NONFICTION - Dec. 13, 1992

THE SWAMP ROOT CHRONICLE: Adventures in the Word Trade by Robert Manning (Norton: $24:95; 419 pp.) When we read Russell Baker’s autobiography, “Growing Up,” the humble details of his Depression boyhood are back-lit by his fame as a New York Times columnist. The story ends with Baker in his 20s, his career barely begun, but we scan it for hints of the happy ending to come, clues to the qualities that would separate him from the pack.

It’s just the opposite with the memoirs of Robert Manning, newspaper and wire-service reporter, Time magazine writer, assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Kennedy Administration and editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1964 to 1980. The distinguished career is laid out before us; we search it for glimpses of the man.

Events and personalities parade by--the idealistic beginnings of the United Nations, the miasma of the Vietnam War, J.F.K. and L.B.J., Hemingway and Henry Moore, media moguls from Henry Luce to Mortimer Zuckerman, a host of colorful colleagues. Manning saw much and knew, it seems, practically everybody. He has sensible things to say about press-government relations (the government has the right to keep certain secrets; the press has the duty to dig for everything). Once in a while he ventures an unorthodox opinion (the Cuban missile crisis came nowhere near as close to Armageddon as we think). Still, nothing fades like yesterday’s headlines.

The reticence beneath the witty surface of this book isn’t just a newsman’s conviction that the teller is less important than the story. Rather, Manning seems to have had so many of the right qualities from the start--humor, balance, a gift for friendship, the ability not to get in the way of his own hard work--that he experienced little of the failure or self-questioning that makes autobiographies interesting. “Lucky Bob,” he modestly calls himself; the reader isn’t quite so fortunate.