PEACE CORPS SHOWS GAINS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400220007-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Sequence Number: 7
• Content Type: NEWSPAPER CLIPPING

BOSTON, lhA,;S. Approved, For Release 2006/07/27: CIA-RDP88-?(
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It's.been just over 10 years since Congress, at Presi-
dent Kennedy's behest, formally established the Peace
Corps "to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs
for skilled manpower."
't'oday, in spite of a general US retreat from various
inilitary and economic commitments around the world,
in spite of the current Senate shenanigans with the for-
cign aid bill, and in spite of an orgy of doubting our
morals and motives abroad, 'the Peace Corps is alive and
remarkably well.
Applications have risen by almost 40 percent this
year and requests by foreign countries for volunteers are
on the increase, too. Both are reversing four-year down-
-ward curves.
This turnaround, this resilience curr?ntly shown by
the Peace Corps, suggests the fundamental merits of the
concept. It indicates that it is not merely a glamorous
gimni'ick of the '60s and the New.Frontier to be discarded
:.oil the clustheap of broken American ideals. Ycs, Vir-
ginia, there is a place in the world for volunteer service
by -the people of developed countries for the benefit of
those that are developing.
That's in the abstract. In the concrete, the modest
resurgence of the Peace Corps is a credit to the redirec-
tion which has been brought about in the last few years
by director Joseph Blatchford.
An energetic, former collegiate All-America tennis
,player, Blatchford first captured the public imagination
as the man. who was beaned by partner Spiro Agnew's
wayward serve in a celebrated .Washington tennis match
several years ago.
The 36--year-old Blatchford_ weathered that indignity
and has gone on to breathe new life into the volunteer
organization which many people were beginning to.. view
as an idea whose time had conic-and gone.
Blatchford's contribution has been to set the Peace
Corps in some notable "new directions." Contrary to
Sargent Shriver's Corps of the early '60s, featuring plea-
:lanxes of Ivy-educated generalists floating the backwaters
of the Nile or the Amazon on. a postgraduate period
abroad, the emphasis today is on experienced profes-?
signals fulfilling specific and often technical functions.
The Peace Corps--henceforth to be known as Action
,for its recent fusion with the 'domestic version Vista--
is experimenting with all manner of volunteer service
and servants now. This'iricludes niiarriecl couples serving
as a team, and persons specially prepared through sub-
sidizLd-:_ clucation at selected -colleges (including the
Uri- for a year in-service domes-
tically after college and then two years abroad.
This is, one instance in which the hard. figures have
responded to the soft theori"ring about improving and
updating. Where the Peace Corps had been steadily d.e-
clining in both applications and selected volunteers from
;,'a..pgak of more than 10,000 five years ago, tlii:u trend has
DOW .been reversed.
Applications jumped from 19,000 during the period
September, 1.969, to August, 1970, to 26,500 in the same
12-month period just ended. As of last month, there
were 5213 volunteers in 56 countries around the world.
No one is doing any real tub-thumping about this
state of affairs. For Peace Corps officials are anxious to
maintain a low. posture around the world, free from all
the bravado and braggadocio associated with ti}e venture
10 years ago.
One place inhere this is especially so is Chile where
the Peace Corps maintains a modest and apparently sat-
isfactory operation, and Is very adverse to calling atten-
tion to it.
Chile is 'a land where several years ago two Com-
munist senators launched a full-scale congressional in-*
vestigation of alleged Peace Corps involvement with the
CIA in an attempt to get rid of the program altogether.
1`sie.;eelenients had reason to believe they had ? an ally
in. Xllencle, the first freely-elected Marxist president in
the Western Hemisphere.
Just a year ago, in fact'. at the time of Allende's in-
auguration, some Washington officials in the State De.*
pariment were proposing that the Peace Corps be with-
drawn from Chile before it was thrown out.
Neither thing happened. Today there are some 62.
men and women volunteers in the country, engaged pri-
marily in forestry and fishery works and in the notewor-
thy fish meal concentrate program. Requests from Chilean
government for 22 additional volunteers are now out-
standing, and a number of these are now in training, in-
cluding- a winning college basketball coach (from Dela-
ware U.), requested to prep the Chilean national team
for the next Pan Aniericari games.
The future of the Peace Corp in Chile as elsewhere
isn't fully secure. Officials hasten to point out that the
welcome mat could be withdrawn at any time.
But the organization is demonstrating more durability
there than many an American corporation, such as Ana-
conda Copper. It's proven itself sufficiently so that it
won't sink or_ swim simply on the future won-lost record
of Chile's national basketball team.
Crocker. Snow is assistant managbig editor of the
j Morning Globe.
MORUCIDIF
Approved For Release 2006/07/27: CIA-RDP88-01315R000400220007-0