Boosting Volunteerism

The post carries no official duties, no statutory powers and no salary, but the First Ladyship of the U.S. can be a singularly influential position for women of drive and grace. After years of being uncharitably meowed at by Washington gossips as stiff and unsophisticated, Pat Nixon last week showed that she could master the job.

On a four-day journey to publicize ten volunteer self-help projects on the West Coast, her first official solo trip since Inauguration Day, Mrs. Nixon was a model of warmth and graciousness--flashing her smile and her topaz brown eyes at shy children, embracing self-conscious elderly women, and offering her hand to hesitant black men. She coolly endured heckling at one stop, seemed oblivious to the herd of newsmen pursuing her along her 6,000-mile itinerary, and gratified anxious project directors with her insatiable curiosity--and her ability to attract publicity.

Hostile Confetti. The journey was undertaken to boost "vest pockets of volunteerism," which Mrs. Nixon describes as "those small, splendid efforts of dedicated people that the President spoke about in his Inaugural Address." The cause promises to be for her what national beautification was for Lady Bird Johnson. "I want to make volunteerism the In thing to do," she told a group in Los Angeles. "I think this is the answer to our problems here in America."

Though the reception was cordial in most places, the First Lady was deluged with hostile confetti at a social service center in Portland, Ore. Each scrap of paper was imprinted: "If this was napalm, you would be dead." This greeting, planned by a protest group that has offices in the same building, was accompanied by banners and placards taunting her about Viet Nam and hunger. As Pat gamely launched into her speech, seven barefoot girls in black burst into the hall and chanted an antiwar hex on her in crude doggerel.

For the Duration. At a ghetto garden in Portland that helps feed some 300 people, she cooed over a twelve-year-old farmer's collard greens and admitted that if she lived there, "I would be out every day with my little hoe--gardening is my favorite hobby." She tickled a toddler at a day care facility for children of farm laborers in Forest Grove, Ore. She encouraged teen-age weight lifters at a community center near the Watts ghetto with a little of her own body English.

At a foundation for blind children in Los Angeles, she and her traveling companion, Daughter Julie Eisenhower, were brought to tears by scenes the children put on from The Sound of Music. "That's the real story here today," Pat said. "These children are really learning to enjoy life."

Her cause, the recruitment of "millions more" for volunteer social action without benefit of massive federal funding, may prove difficult. There is, indeed, a strong impulse among Americans for volunteer work. But the impulse is inhibited by the notion that the individual is powerless to change things and by the fact that in today's big, anonymous urban areas, one does not know--or does not trust--those who need help. At any rate, the First Lady proclaimed herself in service for the duration: "I really want to work. I don't want just to lend my name." Pleased with the results of her first trip, she announced a fall campus tour. What about student protesters? Said Pat: "I'm not afraid of anything."

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