On March 4, Kennedy announced Shriver’s appointment as first director of the Peace Corps. A day later, Shriver announced to reporters that the Peace Corps would “take the world by surprise” and that it would amaze people who “think America has gone soft.” He appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late March and was confirmed as director by the Senate on May 21.
Having been named director, Shriver now had to form the agency. Although he had the task force report as a blueprint, many of the important details had yet to be addressed and none of them had been finalized. No one had spoken to heads of state in developing countries to see if they actually would receive volunteers. Shriver himself had no experience with the federal government. He had no idea how one went about securing arrangements with foreign countries. He didn’t know how to prepare legislation. He didn’t know how to procure office space or how to put people on the federal payroll. He didn’t even know how to find the people who did know how to do these things.
In retrospect, Shriver’s lack of knowledge may have been one of his greatest assets in starting the Peace Corps. It meant, for one thing, that he didn’t know what couldn’t be done. He wasn’t constrained by the bureaucrat’s understanding of institutional limitations; he didn’t have the elected politician’s blinkered view of what was allowable. His boundless energy and optimism were not trammeled by any knowledge of bureaucratic limitations. This expanded the horizons of what was possible.
Shriver’s energy and optimism—and his ignorance of proper bureaucratic protocol—infected his task force, as well as the core of staff he began rapidly to recruit after Kennedy had ordered the Peace Corps into existence. The culture of the new agency in its first months—and indeed in its first five years and beyond—was one of cheerful amateurism. Shriver was, of course, able to draw from the beginning on the bureaucratic legerdemain of Josephson and Wiggins, as well as on the administrative resourcefulness of Mary Ann Orlando; as the months passed, a Peace Corps bureaucracy was inevitably formed. But the agency under Shriver’s direction never lost the anything-is-possible creative anarchy—a mixture of idealism, naivete, and brilliance—that had characterized it from the beginning.
The early Peace Corps didn’t cut red tape so much as shred it. “You guys had a good day today,” read a memo from the administrative consultant brought over from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “You broke fourteen laws.” By March 15, the agency had carried out at least twenty-two illegal actions. With the signing of the executive order came an initial $1.5 million to spend, as well as three offices on the sixth floor of the ICA’s building at 806 Connecticut Avenue. Known as the Maiatico Building, 806 Connecticut was just a few hundred yards from the White House, across Lafayette Park, and it had earlier served as the headquarters for the Marshall Plan. But there was not enough space to accommodate all the new support staff, so Shriver, having no idea how to requisition office space, rented space in the nearby Rochembeau Hotel. Since he didn’t know how to procure the money to pay for this space, he paid for these rooms—as well as for supplies, transportation, and other miscellaneous costs—with his Merchandise Mart credit cards and accounts.
The new offices had hardly any furniture. Through the first days of the Peace Corps’ existence, its employees were standing, sharing desks, squatting on floors. Albert Sims and Gordon Boyce had only a single desk and chair between them. When one of them had someone in for an appointment, the other would have to go sit on the floor in an adjoining room. Furniture ordered from the federal government, Shriver learned, could take weeks to arrive. Fortunately, Mary Ann Orlando discovered some unused furniture on an upper floor and simply hauled it all downstairs on the elevator. “That’s what we did when we started the Peace Corps,” Orlando recalled. “We just did what we had to do and filled in the gaps later.” Padraic Kennedy, one of the first persons hired by the Peace Corps, recalled “midnight requisitioning” trips, “which meant raiding the AID [formerly ICA] offices in the same building in the middle of the night. It wasn’t difficult. The AID people always left at 5:00 p.m., whereas we were working half the night.”
The task force was allowed no rest. “We had been prepared to wait a few days, possibly longer” for the announcement of the executive order, Wiggins recalled. “Shriver, of course, knew Kennedy was prepared to go the executive order route, but no one guessed it would happen so fast.” Wiggins went to work planning and developing overseas programs. Josephson began working on the legislation for Congress. Boyce began contacting private voluntary agencies that might be given grants to run Peace Corps programs overseas. Al Sims reached out to universities to develop relationships with them for both the administration of overseas programs and the domestic training of volunteers.
In recruiting staff from beyond the ranks of the task force, Shriver was as creative and relentless as he had been in the Talent Hunt during the interregnum. Often, Shriver would make job candidates read Max Millikan’s MIT report that had proposed a cautious start to the Peace Corps—and anyone who spoke approvingly of its caution would be promptly rejected. “Shriver didn’t want anyone around who was going to be too cautious,” one successful applicant recalled.
Peace Corps lore abounds with stories of men yanked abruptly from jobs and personal lives all across the country, summoned by Shriver’s insistent voice on the other end of a phone line. “Shriver couldn’t wait three months for a guy,” Wiggins said. “He had to come at once. So, the first priority was talent and the second was availability. If he found somebody he thought had unusual talent, he’d think of a job for him to do, or let the person create one if there wasn’t something on the organization chart that suggested itself.” Shriver’s recruitment methods stood in stark contrast to normal government hiring procedures. Suddenly, as Wiggins recalled in Coates Redmon’s Peace Corps history Come as You Are, “Sarge flings open the doors and starts hiring at incredible speed and with great flamboyance a whole slew of people, some of whom came running to us and a few of whom Sarge had to pry out of budding, even spectacular, careers in law, medicine, academia, journalism. Shriver made no pretense that this was an orderly or predictable affair. He was grabbing at talent, period.… It really didn’t matter what you were—a lawyer, a fisherman, a preacher, a government bureaucrat.”
People from diverse professions all over the country heeded Shriver’s call. When Kennedy aides Fred Dutton and Pierre Salinger spoke highly of a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle named Tom Matthews, Shriver reached him at a bar in Utah, where Matthews was on a ski vacation. Matthews arrived at Peace Corps headquarters the next day, still wearing his mittens and ski boots. Matthews, in turn, recommended a Chronicle colleague, Donovan McClure. When McClure met Shriver he was spellbound. “He was just enormously impressive. All the clichés fit: tall, dark, and handsome. Fit as a college athlete at forty-five. He was warm and friendly and funny—was interested in everything, full of anecdotes. He knew as much about sports as he did about politics and as much about the civil rights movement as he did about theology.” McClure soon joined Matthews in the Peace Corps’ public affairs office.
Franklin Williams, who would become the Peace Corps’ first black executive, had worked with Shriver in the Civil Rights Section of the 1960 campaign. When he came to Washington in 1961 seeking opportunities in the Kennedy administration, Williams dropped in on Shriver at Louis Martin’s suggestion. Shriver “began pounding his desk and saying, ‘This is where the action is,’ ” Williams recalled. “He made it sound so damn exciting.” When Shriver asked him to start work right away, Williams explained that he couldn’t leave his job in the California attorney general’s office. “Yes, you can,” Shriver said, and as Williams looked on in wonder, Shriver called the California attorney general and negotiated Williams’s instant release from employment there.
Seeking an expert psychologist to establish the standards for selecting volunteers, Shriver called Nicholas Hobbs, the provost of Vanderbilt University in Tennesse
e who at the time was working on a multimillion-dollar research project. “How much time do I have to decide?” Hobbs asked when Shriver got him on the phone. “Twenty minutes,” Shriver said. Hobbs hung up and booked a flight to Washington.
Shriver’s recruitment efforts attracted a broad array of talent. Morris Abram, the prominent Georgia attorney who had been one of Shriver’s conduits to Martin Luther King Jr. during the campaign, became the Peace Corps’ first general counsel. Thomas Quimby, chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Democratic National Committee, helped run volunteer recruitment. Bill Haddad, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Post reporter who had worked on the Kennedy campaign, signed on as a top aide to Shriver and went on to head up the famous Peace Corps evaluation division. Bill Kelly, who had worked as an administrator for NASA, took charge of logistics and administration.
Charlie Peters, a West Virginia state legislator who had worked on Kennedy’s primary campaign in 1960, thought he would “just come up for about three months to share in the exciting task of getting the New Frontier started”—and ended up working in the Peace Corps’ evaluation division for five years. Shriver’s gravitational force, it seemed, was just stronger than other people’s; once you found yourself in his orbit, it was hard to leave, no matter how hard you were working or what the damage to your personal life. “Wives of staff men,” Wofford said, “tended to be jealous because Shriver harnessed their husbands’ energies and loyalties—and weekends.”
Charlie Peters, like many of Shriver’s recruits, found the camaraderie and idealism of the Peace Corps staff and volunteers enormously appealing. “In my life, I had met many people I liked but comparatively few who shared my feelings and values,” Peters wrote in his memoir, Tilting at Windmills. “At the Peace Corps it seemed as if I found someone like that every day.… It was exciting to work for the United States government in the early sixties. We walked to the office each morning alive with the sense that we had important business to attend to, serving a country and a president we believed in.” Jack Kennedy, Peters wrote, “was an inspiring leader, and I was proud to serve him.” Peters felt the same way about Jack’s brother-in-law. “Shriver had the kind of charisma that makes men charge the barricades. He inspired enormous effort on the part of those who worked at the Peace Corps.”
Perhaps the most significant addition to the new agency was Bill Moyers, who found his own way to the Peace Corps. Moyers was only twenty-six years old in 1961, but he was already something of a legend. Born in Oklahoma, he had grown up to become a Baptist minister in Texas, where he went to work as an aide to Lyndon Johnson, who was then Senate majority leader. Moyers soon distinguished himself as the star on Johnson’s staff. He was idealistic but also politically astute; he could be a ruthless Machiavellian operator when he needed to be. He was famous for being one of the few people who could withstand the notorious Johnson barrages—both the unctuously heavy-handed “treatment” the vice president would lavish on people he wanted to impress and the volcanic torrents of profanity he would unleash when he was in one of his fearsome rages. “Johnson would just come in and stand over you and try to overpower you with his physical presence,” Shriver recalled. “And he’d do that to Moyers. And Moyers was just a kid, maybe less than 125 pounds. Johnson would yell at him, tell him what to do. And then I’d see Moyers stick his head back, and his jaw would clench and he’d grit his teeth—and say ‘No.’ ” Moyers also had an enormous capacity for hard work under high pressure, although at the expense of painful ulcers that occasionally incapacitated him. By the time Johnson took office as vice president, Moyers was Johnson’s top aide.
The job of chief aide to the vice president of the United States was a heady one for a twenty-six-year-old, but Moyers had become intrigued by the Peace Corps. Kennedy’s New Frontier resonated with Moyers’s idealistic side, and he saw the Peace Corps as its most vivid expression. “In my Baptist church,” Moyers later said, “there was a continuing emphasis upon the importance of service, upon the value of commitment, upon expressing your faith in practical, realistic ways.” Shriver drew on the same emphases in his Catholicism and was infusing the Peace Corps with them. Moyers didn’t know Shriver, but he saw that his organization grew out of this religious motivation as well as out of “the barn building myth … [the idea of] America as a social enterprise … of caring and cooperative people.” So he let it be known that if the new agency had a suitable position available, he would be interested in it. (Moyers, Johnson later recalled, “cajoled and begged and pleaded and connived and threatened and politicked to leave me to go to work for the Peace Corps.”) But when Shriver made a move to hire Moyers, Kenny O’Donnell objected angrily. “He’s the only one on Johnson’s staff we trust,” O’Donnell told Harris Wofford, who was by then serving as special assistant to the president. “The president’s going to tell him to stay there, and you can tell Sarge to keep his cotton-picking hands off Moyers.”
Moyers went directly to President Kennedy, who was so impressed with the strength of Moyers’s interest in the Peace Corps that he told him he could go if Shriver wanted him. On March 14 Moyers left Johnson’s staff and joined the Peace Corps as a “special consultant.” Within two years he would be made the agency’s deputy director—the youngest person in history to fill such a high-ranking position in the federal government. Nevertheless, Moyers carried out his most historically significant role in the first few months of the Peace Corps’ existence, when he served as the organization’s congressional liaison and as an invaluable conduit to the White House. But Kennedy’s advisers were not happy with what they saw as the pillaging of the White House staff by the Peace Corps; thenceforward, the Peace Corps had to combat a reputation as a personnel pirate, stealing talent from elsewhere in the federal government.
When Shriver said he intended to have fifty people on the Peace Corps staff within thirty days, the experts at the Bureau of the Budget rolled their eyes; he’s crazy, they said. But, as Wofford recalled, “the government’s usual lethargic pace was broken and Shriver got his staff.” When a General Services Administration budget manager was hired to maintain standard regulations, he found his efforts futile. “Briefly he tried sending around memorandums saying, ‘There will be no more overtime unless it is authorized at least three days in advance.’ At a time when almost everyone was working overtime, that rule did not last.”
No one had ever seen a government agency like this before. Shriver was accomplishing more, faster, and with less, than anyone thought possible—a fact that cheered Peace Corps supporters and worried its detractors. Harris Wofford says that the early Peace Corps days were “an intoxicating and illuminating experience.” Working with Shriver, Wofford wrote in Of Kennedys and Kings, “was the closest to decision-making through a Socratic seminar that I have ever experienced in government. Except that after listening and questioning, proposing and prodding, Shriver would decide on a course of action, usually with a strong consensus behind him but sometimes in the face of strong opposition.”
Another Greek model comes to mind: Alexander was said to have imagined at night, while drunk, but to have decided in the sober light of dawn. There was not much drinking at the Peace Corps, but sometimes the night would end in a free-for-all, in which a new idea would take flight in Shriver’s mind and he or his close associates would “shriverize” it. Used behind his back, that verb meant to escalate, to enlarge, to speed up, to apply greater imagination. Then a second Shriver would preside critically and thoughtfully at the next morning’s staff meeting.
Shriver’s energy was the fuel the Peace Corps ran on; his optimism was the oxygen it breathed. This was powerful stuff: In retrospect, the speed with which he established the Peace Corps as a going entity is astonishing. Today, when the Peace Corps is an established part of the government landscape, it is easy to forget that Shriver, in effect, made something from nothing. “In 1961, President Kennedy had not even given me a bill,” Shriver recalled. “Rather I’d had only four or five sentences f
rom a campaign speech in California to go on. It was like seeing a picture of a cake and then told to bake one—there were no ingredients, no measurements, no idea even of what kinds of substances it should include.” As Peter Braestrup, one of the reporters who first covered the Peace Corps for the New York Times, later reflected, “To get an agency going takes others two or more years. Shriver did it in six weeks.” Warren Wiggins concurred, saying that the speed with which Shriver got the Peace Corps running was “a record for a government agency. Something like a year or two is usually the case. But he got it together [in weeks]; he created its laws, its principles, and he staffed it up.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Battle for Independence
Disaster nearly struck the new Peace Corps in May. From the earliest days of the task force, Shriver had insisted strenuously that the Peace Corps remain separate from the ICA. Drawing on his own instinctive dislike for entrenched bureaucracy, as well as on what Wiggins and Josephson had told him about the hidebound ways in which the ICA approached foreign aid, he felt that in order to succeed, the Peace Corps had to establish its own identity and not get absorbed into the ICA’s way of doing things. If the ICA were to absorb his program, Shriver worried, it would be tantamount to strangling the Peace Corps before it was fully born.
Part of President Kennedy’s motivation, after all, in conceiving the idea was the fustiness of the traditional foreign service. In 1958 Eugene Burdick and William Lederer had published a novel called The Ugly American, which, although fictional, contained a lacerating attack on US foreign service professionals, whom the authors criticized as hypocritical, incompetent, and cynical. The typical American diplomat in the novel didn’t speak the language of the country to which he was posted; lived exclusively in the hermetically sealed world of embassy cocktail parties, limousines, and private clubs; and had little connection with the denizens of the country. Many believed that The Ugly American was, at least partially, the inspiration for Kennedy’s Ann Arbor and Cow Palace speeches; Kennedy had mentioned the book, saying that it made him “shudder” when he read it.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 29