Talk Focuses on Who May Land Clinton Cabinet Posts

It’s only speculation, but Washington is already abuzz with gossip about who might land Cabinet-level jobs under a President Bill Clinton.

Much of the talk centers on people who are advising Clinton already. In foreign, defense and trade policy, the Democratic candidate has amassed a brain trust combining people who worked in the Administration of President Jimmy Carter, with a handful of new faces.

Clinton’s principal foreign policy adviser is W. Anthony Lake, a top State Department official in the Carter Administration who now teaches at Mt. Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.

Key roles in the campaign have also been played by Samuel R. Berger, a Washington lawyer who worked for Lake at the State Department; Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Madeleine Albright, a former aide to then-Vice President Walter F. Mondale who teaches at Georgetown University.

Two others whose guidance have been sought are Richard Schifter, former assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; and Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Lake says Clinton has reached out to several members of Congress for their advice. They include Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Others who have been tapped include David Aaron, a former deputy national security adviser under Carter; Robert E. Hunter, another Carter Administration NSC aide; Penn Kemble, a prominent neoconservative and senior associate at the human rights organization Freedom House; Walter B. Slocombe, a former deputy undersecretary of defense; Richard C. Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state for East Asia, and R. James Woolsey, former undersecretary of the Navy.

Clinton aides say the Arkansas governor has never discussed Cabinet choices--but that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill. Among the names most frequently mentioned for foreign policy-related jobs:

Secretary of State: Los Angeles attorney Warren Christopher, a senior Clinton adviser and former deputy secretary of state under Carter; Mondale; Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Secretary of Defense: Nunn; Aspin; Woolsey; retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

National security adviser: Lake; Albright; Aaron; Holbrooke.

Secretary of the Treasury: Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Roger Altman; Robert Rubin, a banker at the New York firm of Goldman Sachs.

Ambassador to Russia: Strobe Talbott, assistant managing editor of Time magazine and a Rhodes scholar with Clinton at Oxford University.

Ambassador to Japan: Solarz, who was defeated in a Democratic primary last month.