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21
Joseph Biden Jr., 31. Two years ago, this self-confident Democrat persuaded Delaware's traditionally Republican voters to send him to the U.S. Senate, where he is now the youngest member. A few weeks after he was elected, his wife and infant daughter were killed in an auto accident. Biden admits to being compulsively ambitious. An active proponent of environmental and consumer-protection legislation, he has criticized the Senate for failing to stand up to the Executive Branch and has called for greater accountability on the part of Government decision makers—"so I will know whom to crucify."
22
Barry Bingham Jr., 40, wanted to be the world's greatest French-horn player. Lacking the talent, he turned to his family's two newspapers—the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times—and burnished their reputations as two of the finest instruments of journalism in the Midwest. Though he has extended the papers' liberal editorial positions, Harvard-educated Editor-Publisher Bingham has left the day-to-day news operation alone, and was one of the first publishers to hire full-time ombudsmen to monitor both reporting and advertising. To avoid conflicts of interest, Bingham and other top executives have submitted lists of all their charitable activities to the staff. When critics referred to his printing company, radio and TV stations and two newspapers as "the Bingham Empire," he replied with full-page ads exclaiming, "What this town needs is another newspaper!"
23
Joseph Blatchford, 40, set up ACCION, a privately financed, youth volunteer group in Latin America in 1960—before John Kennedy started the Peace Corps. Named to run the Peace Corps for the Nixon Administration, he resigned in discouragement in 1972 because nobody was listening to his ideas (for example, giving college students academic credit and living expenses for a year of domestic volunteer work). Blatchford, an unsuccessful California congressional candidate in 1968, is sidelined this year by a lack of campaign funds, but he is helping Republican Houston Flournoy campaign for Governor. "Right now," says Blatchford, "the challenge is to juice up the Republican Party and get some young people in it."
24
Derek Curtis Bok, 44, president of Harvard, is a scion of the Curtis publishing family and son-in-law of Swedish Sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Bok graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law, studied in Paris as a Fulbright scholar, collected a graduate economics degree from George Washington University. A top labor-law specialist, he was named dean of Harvard Law in 1968, president of the university three years later. Democrat Bok helped organize opposition to Harrold Carswell's Supreme Court nomination, was among the academicians who went to Washington to protest the 1970 Cambodia invasion. An