Shriver had indeed been struck by the boldness of The Towering Task’s proposed approach. “If you want to succeed with an idea that may fail,” Wiggins said later, “you have to do something big enough and bold enough to overcome the critics.” This was what Shriver had been waiting to hear. He immediately proceeded, in effect, to throw all the previous academic reports out the window. Shriver liked Wiggins’s comparison of the Peace Corps to the Marshall Plan, which he said might have failed if it had not been “started on a scale sufficiently large to enable the United States and the European countries to ‘handle it’ right.” Moreover, having earlier conceded the logic of a small, experimental approach, Shriver now saw the greater wisdom of Wiggins’s argument that if the Peace Corps started too small, it would never gain the institutional constituency necessary to propel it to success. And Shriver agreed as well with Wiggins’s argument that if the Peace Corps were to be a truly national project, worthy of Kennedy’s New Frontier and strong enough to survive in the harsh world of cold war geopolitics, it needed to be big.
As he had no experience in getting new federal agencies started and funded, Shriver had had little idea about how to get the Peace Corps off the ground. He knew that eventually Congress would probably have to pass legislation for it—and appropriate the necessary money for it—but he hadn’t yet figured out how to actually bring the Peace Corps into existence. Fortunately, buried inconspicuously in The Towering Task’s paragraph on administration, was an idea. Wiggins and Josephson had written that the president could put the Peace Corps concept into action “with a major presidential statement or speech” that came “in advance of legislation and formal administrative structure,” and that a director and a staff could be hired, and their activities funded, by “a Presidential Determination, utilizing Mutual Security funds through the exemption route … of the Mutual Security Act.”
Translated from the government bureaucratese, this was a simple proposal: The Peace Corps could be launched, and initially funded, by an executive order from the president. This was Josephson’s most significant contribution to The Towering Task. When Shriver asked Josephson to elaborate after the February 6 meeting, the young lawyer explained that since congressional wrangling on a Peace Corps bill might take months and dilute popular enthusiasm for the program, the president would be better off signing the Peace Corps into existence with an executive order, thereby avoiding—at least temporarily—the need for congressional approval. If they were to wait the six months or more that it would take to get legislation passed, Josephson warned, the Peace Corps would be too late to get volunteer recruits from the graduating college classes of 1961—meaning that the program might not get up and running until late 1962 or 1963. Josephson told Shriver that, based on his research, Kennedy could release up to $12 million to start the program. Responding to the speed and directness inherent in Josephson’s executive order proposal, Shriver resolved to make it one of the centerpieces of his report to President Kennedy.
After Shriver asked him to help him prepare his report to the president, Wiggins left his job at the ICA the next day to work for the task force, despite the fact that Shriver told him he didn’t even know how to put anyone on a federal payroll so that they might be compensated. Several days later Josephson got dispensation from Henry Labouisse, Kennedy’s newly appointed ICA director, to be detailed to the task force as a legal adviser.
The Towering Task had provided a viable model for the Peace Corps as well as the legal means for bringing it into existence. But Shriver still had only the barest outline of what the scope and cost of the program might be. Hundreds of important decisions still had to be made—not to mention an executive order to be drafted. And by the time Josephson—whom Shriver assigned to write the executive order—came on board it was already February 9. The president had said he wanted the task force’s report sent to his office by the end of the month. That left less than three weeks to write up a detailed proposal on how to start a brand-new, multimillion-dollar government program.
For the next twenty days, no one on the task force rested. Days began early and ended late. Fierce shouting debates were common, as each task force member sought to have his own ideas included in the report. Shriver encouraged as much argument as possible, having learned from watching Joe Kennedy that the best way to reach a smart decision was to listen to each point of view articulated by its most ardent proponent—if possible in open debate with that point of view’s most ardent opponent—and then weigh in his mind the pros and cons of each. “My theory of why the task force was successful,” Shriver has said, “was its wonderful, rousing fights. From those meetings came the structure of the Peace Corps. My ability was the ability to listen to all the arguments and then say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.’ ”
Probably the most fundamental disagreement during the writing of the report was between Wiggins and Gordon Boyce. Boyce, speaking from his perspective as head of the Experiment in International Living, argued that the Peace Corps should be primarily an administrative and grant-issuing organization, leaving the actual running of the in-country programs to universities and private agencies that already had personnel and expertise there. Wiggins strenuously disagreed, pointing out that this would reduce the new agency to being merely a “Peace Corps Foundation” that would dole out money but not play any substantive assistance role itself. Wiggins argued that, to be successful, the Peace Corps should retain direct control over all its programs.
Through all these debates, Shriver managed to strike the right balance between argumentativeness and concord among the different factions. Many veterans of his employ have observed that he was a master at this practice—although it was not for the weak-willed or the faint of heart. He would let debate rage until it seemed about to become hostile, and then he would rein it back in and make his decision, leaving no doubt that the final authority to resolve all the important questions rested ultimately with him.
The questions that remained to be resolved were many and important, but Shriver didn’t have the luxury of time for leisurely contemplation of them. He had promised his brother-in-law that the report would be delivered before the end of the month—and at times the president seemed impatient even with that deadline, calling Shriver twice more to ask him how the task force was progressing and publicly stating on February 21 that he hoped the Peace Corps would soon become a reality. Thus, even as the members of Shriver’s team continued to debate key issues, they were already beginning to draft and redraft the report that they hoped would become the Peace Corps’ blueprint.
As the end of February approached, the already frenzied pace of the task force accelerated. Tempers grew short. Shriver was incredibly demanding of his team’s time and energy, but every time it seemed on the verge of collapse, he would spur the group on with an inspiring peroration. As the report neared completion, the scene in Shriver’s Mayflower suite was one of barely controlled chaos. Charles Nelson, an ICA veteran, sat in one room writing the original copy for the report. In the adjacent room, Josephson sat revising it, making sure all its technical and legal assertions were accurate. In a third room sat Harris Wofford, injecting his own ideas and turning the drafts into polished final copy. Wiggins ran frantically back and forth among all three rooms, delivering pieces of paper along the chain. Overseeing the whole enterprise with a stern but cheerful eye was Shriver. Chaotic though it may have appeared, the process worked: Shriver delivered the report to the White House on the morning of Friday, February 24.
The report bore Shriver’s characteristically bold stamp. “Having studied at your request the problems of establishing a Peace Corps,” it began, “I recommend its immediate establishment.” “If the world situation were moving at a snail’s pace,” the report said, a Peace Corps that was “timidly conceived and administered could keep in step.” But, the report continued, the “world situation” was highly dynamic in the early 1960s. Nations were winning their independence from colonial powers in Africa; the p
ost–Korean War situation in East Asia was constantly changing; and the cold war often appeared liable to go hot. If you authorize the program, Shriver challenged Kennedy, “we can be in business Monday morning.”
This was not the report’s most audacious recommendation. The report’s most daring assertion was that the Peace Corps should have institutional independence from the existing foreign aid establishment. It should be not a tool for the ICA but an autonomous agency unto itself. “This new wine should not be poured into the ICA bottle,” the report said. Granting that the new organization would have to reside in the State Department (to draw on the experience of the professional diplomats there), Shriver wrote that the Peace Corps should be “a small, new, alive agency operating as one component in our whole overseas operation.”
Moreover, the report continued, as an independent agency the Peace Corps must have “great flexibility to experiment.” “No one,” it said, “wants to see a large centralized new bureaucracy grow up.… This must be a cooperative venture of the whole American people—not the program of some alphabetical agency in Washington.” The palpable animosity toward the hidebound ICA was ironic, given that two of the principal authors of the report had just emerged from that agency. But Wiggins and Josephson (and Wofford, too) shared Shriver’s allergy to bureaucracy and conformist thinking, and the report’s boldness picked up right where The Towering Task had left off. If Kennedy were to launch the program immediately, the report said, the Peace Corps could have 2,000 volunteers in the field within nine months.
The report, a document of some twenty pages, went into considerable detail about how the Peace Corps would actually work. It proposed a term of service between one and three years for volunteers, who, it said, could be of any age and either gender. A college degree would not be required. A volunteer could defer a military draft call-up but could not avoid it outright: The corps was resolutely not to be seen as “a haven for draft dodgers.” The report also proposed some initial guidelines for selection of volunteers. Written and oral tests would be required of Peace Corps applicants as they would be of any foreign service applicant.
The report proposed some of the development projects on which Peace Corps volunteers might work: teaching; public health projects, such as fighting malaria; agricultural and rural development programs; large-scale construction and industrial projects; and government administration and urban development. The need for development assistance in all these areas is sorely needed in the third world, Shriver wrote; academic studies had demonstrated this fact. “If the shortage of able personnel is not made up from outside, some development programs will grind to a halt—or fail to progress fast enough to satisfy the newly aroused and volatile expectations of people of these lands. The Peace Corps can make a significant contribution to this problem.”
The report concluded by arguing that not only could Peace Corps volunteers contribute significantly to economic development in third world countries abroad, but that their exposure to foreign cultures would also benefit America and lead to more harmonious international relations.
With thousands of young Americans going to work in developing areas, millions of Americans will become more directly involved in the world than ever.… The letters home, the talks later given by returning members of the Peace Corps, the influence on the lives of those who spend one or two or three years in hard work abroad—all this may combine to provide the first substantial popular base for responsible American policies toward the world. And this is meeting the world’s need, too, since what the world most needs from this country is better understanding of and more responsibility toward the world.
At first, the task force report was not terribly well received. “This looks interesting,” Ted Sorensen told Shriver, “but it’s not at all what we had in mind.” Kennedy’s political and foreign policy advisers had hoped for something inexpensive and small that could be folded into existing foreign aid programs. They were expecting something that would be more a tool and a public relations ornament for the ICA—which, as the result of another Kennedy task force, was now in the process of being reconstituted as the Agency for International Development (AID)—than a full-blown program in its own right. Moreover, Josephson’s idea of starting the Peace Corps via executive order made the political advisers nervous: Kennedy’s popularity was still very high, but they were reluctant to have him squander precious political capital by unilaterally appropriating money for a new program that had yet to receive congressional approval.
Thus Shriver and his team spent the last week of February arguing their case with the White House. Kennedy’s staff argued that rushing so many young people abroad quickly could lead to diplomatic catastrophe. The potential for a foreign policy embarrassment—and subsequent congressional vengeance—was high. But Shriver argued that the moment was ripe for capitalizing on enthusiasm for Kennedy’s New Frontier. Delay would only sap the Peace Corps’ momentum.
Josephson, rooting around for historical precedent that might justify launching the Peace Corps expeditiously, pointed out that President Franklin Roosevelt had launched the Emergency Conservation Corps via executive order in 1933. He acknowledged that the times were different then, but he argued that, politically anyway, the Peace Corps was similarly a “special case” that merited such a bypassing of Congress. Besides, he and Wiggins repeatedly told Shriver, if the Peace Corps were not launched immediately, it might never be launched: Presidential leeway for inaugurating bold and experimental programs, so strong in the first months of a new administration, dissipated progressively as time passed.
Shriver pressed the case avidly with the president and his aides. Despite their wariness of him, the president’s advisers yielded to Shriver’s arguments. Their acquiescence probably owed something to Shriver’s personal relationship with the president; Eunice gave Sarge access to the president that other federal officials lacked. Although Shriver was reluctant to take advantage of this access for Peace Corps purposes, the knowledge that the access was there may have cowed presidential aides who might otherwise have been inclined to take issue with the executive order approach. The task force’s arguments won the day and, according to Arthur Schlesinger, the Peace Corps became the only agency in the Kennedy administration to be given the status of an “emergency agency.”
On March 1, 1961—three weeks after The Towering Task had found its way into Shriver’s hands—President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, giving the Peace Corps its official existence. The president also sent a message to Congress, asking them to prepare to pass Peace Corps legislation. In his message to Congress, Kennedy said, “Our own freedom and the future of freedom around the world depends, in a very real sense, on the underdeveloped countries’ ability to build growing and independent nations where men can live in dignity, liberated from the bonds of hunger, ignorance, and poverty.” His new program would help these newly independent nations—and these nations, in turn, would be contributing indirectly to the United States. “Our own young men and women,” he said, seizing on an aspect of the program that Shriver had strongly recommended he tout, “will return better able to assume the responsibilities of American citizenship and with greater understanding of our global responsibilities.” Newspapers across the country put coverage of Kennedy’s announcement on their front pages, and many editorials waxed enthusiastic about the new program.
Shriver and his fellow task force members were thrilled: Kennedy had—despite considerable political risk to himself—taken their report to heart and rushed the program into administrative existence. Moreover, the favorable initial public response seemed to have borne out their advice to him. The Peace Corps could now begin to take concrete form.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shriver’s Socratic Seminar
But who was to run the Peace Corps? In the task force report, Shriver had recommended several academics who had had experience placing students in programs in developing countries. The president rejected all of them on the grounds that an iv
ory tower academic would not project the adventurous image he wanted the Peace Corps to have. Shriver himself, in contrast, would project that image. According to Gerald Rice’s history of the program,
Kennedy knew that Shriver was young enough to endow the Peace Corps with the vital image which he hoped it might project. He was also bright, handsome and, in the terminology of the New Frontier, “vigorous.” Moreover, he was a respected figure in the world of education, business, and civil liberties, and his family ties to Kennedy would give the Peace Corps a much-needed visibility; the appointment of his brother-in-law as Director would also indicate the President’s personal interest in the undertaking. These factors, as well as Shriver’s sterling work as head of the Task Force, made him an appealing choice.
Shriver, however, strenuously resisted. He had already turned down Abraham Ribicoff—who had asked him to be a cabinet under secretary at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—because he thought it would invite charges of nepotism. Being appointed to an executive agency, Shriver thought, would invite even stronger criticism. Top-level cabinet appointments, after all, at least required Senate approval, ensuring that those positions had the congressional imprimatur; the Peace Corps, however, as an executive agency, would not require Senate approval for its director. This, Shriver worried, would make Congress that much hungrier to assert its prerogatives when the time came to pass Peace Corps legislation or to appropriate money for it. “It would be a serious mistake,” Shriver wrote to his brother-in-law, “in my judgment, to appoint me as director of the Peace Corps … and then make me the only agency head in the government not approved by the Senate. This is not good for the agency, the people in it, or for me. When I do have to face Congress … they’ll be tougher then—and they will have no responsibility for having okayed me now.” Why don’t you, Shriver advised, pick “another person to head the Peace Corps, which is now well-organized, well-manned, and aimed in the right direction?” But when the president persisted, Shriver acquiesced, on the condition that Kennedy would seek Senate confirmation for the position.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 28