Five years ago, on the eve of President Richard Nixon’s resignation, TIME published a 38-page Special Section on leadership. The world’s problems, TIME said, often seemed to be overwhelming the capacity of leaders to deal with them. For its special section, TIME assembled a list of 200 young Americans who already were having a positive impact upon society and who might play pivotal roles in the nation’s future. Today, the issue of leadership is more acute than ever. As Jimmy Carter struggles to rally a nation troubled by recession, inflation and the energy shortage, TIME again examines the problems of leaders—and followers. In these pages, an introductory essay analyzes the state of the art that Harry Truman defined as “the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do, and like it.” In succeeding stories 24 prominent Americans select the leaders now living who they believe have contributed most to the nation, and there is a review of what has happened to the 200 TIME leaders of 1974. Finally, TIME surveys the nation for promising talent and proposes 50 new faces for the future. Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command… —Ortega y Gasset The season had begun to feel like the summer of 1914, the world’s prospects suddenly darkening. The industrial West read OPEC’S price lists and had premonitions of its own decline. Jimmy Carter conceded that a recession was settling in; more apocalyptic imaginations foretold worldwide depression. In the U.S., motorists formed predawn gas lines, like clients at methadone clinics, to await the fuel that had so abruptly become precious. Americans could idle there and wonder if their houses would freeze in the winter, when the last heating oil guttered out of their tanks. Raised on a gospel of infinite resources, they bitterly blamed conspiracies: Arabs, oil companies, middlemen. They also gave Jimmy Carter the second lowest rating of presidential approval in the history of American polltaking.* The judgment was unfair, in one sense. The problem of leadership in the U.S. goes far beyond the Oval Office, stultifying progress at every level of American society. But Carter was the man at the top, where he had so desperately wanted to be, and Americans were blaming him now for the exhaustion of oilfields, the greed of Arabs and their own insatiability; they were blaming him for much more history than he should be held accountable for. Still, they were right to judge Carter harshly as a leader. In fact, he seems to have judged himself just as severely, as he suggested in his address to the nation after Camp David. All of the President’s frantic exertions since then have represented, among other things, an implicit confession of his own failures as a leader. He seems to have grasped the shortcomings of the Carter Administration as clearly as anyone, although the methods he has used to correct them have seemed at times peculiar and erratic. In a strange, transitional moment, when the nation is tensely suspended, awaiting its problematic future, Carter has often seemed an inadequate and dispiriting figure. As much as any
