OUR Nation section this week looks much the same as it usually does. For the past two weeks, however, the writers and reporter-researchers who produce the section have been engaged in a unique experiment --putting together Nation in our Washington bureau instead of TIME'S New York City editorial offices.

With a presidential election year ahead, it seemed a good time for our Nation staff to take an intensive firsthand look at some of the candidates and issues, as well as the men who run Richard Nixon's Washington. Led by Managing Editor Henry Grunwald and Senior Editor Jason McManus, the visiting delegation of 20 men and women crammed a remarkable variety of encounters into a series of 15-hour days. There were breakfasts with Washington figures ranging from HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson to New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug to Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler. Hubert Humphrey came to an off-the-record luncheon and made it fairly obvious that he is off and running. At one point, Humphrey was so exuberant that a waiter put down his dishes to cheer.

The sojourn provided some fascinating glimpses of the capital's variety and changing styles, even for the Nation staff members who had worked before as reporters in Washington. Despite the Nixon Administration's reputation for imposing a certain managerial grayness on the city, our visitors found that it remains an intriguing place. Its variety was especially apparent at a reception held by Editors Grunwald and McManus and Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel for over 200 of the capital's leading figures. Mingling there were Edward Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Arkansas' William Fulbright, North Carolina's Sam Ervin, Idaho's Frank Church, Maryland's Charles Mathias, television's Eric Sevareid, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman James Schlesinger, Pentagon generals, White House staffers, including Counsel Clark MacGregor, and such nonpolitical types as Novelist Herman Wouk and Explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

At a luncheon with Edmund Muskie's campaign manager Berl Bernhard in the Hay-Adams Hotel the party talked in semiwhispers because the President's director of communications, Herbert Klein, was sitting at the next table. At another luncheon, the Nation staff grilled Presidential Assistant John Ehrlichman about White House relations with the press, later were guests of the White House staff at a reception in Blair House. There was a certain bracing contrast in a dinner with Ralph Nader, who adumbrated his plans for a year-long investigation of the functions of Congress.

Moving round the federal city, the New Yorkers often found Washingtonians asking whether the experiment was a success. By every measure it was. Says McManus: "Many of these Washington newsmakers are now three-dimensional personalities for us in a way that they were not before, and that is bound to improve our collective judgment on them. Action is character, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed. The way in which Wilbur Mills carefully lines up the top of his cigar pack with the top line on the yellow pad on his desk each time he lights up offers a small insight into a formidable and orderly intellect. Beyond the immediate and exhilarating sense of participation that all journalists relish, these two weeks of total immersion in the life of the capital will prove invaluable as we move on to interpreting the tumult of the presidential election year."

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