Special Section: 50 Faces for America's Future

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built up the museum's reputation and staff and amassed a $2 million endowment for acquisitions. A naturalized citizen, de Montebello returned to the Met in 1973 and worked on some of the blockbuster shows ("Treasures from the Kremlin," "Monet at Giverny"). Named director of the Met in May 1978, de Montebello plans to downplay the role of special events and make the museum's treasures more routinely accessible. Says he: "I want people to get used to the idea of dropping in to see familiar objects they love."

16. Alan M. Dershowitz, 40. The student editors of the Harvard Law School Bulletin seldom lavish praise on the faculty, but for Dershowitz they made an exception. As the Bulletin put it, "He energetically attacks discrimination, represents criminals and defends the rights of others to defend themselves." The onetime boy wonder from Brooklyn (he was a full professor at Harvard at 28) admits to being "an extremist" on civil liberties. His credo: "If there is discrimination against anybody, there is discrimination against everybody." He has fought for the rights of American Nazis to speak and assemble, and successfully defended Actor Harry Reems, the lead in Deep Throat, against obscenity charges. Though a Jew and an ardent Zionist, Dershowitz has criticized Israel for establishing settlements on the West Bank. For that, he says, "my mother really gave me hell."

17. Robert Embry, 41, successfully guided Baltimore's redevelopment program from 1968 to the mid-1970s—using low-interest mortgages to attract middle-income residents to downtown and turning the blighted inner harbor area into a showplace of refurbished row houses and new businesses. He caught the eye of Carter, who appointed him Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. As the Administration's point man on urban distress, one of the 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."

18. Martin Feldstein, 40, his colleagues predict, is some day bound to reach the pinnacle of their profession: chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Feldstein is already perhaps the most influential young economist in the nation, the leader of a group of "new conservatives" who are arguing that the Government should meddle less in the economy. Feldstein heads the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, a private organization financed by grants from foundations and corporations, highly respected in the profession for its study of economic cycles. The cure for what ails the American economy, argues Feldstein, is more capital investment, helped by tax incentives. He believes the Government should lower Social Security taxes to encourage private savings and make unemployment benefits taxable to remove incentives for