The Durable Four

Five years, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara once remarked, is about the longest any man should serve in a top Administration job. Of the eight men who have held the Defense post since it was created in 1947, he is by all odds the ablest and most controversial (TIME, Jan. 21). Yet as he entered his sixth year on the job, Mc Namara, 49, showed no signs of battle fatigue. Nor, for that matter, did the three other durable men who celebrated their fifth anniversaries as Cabinet officers last week.

DEAN RUSK, 56, has, if possible, weathered even more rumors of impending resignation than McNamara.

Self-effacing to the extreme, the Secretary of State has nonetheless proved a consistently prudent yet firm profession al, has worked harder, traveled farther (540,945 miles by last week) and, before Congress at least, defended U.S.

foreign policy more effectively than any of his recent predecessors. As Everett Dirksen puts it, "He has walked on more eggs than any other human being in the last half-century of this country."

STEWART UDALL, 45, made more politically embarrassing statements in his first six months as Secretary of the Interior than any other Cabinet member since Charlie Wilson. Prodded by conservation-minded Lyndon Johnson, he has since broadened his office's traditional preoccupation with Western problems into a nationwide mandate, presided over the greatest expansion in conservation activity since Theodore Roosevelt's day. As the Great Society's custodian of natural and civic beauty, Udall has taken as his active concern everything from the water needs of thirsty Eastern cities to the fate of the nearly extinct California condor.

ORVILLE FREEMAN, 47, experienced his darkest hour as Secretary of Agriculture in 1963 when U.S. farmers overwhelmingly rejected his wheat program. Since then, in one of the Cabinet's toughest jobs, Freeman has steered a four-year farm bill through Congress, reduced agricultural surpluses by nearly a third, helped to make American food production a key instrument of foreign policy. He now stands at the peak of his popularity with farmers.

"Five years ago," Freeman told a farm group in Lincoln, Neb., last month, "I was just beginning to learn what a Secretary of Agriculture does to earn the title." What does he do? "He sur vives." To which McNamara, Rusk and Udall would probably agree.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.