After considerable experience on the other side of an interview, Martha Mitchell last week took over the guest co-host spot on Washington's midday talk show Panorama. Martha, liberally divesting herself of opinions, condemned streaking, praised Governor Wallace, attacked the nation's schools for being overly psychoanalytical, and deplored conditions in veterans' hospitals. In between, she conducted a few interviews, asking ex-Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas how she felt about the Red-scare smear campaign that Richard Nixon used to defeat her in 1950. Said Douglas: "I woke up the next morning a free person and found that I had been sincere with myself." With ex-Housewife Pat Loud she discussed the lack of neighborliness in New York. The most stirring interview was when Martha came face to face with a tiger named Prince, who was under the eye of Animal Tamer Gunther Gebel-Williams Then she had a revelation of her own: "I talked my husband into becoming a Republican [in 1966]. He'd always been a Democrat. And the day I talked him out of calling the President Tricky Dick' --I could still shoot myself!"

After presiding over the Senate for four years as Vice President, Hubert Humphrey took on a real circus. Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey variety. In red sequined coat and black stovepipe hat ("I won't throw it into the ring, and that's the first time I've ever said that"), Senator Humphrey stepped into the spotlight before a packed audience of all ages at the Washington, D.C., armory. By longstanding tradition, the opening was billed as Congressional Night at the Circus. Seldom at a loss for words, Humphrey kept up an authentic ringmaster's patter for half an hour as North Dakota Senator Quentin Burdick and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens plus 14 Representatives dressed as clowns paraded around the ring on elephants before the regular show. Perhaps noting the lack of donkeys, Senator Henry Jackson was a no-show. Instead he went to Circus America, the rival big top now playing the capital.

By common agreement, the finest throwing arm in the history of the U.S. Military Academy belongs to Omar Nelson Bradley, Class of '15. After a distinguished career as outfielder for the West Point baseball team, Bradley went on to make a succession of spectacular martial catches: commander of the Twelfth Army in World War II, postwar Veterans Administrator, first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, at 81, the only living five-star General of the Army. Bradley returned last week to the ivied walls on the Hudson for the dedication of the Omar N. Bradley Library, which will contain his personal papers. With his uniform razor-creased and his eyes glistening as if they were spit-shined, Bradley told cadets: "Every time I return to West Point I visit my youth, my roots, my dreams. At this stage of my life I'm glad to be anywhere, but today I feel a special kind of fulfillment." "

The home-team lineup for the afternoon's floor-hockey game at Manhattan's Felt Forum read like the New Frontier Ladies' Auxiliary: Ethel Kennedy, Eunice Shriver, Pat Lawford, Jean Smith, Althea Gibson and Carol Channing. Arrayed against that formidable phalanx of palestral pulchritude in the sixth annual Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation Special Olympics was a team of mentally retarded children, beneficiaries of the foundation. Team Scribe Barbara Walters described the contest: "I was a little nervous at first, but I noticed that Eunice was out of breath and I wasn't. And you know what good athletes those Kennedys are. Before the game Eunice told us, 'Do your best and just remember, if you lose, it's only a national disgrace.' " They lost 3-2.

Argentina's ambassador to the U.S., Alejandro Orfila, decided to throw the ultimate tango party. So last week he invited 170 guests, including Vice President and Mrs. Gerald Ford, Attorney General and Mrs. William Saxbe, and former U.S. Ambassador to Argentina and Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. The whole party was beamed live via satellite to television viewers in Argentina. They saw Ford stump stiffly through what looked less like a tango than a gringo foxtrot. "Mrs. Ford has been hoping for about 26 years that I could tango," he said. "We're still working on it." The nation's honor was upheld, however, by White House Secretary Rose Mary Woods, who has lately distinguished herself by some fancy footwork off the dance floor. She glided faultlessly through the complicated rite with a number of partners. The music was live; after all, who would want a tango interrupted by a gap in the tape?

The makings of a coalition government were assembled last week in London's historic Whitehall Banqueting House. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, along with former P.M. Edward Heath, Liberal Party Leader Jeremy Thorpe, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Lord Avon (Anthony Eden) joined some 200 other guests to honor Lady Spencer-Churchill on her 89th birthday. After toasts with Sir Winston Churchill's favorite Pol Roger champagne had been exchanged, a fragile-looking Clemmie, who has been mostly confined to a wheelchair since breaking her hip two years ago, was helped to her feet by Grandson Winston, M.P. for Stretford, Lancashire, to announce a fund-raising drive for Cambridge's Churchill College and to sponsor traveling scholarships. To launch the "1 million pounds from 1 million people" campaign, she dropped a crisp pound note into the silver bowl presented to the newlywed Churchills in 1908 by Prime Minister Asquith's Cabinet. Remembering Churchill in what would have been his 100th year, Clemmie said quietly, "I think that Winston really did stand a head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

In the pink-washed and colonnaded villa La Serena in Las Brisas, the social summit of Acapulco, Nancy and Henry Kissinger found a honeymoon refuge last week. Lazing by the shell-shaped pool or strolling in the tropical gardens of the estate lent to them by Mexican Pharmaceuticals Importer Eustaquio Escandon, the Kissingers' only argument was with their host's mean, green parrot that set up a racket every time Henry opened his mouth. Kissinger was resigned to the bird's preference for his bride. "That parrot can't be all bad," he said. Henry was not so tolerant of the 40-odd newsmen who were encamped at La Serena's gate. Flushed from adjoining gardens by the twelve Secret Service agents and 20 Mexican police assigned to guard the U.S. Secretary of State, the reporters and photographers followed the Kissingers' every move. Carloads pursued the couple when they went into town. A motor-boatload of newsmen rocked their sloop during an afternoon sail. Kissinger finally negotiated a truce halfway through the ten-day honeymoon. In exchange for a press conference, the newsmen agreed to leave the couple alone. Summoning the press to the house of Mexican Foreign Minister Emilio Rabasa, Kissinger, dressed in a white guayabera (a casual Mexican shirt), was his usual genial self. Nancy, peering from behind oversized sunglasses, was tense, and she did not find the barrage of personal questions reassuring. "How many children will you have?" demanded a reporter. Nancy, who is, according to friends, "crazy about children," replied warily, "I don't know. However many come."

Washington has many more personal questions for the newly weds, specifically about their domestic arrangements. Said a Congressman's wife: "Everyone has conjecturitis." Nancy will definitely not leave her job as adviser to former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller before his next presidential effort. As staff director of foreign policy studies for Rocky's Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, she researches speeches, assigns position papers to academics, and prepares aides-memoire. As one friend says, "She has power, and she would not like to give it up." He suggests that Nancy will commute to Manhattan for a day or so a week: "A lot of her work is thinking and can be done as well in Washington."

The odds are that the shuttle diplomats will start married life in Henry's town house in Rock Creek Park, near Embassy Row and within a few minutes' drive of the State Department. The interior has been described by one visitor as "early Holiday Inn." Washington Social Veteran Barbara Howar already has advice for Nancy: "Put Henry on a diet and redecorate."

For their formal entertaining, the Kissingers have, after the White House, the most elegant suite in the capital--the State Department's Madison Room, which is furnished with American antiques. But vast embassy receptions and cocktail parties are not really Nancy's style. "I'd fall over backwards if she became the hostess with the mostes' " said one old friend. Nancy prefers small dinners with six to eight informed, articulate friends. She smokes a lot but drinks little. Though she does not fuss over gourmet food, she is a competent cook. Not that she spent much time at the stove in her single days. Through her work with the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund and from trips with the Governor, Nancy collected a large, far-flung circle of friends and acquaintances who always called her up when they were in town. However, men who dated her quickly learned that Kissinger was in the background. A couple of years ago, one friend urged Nancy either to marry him or start playing the field in order to find someone else to settle down with. She was apparently open to such counsel. Several months later the friend chided her: "When I told you to open your little black book, I didn't know it was the whole New York City phone book." Nancy will not give up her career--yet--for Henry, but she has already had to surrender her cherished privacy. From now on, what she says and how she looks will be intensely scrutinized. The unblinking public gaze is not likely to please such a reserved woman. And as the honeymoon drew to an end, she seemed to be growing reluctantly aware of what her metamorphosis from Rockefeller staffer to Mrs. Kissinger will mean. Looking cool and chic in a bougainvillaea-pink pantsuit, Nancy waited on the terrace for Henry to finish taping a TV interview last week. Shading her eyes and looking out over the bay, she referred to the pressures of constant publicity, then asked doubtfully, "Don't you think it will be over after this?"

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