Education: Interns in Government

This summer 7,000 of the U.S. Government’s employees in Washington are college boys and girls, working during their vacations at everything from ghosting speeches for Congressmen to sweeping out the Senate barbershop and digging graves at Arlington National Cemetery. Most of these toilers are Washington-area residents filling the handiest vacation jobs. They type, file and tabulate in a summer version of the classic civil-service grind. But among the roughly 2,000 students with more exciting work are college-sponsored “interns,” who have proliferated in recent years through the pioneering efforts of Dartmouth, Wellesley and Yale to find lively Government jobs. The goal: to show that working for the Government can be exciting and rewarding enough to be preferable to some well-paid corporation job.

Campuses from Harvard to Vassar have sent a record crop of bright interns to learn how upper-government works, and even to work it. Vassar’s Judy McGuire, 20, a finalist in last summer’s Miss Rheingold contest, is spending this summer batting out speeches for Manhattan’s Representative John V. Lindsay. While Judy thus preps for law school, her classmate Rita Goldstein, 20, works at the Treasury Department on the Administration’s tax-reform plans. Over at State, the University of Wisconsin’s Dennis Dresang, 20, helped run a reception for the Somali Republic’s new Ambassador to the U.S., is also handling secret dispatches for the new U.S. Ambassador to the Sudan. Yale’s college corps, the biggest of all, has 70 New Blues busy at everything from aiding Presidential Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner to perusing pornography for the Post Office. One Yaleman, Rhodes Scholar Lou Echols. 22, has even produced a solid report on how the Russians view the U.S. shelter program.*His pleased bosses call Echols’ work “most useful, definite priority stuff.”

Spaghetti & Seminars. After work, the interns go on gobbling up political atmosphere in a college version of the Washington cocktail circuit. They turn quaint Georgetown houses into lively dormitories, spend their thin weekly Government salaries (about $50) feeding each other wine-and-spaghetti dinners, and vie to impress each other—and each other’s dates—with the latest poop from the office. On hot news, they like to boast, the intern network scoops the wire services by at least three hours. But they choke up dutifully on classified information, which doubly helps to promote what one Yaleman jokingly calls “the illusion of indispensability.”

The interns are nonetheless doing not only first-rate jobs, but are also shaking up their elders in the best tradition of youthful inquisitiveness. Two or three times a week, the students pile into seminar rooms to shoot sticky questions at Capitol eminences, most of whom enjoy the battle and are likely to accept an invitation to continue it over spaghetti in Georgetown.

From Cartoonist Herblock to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the guests talk freely because the seminars are strictly off the record. But leaks do occur. Out of one recent seminar, for example, came General Lyman Lemnitzer’s acerb remarks on General Maxwell Taylor’s proposal to merge the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not all the guests like the questions. Irked by one New York intern’s penetrating queries on civil rights, an edgy Southern Senator snapped: “You tend to your problems up there, son, and let us get along with ours. Next question.”

For their part, the interns are freely accepting new ideas. Tulane’s Eliot Levin, 18, “came here as a pretty closed-minded liberal” and devout Kennedy supporter. Having analyzed the medicare bill at first hand. Levin now finds “that the President can be wrong, and that maybe there is a conservative viewpoint that can be right in some cases.”

Cleopatra’s Lure. The White House itself is fostering such education this summer with a series of high-level lectures, open to all 7,000 collegians, in the D.A.R.’s sweltering Constitution Hall. Slated to speak this week on Government investigations, for example, are Senator John McClellan and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Some lecturers have mistakenly talked down to the students, notably Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Federal Housing Administrator Robert Weaver. “No better than a high school civics course,” grumbled one typical listener. But most have won high marks; for example. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who regaled the audience with jokes about a recalcitrant Congress. FCC Boss Newton Minow, another winner, scored with jokes about his headaches (“as frequent as TV commercials”) mixed with gentle proselytizing about the fascinations of working in Washington: “Government is really less like Dracula’s bride than she is like Cleopatra—a woman of infinite variety.”

No one is quite sure how many interns will take up Minow’s message that Uncle-Sam-wants-you. But the Pentagon, at least, reports that 50% of its interns want to return as fulltime employees. To President Kennedy, who plans soon to muster all 7,000 collegians for a send-off ceremony on the White House lawn, this is handsome profit for a hardheaded enterprise. Said he, when the summer help arrived: “The Federal Government does not do this out of largesse. It does it because it hopes that you will become sufficiently interested in government as a career that many of you will come back.”

*They’re not impressed.