Fresh Man in Washington

It was a year after Watergate and PAUL E. TSONGAS '62, freshman Congressman from Massachusetts, was trying to describe the great surge of idealism and purpose that accompanied the Kennedy Administration into office.

His audience, a group of Dartmouth students whose idealism was tested, if not drained, by the traumas of Vietnam and the bitterness of the Nixon years, listened politely but incredulously. "There was an enthusiasm which may well have been ill-founded but nonetheless permeated the early '60s," Tsongas said. "Undergraduates today can't understand what it was like."

It was, Tsongas said later, "damn exciting" to have been in the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Ethiopia. But it was the Peace Corps experience itself that opened Paul Tsongas's eyes to the kinds of issues to which his audience, expecting fire and brimstone from one of the leaders of the so-called freshman revolt in Congress, could really relate.

"The Peace Corps enabled me to look at the United States from an Ethiopian- perspective. It's something you never get over," Tsongas recalled. "I saw this country had an enormous potential for good and for evil.

Tsongas was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1962 to 1964, assisting native teachers and, after winning the respect of the village of Wolisso by saving a drowning child, organizing a dormitory building project. Tsongas waded through a morass of red tape and even helped clear the site for the dormitory, which was built with the assistance of students from an Addis Ababa building college. Even Haile Selassie joined him for the dedication of the facility. "It was a great day for Wolisso, for my students, for the Building College and for the Peace Corps ideal," he wrote at the time.

Tsongas entered politics in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, after serving as Peace Corps training coordinator in the West Indies, studying at the Yale Law School and interning in the Congressional office of former Representative F. Bradford Morse. Now, representing an economically blighted district just west of Boston and extending north to the New Hampshire border, Tsongas is a leader in the freshman caucus, and he emerged as the freshmen's spokesman after a much-publicized confrontation with Speaker Carl Albert early this summer.

Tsongas believes he is "relatively unspoiled" by his year in Congress. He recognizes that change comes slowly, if indeed at all, in the marble halls that sprawl atop Capitol Hill, and his frustration is not so much with his youthful colleagues as with the Congressional system itself. When the freshman class first met as Congress convened in January, Tsongas said, "We tried to create a sense of class identity and assert a peer pressure on freshmen to remain as pristine as possible and not to be taken in by the ways of Congress." The large number of new Congressmen 75 Democrats and 17 Republicans made the struggle against aging committee chairmen and confusing Congressional procedures considerably easier. "If there were only a handful of new people here," he said, "I'd probably have to change."

Tsongas believes the next election will be a significant indication of the direction of Congress. "Then," he said, "we'll see if the freshmen are replaced by the kind of people we replaced or if another group of freshmen like us is elected." He contends a significant change in the make-up of Congress is essential if it is to become an innovative legislative body: "Once there's a national consensus on one issue or another, Congress will ratify it. But the Congress should be in the lead."

Michael J. Harrington, a fellow Massachusetts representative and an outspoken Congressional critic himself, believes Tsongas "appreciates the disarray of government and the pervasive discontent, dismay and cynicism against public officials among the people."

Tsongas has devoted one-quarter of his staff and office allowance to a program to create and save jobs in a district with pockets of unemployment over 13 per cent. And he has continued to hold "town meetings" in his district "to keep accessible and not get encrusted like most of the people around here."

"I hope I haven't changed," Tsongas said, reflecting on a year of challenge not unlike his Peace Corps stint. "I'm less enchanted with the Congress, but I hope my approach hasn't changed."