(7 of 41)
25
Christopher S. Bond, 35, the first Republican to occupy the Missouri Governor's mansion since 1945, has transformed the state's labyrinthine government into 13 Cabinet-like departments. He has also abandoned the patronage system of his Democratic predecessors by recruiting talented administrators from all over the U.S. Scion of an old Missouri family and a graduate of Princeton and the University of Virginia Law School, "Kit" Bond uncovered scandals and inefficiencies in the state administration while serving as state auditor until 1973. Now the U.S.'s youngest Governor, he is helping to create an effective G.O.P. in a traditionally Democratic state.
26
Julian Bond, 34, had to win three elections and a Supreme Court order before he was finally admitted to Georgia's house of representatives at the age of 26. A founder and former information director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.), Bond riled the legislators with his anti-Viet Nam pronouncements and support of draft-card burning—not to mention his color. On the political move again, he will run in November for the Georgia senate from a safe black district. Meanwhile, he has been maintaining a national profile and winning enormous popularity among students with 200 or more speaking engagements per year.
27
William G. Bowen, 40, a trim onetime tennis champion at Denison University, became president of Princeton at age 38. Co-author of Performing Arts—7776 Economic Dilemma (1966), a pioneering study of the finance of culture, Bowen is a practical as well as a scholarly economist: as Princeton's former provost, he put in a budgetary system that erased the school's operating deficit in two years. A thoughtful scholar and decisive administrator, he has notably strengthened Princeton's faculty. He once rescued from a pond a woman who had fallen directly onto an alligator; the beast, Bowen observed, was "probably as scared as she was—but it seemed something you didn't leave up to the alligator."
28
William Bradley, 30, trained himself to be a basketball player by approaching the sport scientifically—measuring trajectories, memorizing, experimenting. That cerebral approach helped him become All-America at Princeton, and later a star of the New York Knicks. It also helped him win a Rhodes scholarship. Now "Dollar Bill," whose frugality has become something of a legend, has found something new to shoot at: politics. A Democrat, Bradley has worked with young people in Harlem's so-called street academies; he is currently laying the groundwork for a possible congressional bid in his New Jersey district with public speaking between games and during the off season.
29
William E. Brock III, 43, left his family's candy business in 1962 and became the first Republican Congressman from his Tennessee district in 42 years. Four terms later he defeated Albert Gore for the U.S. Senate. Civic-minded (he was involved in literacy programs and projects for the handicapped in his native Chattanooga) and tenaciously conservative in social and racial matters, Brock played a central role in organizing the G.O.P. Youth Division for the 1972 convention. As a result, he has nationwide political