The Mollenhoff Mandate

It has been said that when an ace muckraking reporter finally reaches paradise, he is greeted by the patron saint of ultimate rewards, who leads him to a chamber containing a typewriter and the files of the FBI, the records of the Internal Revenue Service, and the dossiers of all security-clearance investigations. The saint hands the newshawk the keys to the files and says, "Now, go get 'em."

Clark Mollenhoff has not had to wait. He used to be the toughest--some would say most demonic--reporter in Washington. Mollenhoff helped unearth the scandals involving Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Baker and many lesser operators. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his "persistent inquiry into labor racketeering." Now Mollenhoff is a White House deputy counsel charged with digging out Government malfeasance and corruption from the inside. He has scoured the record of Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., and has flatly rejected as character assassination the conflict of interest charges Democrats have leveled against the Supreme Court nominee. His efforts have produced one notable success so far: he was responsible for the resignation of Major General Carl Turner as Chief U.S. Marshal before the recent Army scandal broke involving kickbacks and payoffs in the operation of NCO clubs.

The Mollenhoff mandate, however, is shaping up as much larger than that kind of caper. Undermining Republican appointees, after all, has limited polit ical value. Thus Mollenhoff is continuing old crusades he pursued in his frontpage days. He aided Republican Senator John Williams in gathering material for the Senator's charge last week against the Johnson Administration. Friends of L.B.J., said Williams, got $2,000,000 worth of federal land in Austin almost as a gift from lame duck Johnson officials.

Warm Grudge. Four weeks ago, Mollenhoff and the White House helped Representative H. R. Gross put together an attack on former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey and a friend, Max Kampelman, are said to have interceded in a foreign-aid transaction on behalf of an auto gear and parts factory doing business with India. Williams and Gross used to swap intelligence with Newsman Mollenhoff.

Kampelman is an old Mollenhoff target, and Mollenhoff is a man who knows how to keep a grudge warm.

Those who recall Mollenhoff's failure to win the presidency of the National Press Club say his memory is long.

Reporters who fought his candidacy now ask with only faint smiles if their income taxes will be checked. Past Mollenhoff victims wonder if rekindled attacks will be forthcoming. A friendly, bearish man off the beat. Mollenhoff is unremitting in his efforts to scourge those who do not meet his standards. Once asked when he would cease hounding a man. Mollenhoff replied, "When he drops." By the time he joined the White House, many were already weary of his zealotry. But with his new powers, Mollenhoff, 48, is a still fiercer hunter. There is even a rumor making the rounds that the lawyer-journalist-investigator will be J. Edgar Hoover's successor as FBI chief. "If I have made some people uneasy," Mollenhoff once said, "it's not really me that's bothering them. It's something else." If in the past a troubled conscience brought the discomfort, these days just plain Mollenhoff is enough.

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