Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Also, Shriver felt at some level directly responsible for the well-being of each and every volunteer in the Corps. If something—tropical disease; wild animal attack; suicidal depression brought on by acute culture shock; Communist cooptation; assault by an anti-American mob; rape; a hiking or boating or climbing accident—were to befall one of them, it would be on his conscience. As he later wrote, “I used to wake up in the middle of the night with the question tearing at me: How are we ever going to protect the health of the Peace Corps volunteers? Could we go to the parents of this nation and say to them, yes, we want your sons and daughters, and admit at the same time that for two years they would be overseas—many of them in primitive and remote towns and villages—with no medical assistance?” Shriver knew that in the event of the inevitable Peace Corps death or disaster, it would be up to him to face the victim’s parents and tell them what had happened.

  Shriver didn’t have to wait long for his first crisis involving a volunteer. Margery Michelmore, a recent honors graduate of Smith College, was one of the first thirty-seven volunteers sent to Nigeria, arriving in Lagos on September 26, 1961. From Lagos, her cohort traveled to the University College of Ibadan, in the country’s western region, where they were to complete their Peace Corps training in-country before beginning their work.

  Twenty-three years old at the time, Michelmore was by all accounts smart, poised, and mature. But she had grown up in a wealthy manufacturing family in Massachusetts and when, after her seven-week training program at Harvard, she arrived in the city of Ibadan, she was stunned by the poverty and squalor that confronted her there. She wrote a postcard to her boyfriend in the United States that recounted her dismay—but also her fascination—at what was to be her home for the next two years. “Dear Bobbo,” she wrote,

  I wanted you to see the incredible and fascinating city we were in. With all the training we had, we really were not prepared for the squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions rampant both in the city and in the bush. We had no idea what “underdeveloped” meant. It really is a revelation and after we got over the initial horrified shock, a very rewarding experience. Everyone except us lives in the streets, cooks in the streets, sells in the streets, and even goes to the bathroom in the streets.

  Her note (with its description of Ibadan as “incredible and fascinating” and of her living there “a very rewarding experience”) was not by any means wholly negative. But she dropped it on the way to the post office, and to the Nigerian students at the University of Ibadan who found it, Michelmore’s postcard was offensive. “No one likes to be called primitive,” the Nigerian ambassador to the United States subsequently explained.

  Within a few hours, Nigerian students had distributed thousands of copies of the postcard’s text, and small riots were erupting in the men’s dormitory where the male Peace Corps trainees were lodged. Peace Corps volunteers were banned from the student union. By the next day students had organized a large demonstration against the United States, in which volunteers were labeled “agents of imperialism” and members “of an international spy ring.” The dropped postcard became front-page news in all the Nigerian papers for weeks. Editorial comment was “bitter.” There were angry denunciations of the Peace Corps and calls for its banishment from the country.

  Wire services picked up the story, and when it was published in the United States the gloating by Peace Corps critics was palpable. The incident had proved their argument that “immature young Americans would do nothing but get the U.S. in trouble” and “[provide] glorious ammunition for Moscow and Peking.” American newspapers published critical articles, arguing that “the Peace Corps idea had now been exposed for what it was: a dangerous, unworkable exercise in do-goodism.” Former president Eisenhower, speaking at a Republican Party fund-raiser, noted that there was now “postcard evidence” that the Peace Corps was unworkable. Why don’t we send volunteers to the moon? Ike joked. It’s underdeveloped, but the volunteers can’t cause trouble there.

  It seemed to some in Shriver’s inner circle that this could be the beginning of the end. Congress had just passed legislation with trumpets and fanfare—and now the Peace Corps was falling on its face. There was great pressure to pull the entire volunteer contingent out of Nigeria. “The Peace Corps could be thrown out at any moment,” Wiggins recalled the staff at 806 Connecticut thinking. “It could be the domino theory—first we’re kicked out of Nigeria, then out of Ghana, and so on.”

  But Shriver did not panic. He met with President Kennedy—who was aggrieved at the bad publicity the situation was generating for his administration—and assured his brother-in-law that he could bring the situation under control quickly without terminating Peace Corp relations with Nigeria. After cabling back and forth frantically with Sam Proctor, the Peace Corps representative in Nigeria, Shriver decided that Michelmore should be brought home to the United States but that the other volunteers would stay.

  Margery Michelmore, meanwhile, to escape all the vitriol being poured on her in Ibadan, had gone to Lagos to stay with the American family of a deputy at the American embassy, and she had written an open letter of apology to Nigerians in which she offered to resign from the Peace Corps. This was mimeographed and posted on the campus at Ibadan. She expressed to Peace Corps administrators in Nigeria her desire to go home and her belief that she would no longer be able to volunteer effectively.

  But Shriver was concerned not to appear that he was abandoning a Peace Corps volunteer, or forcing her out of the program, at the first sign of trouble. So he conceived the idea of having the president “invite” Margery back to the United States to work at 806 Connecticut in the Division of Volunteer Support. Michelmore flew home to New England for a rest and then began working at Peace Corps headquarters. She stayed there for a few months—long enough not to embarrass either Shriver or the president—before moving back home.

  Coverage of the incident continued in both the Nigerian and the American press for several weeks, but the intensity of the criticism rapidly diminished. Although Michelmore remained for many years the most infamous Peace Corps volunteer, the furor over her dropped postcard soon abated, to the great relief of Shriver and his staff.

  A consensus soon developed at 806 Connecticut that the postcard incident had been a blessing. “It was like a vaccination,” Wiggins said. “The greatest thing that could have happened to the Peace Corps in the beginning was a postcard from a volunteer mentioning that people pee in the streets in Nigeria.” Everyone knew that the Peace Corps would eventually “get sick,” Wiggins said, but no one knew how or from what. “Well, it was Margery—a very, very minor bug in the system. But boy, did it take. Since then, the Peace Corps has had rape, manslaughter, bigamy, disappearances, volunteers going insane, meddling in local politics, being eaten by crocodiles, but never again did it get a bad play in national news.” “In the long run,” Wofford wrote, “Michelmore’s debacle added significantly to the Peace Corps’ sensitivity and success.”

  After the Michelmore incident, Shriver had a new section added to The Peace Corps Handbook. “Like the proverbial goldfish,” the Handbook said, “the Peace Corps volunteer will be ‘in view’ constantly.… Your every action will be watched, weighed, and considered representative of the entire Peace Corps.… You must learn—and respect—the local customs, manners, taboos, religions and traditions, remembering always that the slightest ‘goof’ will quickly be seen and talked of by many persons.”

  The Peace Corps stayed on in Nigeria. On November 28, just six weeks after the incident, Prime Minster Balewa issued a warm welcome to the second contingent of volunteers to his country; by the end of 1961, the first two contingents of volunteers had been joined by a third. By the time the first volunteers left, two years later, Nigerian students were lamenting, “No amount of praise showered on [the volunteers] for their work is too much.… To our Peace Corps friends about to leave us, we say: We are indeed sorry to see you go. We shall miss you and your services.” It was sa
id that the Nigerians had become much more favorably disposed to the Peace Corps when a volunteer saved a drowning Nigerian. Shriver didn’t buy that. “Dramatic incidents, even symbolic acts,” he said, “do not count as much as the quiet work, the daily drudgery of volunteers on the job.”

  THE CONSCIENCE OF THE PEACE CORPS

  The postcard incident reinforced for Shriver the importance of identifying and addressing problems early, before the press got wind of them. Shriver was already wary of the institutionalized blindness that regular bureaucracies naturally fostered in their executives: each person in a corporate hierarchy, he believed, had a vested interest in telling the person above him only what that higher person wanted to hear. With bad news getting filtered out on its way up the ladder, leaders would hear only good news. Shriver believed this could be crippling to an organization. A sign that hung prominently in his office declared: “Bring me only bad news. Good news weakens me.”

  Establishing this principle via platitude, however, was not enough. Shriver wanted it inscribed into the very administrative structure of the Peace Corps. Hence, in the spring of 1961, as the earliest selected volunteers began entering training programs at sites across the country and in Puerto Rico, Shriver and Bill Haddad conceived the idea of sending observers from outside the regular organizational hierarchy to evaluate the training programs. Haddad, a longtime newspaperman, believed deeply in the value of investigative reporting. By sending Peace Corps–employed investigators to report directly to the Washington office the truth of what they saw in the field, Haddad advised, Shriver would have a much fuller knowledge of how things were actually working than if he had relied only on the usual organizational channels. Moreover—and the postcard incident brought this home powerfully—if investigative reporters working for the Peace Corps could discover scandal or incompetence before investigative reporters working for the press did, this would serve (to use Warren Wiggins’s analogy) as a potent inoculation against bad publicity. The idea, as Shriver put it, was “to get the Time magazine story before Time magazine did.”

  Bill Haddad became the Peace Corps’ associate director for the Division of Planning and Evaluation. Haddad in turn hired Charlie Peters, who had worked on the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia, as the Peace Corps’ first chief of evaluation. Originally sent over to the Peace Corps as a patronage hire—which did not immediately endear him to Shriver, who believed patronage placements were generally of inferior quality—Peters soon impressed the Peace Corps director with his ability to cut through red tape, which he did while negotiating for Peace Corps training sites in Puerto Rico in May 1961.

  Peters was sent initially to the University of California at Berkeley to observe the first group of volunteers being trained for a tour of duty in Ghana and then to Texas Western College in El Paso, where volunteers were being trained to do surveying in Tanganyika. As the first Peace Corps “evaluator,” Peters was not a popular figure among the organization’s rank and file. But he was invaluable to Shriver. “The advantage of the evaluation process began to emerge,” Peters recalled. “I was reporting problems that Shriver had not heard through the regular chain of command. This was good for Shriver but did not bring instant delight to the chain of command. The bureaucrats, who were not aware of the problems I was reporting or, if they were, had chosen to conceal them, counterattacked, guns blazing, accusing me of being a spy and being completely unqualified to evaluate what they were doing.”

  Peters had planned to work for the Peace Corps for only a few months before returning to his West Virginia law practice, where he hoped to begin plotting his path to the governor’s mansion. The assaults on him by the “chain of command” only made him more eager to return home. But Haddad prevailed on him to stay longer; Haddad also persuaded Shriver to ignore the angry squawking from the subjects of Peters’s evaluations: the fact that these people were angry and disliked Peters, Haddad said, only proved that Peters was doing his job. At first Shriver was uncertain—he could see how the process of evaluation was threatening to people in the ranks—but after the Margery Michelmore affair he became convinced of the necessity of the evaluation process. He and Haddad pressed Peters to stay on, and in February 1962 Peters became the founding chief of the Peace Corps’ Evaluation Division.

  In this position, Peters remained unavoidably unpopular with many at Peace Corps headquarters, as well as among the Peace Corps representatives—the administrators charged with running programs and overseeing the volunteers in foreign countries—whose work Shriver had ordered him to evaluate with merciless objectivity. Many times, under assault by various Peace Corps representatives and higher-ups from within the Washington headquarters, Peters thought he was about to get fired; other times, beleaguered and harassed, he felt he ought to quit. “It got to the point,” Peters recalled, “where I knew that even though it was clear that some of the [people in Wiggins’s Planning, Development, and Operations Division (PDO)] respected me and even kind of liked me on a social level, they wanted me out, and the sooner the better. I was feeling harassed and scared of their hostility to the point that I’d avoid them … when I saw them coming down the hall. I’d duck into the men’s room or slip into someone else’s office.”

  But Shriver had become so convinced of the value of the Evaluation Division that he almost always publicly backed his evaluation chief against the complaints of the bureaucracy, and Peters stayed on for seven years. By the time he left, Peters had been respectfully dubbed “the conscience of the Peace Corps” by his admiring peers.

  At first, Peters alone constituted the whole of the Evaluation Division. The first reports Peters and his staff sent back from the field were merely brief outlines of how they thought various training programs were working. Over time, however, the evaluations became much longer and more complex. Whole teams of evaluators would go overseas for weeks or months at a time to examine a country’s program. Shriver began enthusiastically recruiting high-profile journalists, academics, and ex-government officials to serve as evaluators. Richard Rovere, Calvin Trillin, James Michener, Renata Adler, John McPhee, and others wrote evaluations. This raised the Peace Corps’ glamour quotient, but it also made the evaluation reports themselves more colorful and readable. Shriver also pointed out that hiring these famous writers to do evaluations would also have the collateral effect of turning influential opinion-makers into Peace Corps advocates.

  Nothing, Shriver decreed, was to be off limits. “As an evaluator,” Peters wrote, “you have a duty to raise hell.” This hell-raising contributed to the already considerable feelings of tension that permeated the organization. In Pakistan, the entire overseas administrative staff was fired as a result of an evaluation. Although evaluations were marked “Eyes Only” and submitted straight to the director’s office, they were shown to the subjects of the evaluations, who often took umbrage at them. Harris Wofford, who in 1962 would become the Peace Corps representative in Ethiopia, carried on a long correspondence with his friend Shriver, denying the accuracy of the Ethiopian evaluations. The Peace Corps representative in Liberia once wrote a twenty-page rebuttal to an evaluation.

  Shriver himself would at times question whether the Evaluation Division was worth the trouble it caused, but he valued having the intelligence it provided. Without the Evaluation Division, Shriver would never have had as complete a picture of his organization as he did. As Brent Ashabranner observed in 1971, “I doubt that any federal agency has ever taken as completely honest a look at itself as the Peace Corps did through its evaluation division.” Equally important, Shriver valued anything that kept members of his growing staff on their toes. His abiding fear was that the Peace Corps would ossify into an entrenched bureaucracy, which might cause it to lose its creativity, flexibility, and crusading spirit. Peters’s Evaluation Division, if nothing else, was a guard against complacency.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Timberlawn

  Despite his peripatetic travel schedule, by the late autumn of 1961 Shriver was final
ly beginning to settle into life in Washington. Through his friend Merle Thorpe, he found a picturesque 30-acre estate in Rockville, Maryland, just northwest of Bethesda. The estate was known as Timberlawn, and the owner was looking for a new tenant.

  When Shriver had first visited the house in July, he had fallen in love with the property, and in particular its spacious backyard: more than 25 acres of the most beautiful lawn he had ever seen rolling down from the house into a valley. At the end of the lawn, where the property ended, was a fence and a road and then another 250 acres of hills and woods and farmland. Looking at it, he was reminded of the old Shriver homestead in Union Mills. When the realtor told him that his family could have access not only to the 25 acres of lawn but also to much of the acreage that lay beyond it, Shriver decided on the spot that this was where his family would live. By the time Eunice arrived from Chicago over Labor Day, bringing with her seven-year-old Bobby, five-year-old Maria, and two-year-old Timothy, the new Shriver home was ready for them.

  Timberlawn became a bustling bucolic outpost of the New Frontier. An epicenter of social life among the nation’s governing elite, Timberlawn’s parties were known for the eclectic array of guests they attracted: senators, representatives, and the president and his staff; high-powered lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court justices; business executives and millionaire financiers; labor leaders and community organizers; famous professors and best-selling authors; professional football, baseball, and tennis players; foreign ambassadors and heads of state; and of course cardinals, bishops, and priests. The parties the Shrivers threw at Timberlawn were like the parties they had thrown in Chicago, only on a far grander scale—interesting, unpredictable, full of political chatter. John F. Kennedy’s White House was known for its youth and vitality, and for the constant stream of interesting and talented people who passed through its orbit. Timberlawn was like that, but with a joie de vivre distinctively its own.