IT'S AT THE Metropolitan Club, just a block from Lafayette Square where Andrew Jackson, prancing above the flower beds on his bronze horse, perpetually takes off his hat to the White eat that official Washington likes best to be seen eating lunch. There, almost every day when he's in town, promptly at 1 arrives a spare, neatly dressed individual with dark hair and eyes and the restrained impatience of manner of a man whose every moment is very, very valuable. In his 63 rd year, Walter Lippmann still looks the precocious young deep thinker of the days of the new New Republic, when, in the dawn of a freshman century, the country was coming to believe that, if only the dull old vested interests would allow it, all the problems of the universe could be solved by a fresh approach and a logical mind. No word but pundit could be found sufficiently to describe the brightness of young Walter Lippmann.

Today he still arrives for lunch looking fresh and trim. As soon as he awoke at the English-style house across from the Episcopal Cathedral, where he lives amid green lawns and shrubberies in the admiration of a highly intelligent wife, two secretaries, a young lady researcher and a pair of French poodles, he went into his study to digest the daily papers. Then, at his desk in bath robe and slippers, he polished off the morning's chore of writing. With the help of the young lady researcher, who has an office on the third floor, he has checked and rechecked his facts. If it is the day for the column to go to press, he has recited the polished sentences into a Dictaphone, and soon they will be teletyped into the offices of the Herald Tribune on 41 st Street in New York. From there, after an editor has read them with reverent care, the syndicate will siphon the column by airmail and telegraph into prominent papers in Bombay and Des Moines and Dallas and Copenhagen and Halifax. If a comma is misplaced or a paragraph mangled, the editor may hear from Mr. Lippmann. In a couple of hundred newspapers, anxious readers will find in Mr. Lippmann's opinions the balm of certainty.

It's not from these dim millions that the columnist gets his response. There's fan mail, of course, but the public is not in a position to know. It's at the Metropolitan Club, from the retired administrator stepping out of a cab, or the head of a Government agency pulling off his coat in the lobby, or the Senator on his way up in the elevator to the bar, that he learns whether his words have hit a mark. A Washington column is the record of conversations among very important persons.

IT'S AT LUNCH that the important are most easily seen. In the bare old dining room on the fourth floor of the Metropolitan Club, with its memories of mustaches and Madeira wine and terrapin Maryland, the unleisurely men of today take only a few minutes off to talk personalities over a hurried meal of Ry-Krisp and iceberg lettuce. There are newsworthy faces at every table. A man speeds up the conversation with his lunch eon partner to get a chance to exchange a word with someone more important who's just shoving back his chair.

Mr. Lippmann has spent his life among important people. He was fortunate in his beginnings. His parents grew up in that highly literate wave of immigration that a century ago brought to America the civilization of the Rhineland, Beethoven and Brahms, a respect for learning and a tenderness towards the unfortunate. The Lippmanns were comfortably off. Walter was an only child. A studious, argumentative, handsome boy of 17, he took up his abode at Weld Hall in the Harvard Yard and proceeded to make a name for himself. It was Harvard College's most vivid moment. Eliot was president. William James of still teaching. Fellow students of the famous class of 1910 were the poet T. S. Eliot, emotional Heywood Broun, the romantic revolutionist Jack Reed, the scene designer Robert Edmond Jones. They were all going to make their mark in the world by casting down evil from its lofty seat. A friend once introduced young Lippmann as the future President of the U.S.

HIS CAREER WAS brilliant. He hurried through college in three years, and returned for a fourth as assistant in Santayana's fashionable philosophy course. Lincoln Steffens sought him out to help muckrake the politicians in Everybody's Magazine After a turn as a socialist reformer in Schenectady, he retired to the Maine woods to write A Preface to Politics. T. R. did an admiring review. When Herbert Croly founded the New Republic, it was inevitable that Walter Lippmann should be invited to become an editor. When Woodrow Wilson swung the New Freedom to the defense of the British Empire, Walter Lippmann was one of the first of the bright young men to be called to Washington. He worked on the Fourteen Points, he was an aide to Colonel House, an officer in Army Intelligence. Disillusioned with the peace treaty, he resigned and went back to the plain living and high thinking of liberal journalism.

His stately paragraphs graced the editorial page of the New York World. When the Pulitzers sold the paper, he carried his crusader's banner over to the Herald Tribune. With the Roosevelt revolution, Washington really became the capital of the U.S. A columnist who forms opinions must keep in touch. Only in the capital can he find the stamp of authority. Mr. Lippmann moved to the capital.

FROM HIS HOUSE on Woodley Road he sets out daily to the intelligent lunch, the enlightening interview at the Carlton or the Willard; only rarely he visits the turbulent Hill; sometimes he garners a few words heavy with meaning in the late afternoon in a Georgetown parlor.

But mostly his contacts come to him. Very important persons are pleased to be invited to dinner (black tie) with the Lippmanns on Woodley Road. When the guests step out of their cars, the cathedral rises behind them, hazy above the street lights. In the long drawing room, they find drinks, a very important person seated beside the fire, respectful black poodles tethered under the piano. At dinner, it is on Mr. Lippmann's right that the very important person sits, and the charming intellectual lady on his left. After dinner there's some leg stretching. The ladies flow into the drawing room, the men find themselves in a small parlor with brandy in glass balloons in their hands. The less important guests listen with discreet appreciation. The columnist gravely nods, occasionally emits in a word or two the voice of reason.

During the evening a change comes over his face. Eyebrows bristle to little points, bags appear under the eyes: there's a touch of the croupier in evening dress. The ball starts rolling.

Everything is delightfully off the record. The very important person outlines succinctly a few things he would like the public to know without having to broadcast them himself. They can't come from him. Spontaneously you understand. The columnist's eyebrows bristle with portent. The very important person has finished his brandy. Time to join the ladies. After a short Scotch fizzed with generalities, the wife of the very important person rises to her feet. Once they have gone, there is nothing left to say. As if the house were on fire, the less important guests are handed their wraps and hurried to the door.

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