(40 of 41)
192
Jann Wenner, 28, is known around the San Francisco offices of the biweekly Rolling Stone as "Citizen Wenner." The more or less jocular analogy to William Randolph Hearst is apt: Wenner is a brilliant, brash autocrat with an eye for lucrative markets and talented writers. Perceiving a vast audience for a rock-music magazine, he borrowed $7,500, produced his first issue in 1967. Since then, the staff has grown from six to 90, circulation has jumped to 415,000, and Stone's irreverent, meandering and sometimes erratic reportage has been extended to politics and society in general as the magazine grew up along with its audience. Wenner, born in New York City and a dropout from the University of California at Berkeley, grossed $6 million last year from Stone and Straight Arrow Books.
193
Kevin H. White, 44, Democratic mayor of Boston, has succeeded John Lindsay as the most visible articulator of urban problems. Educated at Williams, White was elected Massachusetts secretary of state in 1959 and went on to win the mayoralty in 1967 against antibusing candidate Louise Day Hicks. Though he has earned a measure of good will with a sizable suburban residential rebuilding program and a network of "little city halls," trouble looms this fall when citywide school busing is scheduled to begin despite strong community opposition.
Marina v.N. Whitman, 39. "I was going to get a master's in journalism and one in economics," she recalls, but she chose economics and went on to become celebrated in 1972 as the first woman member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. The daughter of Computer Pioneer John von Neumann, Mrs. Whitman was a junior Phi Bete who graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and won a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia. A feminist, she got a chapter on women's economic status into the 1972 Economic Report. An authority on international trade, she returned to teaching in 1973 at the University of Pittsburgh.
195
George F. Will, 33. Tired of teaching politics, Will went to Washington in 1970 to watch the workings of government firsthand. He was an obscure Congressional aide until two years ago, when he signed on as Washington editor of National Review. He started a column in the Washington Post soon afterward, and almost overnight his perceptive political commentary made him a leader of conservative opinion. A native of Champaign, Ill., he studied at Trinity, Oxford and Princeton, and taught at Michigan State and the universities of Illinois and Toronto. Among the first conservative leaders to break with President Nixon, Will says: "I agree with him on most of the issues [but] I think he is guilty."
196
James Q. Wilson, 43. His Harvard title is Professor of Government, but Wilson is a criminologist, a sociologist and an urbanologist as well. During the '60s, he wrote a book a year on subjects like the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, campus unrest, police behavior and urban politics. Wilson, presently a consultant to the Drug Enforcement Administration, was born in Denver, graduated from California's University of Redlands and the University of Chicago, has taught at Harvard since 1961. Having just