CARTER'S BRAIN TRUSTS

"Every new President seems to dip into his own special talent pool to fill key posts. John Kennedy plucked many of his New Frontiersmen from the Harvard faculty. Richard Nixon staffed his Government with many graduates of U.C.L.A. President-elect Jimmy Carter is expected to draw heavily on two talent repositories--the Trilateral Commission in New York City and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C

Just two weeks ago. Carter selected Cyrus Vance, a member of the Trilateral Commission, to be Secretary of State. No fewer than 16 other Trilateralites--about a quarter of the commission's U.S. members--are advising Carter during the transition. They include Carter's Vice President, Walter Mondale; the commission's former director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who could become Carter's National Security adviser; one of the President-elect's leading union backers, U.A.W. Chief Leonard Woodcock; Attorney Paul Warnke, a possible choice for Secretary of Defense; and Columbia Professor Richard Gardner, a Carter foreign policy aide.

At least ten of the 46 senior fellows at the Brookings Institution are assisting Carter in the takeover and some will land jobs in his Administration. Those who have worked with Carter include Charles Schultze, Budget Director under Johnson, who may wind up in Carter's Cabinet; Henry Owen, onetime chief of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, who is a foreign affairs specialist for Carter; and Alice Rivlin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, who may head up Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. Then, too, there is Robert Roosa, chairman of the Brookings board, who may be in line for Treasury Secretary (and who, like Owen, is on the Trilateral Commission).

Despite the star-studded lineups of the Trilateral Commission and the Brookings Institution, both remain largely unknown to the general public. The more obscure of the two is the Trilateral Commission, which Chase Manhattan Chairman David Rockefeller prodded into existence in July 1973. Rockefeller thought there ought to be a meeting place for citizens from the leading non-Communist industrial areas--Japan, the United States and Western Europe--to debate and perhaps work out solutions to their common political, economic and security problems.

With blue-chip backing from the likes of the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the commission set up in a modest office near the United Nations and recruited from those three world areas some 200 members in business, politics, academe and publishing. Seeking a political figure from the South, the commission asked Georgia's Governor Jimmy Carter to join. Carter, already contemplating a race for the presidency, was very responsive: he attended four of the first six Trilateral meetings over a span of 19 months. In his book, Why Not the Best?, Carter says the commission became "a splendid learning opportunity" for him. But Republican Congressman John Anderson, a commission member, thinks Carter was simply trying to acquire "a little shine and polish by being a member."

Whatever his reason, Carter did get a crash course of sorts in foreign affairs from the commission. The commission's voluminous flow of reports has ranged over ocean management, the strains on democracy, aid to the world's poorest nations, and the global energy crisis.

The commission has its critics, mainly but not exclusively on the left. By and large, the criticism is no more substantial than the observation that there are many wealthy people on the commission. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in the Wall Street Journal that only last month he tried to persuade a Paris audience composed of intellectuals and journalists that the commission was a respectable organization and not a "horrible bankers' conspiracy" dreamed up by the Rockefellers.

The Brookings Institution, also nonpartisan, draws frequent fire too--but largely from the right. St. Louis Woodenwares Tycoon Robert Somers Brookings, who was Woodrow Wilson's price-control chief during World War I, put $6 million and 36 years of his life into establishing the institution as a nonprofit, scholarly center to analyze Government problems and issue objective, statistical reports. Housed in an imposing, eight-story, gray-fac,aded building eight blocks north of the White House, the 49-year-old institution has a current endowment of almost $35 million. It supports a staff of 240, including 46 senior fellows and 19 research associates, whose salaries go as high as the mid-$40,000 range. Contracts last only one year. Says Brookings Spokesman James Farrell: "You don't produce, you leave."

Harry Truman was the first President to turn to Brookings for high-level help. In 1946 he named Brookings Vice President Edwin Nourse as the first chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. The institution's star really began to rise in the 1960s, when John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson tapped many of its members for key posts. Kermit Gordon, Brookings president from 1967 until his death six months ago, was Budget Director for both Democratic Presidents. As a result, Republicans regard the institution as "the Democratic government-in-exile." During the Nixon years, White House Aide Charles Colson went so far as to suggest fire-bombing the place--though he now says he was joking.

Yet Richard Nixon hired Herbert Stein, a Brookings scholar, as chairman of his CEA. Today former Nixon Aide Stephen Hess, whom Jimmy Carter is consulting on reorganizing the White House staff, is working at Brookings. "It's palpably unfair to put a political label on Brookings," says Acting Director Gilbert Steiner. "A house count would show there are more Democrats than Republicans, but there are more Democrats in the U.S., more among academics and, until now, more out of Government."

Carter first approached Brookings for briefings in July 1975.

He attended two informal luncheons on foreign policy and economics. Says Owen, one of his hosts: "I was taken with the pointedness of his questions and how quickly he assimilated the answers." Now many Brookings members are apparently anticipating long sojourns in the Carter Administration--with the institution's blessings.

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