Nation

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At 33, Christopher Bond was the youngest Governor in the U.S. Now "Kit" Bond is 47 and no longer a boy wonder, but he still stands out from the political crowd. Last Tuesday he became the only Republican this year to capture a Senate seat from the Democrats, beating Lieutenant Governor Harriett Woods 53% to 47% to take the Missouri seat held by Thomas Eagleton, who is retiring. Bond's victory confirmed the strong conservative Republican trend in Missouri, which was once a staunchly Democratic state.

Bond embodies that turn to the right. An aristocrat whose grandfather made a family fortune selling fire-resistant brick, the Princeton-educated, preppie-looking Bond entered Republican politics young and in 1972 became Missouri's first Republican Governor in 32 years. He was then considered a moderate, and his reformist notions and support of the Equal Rights Amendment alienated some G.O.P. conservatives. Defeated for re-election in 1976, he came back as a conservative and won a second term four years later. During the Senate campaign, Bond got an unintentional boost when Woods ran a TV spot that pictured a farmer in tears, provoking a serious negative reaction. Bond called the "crying farmer" spot the "silver bullet that was pointed in the wrong direction." The new Senator says he might differ with the Senate's present Republican leaders on only one issue: he wants no part of any potential tax increase.

War Hero

When opponents assailed him in 1982 as a carpetbagger who was running for Congress only about a year after moving to Arizona, Republican John McCain had a ready retort: "The longest place I've ever lived in my life is Hanoi." That was no exaggeration: after a peripatetic life as a Navy pilot, McCain was shot down over Viet Nam in 1967 and spent the next 5 1/2 years in a prisoner- of-war camp. He came out with two broken arms and a broken leg; he still walks with a slight limp and cannot raise his right forearm above elbow level. His war-hero status helped elect him to two terms in the House and, last week, to Barry Goldwater's seat in the Senate. McCain, 50, easily defeated Democrat Richard Kimball, 60% to 40%.

Though McCain is a staunch conservative on most matters, befitting a successor to Goldwater, he is something of an independent on foreign policy. He supports sanctions against South Africa and favors military aid to the Nicaraguan contras but strongly opposes direct U.S. intervention in Central America. McCain has curbed his formidable temper but not his irreverent humor: he got off one of the best quips of the campaign at Goldwater's expense. McCain recalled Goldwater's saying that if he had been elected President in 1964 and had put his hawkish policies into effect, McCain would never have wound up in a Vietnamese prison camp. Right, said McCain, "it would have been a Chinese prison camp."