Washington's Third Pair

If nothing else, Washington's new syndicated partnership in punditry is proving highly marketable. Conceived almost a year ago, the Frank Mankiewicz-Tom Braden column is regularly carried by 70 newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Post, and has been offered as a summer fill-in to another 180 papers. More ac curate and less sensational than Pear son and Anderson, less likely to magnify trivial exclusives but also far less enterprising than Evans and Novak, Mankiewicz and Braden produce a stylish, knowledgeable column that offers sharp opinions and no doubletalk.

Considering the experience of the two writers, the column actually ought to be better. The savvy, wry Mankiewicz, 45, is a former Peace Corps director for Latin America who became Robert Kennedy's press secretary. He is best known to the public for his sure handling of televised press conferences, despite his grief, after the Senator was shot. But he is also admired by reporters for the kind of whimsy that led him to explain away the biting of two ladies by Bobby's Newfoundland, Brumus, when a group visited the Kennedy home last year. "I only wish to point out," he said soberly, "that of all the women's legs at Hickory Hill today, less than one-half of one percent were bitten."

The versatile Braden, 51, is a former Dartmouth English instructor, wartime OSS and CIA official, and owner of the Oceanside (Calif.) Blade-Tribune (which he purchased in 1954 with the help of a $100,000 loan from Nelson Rockefeller and sold profitably last year). A Kennedy liberal, Braden headed California's board of education, a post in which he clashed often with Max Rafferty, the reactionary state superintendent. This journalistic odd couple--Braden is tall, wiry and intense, Mankiewicz is short, round-faced and bemused --launched their project in the belief that most columns "are lousy" and fail to express a "sense of outrage." Yet the two have developed a detached style, garnished with historical and literary references, which mutes their anger. They have assailed such targets as the war in Viet Nam, the ABM, and MIRV, nerve gas and wiretaps.

They also have knocked federal officials, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (for issuing statements "almost totally devoid of the truth" about planting concealed microphones only with the approval of attorneys general). Another target: Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, whom they prematurely called "the right man for the wrong job." They questioned the appointment of Herbert Klein as President Nixon's Communications Director, claiming that when he was editor of the San Diego Union, that paper managed news to promote Republican candidates.

Braden and Mankiewicz seem overly fond of making offbeat comparisons, some apt and some silly. Criticizing Attorney General John Mitchell's easing of school-integration guidelines, the columnists wrote: "If the Supreme Court had decided 15 years ago that the union shop was illegal, you can bet John Mitchell would--if necessary--have had paratroops closing up the union halls." They said Nixon's visit to Rumania was "as though Kosygin should decide to visit suddenly dissident Puerto Rico in order to converse privately with Eldridge Cleaver." Most outlandish of all, they compared Senator Edward Kennedy's televised explanation of his fatal accident to the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, who quit out of love for Wallis Simpson.

Behind the Fac,ade. Although the column shows too few signs of strenuous legwork, it is at its best when the writers use their varied contacts to report what really goes on behind Washington's public facade. Their detailed account of the extent of defense contractors' involvement in a widely placed ad supporting the ABM preceded last week's front-page revelation in the New York Times by three weeks. They revealed that a proposal by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to set aside 7,000,000 acres of land for national monuments was not approved by President Johnson because L.B.J. was miffed that Udall had just succeeded in renaming Washington, D.C.'s stadium "Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium."

The columnists have also shown a commendable ability to avoid a knee-jerk liberal response to every national question. Followers of George Wallace may be similar to those of Adolf Hitler in expressing their "grievances in hate," they wrote, but "they do no greater wrong than do those blacks whom it pleases some of us to call 'militant' instead of 'fascist.' " With unexpected sympathy, they noted that whatever concessions President Nixon makes to Hanoi in the Viet Nam war will annoy all the hawks in 1972, yet not guarantee support of the doves; he is "approaching that lonely position where the courageous act may lead to his downfall. It. is a lot to ask." They said flatly that the Kennedy accident on Chappaquiddick Island marked "the end of the Kennedy era."

The Braden-Mankiewicz column could easily use some of the needling levity the two display on a five-day-a-week commentary on Washington's WTOP-TV. Chiding local Young Republicans for assembling to watch a nudist movie, Braden suggested that the next step will involve "Everett Dirksen reading aloud from Portnoy's Complaint." Mankiewicz belittled the Potomac Electric Power Company's plea for customers to shut off air conditioners during an unanticipated "power emergency." Observed Mankiewicz: "The emergency is summer, which arrives in Washington and throughout the country every year and is most evident in July and August."

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