Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 17

Sunday, July 3, 1084 GMffiMl1 DETROIT FREE PRESS editorials booExc EDITORIALS 2 OTHER VOICES 3 BOOKS a Call th Newt Desk: 222-6494 Your Superfluous Excellency': The work of America's 43 vice-presidents in 235 pages? Why not, considering they've had nothing to do and have done nothing. Martha Griffiths' book review is on Page 5B. GBOOu weight, goes without breakfast, is likely to have a hot dog or a salad for dinner, usually after 10 p.m. Almost everything she owns of any value was given to her, from the crucifix on her bedroom wall, to her tennis racket, to the mini-trampoline in her living room, to two Eddie Bauer canvas satchels, one maroon, one navy, which she carries together to meetings. She drinks instant coffee because she doesn't own a coffee pot, writes speeches at her vinyl-draped dining room table and stays up long past midnight, until her work is finished.

For many nights in a row she will sleep only four or five hours. She has, since the first of the year, spoken to 44 groups about poverty in Michigan, from hospital administrators to high school assemblies. Usually she drives alone to the engagements, in a state car (she's never owned one), often saying her Rosary at the wheel. Her friends, and her closest advisers in the department, urge her to rest, to take a vacation. She hasn't taken more than a long weekend in five years or more.

But she laughs and says "I'm fine. Do I look worn out?" State Rep. David Hollister, D-Lansing, her closest friend in Lansing, says of her stamina: "She feels she has a wellspring within her." I HEN GOV. JAMES BLANCHARD told Sister Agnes Mary Mansour, president of little Mercy College in Detroit, that he wanted her in his cabinet, she asked for the DSS. No other The politics of compassion Agnes amour finds Lansing a hard sell By SUSAN AGER Free Press Staff Writer For 20 years, as a woman married to God, Agnes Mary Mansour wore on the ring finger of her left hand a silver band inscribed with a phrase she hated, "a pious little something that wasn't me." Pressed against her skin, invisible to her, the words irritated like a rash that won't go away.

Ten years ago, in a very unusual move for a nun and with the encouragement of her superior, she ordered a new ring with a new motto. "I was madder than hell" about the first inscription, she says now. It was not her choice, nor was her nun's name, Agnes, which means lamb in Latin. While most of her classmates could choose their own names and mottos, Mansour's were thrust upon her by her superiors when she was a headstrong 22-year-old named Josephine, new to the convent, a little skeptical, but not about to make a stink. The old words: "Sweet heart of Jesus, be my love." The new words: "Free to be faithful." Agnes Mary Mansour insists she be able to choose to be committed, or opt to back out.

Fourteen months ago, when the Roman Catholic Church stirred national publicity by forcing her to choose between her sisterhood or her new job as director of Michigan's Department of Social Services, she. chose the work and left the convent. Very few of the hundreds of journalists who reported her choice quoted what, to her, was the key sentence of her announcement: "To be faithful to the Sisters of Mercy, my vows, my church and even God, I must first of all be faithful to myself, and I must be free to be faithful." In other words, nobody is going to shove Agnes Mary Mansour around. department was discussed. Blanchard says now he figured her nunhood would be a plus.

"People would understand she was committed to public service and mankind, not for just a love of politics and a fancy government job, but for a lifetime." Devoted or not, her friends told her she was crazy. "Take anything but that," they said. "It's a big job, God help her," says her 84-year-old mother, Marie, bowing her head for her youngest daughter. The DSS is a department with more employes 13,200 than the University of Michigan. Its $4.1 billion budget of state and federal money, with hundreds of strings ft iiiftii' itif SHE GINGERLY makes the unpredictable transi A tion from a sisterly to a secular life, the director of the state's biggest department and administrator of more than a third of the state's budget is Photo by ANNA PONTONI attached, is 372 times the $11 million budget of Mercy College.

Its employes are low-paid, overburdened front-line workers, who meet the poor every day and fight creeping cynicism, or lifetime DSS bureaucrats who tend to think they know best how to run the agency. Its clients are the poor, 1.4 million people collecting ADC, general assistance, food stamps, Medicaid or SSI (Supplemental Security Income) 15 percent of Michigan's population. Others DSS cares for include abused children, abandoned babies, delinquent teenagers. Mansour took over the department when its caseload was at an all-time high, and its money and staff were being shaved away by executive budget cuts. Welfare recipients haven't had a raise in almost five years.

Instead, she says, they collect eight to 10 percent less than they did in 1979. Says Sen. Kelly: "She has had to deal with both a public that is dissatisfied and a clientele that is dissatisfied." "She's been put totally on the defensive," says state Rep. Lynn Jondahl, D-East Lansing: "What we have done is gut her staff, assure that constituents get no increased benefits, and assure she gets more constituents to serve. "The only thing she's had that she could be generous with is her own compassion." HER CRITICS WITHIN the DSS complain that she is a lax administrator, that she worries more about the poor than she does about her own employes, that she refuses to give in to what are obvious obstacles to change.

"Things don't get done because she's always off on a philsophical bent," according to Busch, who says "a number" of her middle-level managers have complained to him. Her critics in the Capitol say she won't listen to what they say or even pretend they've got good ideas; that she ought to administer more and speak out less; that while others gently tug at them for more, she yanks; that she ignores the rules of the political game. "She's not politically naive," says Sen. Pollack. "She's politically stubborn.

"They expect in Lansing for her to take a partial loaf and go away with gratitude," says Pollack. "Instead, she says: 'It's not enough to feed my people, and don't expect gratitude for empty "Part of what she's experiencing is a desire to kill the messenger who is bringing the bad news, the message no one wants to hear." LAST MONTH, in a speech to an affluent audience at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, she spoke for an hour, her voice rising in intensity, cracking at times. She becomes so impassioned when she speaks, usually from notes scribbed on lined paper hours or minutes before, that See MANSOUR, Page 4B igneS Mary anSOUn "I have arrived at new insights from my position as director of the Department of Social Services. Twenty years after the War on Poverty, I say we now have a war on the poor." batting away critics who, like mosquitos, may not be deadly but make noise and are distracting. They come from her own department, and from the Capitol, which looms beyond the windows of her simple, eighth-floor office, whose only luxuries are a few pink silk flowers and a couple of terrariums.

An old-fashioned transistor radio plays softly in the background almost constantly. An avocado green coffee pot boils water that she mixes with instant Kava and drinks from a cup labeled, "When God made man, She was joking." "People around here are trying to discredit my administration," she says, her palms pressed against the top of her conference table. "They want to say you can't be a good administrator if you're an advocate. I challenge that. I would put my administration against anybody else's.

"Just give me time," she says, lowering her voice to a dauntless near whisper. "And get out of my way." SHE IS A BUREAUCRAT with a mission, a woman with no visible ambition for money or higher office. Since taking the $58,400 job, she has lived off $600 a month allotted to her by the Sisters of Mercy, to whom she sends her paychecks. She has no savings, and expects to have no pension. This month, for the first time, she kept her paycheck, opened her first savings account and began putting money away for her future, after friends told her it was silly to have no financial cushion.

She still wears her silver nun's ring, although a few months ago, in a symbolic gesture she has a hard time explaining, she moved it from her left hand to her right. She now appears, to the world, as an unmarried woman. She believes that twists of divine providence over the past 35 years brought her to Lansing to do a job that's part of the vows she took when she was 22: poverty, chastity, obedience and service to the poor, people "who have little self-respect and feel forgotten." Not everyone in Lansing is comfortable with that. "MOST PEOPLE COME UP here as opportunists, to see what they can get out of it," says state Sen. John Kelly, D-Detroit.

"When they see someone who has a goal, it becomes offensive to us, as legislators, because most of us don't." Even her critics compliment her sincerity, but some say she's just too damned preachy about the poor, and it gets to be too much. Once, House Republican leader Michael Busch told her in the midst of an argument, after she had left the convent, "Dammit, Sister, you remind me of Sister Lucy, my fifth grade teacher. We're not in the classroom anymore, so quit lecturing me." "She just comes on so strong," says Busch. "It's guilt-inducing," says state Sen. Lana Pollack, a liberal Democrat from Ann Arbor.

Says Republican Sen. Bob Geake of Northville, who has opposed Mansour on welfare issues, "I'm impressed by her compassion for the poor. I just wish she had more compassion for taxpayers." He concedes that she "has a moral right to lecture other people, because she's living that sort of life. It's not just talk." SHE IS A 53-YEAR-OLD single woman who shares a $600-a-month, two-bedroom apartment with Lt. Gov.

Martha Griffiths, whom she rarely sees. She worries about her "I'm impressed by her compassion for the )oor. I just wish she had more compassion for taxpayers." Sen. Bob Geake, R-yorthrillc She is "committed to public service and mankind, not for just a love of politics and a fancy government job, but for a lifetime." Gov. Blanvhard "Things don't get done because she's always off on a philosophical bent She just comes on so strong.

I don't think the legislature takes too kindly to that." House Republican leader Michael Busch "She's not politically naive. She's politically stubborn. They expect in Lansing for her to take a partial Joaf and go away with gratitude. Instead, she says, it's not enough to feed my people, and don't expect gratitude for empty Sen. Lana Pollack, 1)-Ann Arbor BWWUIW.yH.1 Pi 7 4 i I 's AM U.S., Soviets may agree only to talk about space talks news analysis tween the two countries to start talking about ways in which demilitarization of space might be discussed.

IN OTHER WORDS, the effort to start discussions is, at best, preliminary. The aim, according to an official U.S. statement, is "to seek agreement on feasible negotiating approaches." Actual negotiations on space weapons would be a second step. Preliminary talks, if agreed on, would be held in Vienna in September. But even that limited objective agreement to talk about how talks might be set up has not been achieved.

The latest Soviet statement came Friday and left U.S. officials somewhat puzzled. The Russians repeated that they still want talks but that they must be limited to discussing anti-satellite weapons. The United States already has agreed to agreements beyond those already governing activities in outer space have been found to date that are judged to be in the overall interest of the U.S. and its allies." But Reagan now is prepared to overlook the verification problem to try to get talks started, though officials still doubt that a treaty can be verified adequately.

A State Department spokesman said he was convinced an agreement to open discussions "would be pretty significant." There have been no real negotiations between the two countries in this increasingly dangerous area, he said, and "we could begin to define terms." Raymond Garthoff, a former strategic-arms negotiator now at the Brookings Institution, said the Soviets may be deeply concerned about progress in American research in anti-satellite weaponry and anxious to head off the development of new U.S. weapons. negotiations are suspended because of Russian walkouts. U.S.-Soviet relations are tense. Reagan repeatedly has said he wants to improve them, but the Soviets suspect his motives.

Election-year politics is involved heavily in the administration's willingness to negotiate. State Department officials acknowledge this is a factor in the administration's posture. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the Reagan administration has changed its attitude toward negotiations on space weapons. EARLIER this year, the administration was telling Congress that it could see no point in negotiations because a space-weapons treaty would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify. In a March 31 report to Congress outlining its position on anti-satellite arms control, the administration said that "no arrangements or By JAMES McCARTNEY Free Press Washington Staff WASHINGTON The Russians struck without warning 10 days ago with an offer to open talks to "prevent the militarization of outer space." The result has been a series of U.S.-Soviet charges and counter-charges; each side is saying that it wants talks but that the other side is playing political games.

Is this another round of icy rhetoric between President Reagan and the Russians? Or is it possible that relations between the United States and the Soviets are thawing? The answer, according to administration officials and arms-control experts outside the administration, is that no major breakthrough is in sight in U.S.-Soviet relations or in arms control. At best, these authorities say, the current diplomacy could produce an agreement be that, so it was unclear whether talks could be arranged. THE EXPERTS say they believe that control of space weapons is going to be far more complex than might be suggested by any agreement to start talks. They cite these major points: There is virtually no possibility of successful negotiations soon to achieve limits on space weapons. This point is conceded by administration officials.

Space-weapons talks would involve fringe concerns in the nuclear-arms race, not major concerns. Major concerns still rest with talks on strategic-arms reduction and on controlling intermediate-range weapons. Both these sets of.