Times Not Forgotten

By WALTER ISAACSON

Once they were brothers in arms, but that was in another time and another place, back when Julian Bond and John Lewis were in Selma together for the march to Montgomery, back when they drove the rural roads of the South together, registering voters in towns like Waterproof, La., and Belzoni, Miss. Now, though their paths cross almost every day, the two men barely speak. It has been that way since they sat down for lunch last autumn at a Marriott Hotel in Atlanta. "Well, Mr. Senator, what are you going to do?" Lewis asked his friend, the state senator. "Mr. Chairman," replied Bond to the man who had been his leader years ago as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), "I'm running." Said Lewis: "I'm running too."

In terms of ideological trends and political tidings, the Aug. 12 Democratic primary in Georgia's Fifth Congressional District means little. Its significance far transcends such things. It is about friendships and loyalties, history and change. It is about the ambitions of two men with very different backgrounds and styles who had -- and still have -- an important vision in common. It is about the coming of age of a movement, one that Bond and Lewis helped found 25 years ago, which sought for blacks the right to participate fully in the political process.

Bond, who still has the boyish smile and laid-back cool that made him a celebrity in the '60s, is the glamour candidate. He is the clear favorite of the upwardly mobile young blacks, known as buppies, whose BMWs decorate the lot of his sprawling campaign headquarters. Cicely Tyson came down for a fund raiser, and so did the Temptations; Bill Cosby and Ted Kennedy have sent checks. Polished and witty, Bond has an air of bemused nonchalance; like a horse who shies from hurdles, he has backed away from seeking higher office or tougher challenges in the past. The current campaign, however, has made him more forceful. He now seems to relish a national role. Asked at a forum how effective he would be in getting money for the elderly, he replied, "I was having dinner in Washington last week with Majority Leader Jim Wright, and we discussed my possible position on committees."

Lewis, balding and intense, is a thick-tongued speaker. But he is widely revered as a living saint, a man of courage and commitment who was always on the front lines. During the movement, he was arrested 40 times and beaten often. As an Atlanta councilman, he has set himself up as an unyielding moralist. "In some quarters they think I'm too honest, too open to be effective," he admits with pride.

In many ways, they embody competing cultures within the black community. Bond's father and grandfather were both college presidents, and on the wall of his headquarters are pictures of him as a boy with such people as W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. He went to a predominantly white prep school in Pennsylvania, then studied English at Morehouse College. Lewis was one of ten children born to a rural sharecropper. He grew up wanting to be a minister -- he used to preach funerals for the chickens on the farm -- and attended a Baptist seminary. Bond and Lewis met in 1960 when as students they joined the fledgling civil rights movement, and they were among the founders of SNCC. Lewis became chairman and led the marches; Bond was the communications director who stayed back at headquarters.

The campaign has, perhaps inevitably, turned harsh. Yet when Bond and Lewis, now both 46, discuss the old days, a wistful tone creeps into their voices. Lewis recalls the time they brought some donated textbooks to Birmingham and hatched a plan, which involved pretending to be working for a white volunteer who was with them, in case they got stopped by state troopers. And the time he was host at a birthday party for Bond's 16-year-old daughter. And the times he had to wake Bond up in the morning. "We used to call him God's greatest sleeper," Lewis says. Bond, for his part, remembers that the early-to-rise Lewis would fall asleep when they went to the movies, "even if it was Conan." And he remembers how they would sit around the bars of Holiday Inns while traveling through the South and elicit personal confessions from each other. "We used to visit five or six towns a day together," he recalls, as he flips through old scrapbooks picking out pictures of the two of them.

The seat they are seeking is being vacated by Wyche Fowler Jr., who is running for the nomination to oppose Republican Senator Mack Mattingly. Facing Fowler in the Democratic primary is Hamilton Jordan, President Carter's former chief of staff, who while recovering from lymphatic cancer last year ! decided to launch his own political career.

Their contest involves the split between what has become known as "the two Georgias." Jordan, affecting a down-home and folksy style, is popular in the rural areas and farm towns, which still have more than half the state's Democratic primary voters. Standing on the deck of Spivey's pond house near Swainsboro or appearing at a fish fry at Mutt Kennedy's place in Midville, he swaps family tales and corny jokes before giving his stump speech about the need to bring the Democratic Party back to the center.

Fowler, far more urbane and polished, is stronger in Atlanta. He has a wry sense of humor, which he uses to deflect Jordan's charge that he is too far to the left. It reminds him, Fowler smiles, of the time he was marching in a small-town parade and heard an old country boy on the sidewalk growl, "That Fowler even looks like a liberal, don't he?" With its city-slicker vs. good- ole-boy flavor, the Fowler-Jordan race is in some ways a reflection of the Bond-Lewis contest.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Midville and Don Winbush/Atlanta