Since the beginning, most writers about the Peace Corps have either derided it or heaped praise on it, but never understood it. In this book, David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, two former officials of the organization, never mock or gush about it but always understand it. Their work is tough, realistic criticism, so tough and real that it is sometimes cruel and occasionally unfair. But it tells us, as no other book has, what the Peace Corps is all about. In assessing the work of the 30,000 volunteers sent to the Third World since 1961, Hapgood and Bennett conclude that “as a contributor to development in the Third World, the Peace Corps can make no great claims to accomplishment. . . . Volunteers have filled a lot of jobs, but their utility on those jobs, and often the utility of the jobs themselves, is questionable.” The writers do see more hope for the future. “An enormous potential clearly exists in the Peace Corps. ...” they write. “If the Peace Corps can build on the isolated cases of its success that its volunteers have registered, then its help to the Third World could be much greater than it has been to date.” But, even if the potential for development is unrealized, Hapgood and Bennett see a great deal of worth in the project...

Medicare will be “the most sweeping new departure in American Social legislation since Roosevelt’s Social Security Act thirty years ago.” That description, culled from one of the many news accounts of House passage of the bill, already has deadened into a cliché. All analysts have accepted the fact of medicare’s great impact, but very few have bothered to delve into the details of that impact. How will America and medicine change after medicare? Only a fool would try to predict this with certainty. A bill, especially one 296 pages long, has byways and tremors and lurking commas that can twist society in a manner no one anticipates. Yet some trends can be spotted ahead of time. Medicare has the potential to confirm doctors’ fears that federal pressures will change the way they practice medicine. It also has the potential to stuff a financial bonanza into the pockets of America’s fat-cat doctors...

Lie Detectors - The Industry, the Technology and the Victims. The first lie detector, employed centuries ago, was a handful of rice dropped into the mouth of a suspect. If the rice stayed dry while he answered questions, he clearly was a liar — exposed under the questionable theory that a liar's salivary glands would dry up when gripped by fear. The lie detector used most commonly today is far more sophisticated. Developed by the psychologist and criminologist Leonard Keeler almost forty years ago, it comprises a pneumatic tube that fits across a subject's chest to measure breathing, an inflatable rubber cuff that wraps around the arm to measure blood pressure and a pair of electrodes that touch the fingers and, by the flow of current, measure the dampness of the palm. These instruments activate pens that draw wiggles and waves on a rolling sheet of paper — a process that gives the lie detector its modern name, polygraph, Greek for "many writings." In theory, an examiner can look at the chart, note any unusual wiggles and waves, and nab his man. This polygraph, obviously more complicated than a few grains of rice, is also touted as more accurate. In truth, it is not...

The Alliance for Progress, whatever it signifies for Latin America, has meant for American labor an alliance with government and big business. American labor has never minced words about the unions of the Soviet Union. “The so-called trade unions in the USSR,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council has proclaimed, “are nothing but agencies of the Communist dictatorship.” The implication, sharp and clear, has always been: Unions of America are anything but agencies of government and big business. That has been a pride of American labor, but the new alliance raises questions that may make that pride ring a bit hollow. British Guiana is a good place to begin. American Government, business and labor have never been happy with the leftist administration of Cheddi Jagan that took office after the August, 1961, elections in the British colony. American woes and worries have multiplied with the approach of independence. The AFL-CIO boasts of its part in helping the trade unions there battle the Jagan government. “In British Guiana,” said a recent union advertisement, ‘‘the AFL-CIO has rendered generous aid to the free trade unions resisting the attempt of the pro-Communist Jagan regime to destroy their independence.” On the surface, American labor has moved into British Guiana to help brother unions fight communism. But the situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that, and its “generous aid” has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury...

THE CAPTURE of military personnel, and of key civilians, is vital to a Pentagon publicist, but his more exciting, perhaps more significant, work centers on the capture of the mass media — Hollywood, television, the press, even the comics. The Department’s Office of News Services has an Audio-Visual Division which, among its other duties, sees to it that some movies and television shows have good chunks of military propaganda. The division examines scripts and then lends aid to those deemed worthy of cooperation from the Department of Defense. Cooperation can save a producer a good deal of money. Indeed, if he plans a movie based almost entirely on the activities of the armed services, cooperation can determine whether he will have a movie at all. For a producer clutching a script blessed by the division, the services may provide military equipment that he can’t get elsewhere: modern tanks, weapons, ships, planes. An officer, acting as technical adviser to insure the movie’s authenticity, often is sent along...

IN THE SPRING of this year, Martin Burke, Gilbert Bauer and David Figlestahler, pupils of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School in Portsmouth, Ohio, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. In the event of war, Russian troops “will be landing inside our borders,” they told the Secretary. If that comes to pass, “the American people will defend this country in a last ditch, to the death stand, along with the military.” The civilian population must train itself for this future. “Please send us any able weapons,” the schoolboys asked. They listed recoilless rifles, antitank guns, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, browning automatic rifles and submachine guns. Martin, Gilbert and David said the weapons would help them learn about arms and would “help us prepare ourselves for our future military service.” The boys closed with a compliment: “We the senders of this letter are in full accord with your conduction of your duties so far as Secretary of Defence” [sic]. Although the schoolboys had not learned their spelling, they had learned other lessons well, for they are growing up in a time when all the channels of communication and education overflow with images of war and might and glory, images that tend to obscure the views of death and destruction that linger from other times and other lands...

IN 1975, Americans will have 111 million cars, trucks and buses. To keep these wheels rolling, the federal government has embarked on the biggest public-works project in history, spending billions of dollars for 41,000 miles of superhighways crisscrossing the nation. Millions of this money already, have been spilled over into waste, inefficiency and fraud. There is nothing secret about this. Newspapers and Congress have uncovered scandal after scandal. But the revelations have not evoked the same indignation and outcries that scandals like the Dave Beck plunder of the Teamsters treasury have caused. Instead, much of the public has a boys-will-be-boys attitude about corrupt highways. When you spend 41 billion dollars in a public program, influential and impatient people say, you have to expect some tomfoolery, so let’s get on with the show. Americans want their highways in a hurry. “When you have a program of this magnitude,” Rep. Gordon H. Scherer, (R.-Ohio), told the House last July 1, “you are bound to attract the chiselers and the grafters.”...

JOHN CRAMER of the Washington Daily News recently reported the mounting cries of complaint from Post Office workers under pressure to buy U.S. Mail, a book by the Department’s leading literary critic, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. “Not enough of our employees have bought it,” Cramer quoted some supervisors as telling postal workers. “It’s been suggested we really ought to make a better showing. . . . We think you ought to give us an assist on this.” Summerfield, his voice muted in this book through an “as told to” collaborator, surveys postal history, describes and defends present programs of the Department, and prophesies a bit about mail transport in the post-Summerfield, space age. The book would rank among the dullest ever written but for the fact that it appears at about the same time that another writer has decided to cover the same material from a very different point of view. Placed side by side, the views tend to tangle. Mailman U.S.A. comes from William C. Doherty, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. Doherty is a jovial Irishman with a keen wit and, at least where Postmasters General are concerned, a bitter pen...

IN THE Federalist days, the young, fretful American Republic tried to stop pamphlets about the French Revolution from reaching the mailboxes of its citizens. Since then, in sporadic moments of crisis, the federal government has continued to screen mail and weed out what it considers foreign or dangerous propaganda. Such moments have come in the pre-Civil War days, during the two World Wars, and, now, in the Cold War. But the present little-known program, a joint effort by the Post Office Department and the Customs Bureau, is facing the heaviest attack in its existence. For the first time, law suits have been filed against it. Under the program, the Customs Bureau checks foreign non-first class mail as it enters the United States. If translators and inspectors decide the mail contains foreign - usually Communist - political propaganda, the Post Office generally holds it up and sends a notice to the addressee...

An innocent-looking envelope, addressed to the teen-ager in your family, slips into the morning mail. The envelope is opened. A letter and two photos fall out. Half-nude girls beckon from the photos. For a few dollars, the letter promises, you can get more and better photos perhaps showing less clothing and more action. Shock and anger grip you. "Can't something be done to keep such mail away from the American home?" you demand. "Must our teen-agers be exposed to this?" You investigate and find that the Post Office department, led personally and loudly by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, has embarked on a campaign to rid the mails of pornography. But there is a hitch. You also discover that in some quarters the post office attempt to clear up the mails has provoked bitterness and anger. Critics like the American Civil Liberties union and book publishers say the post office tramples on freedom of speech and of the press, and, in its zeal, too often mistakes a classic for a French post card. Through the years, they say, the post office, while attacking pornography, has tried to ban a host of literary classics...

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...