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Orville Lothrop Freeman, 42. Orville Freeman's Swedish grandfather homesteaded a farm in Minnesota in the 1850s, but Orville was a city boy, son of a Minneapolis storekeeper. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota just in time to enlist in the Marines at the start of World War II. During the Bougainville campaign, a Japanese bullet ripped through his left cheek, left him unable to speak. As the wound healed—the scar is still visible—Freeman learned to talk again and in the process developed into an uncommonly forceful orator.
After the war, Freeman won his law degree and went to work as an assistant to a rising young political amateur named Hubert Humphrey. As buoyant, garrulous Hubert Humphrey bounced up the political ladder from mayor of Minneapolis to U.S. Senator, dogged, serious, quiet Orville Freeman climbed with him: Freeman became Governor in 1955 and straw-bossed the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which turned out the Republicans who had controlled Minnesota for 17 years.
A fine administrator, Freeman took good care of the state's lagging education and welfare programs; in five years he spent $27 million on college buildings, added 1,500 beds to state mental hospitals, increased state aid to local school districts by $50 per pupil. But Fair Dealer Freeman also pushed property taxes to an alltime state high, ran into trouble last year with the normally cooperative legislature when he tried to install pay-as-you-go income taxes. G.O.P. opponents made much of the tax fight and chided Freeman's poor judgment in sending state militia to close a strikebound Wilson & Co. Inc. meat-packing plant, an action reversed in federal court. Upshot: Freeman lost by 23,000 votes to Republican Newcomer Elmer Andersen, while Friend Hubert Humphrey was winning a third Senate term and Jack Kennedy was carrying the state.
Freeman styles himself as a friend of the farmer, and he is also a friend of the subsidy-loving National Farmers Union. He believes that family farms must be preserved (presumably by subsidies), and farm surpluses must be reduced by overseas sales programs and giveaways, by free school-lunch programs and gifts to depressed areas. He talks in terms of "managed abundance," and if Kennedy pushes through Congress the control-heavy farm program he campaigned with, Freeman will be in command of the greatest federal managing operation short of the Commander in Chief himself.
ATTORNEY GENERAL
Robert Francis Kennedy, 35. The most controversial of the new appointments, Bobby Kennedy's, cannot really be called nepotism, his brother insists, because Bobby has earned it in his own right. Father Joe Kennedy agrees. Bobby Kennedy hesitated a long while, knowing that others would not agree.