Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Although many good people worked at the ICA, the agency represented exactly what Kennedy was reacting against by proposing a Peace Corps. It wouldn’t do, Shriver believed, to start this bold new Peace Corps program only to see it folded into the agency it had defined itself against. Wiggins and Josephson, as veterans of the ICA, felt particularly strongly about this, and they egged Shriver on in his campaign for independence. Congress, Josephson had warned him in February, sees the traditional foreign policy establishment as a series of “boondoggles”; developing countries, moreover, perceived that establishment as “imperialist.”

  Shriver took Josephson’s admonitions to heart, and in his report to the president stated that “beginning the Peace Corps as another ICA operation runs the risk of losing its new appeal.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk was an ardent supporter of the Peace Corps, so Shriver went to him, telling him that it was important that the Peace Corps not be seen as merely an ICA tool, just “another foreign aid resource like development loans or Food for Peace.” Kennedy’s vision for the Peace Corps, Shriver reminded Rusk, required “an identifiable, visible body of people, a corps in the fullest sense of the word with an esprit de corps all its own.” Only in this way would the new program be seen as distinctively Kennedy’s. Rusk concurred, as did his under secretary Chester Bowles, who told Kennedy that there “was wide agreement on the necessity and importance of the Peace Corps maintaining its own separate identity.”

  Elsewhere, however, there was vehement resistance to an independent Peace Corps. For one thing, under Kennedy’s own proposal to reorganize the ICA as the Agency for International Development, the entire US foreign assistance apparatus—with all its constituent components—was to be placed under a single bureaucratic roof. If this proposal, announced in March just days after the launching of the Peace Corps, were to be carried out, then all the federal government’s foreign development initiatives would be housed in one place. Why should the Peace Corps be exempt?

  Naturally, too, members of the foreign policy establishment resented the Peace Corps’ implicit criticism of their traditional way of doing things—and at the same time, they wanted to make use of what the Peace Corps could provide. As Bill Moyers pointed out, “The old-line employees of State and AID coveted the Peace Corps greedily. It was natural instinct; established bureaucracies do not like competition from new people.” And then there was of course the concern that Eisenhower and others had raised: Did the United States really want a bunch of untrained youths running around in alien countries, raising a ruckus and causing trouble for America’s “real” foreign policy? If we must have a Peace Corps, the foreign policy traditionalists argued, place it under the direct control of the new AID—that way, at least, an experienced hand can rein in these kids.

  If this argument had initially been waged directly between the old-guard foreign policy types on the one hand and Shriver’s gang of eager neophytes on the other, the old guard very likely would have prevailed, and the Peace Corps would have been absorbed immediately into AID. But because the president himself had taken such a keen interest in the Peace Corps, and because his brother-in-law was its director, the foreign policy establishment was reluctant to argue too strenuously before it knew what the president wanted. And for the moment, Kennedy was being cryptic; no one knew what he wanted.

  A tense bureaucratic standoff began. In late March, when Shriver saw an early draft of Kennedy’s message to Congress on the reorganization of foreign aid, he was dismayed to see that the president was planning to situate the Peace Corps in the new AID after all. A few days later, Shriver steamed as he sat through a meeting at the White House in which he was shown AID’s organizational chart: The Peace Corps was in a little box on the far right in a section called “resources.” As he had feared, his program was being reduced to one among many items in the AID tool kit. He argued his case but to little avail and returned from the meeting angry and uncharacteristically disconsolate. “There are about twenty people in Washington who have our concept of an autonomous Peace Corps,” he seethed to his staff at 806 Connecticut Avenue, “and 20 million public administration experts who want a tidy organization chart.”

  Eunice was at this point in the hospital in Boston with one of her periodic bouts of illness brought on by Addison’s disease, and in the midst of all the Peace Corps politicking, Sarge went up from Washington to be with her. As the date of Kennedy’s message to Congress approached, Josephson and Wiggins flew up to Boston for a final briefing with Shriver. They met in the basement of the Ritz Carlton to compose a memo to the president, reiterating once more the argument for Peace Corps independence. Shriver also continued to argue by phone with Ralph Dungan, who was heading the AID task force, and with Ted Sorensen and Dick Goodwin, all three of whom thought the Peace Corps should logically reside under AID control. The Peace Corps director’s vote should have carried more weight than Dungan’s, Sorensen’s, or Goodwin’s, but as Bill Haddad observed, “in those days the Kennedy people didn’t have the respect for Sarge that later developed.”

  Shriver’s emergency memo to Kennedy won the Peace Corps at least a temporary reprieve. In his March 22 message to Congress on foreign aid, the president hedged, saying neither that the program would be located within AID nor outside of it—only that it would retain its “distinctive identity” (this was a nod to Shriver) and be a “flexible tool” (this was a nod to Dungan and the AID crowd) of the foreign aid program. The Peace Corps team regarded the president’s ambiguous statement as “a signal to keep pushing,” and they did.

  But the president’s aides remained intransigent, and a week later Kennedy announced that Henry Labouisse, who had been head of the ICA, would coordinate a task force charged with incorporating the disparate foreign assistance programs—including the Peace Corps—into AID. Sensing Shriver’s recalcitrance, the president sent him a sternly worded memo saying that he expected Shriver to give Labouisse his full cooperation.

  Shriver immediately set about pressing his case with Labouisse, Dungan, and Sorensen, once again making the argument that for both political and practical policy reasons, the Peace Corps would be better off as an independent entity. In a memo he sent to Dungan and Labouisse on April 11, Shriver said that it would destroy the Peace Corps to have it subsumed in the larger foreign aid bureaucracy.

  The Peace Corps … embodies a broader concept than foreign aid. In historical terms, the Peace Corps is a new effort in the long history of American initiative in assisting other less fortunate people around the world.… Integration of the Peace Corps with the new foreign aid program, however, would jeopardize its ability to win the full support of the kind of individuals and groups who historically have played most important roles in this kind of endeavor.…

  Politically, the public image of the Peace Corps at home and abroad must be clear and unfettered. Its obedience to the policies of the State Department and the new aid administrator must not be obvious. It must accomplish its mission under a new banner.

  Had the president at San Francisco [in the Cow Palace speech] merely proposed an extension and expansion of ICA … the political response would have been negligible. It would not have kindled the dormant idealism of young Americans and certainly not won the praise of Congress.

  In the eyes of those abroad particularly, clear connection with foreign aid programs may hurt the Peace Corps.… The disadvantages of tying the Peace Corps completely to the foreign aid program and thus to the month-to-month twists of, and reactions to, United States foreign policy are clear.

  As White House staff refused to relent, Shriver grew desperate. The clock was running out. The meeting at which the Peace Corps’ fate would be decided had been scheduled (purposely, Shriver thought) for April 26, four days after he was to begin a tour of developing countries to try to solicit their interest in receiving Peace Corps volunteers. Dungan and company, Shriver felt sure, would take advantage of his absence to allow AID to devour the Peace Corps. “I don’t want to go gallivanting a
round the world, if, while I’m gone, all of the most fundamental decisions about the Peace Corps’ ‘bureaucratic stance’ are being taken,” Shriver wrote to Labouisse.

  Thus he ratcheted up the pressure: I don’t want to have to do this, he told Dungan and Labouisse, but if I must I will go directly to the president and press my case with him. Labouisse took umbrage at this threat, saying that Shriver’s trading on his familial relationship with the president would amount to foul play. Shriver in turn responded with an angry memo to Labouisse, which he copied to the president. “I agree,” he wrote, “that we should avoid troubling the president at this time” but—and this was intended to ensure that Kennedy paid attention—“these issues about the future place and role of the Peace Corps are of such fundamental importance that he ought to participate in their resolution. His espousal of the Peace Corps notion in the course of his campaign was an important political commitment, and he has a genuine interest in the success of the Peace Corps as well.” It would be a grave mistake, Shriver wrote, to allow “organizational neatness” to take precedence over political wisdom.

  An early high noon for the Peace Corps was at hand. Shriver would have liked to stay to press his case at the April 26 meeting himself, but he had told the president he would make this trip. Hoping that the president’s own interest in seeing the Peace Corps succeed would carry the day, Shriver left it to Wiggins and Josephson to represent the Peace Corps on April 26, and on April 22 he took off from Idlewild Airport in New York for East Africa, accompanied by Wofford, Franklin Williams, and Ed Bayley, the Peace Corps director of information. The trip was to take them from Ghana to Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and the Philippines.

  A dark pall dulled the excitement that should have surrounded Shriver’s trip. The pall was cast by two sources. First, there was the impending April 26 meeting. Shriver tried to retain his normal optimism, but Wiggins—who had had several encounters with Dungan in which Dungan hinted that the president was on AID’s side in the debate—had told him that the situation did not look good.

  Second, the American-sponsored invasion of Cuba had ended just a week earlier with the Bay of Pigs disaster. On April 17, in a plan hatched by the CIA under Eisenhower but approved by Kennedy, a group of several hundred Cuban exiles went ashore at Cochinos Bay, hoping to lead a revolt that would bring down the Communist regime of Fidel Castro. The invasion was a dismal failure, and by April 20, two days before Shriver took off from Idlewild, all the invading forces had been captured or killed. This brought Kennedy’s popularity, both at home and abroad, to its lowest ebb so far and greatly increased skepticism among developing countries about the benevolence of American intentions. The winds of the cold war blew chillier. All this would make Shriver’s job of selling the Peace Corps to the international community that much more challenging. In addition, Kennedy was now being subjected to criticism that said he was a ham-handed executive of foreign policy; this could only, Shriver feared, make the president less open to a more independent role for the Peace Corps. Finally, dealing with the political fallout from the Bay of Pigs debacle was taking most of the president’s available time, so he wouldn’t be able to attend the foreign aid meeting in person. Instead, he deputized Ralph Dungan to chair the meeting and represent the White House.

  This was horrible news. Wiggins and Josephson knew that Dungan, as head of the AID task force, was staunchly opposed to giving the Peace Corps its independence. Sure enough, at the meeting on April 26, while Wiggins and Josephson made the case once again for keeping their program out of the traditional foreign aid establishment, both Labouisse and Bureau of the Budget director Dave Bell argued for folding it into AID. Dungan, chairing the meeting on the president’s behalf, made the decision to incorporate the Peace Corps into AID, saying that, as Josephson recorded it in a memo immediately afterward, “the Peace Corps could not be favored or given extraordinary treatment at the expense of overall government considerations.”

  Shriver was sweltering in his New Delhi hotel room in the 110-degree heat when a telegram from Wiggins arrived. “PEACE CORPS NOT REPEAT NOT TO HAVE AUTONOMY” it said. “DUNGAN DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS ACTING ON BEHALF OF THE PRESIDENT.” “We had lost,” Shriver recalled. “The White House had decided to put the Corps in AID. I remember just sitting there for some time, half-way around the world from Washington, holding the bad news in my hand and feeling helpless. I was convinced … that the Peace Corps was about to die a-borning.”

  Shriver paced back and forth in his hotel room, trying desperately to think of how he might save the program. Casting his mind back over the past few weeks, he recalled a discussion he had had with Bill Moyers and Lyndon Johnson, after Moyers had joined Shriver’s staff. “Boys,” the vice president had said in his inimitable patois, “this town is full of folks who believe the only way to do something is their way. That’s especially true in diplomacy and things like that, because they work with foreign governments and protocol is oh-so-mighty important to them, with guidebooks and rulebooks and ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ to keep you from offending someone. You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service and they’ll put striped pants on your people when all you’ll want them to have is a knapsack and a tool kit and a lot of imagination. And they’ll give you a hundred and one reasons why it won’t work every time you want to do something different.” Johnson concluded, “If you want the Peace Corps to work, friends, you’ll keep it away from the folks downtown who want it to be just another box in an organizational chart.”

  This articulated Shriver’s fears precisely, and at the time of the conversation it had caused him to think that Johnson was smarter and more formidable than some of Kennedy’s people seemed to believe. Thinking back on the conversation now, it dawned on Shriver that the vice president might be his only hope. LBJ was “the lone ace up my sleeve,” he recalled. He cabled Wiggins and Moyers and told them, “Talk to Lyndon!”

  Moyers went to Johnson and, playing on the vice president’s sympathy for the Peace Corps’ plight, asked him to intercede with Kennedy. Johnson agreed and set up a meeting for May 1. On that day, Kennedy and Johnson met in the Oval Office. Johnson pointed out that the foreign aid general program’s unpopularity in Congress would make it hard for the Peace Corps to get funding and that if the new program were to succeed it needed to have a “special identity,” distinct from AID’s. As Josephson later reported, Johnson “badgered” Kennedy ceaselessly until the president relented. When Johnson finished making the case, Kennedy said, “All right, Lyndon, since its being independent is so all-fired important to you and Sarge, let it be independent.”

  Wiggins relayed the good news back to Shriver by telegram. Shriver was exuberant. Disaster had been averted. Vice President Johnson had saved the day. Shriver’s regard for LBJ reached new heights, and from that point forward he took to calling the vice president “a founding father of the Peace Corps.”

  The Peace Corps had won its independence. But Dungan, Labouisse, and Bell seethed, especially when a front-page New York Times headline on May 4 blared, “Peace Corps Wins Fight for Autonomy.” Kennedy’s aides chastised the Peace Corps crew for allowing the story to leak; they suspected Bill Haddad of leaking the story, since he was a friend of Times reporter Peter Braestrup. (Haddad denied being the leak.) Dungan agreed to abide by the president’s decision to allow the Peace Corps its independence, but he let it be understood that he was not happy about it. Certain members of Kennedy’s staff had always felt cool toward the Peace Corps in general and to Shriver in particular. Now they made it clear that they not only disagreed with Peace Corps independence as a matter of policy but also that they were, as Gerald Rice put it, “extremely annoyed at the unusual methods which Shriver and his team had used to achieve their objectives. Deploying Vice President Johnson was considered particularly sharp practice.” So was Shriver’s trading on his status as presidential brother-in-law.

  “Dungan was highly irritated about these hotshots in the Peace Corps,” J
osephson recalled. “Ralph called me up and said we were on our own. I said, ‘Would you like to come over and talk about this? We’re going to be working together for a long time.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely not. You are on your own. Don’t ever come here asking for help.’ ” If the Peace Corps wasn’t going to play by the rules established by the White House staff or by AID, then it shouldn’t expect to get any assistance or sympathy from those quarters. Now that the Peace Corps had its independence, it would have to sink or swim on its own.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “The Trip”

  With the specter of absorption in AID no longer haunting the Peace Corps, Shriver could concentrate on the matter at hand: convincing leaders of developing countries that they could use Peace Corps assistance. This promised to be a formidable challenge. Shriver’s report to the president had emphasized that the Peace Corps would go only to the countries that had invited it—yet to this point, only a single country had seen fit to do so. No one in the US government had had time to make initial inquiries with foreign leaders until the beginning of April. And now, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco darkening the foreign relations horizon, there was some question whether the Peace Corps would ever be welcomed anywhere at all.

  The first suggestion that there might be a request for volunteers had come some eight weeks earlier from Tanganyika, an East African nation that was in the process of gaining its independence. Chester Bowles, the former ambassador to India and now an under secretary of state, had good relations with Julius Nyere, the Tanganyikan prime minister. An ardent Peace Corps supporter, Bowles told Nyere about the new program, and the prime minister said he was at least provisionally interested; the country was about to embark on a national road-building project, and it needed surveyors, geologists, and engineers, among other technical assistance. Nyere inquired whether the Peace Corps might be able to provide that help with the project.