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The list is intended neither as an endorsement nor as TIME'S version of "The Top 200 Americans." It is a fallible selection, a sampling to suggest the great diversity of the country's abilities. Any list maker runs the risk that some of his choices may prove to be eccentric and some of his omissions unforgivable. But that seems a risk worth taking if it helps start a debate about who the future leaders are and what leadership really means, and to demonstrate that there may be cause for hope in a time of deep concern.
Thus, on the following pages, 200 faces for the future.
1
A. Robert Abboud, 45. Deputy chairman of the First Chicago Corp., holding company for the powerful First National Bank of Chicago, Abboud is certain to have considerable influence on U.S. and world economic matters in the years ahead. The Boston-born grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Abboud collected business and law degrees from Harvard. As head of First National's international banking section, he helped turn a provincial institution into a worldwide banking power, is now the favorite to become the bank's next chairman. A monetary and economic conservative, Abboud considers himself "a liberal in social matters," advocates that the Government adopt an income floor below which no person would be allowed to fall.
2
James Abourezk, 43, one of 14 Lebanese-Americans in South Dakota, is a relaxed, informal politician who finds the U.S. Senate a bit too stuffy. Liberal Democrat Abourezk (pronounced Aber-esk) decided to study law at 32, went to Congress at 39 and, after a single term, captured his Senate seat in 1972. Besides being the Senate's most forceful spokesman for the Arab cause in the conflict over a Palestinian state, Abourezk, who was born on a Sioux reservation and knows more about the American Indian than any of his 99 colleagues, is chairman of the Senate's Indian Affairs Subcommittee and is pressing to increase both its staff and its effectiveness.
3
Lamar Alexander, 33, rarely mentions any more that he was a White House aide to Richard Nixon in 1969. A graduate of Vanderbilt and New York University Law School and a former newsman, Alexander coordinated Tennessee Republican Howard Baker's Senate race in 1966 and was campaign manager for Tennessee Governor Winfield Dunn in 1970. Now he is a candidate himself for this year's G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination. Chairman of the state's Council on Crime and Delinquency, Alexander has made a point of announcing, "I'm going to disclose every single contribution I get although I'm not required to and although it will be a big, burdensome task."
4
Alan Altshuler, 33, a farsighted urban planner, became Massachusetts' secretary of transportation and construction in 1971, after leading the effort to persuade Republican Governor Francis Sargent to halt all new expressway construction in the Boston area until a plan balancing environmental and social consequences, mass transit, and automobile use could be fully worked out. A Cornell graduate and former M.I.T. political scientist, Altshuler lobbied for three years for the transfer of interstate highway funds to urban areas for mass transit; last May the Bay State was granted the first such transfer —$670 million