Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

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Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 31

by Scott Stossel


  Shriver immediately determined to send a Peace Corps representative to investigate the situation in Tanganyika. He wanted someone who could discern the country’s needs and make sure the country was suitable for American involvement—and someone who could get a commitment from the prime minister before he changed his mind about the Peace Corps. But who could do this?

  Lee St. Lawrence was a former program officer from the ICA who joined the Peace Corps as one of its first employees in early March. During the 1950s he had worked as a program officer in Laos, Vietnam, and the Belgian Congo. He was “shrewd, learned, utterly unafraid, an almost legendary taker of risks,” and he spoke several languages fluently; with his rascally attitude and longshoreman’s profanity he reminded some people of a soldier of fortune. “He was swashbuckling, courageously foolish—or foolishly courageous,” Josephson recalled. In the Congo, he twice was beaten up by rebelling Congolese soldiers and once was nearly hanged. St. Lawrence, in short, was just the sort of buccaneering adventurer Shriver admired.

  When St. Lawrence volunteered to go to Tanganyika in early March, Shriver eagerly assented. The next day St. Lawrence got on a plane—and vanished. “Didn’t hear a word from him for weeks,” Josephson said. When St. Lawrence finally returned a month later, Franklin Williams recalled that Shriver turned “phosphorescent” with pleasure at the stories the conquering adventurer told. St. Lawrence told of “bushwhacking the country from end to end in order to see the exact conditions under which volunteers would live and work, all this glamorous stuff about trudging through the high grass, seeing giraffes and Masai warriors, talking politics with the prime minister.” Shriver was impressed—and he was, of course, thrilled to hear that Nyere had formally proffered an invitation to the Peace Corps. The audacious success of St. Lawrence’s trip set a high standard for Peace Corps excursions; St. Lawrence had made it seem that “with enough determination and imagination … anything was possible.”

  But one country was not nearly enough. Even with Tanganyika enlisted, Shriver felt that the pressure on him to make this trip succeed was enormous. The first challenge was to get countries to invite him to come and present the case for the Peace Corps. As Wofford recalled, “We were not supposed to fish for invitations, obviously,” but Shriver had to “prime the pump of foreign interest.” Wofford’s own best connections were in India, and when he heard that the Indian ambassador to the United States had expressed an interest in the program, he immediately invited the ambassador to his house for dinner with Shriver. At dinner, Shriver enthusiastically regaled Ambassador B. K. Nehru—a cousin of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister—with his plans for the Peace Corps, explaining how he thought young American volunteers could provide valuable assistance on the subcontinent. Through it all, however, the ambassador remained impassive, apparently impervious to Shriver’s charm and energy. The evening seemed destined to end in disappointment: If India, the world’s largest democracy and the leader of the “neutral bloc” of countries officially aligned with neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, was not interested in Peace Corps volunteers, what country would be?

  But as Ambassador Nehru walked out the door of Wofford’s house, he looked over his shoulder and addressed Shriver: “Am I correct, Mr. Shriver, in thinking that you would not be averse to an invitation from our prime minister to visit India and talk about your program?” Shriver’s heart rose. Several days later, an invitation from Prime Minister Nehru arrived via the State Department.

  Once word leaked out—and Shriver made sure that it did—that India had invited him to discuss the Peace Corps, invitations from other countries soon followed, and an eight-country itinerary was rapidly thrown together.

  Shriver and his team took off from New York on April 22. The first overnight stay on the itinerary was Accra, the capital of Ghana, on the west coast of Africa. Upon arrival in Ghana, Shriver found himself stricken with laryngitis—perhaps a result of his having stayed up all night on the flight from New York, playing cards and drinking gin martinis with Thurgood Marshall, soon to be named to the federal bench by President Kennedy and who happened to be on the same plane. At his press conference at the airport Shriver rasped, “Sorry, I’ve lost my voice. But that’s all right. The Peace Corps’ purpose in Ghana is to listen and learn.” In Shriver’s meeting with the Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, Nkrumah told him that he didn’t want Peace Corps volunteers “indoctrinating our young people. So don’t come as social science teachers.… You should come to teach science and mathematics. We don’t want you to affect them; we just want you to teach them. Agreed?” Although Peace Corps volunteers would in the course of events profoundly “affect” their students, Shriver agreed. “Fine,” Nkrumah said. “We will invite a small number of Peace Corps teachers.… Can you get them here by August?” One country down, seven to go.

  Next on the itinerary was Nigeria, which just months earlier had gained its independence from the British. The country, although rich in oil resources, lacked the skilled workforce necessary to take advantage of oil development. The key to building such a workforce was education, but there was a shortage of Nigerian teachers: Only 14,000 classroom slots were available for the more than 2 million school-age children.

  Shriver perceived a golden opportunity for the Peace Corps and hoped that Nigeria’s leaders would recognize how his program could help the country. They did. Both President Nnamdi Azikiwe and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa greeted him warmly, expressing their wish that Peace Corps volunteers might help them staff Nigerian classrooms and teach English.

  Because Nigeria comprised a loose federation of independent states, Shriver had been advised that if he wanted to get Peace Corps volunteers into the country, he would need to gain the support not just of the national leaders Balewa and Azikiwe but also of regional heads of government and various cabinet ministers. So over a frenetic three days, Shriver and company crisscrossed the country by car and airplane, visiting seven of Nigeria’s largest cities and towns to consult with government officials.

  The next stop was India. India, Wofford later wrote, “was the hardest and most critical test of the trip—and with its half billion people and leading role in the Third World, it was our chief objective.” But the Indians, already wary about what seemed to them America’s imperial designs on the developing world, had been further alarmed by President Kennedy’s ill-fated invasion of Cuba. Fortunately, Chester Bowles, who had been the American ambassador there during Truman’s second term, was still a highly popular figure in India. He made sure Prime Minister Nehru, as well as his daughter Indira, received Shriver’s team openly. Still, Shriver and company had to work hard to convince their Indian hosts that any Peace Corps projects would not be undertaken in a “neocolonial spirit.” It was possible, Shriver insisted, to teach poultry production without presuming to “teach democracy to a nation that since 1948 had been regularly holding the world’s largest free elections.” The grandiosity of what Shriver thought the United States could accomplish in the world was considerable—but his humility about what the United States still needed to learn was genuine. He emphasized that Peace Corps volunteers would seek not merely to teach technical skills to Indians but also to learn from them about democracy.

  This argument seems to be what won Nehru over. During his meeting with Shriver, Nehru reclined deep in his chair and appeared to sleep as the Peace Corps director described how the program might be beneficial to India. But Nehru roused himself and said, “I am sure young Americans would learn a good deal in this country and it could be an important experience for them.” Saying he would be happy to receive a small number of volunteers, Nehru then warned Shriver not to expect too much. “I hope you and [the volunteers] will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came.”

  This was not exactly a rousing endorsement of the Peace Corps’ prospects, but that hardly mattered. The mere fact that Nehru would allow volunteers into India would signal
to other developing countries that the Peace Corps should be welcomed. John Kenneth Galbraith, President Kennedy’s ambassador to India, had predicted that Nehru’s diffidence would make him unreceptive to Shriver’s entreaties and had advised Shriver not to ask for too much. But after watching the meeting between Nehru and Shriver, Galbraith wrote in his diary that he left the prime minister’s office “a little dazed and with my reputation as a strategist in poor condition.” “The Peace Corps had to succeed so as to prove that idealism was still worthwhile—to disprove the case of those who considered kindness to be subversive,” Galbraith wrote. “Then Sarge took over and made an eloquent and moving plea on behalf of his enterprise. The effect was just right—natural, uncontrived, and sincere.”

  Once India had agreed to receive volunteers, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaya (now Malaysia), and the Philippines all followed suit readily. In Rangoon, Burma, U Nu and his government received the Peace Corps team warmly and gave them an elaborate reception at Nu’s residence. At one point, Nu took Shriver off to the side and said, “Mr. Shriver, do you believe that there are young Americans who would volunteer to work in the jungles of north Burma with the same zeal for democracy as young Chinese Communists are doing for their cause?” “I told him yes, absolutely,” Shriver recalled, but “my reply was based on faith rather than knowledge. At that time I had never so much as laid eyes on a Peace Corps volunteer.”

  The trip was a triumph: all eight countries that Shriver formally visited had invited Peace Corps volunteers. Within days of their return to the United States, Wofford, putting on his hat as special assistant to the president, was moved to send a memo to Kennedy singing the Peace Corps director’s praises. “Shriver is a born diplomat,” Wofford wrote.

  I have never been witness to so successful an international operation. His meetings with government officials, newsmen, and private citizens all produced good results for the Peace Corps and US relations. Our ambassador and other overseas officers in every country expressed to me and others their admiration at how much was accomplished in such a short time, and their increased hopes for the Peace Corps in their respective countries.

  Despite these successes, Shriver’s traveling companions at times found the experience trying. For Franklin Williams and Peace Corps public relations official Ed Bayley, this was their first prolonged exposure to Shriver. They marveled at him. The first thing Williams noted was that his boss was “absolutely indefatigable.” In “twenty-six days, in and out of eleven countries, if you count all the detours and airports, [Shriver] never got tired,” Williams said. “I found it irritating.”

  Williams also noted the devoutness of Shriver’s Catholicism. “He kept a Bible with him. He often consulted it. He got up at 5:00 a.m. to go to mass in any city, town, or village, in any country, where there was an available Catholic church that held early mass.” Finally, Williams was both impressed and annoyed at the needless hardships Shriver would endure “to avoid the appearance of being on a ‘junket’—the idea of a government official taking his ease on an alleged ‘fact-finding tour’ at the taxpayer’s expense.” “Why,” Ed Bayley wondered, “does Sarge insist in running the Peace Corps as if it was the last stage of a presidential campaign?”

  Shriver returned to Washington a conquering hero. Not only had the Peace Corps’ independence been secured—through the intervention of LBJ—but there were also now eight countries to which a total of 3,000 volunteers could be sent. Once word spread of the eight invitations, more flooded into the office at 806 Connecticut Avenue unsolicited. Within a week of Shriver’s return on May 17, President Kennedy announced that there had been more than two dozen formal requests for volunteers. By early July, the first six Peace Corps projects—in Tanganyika, Ghana, the Philippines, Columbia, Chile, and St. Lucia—had been officially announced.

  Shriver came back from his trip with “a lot of important scalps on his belt,” recalled Charlie Peters. “He had negotiated with some of the most fabled and powerful third world leaders during a period when the third world was not anti-American per se, but was certainly suspicious about any kind of neocolonial approaches and which was by and large burning up with independence fever. Sarge had no previous training or experience in international diplomacy nor any experience in the federal bureaucracy, and yet, while he was accomplishing the former he was also pulling off the latter, forcing the issue of bureaucratic independence at a remove of 10,000 miles. Having accomplished all of this in less than thirty days, he came back home more than the brother-in-law of the president.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Storming Capitol Hill

  When President Kennedy brought the Peace Corps into existence with his executive order on March 1, he made clear that its funding—which came for the time being from his executive branch discretionary funds—was temporary. Only Congress could appropriate money for it on an ongoing basis. This meant that Shriver’s next task was to persuade Congress, and in particular the skeptical Southern conservatives, to pass Peace Corps legislation. Despite the program’s general popularity, this would not be easy. Congress was notoriously hostile to foreign assistance programs in general (in early March, for instance, the very week Kennedy signed the Peace Corps executive order, the House Appropriations Committee refused to authorize a single dollar of the $150 million in foreign policy emergency funds the president had asked for) and was feeling particularly ornery about the Peace Corps. Members of Congress felt that the president had usurped their prerogatives by launching the program via executive order. The White House received letters from aggrieved senators and representatives.

  Shriver initially assumed that he would have significant assistance from the White House in selling the Peace Corps on Capitol Hill. After all, the president had reaped considerable political benefit from his support of the program, and it was closely identified with the New Frontier. Moreover, a majority of Americans seemed to be in favor of the Peace Corps. Time magazine had recently reported that “the Peace Corps had captured the public imagination as had no other single act of the Kennedy Administration.” It seemed Kennedy would have little to lose by deploying White House aides to help in crafting political strategy.

  But Kennedy’s aides had other ideas. When Ralph Dungan had told Bill Josephson that the Peace Corps was on its own now, he had meant it: If Shriver and company weren’t going to play along with AID, then they could damn well craft their own legislative strategy. According to Josephson, Dungan and Larry O’Brien derided the Peace Corps people as “empire builders.” As Wofford recalled, “When we returned home [from the trip to Africa and Asia] at the end of May, we found there was a price to pay for the Peace Corps’ newfound freedom. It took Shriver a few weeks to realize what was happening: O’Brien and the White House congressional staff were doing nothing whatsoever to promote the Peace Corps Act.”

  When the White House staff’s recalcitrance became apparent to Shriver, he initially assumed that the president himself was unaware of it. Flying to Cape Cod one weekend, he mentioned this to Eunice. That weekend in Hyannis Port, she mentioned the situation to her brother. “If Sarge hadn’t demanded that it be separate,” Jack replied (as Eunice later reported it to her husband), “I would have only had to ask for a congressman’s support once and we could have got AID and the Peace Corps together. But now I left it out there by itself at their request—they wanted it that way, they didn’t want me to have it in AID where I wanted it—so let them go ahead and put the son of a bitch through.” Getting the AID bill through was going to be “goddamn difficult,” Jack told his sister, and he didn’t want to then have to turn around and worry about getting the Peace Corps through, too.

  Eunice went back to Sarge and told him: “Jack feels that you and Lyndon demanded that the Peace Corps be separate and that therefore you ought to get your damn bill through Congress by yourselves.” “The business of trading favors,” Wofford wrote in Of Kennedys and Kings, “was bad enough among politicians, but it seemed even worse to him among brothers-in-
law. Because of that family relationship, [Shriver] says, he ‘never spoke one more word to President Kennedy asking him or anybody in the White House ever to do anything for the Peace Corps—ever again.’ ”

  Shriver later recalled his reaction to Jack’s response.

  In wanting to have the Peace Corps have a separate identity … I then found myself saddled, you might say, with all of the responsibility, because I had made that request. So I said, “Okay, if it’s my baby, I will never ask anyone for help again.” And I never did.… I just took the bull by the horns and said, “Okay, it’s the Peace Corps against everybody else.” If it had to be done entirely by ourselves, I was damned well sure it was going to be done successfully.

  From the moment Eunice conveyed the president’s go-it-alone dictum for the Peace Corps, Shriver said, “I really went to work.” Shriver approached Hubert Humphrey and Henry Reuss, who, as sponsors of previous legislation relating to the Peace Corps, were natural choices to be floor managers for the bill in the Senate and the House. Humphrey’s assistance was crucial. As Senate majority whip, Humphrey had considerable influence over his fellow Democrats; and with a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he was well positioned to help shepherd the bill from committee to the Senate floor. In anticipation of having to help a Peace Corps bill through Congress, Shriver had on March 5 paid a call on the most powerful man in the House of Representatives, Lyndon Johnson’s old congressional colleague Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, seeking his advice and support.

 

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