Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  The truth was, Kennedy didn’t seem to know what he wanted out of a Peace Corps. He could see that it spoke to the burgeoning youthful idealism of the time, and it resonated with his own concerns about America’s place in the cold war world—but he was also sensitive to the impression in certain circles that he was a callow neophyte in world affairs, and he was anxious not to embarrass himself with a half-cocked program fueled more by idealism than by hard-headed good sense. Thus, although he had Millikan’s report in hand, he called for a task force to explore the idea.

  Why Shriver to head it? Kennedy had good reasons for selecting his brother-in-law. The president by now had had ample opportunity to see Shriver at work, and he was a strong admirer of Sarge’s abilities. Joe Kennedy, of course, had always spoken approvingly of Shriver’s skill and judgment, but Jack had watched Shriver for the last eight years himself. Kennedy had been impressed by Sarge’s efforts in the 1952 Senate campaign and by his work on the Civil Rights Section of his presidential campaign and on the Talent Hunt. Shriver was someone to whom Kennedy could give minimal instructions and yet who would return later with maximal results.

  Kennedy also knew that the Peace Corps spoke especially to Shriver’s interests and strengths. And he knew that Chester Bowles, a strong supporter of the idea, and Shriver saw eye-to-eye on foreign policy. Moreover, the president was aware from his conversations with his brother-in-law that Shriver’s worldview had been significantly shaped by his experiences as a teenager in the Experiment in International Living, whose motivating principle of cross-cultural learning and exchange would necessarily be shared by any successful Peace Corps program.

  Public relations would also be important: The American people already seemed to be largely sold on the idea but their interest would have to be maintained, and the US Congress (who would legislate the program) and foreign countries (where Peace Corps volunteers would be sent) still needed to be convinced of its virtues. Kennedy knew that Shriver would be a good salesman for the program.

  Finally, he had to put Shriver somewhere, since Jack knew that Eunice wouldn’t be content to remain in the Midwest when all the action was in Washington. The Peace Corps task force was one of the few options that was left.

  Jack didn’t articulate any of these considerations when he called his brother-in-law on January 21. He just told Shriver that he wanted a Peace Corps task force and asked him if he would head it. Shriver demurred, arguing that someone with State Department experience, or with an academic background in foreign policy, would be better suited to the position. (He also pointed out that his appointment would invite charges of nepotism.) But Jack persisted and Shriver acquiesced; it was hard to say no to the president of the United States on his first day in office. Shriver assumed, however, that once the task force’s job—“to report how the Peace Corps could be organized and then to organize it”—was complete, he could return to Chicago to prepare for a Senate run in 1962.

  The first step was to form the task force, so before returning to Washington, Shriver called Harris Wofford. “You thought you were going to have a vacation?” Shriver said. “The president just asked me to set up a task force to see whether the Peace Corps idea really makes sense. When shall we have our first meeting?” Wofford was the natural first person for Shriver to call: Not only had they become close and effective colleagues during the election and Talent Hunt, but Wofford also had a particular interest in the Peace Corps idea. Some ten years earlier he had been a founder of the Student World Federalists, who proposed a “peace force” of volunteers for development projects in communities abroad; in the 1950s he had consulted with American unions about a large-scale American volunteer service in developing countries; and he had been directly involved in launching the International Development Placement Association, which placed American students overseas.

  Shriver and Wofford reconvened at the Mayflower Hotel, where they had spent so many hours during the Talent Hunt, and picked up where they had left off, calling people across the country who might fruitfully contribute to the Peace Corps task force. They began by rounding up the usual suspects: Louis Martin and Adam Yarmolinsky from the Talent Hunt soon joined them. Notre Dame University president Father Theodore Hesburgh—Shriver’s friend and Wofford’s former boss—came to the Mayflower. So did George Carter, a civil rights campaign worker, and Albert Sims, who ran an organization called the Institute of International Education and who, the year before, had helped Shriver with a student airlift from Kenya subsidized by the Kennedy Foundation. Shriver took special pleasure in recruiting Gordon Boyce, who had succeeded Donald Watt as head of the Experiment in International Living, to the team.

  Early in 1960, some months before Jack Kennedy first invoked the Peace Corps in campaign speeches, Hubert Humphrey and the Wisconsin congressman Henry S. Reuss (whose wife was also a graduate of the Experiment in International Living program) had sponsored legislation calling for research into the viability of Peace Corps–type programs. Humphrey’s bill, which included the first known use of the name “Peace Corps” to describe such a program, called for “young men to assist the peoples of the underdeveloped areas of the world to combat poverty, disease, illiteracy, and hunger.” Humphrey and Reuss stopped by the Mayflower in early February to take part in the discussions, along with dozens of other people.

  As during the Talent Hunt, according to the historian Gerald Rice, “one name soon led to another. During the last week of January and the first week of February, scores of people from academic, business, and religious circles passed through the lobby of the makeshift Peace Corps headquarters in the Mayflower Hotel. It was an informal setup, more like a group of friends gathering together to discuss a pet subject than an official committee establishing a governmental organization.” Even if he had wanted to, Shriver wouldn’t have known how to make the arrangements more formal. He had no experience working in federal government and didn’t know how to procure an office or financial resources, or how to pay his staff. And as he didn’t feel he had time to worry about such things, he just counted on being able to telephone people and have them show up quickly, motivated by Shriver’s enthusiasm and their own public-spiritedness. “My style,” he has said, “was to get bright, informative, creative people and then pick their brains.” What little administrative wherewithal he had for his task force was initially provided by Mary Ann Orlando, his assistant from the Merchandise Mart, who had only just returned home to Chicago after the inauguration before getting a phone call from Shriver saying, “Get yourself back here. We need you.”

  Even before Shriver’s task force began formal deliberations, reports and recommendations had begun streaming in from all quarters, many of them contradictory in their advice. The International Cooperation Administration (ICA), a federal government agency, sent along a study called The National Peace Corps, which recommended that volunteers be paid $3,000 per year and that the whole project be subsumed in existing government assistance programs. Samuel P. Hayes, the University of Michigan professor whose report had helped inspire Kennedy’s impromptu campaign speech in Ann Arbor, which had generated the initial momentum for the Peace Corps, sent along a supplemental report recommending coordination with the United Nations. Researchers at Colorado State University—who were funded with $10,000 provided by Congressman Reuss’s “Point Four Youth Corps” bill—sent in a paper called A Youth Corps Service Abroad, recommending that the Peace Corps submit control of its country programs to existing governmental foreign policy agencies. And Shriver already had the Millikan report, which recommended much the same thing.

  Hundreds of other reports flowed into the Mayflower—from universities (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and dozens more), foundations (Rockefeller, Brookings, and the National Council of Churches, among others), and individuals (from the expert to the insane)—but “the only point of unanimity among all the reports,” as Gerald Rice put it, “was that the Peace Corps should begin cautiously and on a small scale.” Although this cut against the grain o
f Shriver’s nature—which gravitated to the bold and the large-scale—he had to concede that the argument made a certain amount of sense.

  The task force began meeting informally in January, just days after the inauguration. After the first few sessions, Shriver was worried: No real consensus was emerging on the scale or scope of the program, or even on what the program’s basic goals should be. The task force couldn’t seem to arrive at any kind of collective sense of what the Peace Corps was supposed to be. Kennedy ratcheted up the pressure on the task force on January 30 when, in his first State of the Union address, he mentioned that the “formation of a National Peace Corps, enlisting the services of all those with the desire and capability to help foreign lands meet their urgent needs for trained personnel” was under way. The task force could no longer be considered merely an exercise. In early February, when the president called him at home to ask for a report by the end of the month, Shriver really began to feel anxious. “I needed help badly,” Shriver recalled. “Kennedy wanted to know what was taking us so long.… I replied weakly that no one had ever tried to put a Peace Corps together before.”

  Help was on its way. It came, on the face of it, from an unlikely source. Shriver knew, based on Kennedy’s remarks at the Cow Palace and elsewhere, that the president did not have an especially high regard for how things were done at the existing foreign service institutions (like the ICA) of the federal government. Thus, Shriver had consciously gone outside the conventional foreign policy agencies in seeking advice on how to start the Peace Corps.

  Yet when the inspiration that finally fired Shriver’s imagination arrived, it came from deep within the bowels of the foreign service bureaucracy. For the Peace Corps—an agency that would soon develop a reputation as a maverick, antibureaucratic institution—to have had its spark of creation emanate from within the heart of the bureaucracy was ironic. But it also made a certain sense. Who knew better how to vanquish the bureaucratic beast than those lodged within its belly? And who better than practiced veterans of the federal bureaucracy to steer the creative energies of Shriver’s band of brilliant amateurs into the formation of a viable government organization?

  In 1961 Warren Wiggins and William Josephson were mired deep in the federal government’s foreign policy bureaucracy, but neither of them, it is fair to say, had a bureaucrat’s mentality. The thirty-four-year-old Wiggins had already helped oversee the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, served as a US economic adviser in the Philippines, and directed America’s aid program in Bolivia. At the time of Kennedy’s inauguration, he was serving as deputy director of Far Eastern operations for the ICA. Bill Josephson had just turned twenty-six, but as counsel for the ICA’s Far East section, he had earned a reputation as one of the agency’s toughest and most brilliant lawyers.

  The spirit of idealism and renewal surrounding the Kennedy campaign had impressed both Wiggins and Josephson, and they noted with interest Kennedy’s comments about the ossification of the foreign service. Wiggins, based on his own experiences overseas, was appalled by US foreign assistance programs, which had American diplomats living in “golden ghettoes,” apparently oblivious or indifferent to the third world squalor that surrounded them. Kennedy’s critical comments in his Cow Palace speech about the average age of foreign service officials, and about how few of them spoke the native language of the countries in which they were stationed, resonated strongly with Wiggins.

  When Kennedy won the election, Wiggins saw an opportunity to effect change within the foreign aid bureaucracy, and he and Josephson joined some of their ICA colleagues to write a series of papers on important issues—on the situation in Laos, for instance, which was struggling with communism, and on the reorganization of the foreign aid program—to which they hoped to draw the incoming president’s attention. At first, they didn’t give much thought to the Peace Corps; they initially thought it a “silly” idea.

  But as newspapers continued to editorialize in its favor and popular sentiment for it remained strong, it unavoidably became a topic of regular discussion in foreign aid circles. People kept asking Wiggins what he thought of it; it seemed likely that Kennedy would even make it a reality. Moreover, the other papers Wiggins and Josephson had been releasing had met with condescending responses—or no response at all—from the Kennedy people, who didn’t want to take advice from those they perceived as bureaucrats, people “on the inside.” So shortly before Christmas of 1960, Wiggins told Josephson that he thought the Peace Corps might be just the opportunity they were looking for. “We’ve got to have a vehicle [for reforming US foreign aid programs], you know, and if this has to be the vehicle, it has to be the vehicle, so let’s write a paper on the Peace Corps.”

  Josephson remained somewhat skeptical, concerned that the worst fears of the Peace Corps’ critics would be realized: ill-informed kids running off to foreign countries, disrupting American foreign aid policies. But Wiggins kept after him and Josephson soon relented. So Josephson and Wiggins, along with several other staff people from the Far East section, got together and produced a series of drafts that spelled out their ideas for what the Peace Corps should be. “Josephson and I decided that if they didn’t want to hear what we were writing about, we’d have to write about something they wanted to hear,” Wiggins recalled. “Which seemed at the time to be the Peace Corps. We could see, too, that it had the promise of becoming something quite important if done right, and that is the level at which we made our connection. We started writing [our report] in December 1960, and we sent it over to Shriver in early February of 1961.” “Frankly,” Josephson recalled, “we didn’t think much of the whole [Peace Corps] idea when we began writing, but we went ahead with it in order to gain attention.” Josephson did most of the initial writing, but Wiggins did the final rewrite over a weekend and that version became the product they tried to deliver to Shriver’s task force.

  Calling their paper The Towering Task, after a remark Kennedy had made in his State of the Union address on January 30 (“The problems [of third world development] are towering and unprecedented—and the response must be towering and unprecedented as well”), Josephson and Wiggins argued that, contrary to the counsel of all the academic and political experts, the Peace Corps needed to be launched on a big, bold scale. A “small, cautious Peace Corps may be worse than no Peace Corps at all,” they wrote. “It may not receive the attention and talent it will require even for preventing trouble.” The reports from Millikan and others had urged small, pilot programs with only a few hundred volunteers over the first few years, but The Towering Task called for “a quantum jump in the thinking and programming concerning the National Peace Corps,” suggesting that there be “several thousand Americans participating in the first 12 to 18 months” and tens or even hundreds of thousands of volunteers once the program was fully up and running. The smaller the Peace Corps, they reasoned, the greater the likelihood that “an anticipated bold ‘new frontier’ may fall into disrespect rather rapidly.”

  Proposing that the Peace Corps begin with a large program of English instruction in the Philippines and then be extended to such countries as Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and Mexico, The Towering Task concluded that the Peace Corps should be launched within the next twelve months at a level sufficiently large to ensure maximum chance of success: “an immediate program which would look toward the utilization of, say, 5,000 to 10,000 youths in the next 12 to 18 months.” The paper also provided a rough outline of how the Peace Corps might be set up administratively and from where it might draw its funding.

  Now that their report was written, Wiggins and Josephson had to figure out how to get it read by the right people. All the earlier papers they had sent to Kennedy’s State Department had been sent back by someone in Under Secretary George Ball’s office with comments to the effect that “we’re not interested in the ideas of ICA insiders.” So they figured they had to get this to Shriver and his task force directly. In order to maximize the chances of Shriver’s actually seeing their repor
t, they sent copies via multiple routes. They sent one copy to the official ICA working group on the Peace Corps. They sent a copy to Dick Goodwin, on the White House staff, who they heard had helped write the Peace Corps section of the Cow Palace speech. They sent a copy to Harris Wofford, whom Josephson had met when he had brought some of his earlier policy papers over to the Talent Hunt operation. And they had a copy delivered to Shriver’s hotel room at the Mayflower.

  There are varying accounts of what happened next, but the one that has worked its way into the standard mythology of the Peace Corps’ founding—and has therefore acquired a status that might be said to be deeper than truth—is the “Midnight Ride of Warren Wiggins.” By this account, Shriver received one of the copies of The Towering Task on Sunday, February 5, and read it in his hotel room late that night. He was so taken by its contents, by the boldness of vision that spoke to his own convictions, that he tracked down Wiggins’s address and telegrammed him at home in suburban Virginia at 3:00 a.m., telling him to report to the following morning’s task force meeting in the Mayflower just seven hours hence.

  The reality may have been less dramatic—Wiggins remembers no telegram—but its substance was the same: He was present at the Monday morning task force meeting by virtue of his having talked his way in as an interested ICA expert. But upon arrival at the meeting, he was stunned to see “mimeographed copies of The Towering Task set out neatly at every task force member’s place.” And he was flabbergasted when Shriver opened the meeting by asking for Wiggins, introducing him to the group, and saying, “Now I’ve never met this man before this morning. But before we begin today’s meeting, I want you all to read his report because it comes the closest to representing what I think should happen.”