Pat's Bandwagon

Poised and cheerful, the slim blonde with the conventional coiffure and decorous hemline managed to look at home among miniskirted girls with their long hair and longer legs, and boys sporting whiskers and peace emblems. One bushy-jawed college student could not resist giving his guest a respectful buss. Clearly pleased, Pat Nixon reported the obvious: "The beard tickled."

Pat Nixon? What ever happened to the matron in the Republican cloth coat, the silent partner in the Nixon marriage who never appeared quite comfortable as the wife of a public man? She has got to the point of enjoying flattering headlines and TV footage, for one thing. For another, she has acquired sufficient self-confidence to face pickets, skeptical reporters and ordinary citizens with the same aplomb. Finally, she has discovered a worthy cause within her ken: voluntary social action.

Starch and Humor. So off she went last week on the second of her grassroots excursions. This time the itinerary was Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado and Missouri. In style, Pat has suffered in comparison with Jackie; for energy and charm, she has been no match for Lady Bird. But last week she borrowed a presidential 707; her predecessors never did that. Pat held four stand-up press conferences, sharing the microphones with students active in volunteer programs and responding to questions with the proper combination of starch and good humor; Jackie and Lady Bird did not do that either.

In Cincinnati, challenged by a reporter on the usefulness of volunteerism in solving the problems of poverty, she replied: "Government is impersonal, and to really get our problems solved we have to have people too. We need the personal touch."

Women's-righters and antiwar protesters twitted her at some stops. "A few shouters cannot dim the glory of this day," she said in Lexington, Ky. As she filled her 14-hour days with visits to the poor, the blind, the retarded, the aged and the outcast, she emphasized: "I want to go where the action is." All Americans, she said, should "get on the bandwagon and help out in their communities."

Place to Be. For all of her new moxie, Pat stopped short of the front lines. Her schedule this time did not include any ghetto areas, and the only campus she visited belonged to the School of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Mo. But she was constantly surrounded by college students, because many of the institutions she visited were heavily staffed with young volunteers.

Pat was as interested in the helped as in the helpers. One blind child crawled into her lap. "I'd like to take you home with me," Pat crooned. "I need a new little girl. Mine are both grown." To teenage boys in a delinquents' training school, she said: "I want you to do something great. One of you can even be President." Thinking that one over for a moment, she added an aside: "I wouldn't want to wish it on them." Once in a while, Pat's enthusiasm went a bit awry. "This is. a good place to be," she told inmates of Kentucky's Eastern State Mental Hospital. It was a good place to visit, anyway, particularly for a farmer's daughter and former schoolteacher who has learned how to be an unwound First Lady.

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