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.