Washington-USA:

...This regeneration of idealism in a soggy affluent society is possibly the most heartening feature of the United States in the year 1961...

...Their purport was that Moyers had suggested there were Americans tired of making money for corporations, who wanted to dig ditches in Africa for nothing...

...As a result, we almost physically kicked out Prince Souvanna Phouma and installed a crew of grafters and kowtowers...

...A lot of people have a real urge to work for the common good...

...Kennedy's great need at the moment is to find out precisely what are the Soviet intentions...

...A straight South to West deal...

...But Kennedy is not playing that game...

...In return, Russia would stop fueling, feeding and arming Castro, whom it doesn't really like anyway...

...It is responsible for the Southern sit-ins and anti-discrimination pickets, and the rapid growth of college "cause" groups...

...President Kennedy, who seems to represent, or at least to encourage the new spirit, has been engaged in a behind-the-scenes struggle of epic proportions...

...The old hands on Capitol Hill have always regarded "do-gooders" as phonies, radicals or neurotics...

...Dulles was intellectually incapable of admitting neutralism was possible...

...This is not a passive but a defiant idealism, particularly among the young...

...Yet, a committee will listen with flattering deference to political scientist Herman Kahn as he details his weird philosophy that nuclear war is good...

...This might be a good object lesson for the Hickenloopers of the world...

...Another case was a Wall Street attorney who made a similar application and said he was "sick of making out wills for wealthy widows...

...Ignore the young idealists, look with mild contempt upon their spirit, and they may be on your back...

...How far are they willing to move to lessen the danger of world war...

...A Moscow radio commentator named Petrov calls it "a crafty plot to use youth as a pawn in the hands of political strategists in Washington...

...Ironically, criticism of the Peace Corps has come from the two extremes of the political spectrum, the conservatives and the Communists...

...Send me any place as a corpsman...

...A failure of peaceful settlement in Laos will cast the shadow of impending failure over disarmament negotiations, over peaceful evolution in Africa, over settlement in Europe, over the entire world's hope for peace and progress...

...The President's dilemma in Laos has been made almost impossible by the consequences of the late John Foster Dulles' belief that any neutral country was really an enemy—and more dangerous, too, because it was trying to conceal its enmity behind the cloak of neutralism...

...What is done [in Laos] will ring the bell for what is done elsewhere...

...I'm tired of making money for big corporations...

...Onethird of the applications which have flooded the infant Peace Corps are from mature people of considerable experience: doctors, nurses, professional people and skilled craftsmen who have a desire to do good...

...Another third are from persons out of college from one to five years...

...Just south of China there are rich, fertile, rice surplus areas, and the tiger eyes them hungrily...

...Both Moscow and Peking have their own problems with the spirit of the young...

...And this was mild compared to the assault on the Peace Corps a week before by Radio Peking...

...Four Soviet professional women visiting Washington, sitting close to the press tables, watched the scene...

...Senator Hickenlooper curiously chose to goad the Peace Corps on the one quality which has lit such a flame among most Americans: its idealism...

...He might be compared to Hector in Jean Giradoux's play, Tiger At the Gates...

...asked Bourke B. Hickenlooper of Iowa, managing to express in his pleasant, rather soft nasal twang both an infuriating doubt and a mild contempt...

...He was such a devoted friend of America that he was trained in our paratroop school in the Philippines, walked the streets with an American newspaper or magazine tucked under his arm and talked enthusiastically about "democracy...

...In the crowded Foreign Relations Committee room, college students leaned forward, torn between rage for the questioner and prayers for the young man...

...He wants to try disarmament by stages, choosing the test ban as the first trial...

...He has no intention of letting Laos go...

...He is now the Communist pin-up boy of Southeast Asia...

...He finally blew up because, he claimed, his generals were riding about Vientiane in Cadillacs and Mercedes while he and his men were sent out to fight in the jungles...

...The China mainland has suffered for two years from what is admittedly the worst drought in three centuries...

...The occasional witness who comes before a committee to plead "for the good of mankind" is treated with bored inattention or outright rudeness...

...If the great nations cannot resolve in peace this distant problem, when their particular national interests are remote, how then are they to resolve problems where their interests are direct and intimate...

...The young man's face flushed suddenly, beginning in his neck and spreading upward...

...American prestige in Africa is in the process of being restored, and Radio Moscow, with the frantic air of a girl who is losing her boy friend to a blonde down the street, attacks Adlai Stevenson and "Soapy" Williams on all wave lengths...

...Moyers had spoken that morning to Congressional assistants, and one of them, possibly a member of the neo-fascist John Birch underground, had brought ominous notes to Hickenlooper...

...A typical and yet tragic story is that of Captain Kong Le, a young paratroop captain...

...Hector tried to prevent war with Greece, and each time he seemed to avert a clash, fate intervened...

...He asked: "Who works for peace and talks peace but does not do its works...

...The final third are still in college...

...I want to do something worth while...

...He overthrew the Government, and was virtually pushed into the surprised arms of the pro-Communist Pathet Lao by American authorities...

...Only when this information is available can the Administration firm up its own policies...

...This would enable it to drop the heavy arms burden it is carrying, keep China in its place by giving it Laos and South Vietnam, and penetrate deep into Africa...

...Moyers gave two examples...

...it might burn their coat tails...

...In Congress, business is transacted among the elders on a simple, pragmatic basis: "I'll vote for your dam and reservoir in Arizona, if you'll cut the appropriation for the Civil Rights Commission in the committee...

...The elders don't want to see this idealism and defiance go too far...

...We've been surprised at the number of applications we've received from good professional people, teachers and doctors, when other Government agencies, the Information Agency and the International Cooperation Administration, for example, can't get them for love or money...

...Slowly, the color returned to normal...

...A very successful corporation lawyer had called Shriver and said he would like to work for the Peace Corps...

...China with its monstrous population is suffering from famine so catastrophic that it has been forced to buy huge quantities of grain for cash from Canada and Australia...

...This symbolic struggle, matching the doubt of age against the fresh hope of the young, took place a few days ago when Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps director, and his young assistant, Bill Moyers, came to Capitol Hill for their first hazing...

...A reporter threw his pencil on the table and said in an angry whisper, "These old men can always give you 500 reasons why not to do something...

...In his talks with Congressional leaders, Kennedy has made it clear that he sees Laos as a clear test of Soviet intentions...

...Senator Hickenlooper plainly regarded this as incredible and, perhaps, subversive...

...Senator Hickenlooper, who is quite a decent fellow, was a symbol of the doubt and mild alarm of his age-group in his nit-picking questions on the Peace Corps...

...They hear their fathers and mothers talking glibly about democracy and justice, and yet sitting placidly by and doing nothing about injustice or undemocratic practices...

...The coastal areas have been hit by disastrous floods, while no rain falls deep inland where rice and other grains are grown...

...For the young are not sitting still these days...

...No, not that," the lawyer answered...

...It is also causing no little trouble for the always controversial House Un-American Activities Committee, whose "Operation Abolition" film has created a tremendous campus backfire...

...African students in colorful tribal dress stood along the wall, aware how closely this drama touched them...

...I was just telling them about the motivation behind the Peace Corps volunteers," he said...

...I'm sorry," Shriver replied, "but we've already filled the job of chief counsel...

...Fate, in the form of a mysterious caprice of nature, is forcing open the gates of war in Asia...

...This is a big factor in the White House secret conferences on Laos, and may also help explain the sulky Russian attitude on this and a host of other world problems...

...they, too, knew how fiercely skeptical is the nature of power...

...One government social psychiatrist who has interviewed scores of young people engaging in protest movements reports that a main motivating factor is "a horror of the hypocrisy of their elders...

...At the Foreign Relations Committee hearing, young Moyers came to the witness table obviously burning with barely suppressed indignation...

...Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the Majority Leader, made a revealing statement on Friday...

...The winds which usually push moist air masses inland from the China Seas have weakened unaccountably...

...The Soviet Union, it seems obvious from the diplomatic cables, hoped to make an easy, overall deal with the Kennedy Administration...

...Collegiate Young Democratic Clubs all across the country are passing resolutions to either abolish HUAC or transfer its functions to the House Judiciary Committee...