Getting It All Together In the Name of Action

During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon said that John Kennedy's proposed Peace Corps sounded like "a haven for draft dodgers." More recently, a poverty-program official in the Nixon Administration sneered at VISTA, the Peace Corps' domestic counterpart: "The day that Lady Bountiful comes down from Scarsdale for a day of good works in Harlem is over."

The Nixon Administration in 1970 abolished occupational draft deferments, including those for VISTA and Peace Corps volunteers. Possibly to conciliate the young, however belatedly, Nixon used a speech at the University of Nebraska nine months later to praise their altruism and to propose a merger of the Peace Corps, VISTA and a handful of smaller Government volunteer groups into a new corps that would provide "an expanded opportunity" for service. Last week the House okayed the consolidation; unless the Senate disagrees this week, which is considered unlikely, the new agency--called Action--will come into existence on July 1.

The merger is designed to pour into one pot not only the Peace Corps, VISTA and the Teacher Corps, but also an acronymic amalgam of such disparate agencies as NSVP (National Student Volunteer Program), RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program), SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) and ACE (Active Corps of Executives). Also to be incorporated will be the Office of Voluntary Action.

The man who will run Action is the member of the Administration whom the President considers best able to talk to the young: Joseph Blatchford, 37, head of the Peace Corps since early in the Administration and a unique figure in Nixon's button-down Washington. His sideburns are long, his hair falls over his shirt collar, and on occasion he has been seen sporting a fringed leather jacket. One morning during the Mayday demonstrations, Blatchford emerged from his Georgetown house into a crowd of militants. They watched suspiciously as he donned a white helmet and straddled his Yamaha 275 motorcycle. Unrecognized, he flashed the peace sign and rode off to work.

Blatchford often finds young audiences confronting him with the blunt question, "Why do you work for those guys?" He concedes that "not everybody trusts this Administration," but lately, under his leadership, the Peace Corps has come out of a long slump in attracting volunteers: there have been 21,638 applicants thus far in 1971, v. 19,022 in all of 1970. The various agencies that Nixon wants to include in Action now have a combined budget of $160 million. In order to make the consolidation of volunteer organizations more attractive to members of Congress, Nixon offered an extra $20 million for the combined agency's initial budget.

Putting all the Government's service groups together seems plausible enough on paper, but the amalgamation followed several months of infighting between Peace Corps and VISTA officials over which group would predominate in the merged organization. VISTA lost, and one reason may be that its young volunteers have displayed strong political activism; this has piqued some of the nation's more conservative mayors and Governors, both in the North and in the South.

The VISTA wars were fought with leaks to the press--most dramatically, the release of part of a sociologist's report that some Administration officials interpreted as meaning that VISTA workers are "radicalized" by their volunteer experience. One Washington Republican concluded: "VISTA is just a federally financed hate-Nixon postgraduate school." In fact, Dr. David Gottlieb of Pennsylvania State University, who conducted the study, decided that most volunteers in VISTA found it an opportunity to work for change "within the System."

VISTA has been a particular target for conservative criticism. Richard Nixon plainly wants to put his own stamp on the voluntary agencies begun by his Democratic predecessors, and the merger into Action, by absorbing VISTA into a larger, less controversial whole, may blunt the attack. Some think that the reorganization is actually a Machiavellian maneuver by the President to gut VISTA and the Peace Corps, although both programs can continue effectively if the Administration really wants them to. Shuffling bureaucracies about means nothing in itself.

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