At 76, She Works for the U.N. and Has Lost None of Her Energy : Ex-Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick Is Still Fighting the Good Fight

Three years after she left Congress for the front lines of the fight against hunger, Millicent Fenwick waxes enthusiastically about raising fish with the help of Peking ducks.

“You’ve got to go down to the village and listen and learn,” said President Reagan’s ambassador to the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

That was true of the men the patrician politician from New Jersey calls “my heroes”--Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the founders of the Ghana Rural Reconstruction Movement.

“They learned,” she said with passion in her beautifully modulated upper-class voice. “If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be alive.”

A Simple Philosophy

Fenwick, in her modest office in the U.S. Embassy Annex, spoke with respect of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and President Seyni Kountche of Niger, and of her own simple philosophy of development.

She believes, along with Kountche, that projects should begin at the grass-roots level and that planners who have never been in an African village cannot help the people in that village, no matter how much money and how much good will they have to offer.

“Gandhi said, ‘Go to the poorest village you can find. Sit down and listen. See what they want. See what they need. See what human resources and materials they have. Bring those three things together. And when you’ve done all you can, go to the next village.’

“Now that’s wisdom,” she said.

Opportunity Stressed

From Nehru, India’s first prime minister, she learned a definition of progress.

“Progress is giving a man who has a wooden plow the opportunity to get himself a metal plow,” she said, stressing the word “opportunity.”

“And,” she said, “that’s what Deng Xiaoping has been saying too.”

The kind of development project she likes is the aquaculture that two Indian advisers are teaching in landlocked Zambia.

“It’s a protein-producing project in places where there is no protein,” she said.

“You dig a pond, borrow about $900 and with it you get fencing, a flock of Peking ducks, enough food for the Peking ducks for a year and some fingerling talipia fish,” she said.

“You feed the ducks and what they drop in the water feeds the fish--and you start making money in six to eight months.”

Following Gandhi’s advice, she has traveled to several African countries and always gone to the villages. In the sub-Sahara she met a like-thinking paramount chief.

‘Rats and the Government’

“I said, ‘Chief, what are your problems?’ He said, ‘Rats and the government.’ He was like me. He doesn’t trust the government.”

At 76, Fenwick is devoting the same energy and enthusiasm to FAO as she did to Congress, where she inspired the character of Lacey Davenport in the “Doonesbury” comic strip.

Her Rome apartment is a penthouse with terrace, but she rarely takes time to entertain. She calls herself “a fatalist” about terrorism and says she wishes she could dispense with the armor-plated car and armed guard provided by the embassy.

She may not walk as far or as fast as she once did because she has heart trouble and wears a pacemaker. But that has not stopped her from working a minimum 12-hour day.

Charms the Young Men

One of her recent days began even earlier than usual for breakfast with Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy before a program committee meeting at FAO on the other side of town.

She turned up just after 8 a.m. in her working clothes--raw silk suit and silk blouse in pale beige, polished brown leather pumps and handbag, pearls, diamonds and a big gold bracelet.

And she proceeded to charm the table of men a half-century younger than herself.

Reminiscing about her four terms in Congress, which ended in 1982 when she lost a bid to become a Republican senator from New Jersey, she said, “I loved Congress. It’s a mess, but life isn’t tidy.

Nightmare of Nazis

“You find the same thing anywhere. If you put human beings in the same situation, they’re going to act the same. They may look a little different, dress a little different.”

It was the rise of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler that got her into politics, she said.

“The Germans at that time were far more literate than we. I thought, ‘How is it possible that they’ve gotten this monster elected?’ And then it went on, this terrible cruelty. It seemed to me a nightmare. And so I got interested in politics.

“And since then I’ve never trusted government,” she said. “You give it an inch and it will take an ell.”

‘It All Takes Time’

Daughter of President Calvin Coolidge’s ambassador to Spain, Fenwick dropped out of fashionable Foxcroft School for girls but later attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research.

She had been married and divorced, run a farm and worked as a model and as a Vogue editor before she ran for and won public office.

“I was chairman of the recreation committee on the borough council, then the (New Jersey) Legislature. It all takes time. I was 64 when I ran for Congress,” she said.

Fenwick does not mind reading about herself in “Doonesbury.”

“I like Lacey Davenport. I think she’s truthful. She’s not self-important. She’s not vindictive. Sometimes I can hear the cadence of my own voice in what Lacey says.