Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...political age. The procession of candidates now forming to challenge Carter in the 1980 election reflects fundamental problems of leadership. The two who display some size and fire, John Connally and Ted Kennedy (who is resolutely undeclared but watching with interest), come with reputations shadowed by their pasts. California Governor Jerry Brown, with his sleek vocabularies of "planetary realism," sounds like an item from The Whole Earth Catalog. Brown possesses a disco Jesuit allure and what seems to be a gut instinct for the politics of the future, but has far to go before he persuades the nation...
...same time, the general level of critical intelligence and intense watchfulness means that leaders cannot creatively manipulate circumstances as easily, either for good or ill, as they did in the past. A political operator of genius, like Lyndon Johnson, would sink into depressed impotence under such restraints?as at last Johnson...
Significantly, the principal movements that have emerged in the past decade have tended to coalesce around ideas, not leaders: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the fitness movement, for example. Those who participate seem to be too independent, too critical, too wary of the dangers of leadership to entrust themselves to others. The cautionary examples of cults?the followers of Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones?merely confirm the wary in their independence...
...Joan B. Claybrook, 42, spent seven years as a Nader Raider before Carter put her into the driver's seat of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During the past two years, she has ordered a record 15.6 million automobiles recalled for safety checks and changes. Her biggest victory: forcing Firestone to take back 8.7 million "500" radial tires, a move that so far has cost the company $147 million. She has also established tough fuel economy standards (27 m.p.g. by 1984) and stuck to them despite protests from manufacturers. Some of her former consumer-rights colleagues claim Claybrook...
...toughest jobs in town, Embry created the Urban Development Action Grant program that is helping to save 327 distressed urban areas by encouraging private investment. To qualify for UDAG, a mayor must prove that his proposal has local business support and will create jobs. In the past two years, HUD has paid out $700 million in seed money that in turn has generated an investment of $4.1 billion in private funds. An unflappable official, the Baltimore born and bred Embry plans to return to local government after HUD. Says he: "The oldest cities may be the newest frontier...