Backyard Visitor

Smiling, venturing a word or two of high-school Spanish, and shaking thousands of hands, Vice President Richard Nixon last week turned his tour of Central America into an unaffected show of friendship among backyard neighbors. To the official ceremonials that stretched his days to 16 and 18 hours, he brought an old political campaigner's grinning stamina; to the warmly human situations that arose as he made friends with humble people, he brought good-natured aplomb.

In Guatemala, when Nixon asked a market woman about her husband, she rocked him by answering, "I have no husband, just babies"; he didn't bat an eye. In El Salvador, children sang The Star-Spangled Banner in quaint English and proudly confided that they were from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt School; he grinned. In Honduras hundreds of swooping bicycle riders turned the Vice President's dignified motorcade into a happily disorganized parade; he was delighted.

Reluctant Peacemaker. When he reached feuding Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Nixon found his diplomacy put to tougher tests. His tour, planned months before January's Nicaragua-based invasion of Costa Rica, had not been aimed at ending tension between the countries. But Nixon found the role of peacemaker forced on him by 1) the understandable U.S. desire to see the little cold war ended; and 2) the persistent belligerence, impossible to ignore, of those two articulate, extrovert Presidents, Nicaragua's Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza and Costa Rica's Jose ("Pepe") Figueres.

Nixon's Constellation had barely landed in sweltering Managua before Tacho wheeled him into the presidential palace to see an exhibit of arms; they were captured, said Tacho, from Costa Rican-based thugs sent to assassinate him last April. Vowed Tacho to accompanying newsmen: "I will not shake hands with the man who hired assassins to murder me and my family." Later, in private, Nixon tactfully persuaded Tacho to promise that there would be no further disturbances on the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican frontier.

Figueres similarly initiated Nixon's visit to San Jose by telling reporters that he would "never sit down with that Somoza," but he also wound up by assuring Nixon privately that he would "go more than halfway" to head off any more tension. The publicity Nixon turned on them may well keep them peaceful--for a while.

Final Surprise. Nixon finished his isthmian tour by listening to a startling opinion and delivering two of his own. In Costa Rica and later in Panama, he:

P: Heard Pepe Figueres, long a critic of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co.'s operations in Costa Rica, passionately defend the firm from a pending U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit. Figueres argued that United Fruit's "bigness . . . has led to the stability of our banana production."

P: Defended U.S. Information Service libraries abroad as the "backbone of our propaganda program," said the attacks they suffered in 1953 from McCarthy Investigators Roy M. Cohn and G. David Schine were "undeserved."

P: Urged that the 3,200-mile Texas-to-Panama section of the Pan American Highway be finished in a U.S.-sponsored speed-up that would close the 186 miles of gaps in four years.

At week's end Nixon, showing the first signs of weariness, climbed back aboard his plane and headed northeast. This week, on the last lap, he was to visit the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

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