Shriver and Moyers and their aides had paid multiple visits to Passman, where they had been treated to his florid denunciations of the Peace Corps. Oddly enough, in all the time he spent cultivating the colorful, flinty Southerner, Shriver had grown to like and respect him. That feeling was reciprocated. In his memo to Kennedy of August 2, Shriver had noted that he and Moyers “may even have laid the foundation for at least the beginnings of a good working relationship with Congressman Passman.”
This didn’t mean that Passman would make life any easier politically for Shriver. “You know, Ah lahk you Saahge,” Passman would drawl, “but the Peace Corps is a terrible idea and I’m not going to vote for its full appropriation.” In conversations in his House office, Passman was ever the courtly gentleman, but he warned that he would savage Shriver and his team during congressional testimony. “Nothin pehsonal, Saahge,” Passman would say before grilling him relentlessly on the House floor.
The day before the House vote, opponents of the bill were trying to delay action on the bill until 1962, or to slash its funding in half. Shriver, wanting to leave as little as possible to chance, continued to lobby individual congressmen, spending all his free time on Capitol Hill. This effort paid off in an unexpected way. As Shriver recalled, “When the Peace Corps legislation was on the floor of the House, I still did not have an office of my own [in the Capitol], and so I was sitting in a cubbyhole off a corridor in the House Office Building making frantic phone calls to my political strategists. Old Judge Howard Smith, a Virginia representative and the apotheosis of conservatism, walked by and shouted, ‘Hey, Shriver! What are you doing there?’ I explained my predicament. And this courtly curmudgeon—who might never in his life agree with anything I stood for—took me into his office, sat me in his chair, and instructed his secretary to give me the run of the place and the use of his phone.”
This was a significant gesture. Congressman Smith was, as Shriver noted, a hard-core conservative and a likely opponent of the Peace Corps bill. Smith was also chairman of the House Rules Committee, in which position he had the power to prevent bills he didn’t like from even getting to the House floor. By September, Shriver had personally called on Smith four or five times; as a consequence, the two men had struck up a cheerfully adversarial friendship.
Smith seemed to develop a strong respect for Shriver. Still, Smith wasn’t about to use personal affection as a justification for voting in favor of a bill that his conservative constituency loathed. He couldn’t vote for the Peace Corps legislation. So he absented himself from the Capitol on the day the vote was to take place, claiming pressing business elsewhere. This meant that although he wouldn’t be casting a vote in favor of the Peace Corps, he could at least avoid having to cast a vote against it.
Better yet, Smith allowed Shriver the continued use of his office while the congressman was away from the Capitol. This was not just a matter of convenience. As Rules Committee chairman, Smith had an office directly off the House floor. The congressman was sending a powerful message to his colleagues: I may not be here to vote on this bill, Smith seemed to be saying to his congressional peers, but you can all see that I’ve given its principal advocate the use of my office and you can infer my thoughts on this matter from that. “I had the chairman’s goddamned office,” Shriver recalled. “And anybody who had any doubt in his mind about the bill was on my side right away. It was not that they were voting for the Peace Corps; these guys were voting because they wanted to maintain a nice relationship with the Rules chairman.”
With Smith’s tacit support, the bill sailed through: On September 14, the House passed the Peace Corps bill by a margin of 288 to 97. After a House-Senate conference reconciling their two bills, President Kennedy signed the Peace Corps Act on September 22, establishing the Peace Corps on a permanent basis.
Of all the bills Kennedy sent to Congress, only the uncontroversial disarmament agency bill had passed by a larger margin in the House than the Peace Corps bill. Much of this was attributable to the cultural climate: The pent-up idealism of the 1950s was ready for expression, and the Peace Corps was its outlet. Public support for the idea had been strong ever since Kennedy had first raised it on the campaign trail. Moreover, despite the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was still enjoying his honeymoon period with Congress. With the president and the public so strongly behind the Peace Corps, Congress felt considerable pressure to fall in line behind it as well.
Even so, Shriver’s personal role in getting the legislation passed was remarkable. The speed with which he conceived and threw together a new organization, the success he had in coaxing invitations from wary developing nations, the remarkable two-man assault he and Moyers staged on Capitol Hill—all this helped give even some diffident members of Congress great confidence in the Peace Corps director. (“If we had ten Sargent Shrivers we could conquer the world,” said Wyoming senator Gale McGee.) Many of them, in fact, later said that even though they disliked the Peace Corps, they had voted for the bill because they thought so highly of Shriver. President Kennedy paid tribute to this notion when, as he signed the bill on September 22, he turned to his right, grinned, and said, “Also, I want to express my esteem for the most effective lobbyist on the Washington scene, Mr. Sargent Shriver.”
As the New York Times reported a few months later, the passage of the Peace Corps legislation “erased the impression long held in some Washington circles that Shriver is merely another Kennedy-in-law, a glamorous Yale dilettante who espouses liberal causes … and married the boss’s daughter Eunice. Now, he suddenly begins to look like one of those rare animals in Washington: the fellow who can get things done.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Shriverizing
Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man—and to a remarkable degree, the Peace Corps was a direct reflection of the man who first led it; in some sense, the Peace Corps was Sargent Shriver. Bradley Patterson, the Peace Corps’ first executive secretary, recalled that Shriver “[projected] himself onto his staff and everybody who worked for or had relations with the Peace Corps.” “Stylistically,” according to Albert Meisel, one of the Peace Corps’ first training officers, the program “was 100 percent Shriver—kind of an eagle-scout-on-the-make style.” The president was saying, “Let’s get this country moving again … and there we were, most of us about thirty [years old], in a huddle with the president’s brother-in-law, making things happen! I think that the Peace Corps was probably even more exciting, innovative, and daredevil than anything in the New Deal.” Journalists and historians have made similar observations. As Gerald Rice put it in The Bold Experiment, “No organization chart could possibly convey Shriver’s all-pervading influence. Since everything important went through him, the image of the Peace Corps and Sargent Shriver became virtually a single entity.” Or as Robert Liston wrote in 1964, the Peace Corps “is one hundred per cent Shriver, a uniquely personal and unorthodox operation, any appraisal of which is in essence an appraisal of Shriver himself.… Every thought, deed or document associated with the organization must bear the stamp of his personality.”
The new agency reflected Shriver’s distinctive strengths and weaknesses alike. Perhaps his greatest strength was his powerful idealism, which—drawing on the ambient hopefulness of the time—saturated the entire program, making Peace Corps staff and volunteers feel as though they were part of a crusade, or a higher cause.
Another of Shriver’s strengths was his intellectual flexibility. Peace Corps meetings were famously free-for-all, with ideas and arguments flying around the room. Almost no idea was too beyond the pale to get a hearing; no person was too low level, or too far outside of the director’s inner circle, to have his or her ideas taken seriously. Shriver himself was a maelstrom of creativity—but not always productively so. “Shriver’s mind churned out thousands of these ideas a week,” Albert Meisel recalled. “He would pop them on anyone at anytime. You might get a call at midnight or at 7:00 a.m. He mi
ght collar you in the men’s room.… He was crazy about these ideas, and many of these ideas were, in fact, crazy.”
Shriver’s openness to new experiences and cultures made him an ideal evangelist for the Peace Corps overseas. His easy embrace of all that was exotic in other countries—the food, the language, the customs—conveyed an enthusiasm for learning about their cultures that was entirely sincere. Indeed, it was in large part this openness, as it trickled down and saturated the agency’s institutional culture, that made the Peace Corps such a public relations success internationally. It may be that only a program that sought not merely to assist developing countries but also genuinely to learn from them could have so successfully overcome the doubts of those who suspected all American foreign aid projects of harboring neocolonialist ambitions. Shriver’s almost childlike wonder at all that was new—new people, new cultures—was completely unfeigned. In some ways, infusing the Peace Corps with his natural openness, curiosity, and wonder was the most important thing he did.
If the agency’s institutional culture benefited from his strengths, it also suffered from his weaknesses. Sometimes his strengths were his weaknesses. “Shriver’s most serious fault was also his greatest virtue,” Charlie Peters has written. “He set goals that goaded the organization to action but the pressure to meet those goals sometimes caused his subordinates to err.”
Many have observed that Shriver’s capacity for hard work was superhuman; the frenzied work ethic that permeated the Peace Corps inspired some people to paroxysms of effort they otherwise never could have achieved. “When you come to work at this place,” one Peace Corps staffer said in the mid-1960s, “you must be prepared to run a 100-yard sprint for 10 miles every day.” But Shriver couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t always work as hard as he did, and he pushed his staff to the point of collapse. Some who couldn’t keep up dropped out. Others suffered ill health. Others saw their marriages fall apart. (“Family men abandoned family for the greater glory of saving the world,” as Coates Redmon put it.) “When you join the Shriver team,” one Peace Corps veteran recalled, “you put yourself in line for an ulcer, a heart attack, or a nervous breakdown. I held on until I was forced to quit by all three.”
A representative mechanism was the “buzzer bomb.” As the Peace Corps staff expanded and began to fill up several floors at 806 Connecticut, Shriver grew frustrated at not having all his top aides within shouting distance at all times. Thus he had a primitive intercom system installed that allowed him to buzz his staff offices. Significantly, the intercom worked only one way; Shriver’s aides could not buzz him back. Staff members learned that the sudden eruption of dissonant buzzing in one of their offices meant the director was summoning them—and that they had better hustle quickly to Shriver’s office. “The secretaries were just terrified of the thing,” Donovan McClure, of the public affairs office, recalled. “They knew it was Shriver in person, that he wanted something impossible.… So, when it went off, they’d jump up and come screaming after us.”
“A job on the Peace Corps staff,” Gerald Rice wrote, “was not for the timid or stuffy. The atmosphere was one of bedlam, the hours were late, the rivalries were fierce and, of course, everyone was playing to Shriver.” Staff meetings, where policy was made, could be “bloody affairs.” Grown men were known to burst into tears when caught underprepared. As Brent Ashabranner, the first Peace Corps representative in Nigeria and later the agency’s deputy director, recalled, “Shriver’s style of management was to encourage fierce competition and debate among his key staff and to make policy by being the arbiter of who had come out best in the competition.” Although Ashabranner remembered Shriver as an “exciting leader” who always kept morale high, “there was always a winner and a loser in the staff clashes; many wounds were licked and tension was an everyday ingredient of Peace Corps life in Washington.”
Shriver also had the habit—which he had picked up from Joe Kennedy—of assigning multiple people to do the same task independently, often without telling them; Shriver would then take the best final product and discard all the others. At times, this tactic produced brilliant results. At other times, however, the forced competition bred resentment, suspicion, and feelings of redundancy.
Another Shriverian trait that could be a strength as well as a weakness was his allergy to bureaucracy. He wanted at all times to retain maximum flexibility for his organization, often to the point of doing away with all bureaucratic protocol. One early staff member recalled that whenever anyone proposed doing something according to an established bureaucratic precedent, Shriver would reject the proposal as a matter of principle. “The worst possible argument that could be made [to Shriver] was that the Department of State did it that way. The second weakest argument was that it had been done that way before. The strongest argument was that it had never been done before and let’s try it.” Or as Shriver put it in a memo to his staff in December 1961, “There will be little tolerance of a ‘tomorrow’ philosophy or an ‘it can’t be done because it hasn’t been done before’ attitude.”
Shriver deprecated rules and violated existing ones with glee. To him, picayune regulations were not important; the spirit of the place was what mattered. “Working with the Peace Corps,” he wrote in a memo to his staff, “should not be like working with another government agency. We have a special mission which can only be accomplished if everyone believes in it and works for it in a manner consistent with the ideals of service and volunteerism.”
Shriver’s ad hoc approach to establishing policy often put him at odds with officials from other government departments. Once, when someone from the Bureau of the Budget asked Shriver for a long-term budget projection, Shriver burst out laughing. “Look,” he said, “it’s a very legitimate question, but how in the hell do I know where we’re going to be in five years?”
Shriver, aware of his own administrative untidiness, brought in better-disciplined minds—like those of Wiggins, Josephson, Moyers, and Bill Kelly, the director of the Division of Contracts and Logistics—who could rein in his tendency toward chaos. These men could also, when necessary, temper his great idealism and openness, two other great Shriver virtues that could at times become faults.
Even hemmed in by his tough-minded deputies, Shriver managed to imprint himself on every aspect of the Peace Corps. Everything was, as his staff put it, “Shriverized.” He made not only all the large decisions; he had a hand in most of the small ones as well. It sometimes seemed as though he wanted to analyze every overseas program, interview every prospective employee, personally approve every training site, review every press release, and formulate all office policies himself.
His relentless energy ground people down and wore them out. And his soaring idealism and his concern for humanity could sometimes seem purely abstract. “He can be indifferent to the point of callous about the problems of the bloke working beside him,” complained one Peace Corps staffer.
Yet despite all the hardships he imposed, Shriver remained much beloved by the Peace Corps staff. The journalist Robert Liston, writing in 1964, concluded that “hardly anyone on his staff dislikes him. The same is true of those he has dismissed or who have left his employ, beaten down by the pressures or disgusted by the unending righteousness.” As one staff member put it,
There’s no getting around it. The man is hypnotic. You can be sitting at your desk, seething at all the work he’s piled on you. Seething because you know you’ve got to do it fast and well and that if you don’t, he’ll chew you out in that gentle, soft-spoken, devastating way of his. But let him summon you to his office. Just spend a few minutes with him there, and you leave the place walking on air, convinced he’s the greatest guy in the world and that anyone who doesn’t work for the Peace Corps, or who does and is thinking of quitting, is a first-class stinker.
Life at the Peace Corps was fun. Frank Mankiewicz was the first Peace Corps head of Latin American operations and went on to run presidential campaigns for Bobby Kennedy and George
McGovern. He recalls, “The thing about the Peace Corps was that—more than anything else I’ve done—it was fun all the time. It was serious business but there wasn’t a day went by that you couldn’t laugh about something.” Again, this was a clear reflection of the director; Shriver himself was clearly having so much fun that his staff couldn’t help having fun, too. Important staff meetings, for all their seriousness and competitive tension, were often broken up by torrents of hilarity. Bill Haddad has observed that the early days of the Peace Corps were like a war movie without horror: all camaraderie and joking and desperate situations and narrow escapes and high hopes. At times, the Peace Corps was less like a war movie than a series of scenes from a Frank Capra film, or a screwball romantic comedy from the 1940s: full of comic high jinks, madcap antics, and boisterous repartee. This helped mitigate what some outside the organization found to be the agency’s insufferable earnestness about the righteousness of the Peace Corps cause.
THE DROPPED POSTCARD
The emphatic passage of the Peace Corps Act by Congress had been a great triumph for Shriver and his new program. But now, having been given the money, the Peace Corps had to deliver the goods. Conservative opponents continued to skewer the agency, mocking its jejune idealism and warning that disaster awaited. Some liberals, too, were worried. Eleanor Roosevelt met with Shriver and expressed her fears about women being sent off alone into the jungles of Africa.
Privately, Shriver himself worried. If anything went wrong, all the goodwill he had generated over eight months could vanish instantly. The critics were watching for any misstep. All it would take was a dead volunteer or an angry host country, and all the hard work he had done getting the program legislated could unravel.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 33