's student body, and later an intern in the Ford White House. Between various Washington jobs, McClure earned a law degree from Baylor, then worked as vice president of Texas Air Corp. until 1988, when George Bush and Sununu made him assistant to the President for legislative affairs. Now he is launching a Dallas consulting firm to help companies deal with government. If Republicans regain the White House in 1996, McClure is likely to get a Cabinet post or other top job. "Politics," he says, "is in my blood." CYNTHIA MCKINNEY, 39, Congresswoman, Georgia Cynthia McKinney may be the only elected official in the country to show up for work in gold lame sneakers. As her choice of footwear might indicate, she is not one of the more timid members of Congress. "Whenever you see a good fight, get in it," is how this Democrat describes her leadership philosophy. Elected Georgia's first African-American Congresswoman in 1992, McKinney, a single parent, has been battling to improve the lives of the poor. She successfully fought for a larger tax break for working families and also for an EPA investigation into environmental contamination of an impoverished Georgia community. In addition, she has backed legislation to fund breast-cancer research and to protect access to abortion clinics. "Nobody minds when I lobby them because they always get a hug and a kiss," says the self-described maverick Congresswoman. "I don't practice the same good-ol'-boy, business-as-usual politics." WAYNE MEISEL, 35, Founder, COOL A self-appointed former "roads scholar," Wayne Meisel took a 1,500-mile trek from Maine to Washington in 1984 to launch community-service projects on college campuses. From those seeds grew COOL, for Campus Outreach Opportunity League, a national group that involves 700 colleges and universities. Meisel was a primary architect of President Clinton's National Service legislation, Americorps, passed by Congress in 1993. Like astronaut Sally Ride, Steven Jobs and Henry Cisneros before him, he is a recipient of the Jefferson Award for the greatest achievement in public service by an American under age 35. Meisel, who is dyslexic, is starting a program called "Dyslexics Untied" (a deliberate transposition of united) to work with similarly afflicted children. He now heads the Bonner Foundation, a charity based in Princeton, New Jersey, that grants 1,600 scholarships annually to students who perform community-service work. NANCY-ANN MIN, 37, White House budget official Reared in Rockwood, Tennessee, by a single working mother, Nancy-Ann Min carries a soft heart for the disadvantaged, complemented by a hard head for management. At the University of Tennessee, she was the first woman to be elected student president. On a Rhodes scholarship she studied politics and economics, then earned a law degree from Harvard. By age 30, she was running and reforming the 6,000-employee Tennessee department of human services. Her belief in activist government survived that experience, but Min grew obsessive about cost-efficiency and skeptical of bureaucratic solutions. Those traits have placed her in conflict with some of the more starry-eyed of Clinton's health-care advisers but should serve Min and her President well in dealing with the new Republican Congress. "She's become a health-care expert," says White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, "but she's capable of just about anything." R. ALBERT MOHLER, 35, Southern Baptist Seminary If clarity of purpose is a requisite of leadership, then Al Mohler has what it takes. Barely into his second year as president of the prestigious Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, he forced the resignation of the seminary's first-ever female theology professor on the ground that her perceived liberal teachings were outside the boundaries of the institution's 136-year-old Abstract of Principles. In doing so, Mohler forcefully asserted his traditional values on the school and by inference on the entire 15 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. He also launched a school of evangelism, named after Billy Graham, and raised $7 million for it. Mohler's conservatism is manifest, from his insistence on the authority of the Bible to the dark blue suits that dominate his wardrobe. "My first mission is to call the church back to the truth of the gospel," he says. "Only then will the church be a powerful force for the transformation of society." SUSAN MOLINARI, 36, Congresswoman, New York Sprinting in and out of 84 congressional districts in 36 states in support of her Republican comrades this campaign season was pretty heady stuff for a two-term Congresswoman from Staten Island. Susan Molinari not only met the demand but also managed to win her own third term by a remarkable 71%. Articulate but disarmingly nonconfrontational, Molinari, a third-generation politician, describes herself as "an urban conservative," which means pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-balanced budget. Currently campaigning for the vice chairmanship of the House's Republican Conference, Molinari is married to another Republican member of Congress from New York, Bill Paxon, a rising star in his own right. But even Paxon acknowledges his wife's ascent may be swifter: "I believe Susan's career potential is unlimited, and certainly I would be very content staying home with the kids and the dog while she pursues political ambitions." CHARLES MUNN, 39, Conservationist-zoologist Charlie Munn loves birds so much that as a guest at a college friend's Vermont home, he took it upon himself to cover the kitchen windows with tree branches in order to deter warblers at a nearby feeder from crashing into the glass. He is recognized as the world's leading authority on wild macaws, having spent nearly 20 years studying the Amazon's largest and most endangered species of parrot. Fascination with one bird, however, has lead Munn to something far broader: habitat protection. He is a pioneer in promoting ecotourism as a means by which Third World nations can profit from nature without destroying it. To do this, Munn has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars so that remote wilderness areas can be bought by the people who care for them best: indigenous tribal communities. Result: Munn's forest reserves, conservation units and protected parks now encompass more than 9 million acres of South American rain forest. JIM NUSSLE, 34, Congressman, Iowa Jim Nussle has come a long way since he protested the House banking scandal three years ago by addressing the chamber with a paper bag over his head and declaring, "It's time to take the mask off this institution." Along with the other "Gang of Seven" G.O.P. fiscal conservatives, Nussle has not only ripped off the mask but now, as head of Newt Gingrich's "transformation" team, has begun rearranging the innards of an institution that was run by Democrats for 40 years. He is uninterested in just tearing down the old structure, he says. "We're building a rocket ship while the thing is taking off." Fervently committed to fiscal responsibility, Nussle voted against federal flood-relief funds--even for his own district--because his colleagues had failed to offset the aid money with spending cuts. "He sort of got a bum rap because of that bag thing," says Dave Yepsen, political editor of the Des Moines Register. "But I think there's a lot underneath that bag." RALPH REED, 33, Executive director of the Christian Coalition Though a crusader for Christian values in American politics, Ralph Reed is not one to turn the other cheek. His angelic demeanor belies a James Carville-like tough-mindedness. As the executive director of the Christian Coalition, Reed aims to reconcile biblical conservatism with mainstream politics, and that makes him the single most important strategist for the religious right. He has shrewdly expanded the Coalition's agenda to embrace conservative positions on term limits and balanced budgets, thereby wooing moderate Republicans, even as he rallies the growing bloc of voters who embrace traditional moral values. At the same time, Reed wages a holy war against secular liberals through hundreds of Coalition candidates on local school boards and city councils. The grass-roots campaign, he says, gives Christian politicians "the same permanence and status as unions, the feminists or the civil rights movement." CONDOLEEZZA RICE, 40, Provost, Stanford University In high school, Condoleezza Rice's counsellor told her she was "not college material." Now she is the youngest, the first black and the first woman ever to serve as provost of Stanford, a position widely regarded as a stepping-stone to the presidency of a major American university. Not only did Rice prove to be college material, but she graduated from the University of Denver at age 19 and went on to become a leading Soviet scholar--a field that attracts few blacks. As a member of George Bush's National Security staff, she helped shape U.S. foreign policy during the demise of communism. Taking the Stanford job meant turning down the chance to run for Congress, but many expect to see her in Washington again. "She has the ability to have a Cabinet-level job," says Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins. "She could be Secretary of State." But having been a frontline witness to the collapse of communism, she says, "It doesn't really get much better than that." JOHN ROGERS, 36, Mutual-fund manager Though he came of age as a financial whiz in the 1980s, John Rogers managed to avert the era's excesses. A believer in the philosophy that steady market tortoises could beat impetuous hares, he patiently nurtured his mutual-fund company, Ariel Capital Management, into $2 billion worth of assets. But what makes Rogers most unlike the Gordon Gekkos of Wall Street is his modest life-style and abundant public commitment. He has no second home or even a private office. He is also the first African American to serve as the unpaid president of the $300 million Chicago Park District, whose 3,000 employees are charged with running everything from the city's lakefront to its museums, zoos and Soldier Field. His wife Desiree, 35, runs the state's lottery and is a member of Illinois Governor Jim Edgar's cabinet. In addition, Rogers is paying tuition and expenses for 37 inner-city students from sixth grade through college. JEFFREY SACHS, 40, Economist Jeffrey Sachs is to ailing economies what Albert Schweitzer was to disease-stricken backwaters. As an adviser to the President of Bolivia for four years, this Harvard economist helped cut the country's commercial-bank debt in half. From 1988 to 1990, he took his financial-reform act to Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela. By 1989, the year the Soviet bloc disintegrated, he was already helping Poland devise a plan for economic "shock therapy." Two years later, this unabashed purveyor of free-market capitalism was invited to lead a team into Russia to perform emergency resuscitation on a code-red economy. With former communist hard-liners creeping back to power, Sachs recently resigned his position as adviser to President Boris Yeltsin. Whatever the fate of Russia's on-again, off-again flirtations with reform, the peripatetic Sachs seems destined to retain--and enhance--his status as the world's best-known economist. BRET SCHUNDLER, 35, Mayor of Jersey City He is the last person one would expect to see running Jersey City. More than half the population is nonwhite, over 14% of the city's residents are on welfare, and Democrats have controlled City Hall since 1917. Bret Schundler is white, prosperous (he once sold bonds on Wall Street) and a darling of the Republican Party. What makes him stand out in Jersey City, however, is his accomplishments since being elected in 1992. In a mayor's office so corrupt that one of his predecessors' desks was actually rigged to drop bribes into visitors' laps, Schundler's fiscal proposals present a national model for urban reform--while casting the mayor as a potential candidate for national office. Schundler preaches a gospel of lower taxes, less government and "voucherizing" city services so that people decide for themselves who sweeps their streets and educates their kids. Says he: "We want those directly affected by services to be in charge of hiring them." TAVIS SMILEY, 30, Radio talk-show host In the wildly popular and largely conservative medium of talk radio, a young black man unafraid to take on the white Establishment would not seem to have a promising future. But Tavis Smiley, self-styled "practical progressive," is making a name for himself--in part because he is equally willing to admonish fellow African Americans who too quickly blame racism for their problems. Evenings, Smiley can be heard on Los Angeles' KMPC radio as co-host of a show that reaches a racially diverse twentysomething audience. Mornings, he joins Ken and Barkley on L.A.'s No. 1 drive-time talk show with a mostly middle-aged white following. His success in engaging both blacks and whites on sensitive issues has earned him his own nationally syndicated radio spot, The Smiley Report, as well as TV appearances. Calling talk radio "the hottest medium in the country," Smiley observes, "I am part of the political debate every single day." LAWRENCE SUMMERS, 40, Treasury Under Secretary If Nobels ran in the genes, Lawrence Summers would have a lock; two of his uncles--Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow--have won the Prize for Economics, and Summers' colleagues have long thought him a favorite in his own right. Tenured at Harvard by age 28, the slightly rumpled, heavily laureled and intellectually overpowering economist joined the Clinton Administration as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, advising Clinton on everything from currency markets to Japanese trade. Summers argued early on that just as democracies don't go to war with one another, countries with hyperinflation do not necessarily stay democratic, hence the need for more aid to Russia. "There's no greater challenge for the U.S. than sharing prosperity," he says. "From Russia to Rwanda and Pretoria to Palestine, shared prosperity makes conflict less likely, democracy more viable and a healthy American economy more certain." TERRI SWEARINGEN, 37, Environmental activist Whatever It Takes, reads the button Terri Swearingen wears, and whatever it takes is what Swearingen will do to shut down a hazardous-waste incinerator 1,100 ft. from an elementary school in East Liverpool, Ohio. A nurse and housewife, Swearingen has been arrested, has testified before Congress and has gone on a hunger strike. Her leadership of the Tri-State Environmental Council persuaded Ohio Governor George V. Voinovich to ban construction of more burners, the Ohio EPA to toughen its building-site criteria and the federal EPA to announce an 18-month nationwide moratorium on new hazardous-waste incinerators. Ironically, the incinerator in her backyard is exempt. "Terri Swearingen, nearly on her own, raised the issue to a level that got the President's attention," says Richard Woodruff, a former aide to Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum. "She has the facts; she's tenacious; she's committed; and she's right." URVASHI VAID, 36, Gay-rights advocate When her family moved from India to Potsdam, New York, in 1966, says Urvashi Vaid, "we stood out like sore thumbs. Kids used to ask, `Did you grow up in a tepee?'" Years later, as a lawyer, writer and gay-rights leader, Vaid is still an outsider in a movement dominated by gay white men, but she is an outsider with clout. The first woman of color and Indian American to run the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, she was often the only woman at meetings. "My revenge," she says, "was to be really good." Having strengthened the task force's base and broadened its mission, she stepped down to write, from her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a book about the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movement. Once she's finished, however, it's back into the fray, with the goal of "freeing people to move beyond the old roles assigned to them." She flatly rules out running for office. "The temptation to compromise and cave in," she says, "is too great." FIDEL VARGAS, 26, Mayor, Baldwin Park, California In 1992 a security guard refused to let him walk into a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Washington. Not unreasonable, considering that Fidel Vargas, as California's youngest mayor, could have easily passed for a courier. Since he receives only $3,000 a year for running City Hall in Baldwin Park (pop. 72,000), Vargas can probably lay claim to providing taxpayers with the best value of any politician in the country. Elected at 23, he promised to combat prostitution and drug dealing, then stepped up police patrols and prohibited motels from renting rooms more than once in 24 hours. As a result, arrests fell from 150 to five. Vargas kept two other pledges by removing the ubiquitous graffiti and expanding a local community center. L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, for whom he serves as a public-safety policy analyst, calls Vargas "one of the most focused and confident young leaders I've come across." His goal is a seat in the U.S. Senate. KEVIN VIGILANTE, 40, Founder, Community Outreach Clinic In his campaign for Congress from Rhode Island's 1st District, Democrats claimed he was a tool of the medical lobby, intent on protecting doctors' lavish life-styles. He lost--to Patrick Kennedy--by 13,000 votes. Now Dr. Kevin Vigilante is back leading a life that is anything but lavish: treating HIV-infected women, as well as females at risk of contracting the virus, and teaching at Brown University Medical School. In the past three years he has done volunteer work in a Romanian orphanage, opened an inner-city clinic for women released from Rhode Island's Adult Correctional Institute and treated HIV-positive women in the prison. "Most people who make public policy don't see those things," he says. "I learned about it firsthand." In his campaign, he proposed restructuring the tax code to include credits for the uninsured. Uncertain whether he will seek public office again, the doctor believes government must solve problems beyond a physician's reach. REBECCA WALKER, 25, Co-founder Third Wave The daughter of an interracial couple who married in defiance of Mississippi's antimiscegenation laws, Rebecca Walker is true to her birthright: she continues to agitate. Upon graduation from Yale in 1992, she co-founded Third Wave Direct Action Corp., a national nonprofit organization dedicated to grooming female leaders. Her first challenge was Freedom Summer '92, a voter-registration drive that produced 20,000 new voters, most of them low-income, young women of color. For her efforts, Walker was named Feminist of the Year by the Fund for the Feminist Majority. These days she is spearheading Third Wave On Line, a fund-raising campaign aimed at connecting young women in cyberspace. Walker also writes about women's issues, with an eye toward broadening feminism beyond the white middle class--an accomplishment that must make her mother, novelist Alice Walker, very proud. OPRAH WINFREY, 40, Talk-show host She has turned an emotional flair for asking all the right questions into earnings of more than $50 million a year. Oprah Winfrey has become one of the wealthiest women in show business, so it's no wonder that she has cooked up a satellite dish of talk-show clones. But Winfrey has also managed to distinguish herself from the world's Sally Jessys. Her company, Harpo Productions, has been recognized as a purveyor of quality films and programming. With fiance sports-marketing executive Stedman Graham, Winfrey founded Families for a Better Life, which will finance the relocation of 100 inner-city Chicago families. Even more notably, she helped bring about the National Child Protection Act. It was Winfrey, a survivor of sexual molestation, who proposed that Congress establish a data bank to track child abusers. With luck, her emulators will follow suit if she fulfills her pledge to avoid tawdrier topics on her TV show. NAOMI WOLF, 32, Feminist author Devoid of any strident provocateurs, feminism in the 1980s resembled a ghost town. It was Naomi Wolf's 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, that helped bring the movement back to life. In it, the Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar posited that women are hindered by the marketing of unrealistic beauty standards. She vilified the $20 billion-a-year cosmetics industry for ensuring that women remain fixated on their looks. Wolf was not embraced by all feminists, but she certainly sparked a clamorous debate among them. Ironically, her second book, Fire With Fire, called for women to "build beyond" divisive tendencies within the feminist movement. "We need to realize the extent of our power as women, as the majority in a representative democracy," says Wolf, "and also to heal the breach between many millions of Americans who want gender equality." With Wolf still onstage, feminist discourse is not likely to fizzle. </body> </article> </text>