Informed Sources

O, Mighty Gergen!

Washington -- It has taken hardly a month for David Gergen to become the White House Svengali: a top West Wing aide says he's now the non-Hillary person the President listens to most. It was Gergen who pushed Clinton to have dinner with Bob Dole last week, who helped dispose of the travel-office scandal and the owls-vs.-timber brouhaha. "We're taking out the trash," says a Clinton aide in the White House. "When we come back in July and go into conference on the budget, we cannot have this stuff lying around."

Is the Department of Energy Wasting Billions?

Washington -- Jim Courter, chairman of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, left out one conclusion when he submitted his panel's report to the President last week. While taking testimony on redundant military bases, Courter found out that there was even more post-cold war waste at Department of Energy facilities. The budgets for Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are each over $1 billion, and DOE insiders concede that both could be closed and their tasks taken over by another facility. Courter says another commission is needed to sort out the glut, which could mean the squandering of billions of dollars: "DOE has excess capacity you wouldn't believe."

The N.A.A.C.P. vs. Jesse Jackson

New York -- According to a highly placed source in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jesse Jackson has been blocked from speaking at the group's annual convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, this month. Earlier this year, Jackson campaigned hard to become the head of the N.A.A.C.P. and was rebuffed. This new conflict does not figure to be a high- minded struggle over principles: extra security guards have been hired to keep Jackson away from the speakers' platform, in case he tries to make an unauthorized stage appearance.