TRB at 80

A young man in a hurry

One of Washington's worst-kept secrets is that Richard Strout leads a double life. Most days, Strout is a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, spinning out four or five articles a week for that Boston-based daily. Every Tuesday, however, he shuts his office door, sits down at his rolltop desk and becomes the pseudonymous TRB, author of the syndicated (50 newspapers) New Republic column that many colleagues call the liveliest, best-researched, most passionately liberal political commentary in town.*

Last Tuesday Strout almost missed his weekly transformation. The day marked his 35th anniversary as TRB and his 80th as Richard Strout. He was toasted at breakfast by 30 capital colleagues, before lunch by his friends at the New Republic and after lunch at the Monitor, where Reader Jimmy Carter telephoned his congratulations. Strout got a late start on his column, but one would never know; as usual, TRB this week is a sprawling symphony of erudition, indignation, historical allusion and harmonic prose. His overture to a diatribe against the two-thirds Senate majority requirement for treaty approval: ''I don't know whether to start this piece with an American battleship dashing round the Horn in wartime, a biologist slicing the salivary gland of a female mosquito, a volcanic eruption killing 30,000 people . . . or the vote of the United States Senate last week on the Panama Canal."

A New Deal liberal, Strout-TRB rails regularly against such familiar betes as conservative economists, gun lobbyists, petroleum plutocrats, union busters, segregationists and polluters. Yet he is also troubled by the rise of illegal immigration ("We have a duty to blacks here who are unemployed") and has a deep reverence for the presidency ("The office has a tendency to lift even little men up"). Says Strout: "I get indignant easy." Agrees Washington Post Columnist David Broder: "He must get out of bed every day as if it's his first chance to set the world right."

Brooklyn-bred Richard Lee Strout has been rising to that task at least since the early 1920s, when, not long out of Harvard, he parked his Model T on the ellipse behind the White House and joined the local Monitor crew. He trod the White House beat while Warren G. Harding entertained Nan Britton in a coat closet, and when tight-lipped Calvin Coolidge gravely turned over a ceremonial spade of earth one Arbor Day and, asked to say a few words, pronounced: "That's a fine fishworm." He called Franklin D. Roosevelt "the greatest President of my time," respected Dwight Eisenhower, was dazzled by John F. Kennedy and never did like Richard Nixon. "If you live long enough, people confuse ability with longevity," says Strout. "I'm just an analytical writer with some color. I'm not a whizbang."

Untrue. Washingtonians can see him almost any day whizzing around town, often on foot. Tall, slim and elegant in his dark suit and white mustache, Strout avoids the cocktail circuit, preferring the evening company of Wife Ernestine and his longtime mistress, the printed word. "I read, read, read," he says. "You can't read enough. You can't know enough."

Strout said he has no plans to stop writing. Besides, there is a big story coming up. According to what he calls Strout's Law, "There is a major scandal in American political life every 50 years: Grant's in 1873, Teapot Dome in 1923, Watergate in 1973." Advises Strout: "Nail down your seats for 2023."

* TRB, according to New Republic legend, is a transposition of Brooklyn Rapid Transit, and was the brainstorm of an editor carrying the very first unsigned column to the Brooklyn printer via subway.

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