American Notes

WHITE HOUSE The President's Boswell

It is a historian's dream: virtually unlimited access to the day-to-day activities of a sitting President to prepare the leader's definitive biography. The news last week was that Author Edmund Morris, 45, who won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, will have the privilege of being Ronald Reagan's shadow for the rest of his term. In the past three weeks, Morris has attended White House conferences, interviewed Reagan and several of his aides and even accompanied the President to Geneva aboard Air Force One.

For all that, Morris was a somewhat reluctant recruit for the job. State Department Chief of Protocol Selwa Roosevelt gave the Reagans Morris' book on her husband's grandfather, the start of a planned three-volume work. The Reagans enjoyed the book, and in 1983 close aides like Michael Deaver began an ultimately successful two-year courtship of the author. Morris will not write his book until Reagan leaves office, but his agent is already angling for a publisher. The price rumored for the Reagan chronicle: more than $2 million. INDIANS A Mankiller Takes Over

"A petticoat government" was how one 18th century British observer described the workings of the Cherokee Indian tribe. Not only were women influential with the tribal elders, but those who had performed special acts of valor bore an honorific title: Beloved Woman. Despite such enlightened attitudes, no woman has ever headed the Cherokees, the nation's second-largest tribe (after the Navajo), whose 67,000 members live mainly in Oklahoma. That will change when the present Cherokee chief, Ross Swimmer, is confirmed by the Senate as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His elected tribal deputy, Wilma Mankiller, 40, will then become the Cherokee Nation's first female leader.

"Women are very often the focal point of the tribe," notes Vincent Monico, a BIA spokesman, "because they run the family." Of the 504 American tribes, 43 are headed by women. Man-killer, whose unusual last name was inherited from an 18th century warrior ancestor, is divorced and has two daughters. She will oversee some 45,000 acres of Cherokee land and the tribe's industries, which have sales of about $12 million a year. Says she: "It's like running a tiny, tiny country." CIVIL RIGHTS Double-Barreled Discrimination

Yonkers (pop. 191,000), an industrial suburb just north of New York City, is a place divided. To the east of the Saw Mill River Parkway live most of the city's whites; to the west live most of its blacks and other minorities. In what may turn out to be a landmark civil rights decision, Federal Judge Leonard Sand ruled last week that the deliberate concentration of low-income housing projects on Yonkers' west side resulted in a racially segregated public school system that "has clearly worked to the disadvantage of minority students." It was the first time that a single case linked racial discrimination in housing and schools.

Sand's decision, which resulted from a suit filed by Jimmy Carter's Justice Department in late 1980, was politely applauded by the Reagan Administration. The N.A.A.C.P., which became a joint plaintiff in 1981, saw the ruling as a boost for similar cases in Milwaukee and Kansas City. Said N.A.A.C.P. Assistant General Counsel Michael Sussman: "We knew we were going to win all along." So perhaps did Yonkers' political establishment, which expressed no surprise at the ruling. Some of the city's officials acknowledge that segregation exists, but have denied that public planning had anything to do with it. DRUGS Tuning In to the FBI

The inventory was fairly typical for a drug smuggler's warehouse: guns, airplane fuel tanks, maps of landing fields from Miami to Indiana. But Broward County, Fla., sheriff's deputies turned up a disagreeable surprise during their raid: a 62-page list of supposedly secret radio frequencies, including channels used by the U.S. Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and even Ronald Reagan's limousine. In the wake of that discovery, Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini last week ordered up a survey of all the agencies to determine the cost of making Government transmissions safe from snoopers.

Ultrasensitive messages, like those used by the White House Secret Service detail, are scrambled and cannot be decoded without sophisticated equipment. But unscrambled transmissions from most agencies are vulnerable to eavesdroppers using commercially available radio scanners. DeConcini wants Congress to fatten the budget for secure communications. The Government was reminded of the embarrassing problem of intercepted radio messages during the Achille Lauro episode in October, when ham-radio operators heard Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger advising the President over an unsecured channel. NEW JERSEY A Corrupt Pol Surfaces

For an untimely death, it seemed suspiciously well timed. Last September, while awaiting sentencing on a federal extortion conviction and just days before he was to be indicted on fraud charges, former New Jersey State Senator David Friedland was reported to have drowned in a scuba-diving accident near Grand Bahama Island. Last week the missing politico's attorney received a phone call with a taped message: "I am alive and in fear for my life," it began. Friedland hinted that he had evidence of other possible crimes, implying that he might cut a deal with authorities.

Friedland, 47, a state senator from 1977 to 1981, was convicted in 1980 of taking $360,000 in kickbacks to arrange a $4 million loan from New Jersey Teamsters Local 701 to a shady West Coast businessman. To reduce his imminent prison sentence, Friedland agreed to act as a federal informant. Meanwhile, he apparently headed a plan to defraud Local 701's pension fund of 520 million. In Friedland's hometown, few who knew the wheeler-dealer raised an eyebrow at his scuba scam. "We're from Jersey City," Lawyer Jack Russell told the New York Daily News. "We understand those kind of things."