Field Trip

As not exactly everybody knows, the chief U.S. official for Latin American affairs is Jack Hood Vaughn, Assistant Secretary of State for the past six months. Vaughn's obscurity is readily explainable: his predecessor, Thomas Mann, is Lyndon Johnson's longtime Latin America expert, and even though Mann has been promoted to Under Secretary of State, it is Mann whom the President phones, not infrequently at midnight, to talk Latin America. Last week Vaughn, a onetime professional boxer and teacher who rose through the civil service to become Peace Corps administrator in Latin America and Ambassador to Panama, set about establishing his own primacy in the job.

Jetting through five Latin nations, Vaughn showed himself to be an articulate Administration spokesman, with a special competence for the farming affairs that are a major concern of the Alliance for Progress. "I'm the son of a cowboy," explains Vaughn, who was born and raised in Columbus, Mont. He had been known in Panama as "the peasant ambassador"; after he put in an exhausting week in farmers' fields all the way from Mexico to Chile, the label seemed more appropriate than ever. Inevitably, there were formal encounters with Presidents and Cabinet ministers, but the restless, inquisitive Vaughn everywhere preferred to seek out campesinos and artisans.

He chatted in almost flawless Spanish with farmers in a corn patch outside Mexico City. In El Salvador, he was charmed to hear members of a pick-up band tootle The Star-Spangled Banner, which they had learned by ear from a Peace Corpsman, who had whistled it for three days. In Panama, he visited an Alliance-financed grade school and attended a dinner honoring the fourth anniversary of the Alliance, which he heads as part of his assignment.

In Quito, Vaughn insisted that handicraft workers witness the ceremony when he signed a $3,000,000 loan for artisan credits.

Cornered by a group of curious Peace Corps volunteers in Ecuador, Vaughn offered his assessment of the U.S. effort. "Until the ordinary people you're working with get a chance to join the human race," he said, "there's no hope for democracy. Today we are not thinking of the Latin Americans in terms of throwing them another $2,000,000 just to get them out of our hair." This week Vaughn moves on to Bolivia and Peru, then returns to the U.S. When he gets home, maybe the phone will start ringing at midnight.

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