THE AMERICAS: Answers, Please

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Acting as the eyes and ears of his brother Dwight, Johns Hopkins University President Milton Eisenhower flew south from Washington last week for a fact-finding and good-will swing through six nations of Central America. The trip, originally scheduled for June 15, was postponed lest Milton meet a backwash of the violence that greeted Vice President Nixon in Lima and Caracas.

Welcome News. By last week the most worrisome signs of anti-U.S. feeling—forays into the Canal Zone by flag-planting, nationalistic Panamanian students—were more than two months in the past, and spectators along the road from the airport to Panama City stood peacefully as Milton rode past at 40 m.p.h.

As he set foot in Panama, Milton delivered the welcome news that a joint U.S. House-Senate committee had just agreed to end the controversial double standard under which U.S. and Panamanian Canal employees are paid according to separate wage scales. His No. 1 mission, however, is asking questions and getting answers about Central America's economic problems, and he took along key men to help him with the job. With him were Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State for inter-American Affairs; Tom B. Coughran, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Export-Import Bank President Samuel C. Waugh; and Development Loan Fund Manager Dempster Mclntosh. Along to handle hostess duties was Milton's daughter Ruth.

Topic A. A main topic of all stops will be the common-market arrangement that is gradually taking form throughout the area. The U.S.'s aid experts will inspect the fruits of past aid programs and discuss needs for new ones. Examples: the Export-Import Bank is considering a loan of $500,000 to the Honduran Development Bank, and the U.S. International Cooperation Administration may lend $1,700,000 for school construction in Panama. El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala will want to talk about the troublesome world surplus of coffee.

Milton will spend this week in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica, will fly next week to Nicaragua, and then take a side trip to Puerto Rico (for Commonwealth Day celebrations). After last stops in El Salvador and Guatemala, he will fly home Aug. 1. This week he was well into his Panama business meeting with President Ernesto de la Guardia, and surrounded by such security that each day's doings were not announced until the morning of the day they were to take place—and his routes to and from his appointments were not released at all. There was one threatening cloud. Milton had agreed to meet a student delegation at the U.S. embassy. The students' reply: if he did not come to the university, there would be "action."