Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  But “bigger” and “faster” were not always consonant with “better.” Some Peace Corps executives thought it was growing too fast. “There is no doubt that [the rapid speed of its launch] contributed to the troubles of the early programs and the volunteers who comprised them,” Brent Ashabranner, who succeeded Bill Moyers as deputy director of the Peace Corps, has written. “Officials of receiving countries frequently did not understand who volunteers really were or what they were to do. Usually there was not time to see if the number of volunteers requested in any way matched the number of jobs—or in fact if real jobs existed.” Shriver’s May 8 meeting with the Bureau of the Budget was a harbinger. The budget department staff kept asking Shriver for more accurate projections, and Shriver kept saying such projections were difficult if not impossible. The budget officials persisted until finally, in exasperation, Shriver explained that the Peace Corps staff was so busy running its program that it didn’t really have the staff to do long-range planning.

  POLITICS AND THE PEACE CORPS

  In 1962 many American politicians shared an almost religious conviction: Communism must be, if not conquered, then contained. Congress, the president, and just about everyone involved in American government viewed all global politics and international relations through the prism of the cold war; their counterparts on the Soviet side of the iron curtain did the same. Thus it was inevitable that, as the Peace Corps spread into neutral and even Soviet-backed countries, Communists would view it with great suspicion. And it was also inevitable that some in the US foreign policy establishment would seek to use the Peace Corps for strategic cold war purposes.

  The Soviet Union denounced the Peace Corps as a tool of capitalist imperialism; so did Maoist China and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Other leftist governments, many of them Soviet-supported, declared that the Peace Corps was simply a front for espionage operations. In March 1961, Radio Moscow reported that the Peace Corps would be engaging in “the collection of espionage information for Allen Dulles’s agency,” the CIA. In many countries the Peace Corps entered, the local Communist newspaper or Communist Party cell published attacks on the volunteers as “agents of imperialist domination.” In Peruvian shantytowns where volunteers were working in community development, some local children developed stomach upsets from the richer milk provided by the Peace Corps. Communists in the area distributed leaflets accusing the Peace Corps of “poisoning” Latin American children with “Yankee insects”—“Death to the Yankees,” Communist radio broadcasts demanded. In Somalia, one Communist newspaper alleged, female Peace Corps volunteers were seeking to corrupt and brainwash Somali nationals by teaching them the salacious movements of “the Twist.” Shriver was, to his amusement, called “a bloodthirsty Chicago butcher and sausage-maker.” And in a bit of propaganda that Shriver took great delight in repeating, Radio Moscow in 1962 broadcast that “Director of the Peace Corps, Shriver, is an old employee of the CIA.”

  In fact, Shriver had been at great pains to establish an impenetrable firewall between the Peace Corps and the CIA. With the colonial era in Africa only just ending, and with the whole world highly sensitized to the reverberations of cold war actions, the Peace Corps was bound to be regarded suspiciously by many in developing countries. It would certainly have made some strategic sense for the Peace Corps to be a tool of the Pentagon or of American espionage operations. (AID missions were already known to be rife with CIA operatives.) Aware that this sort of suspicion already floated freely through developing countries, especially in neutral-bloc and Communist countries, Shriver believed it absolutely essential that there be not the slightest hint of imperial or espionage designs associated with the Peace Corps. Even the appearance of being an intelligence-gathering operation or a US propaganda machine, Shriver thought, could do irrevocable damage to the Peace Corps’ international image, perhaps even undermining its whole reason for being. Thus he needed at all costs to keep the CIA—which in the early 1960s was just beginning to become known as somewhat of a rogue institution within the US government—away from the Peace Corps.

  One problem with monitoring the CIA was that its operations were by their nature cloaked in secrecy. Even within the United States, few people beyond those at the upper reaches of the government (and sometimes not even those people) knew much about what the CIA was doing at any given time. Shriver was aware that even if he declined to allow the spy agency to have any public or official association with the Peace Corps, he would have no way of knowing if agency operatives were infiltrating the program by posing as volunteers. The temptation to do this, Shriver understood, must be considerable. A CIA agent undercover as a volunteer in Latin America or Africa or Asia would have an easy, on-the-ground vantage point from which to do intelligence gathering.

  In order to prevent this, Shriver not only publicly made clear that such activities would be intolerable to him but also approached his brother-in-law privately and demanded assurances that the CIA not use the Peace Corps for espionage purposes. The president agreed, and he passed Shriver’s wishes directly on to Allen Dulles and, later, to John McCone, who succeeded Dulles as CIA director. This agreement became known around the Peace Corps as “the Treaty.”

  The Peace Corps’ official policy on intelligence was released on September 6, 1961. “We do not want the Peace Corps publicly identified in any way with intelligence work,” the official directive stated, “and we do not want the Peace Corps used as a vehicle for intelligence work.” The directive stated that no one who had worked in intelligence in any capacity within the previous ten years—and no one who had ever worked for the CIA or who was married to an intelligence operative—was eligible to join the Peace Corps as a staff member or volunteer. Even secretaries who had once done typing for the CIA were not allowed to work for the Peace Corps. Furthermore, according to the arrangement that Shriver worked out privately with President Kennedy, the CIA was not allowed to hire Peace Corps volunteers until ten years had elapsed since their term of service—and even then they could not be deployed as operatives in the countries where they had volunteered.

  In 1963 Shriver heard rumors that CIA operatives were exploring making use of the Peace Corps. He called the president immediately. “I’m getting rather suspicious over here that … despite your instructions … some of our friends over in the Central Intelligence Agency might think they’re smarter than anybody else and that they’re trying to stick fellows in the Peace Corps.” Call Richard Helms, Jack responded, the CIA’s deputy director, and tell him “that I don’t want anybody in there.… And if they are there, let’s get them out now.”

  The Treaty seems to have held. “All available evidence,” Gerald Rice wrote in 1985, “indicates that the Peace Corps and the CIA had a perfect relationship: they stayed as far away from each other as possible.”

  Distancing the Peace Corps from covert intelligence operations was one thing; distancing it from overt politics was another. As Shriver had indicated to the president upon his return from Guinea in the spring of 1961, the Peace Corps’ success as a political enterprise was in fact contingent on its appearing not to be a political enterprise. This apparent paradox lay at the heart of the Peace Corps’ place in cold war geopolitics.

  Jack Kennedy had planted the idea for the Peace Corps in a seedbed of idealism. The off-the-cuff remarks he made to University of Michigan students in October 1960 were aimed to appeal to youthful optimism, to the hopeful sense that the world could be made a better place for its inhabitants if Americans were willing to dedicate a few years of their lives helping developing nations. But these remarks were also unavoidably issued and interpreted in the context of the cold war struggle for influence over the nonaligned countries of the developing world. Kennedy’s subsequent comments on the Peace Corps—in which he referred to the threat posed by Communists providing technical assistance in developing countries—made this reality clear: If the United States did not send volunteers to such countries, the Soviet Union would—and that, in turn, might tip the
global ideological balance toward communism.

  One of the guiding ideas of the Peace Corps, then, was that by providing “nonpolitical” help (in the form of no-strings-attached humanitarian and development assistance) it would be helping to accomplish an important political goal—the roll-back of global communism. And precisely by being nonpolitical, by claiming idealistic and humanitarian motivations, the Peace Corps could demonstrate the power of the American ideals of freedom and democracy. The idea was that when people in the developing world got to know Americans, and to see how pure their motivations to provide aid were, they would feel compelled to learn more about the American political system. Eventually, it was hoped, foreign nationals would come to understand and appreciate the American system more. And this, of course, would be an important step in the battle against communism.

  In aiming to be simultaneously political and nonpolitical, the Peace Corps was perhaps peculiarly American. Europeans, with their longer-marinated sense of history and more sophisticated Continental conceptions of political theory, would likely have had a harder time allowing that any state-sponsored policy could be purely nonpolitical. Americans, however, with their distinctive mix of canniness and naiveté, were equipped to carry off this balancing act with sincere enthusiasm.

  Shriver himself possessed the perfect combination of genuine idealism and strategic savvy to lead this endeavor with aplomb. He had no trouble living with the contradiction inherent in using an explicitly nonpolitical program for political ends—because to him this was no contradiction. “It is important that the Peace Corps be advanced not as an arm of the cold war but as a contribution to the world community,” Shriver had written to the president in March 1961. “The Peace Corps is not a diplomatic or propaganda venture but a genuine experiment in international partnership.” And if this international partnership helped drive communism from the developing world, well, that was only as it should be; Peace Corps volunteers couldn’t help but spread democracy and freedom—and this, Shriver would explain, wasn’t a political endeavor that served the United States, but a moral one. “The Peace Corps,” the historian Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman has written, “used culture-to-culture diplomacy to make friends in nations that had little inherent power but that could without warning become theaters of the cold war.… The Peace Corps was a countermove against the Soviets and a gesture of friendship toward the third world.” Through the Peace Corps, President Kennedy became very popular—much more popular than Eisenhower—in much of the recently decolonized world. In Africa and Latin America, he became known as “the great one” and “the good man” and “the friend of the colored man everywhere.”

  THE ROMANCE WITH CONGRESS CONTINUES

  Shriver’s love affair with Congress continued, to a degree that confounded the Peace Corps’ critics. Although a few individuals in Congress—most notably Otto Passman of Louisiana—continued to attack it, the Peace Corps enjoyed remarkably cordial relations with the legislative branch after 1961. As the program rapidly grew, Shriver asked for more money, and Congress freely granted it. Part of its willingness to dispense money was a result of Shriver’s practice, all but unprecedented in the annals of government, of bringing the Peace Corps in under budget—and of actually returning unused funds, “with well-publicized flourishes,” to Congress at the end of the fiscal year. The press took to describing Shriver’s relationship with the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses as a “love affair.” The relationship was cast in romantic terms even in the Peace Corps’ internal memos. As debate began on the budget reauthorization in March 1962, Shriver was able to write to the president, “Our House Foreign Affairs hearing last Thursday was a love-feast.”

  In the House, where support for the Peace Corps had been weakest in 1961, passage of the full authorization—$64 million—seemed very likely. In the seven months since the original September vote, the Peace Corps had become so popular in Congress that even the archconservative Judge Smith of Virginia was able to come out comfortably in support of reauthorization. So unlikely was the support of Congressman Smith that Senator Fulbright, when he heard of it, raised his eyebrows and said “Shriver, I’m getting suspicious about you.” But “best of all,” Shriver told the president, “Smith permitted the Rules Committee to vote unanimously in open session for the Corps—something the House Parliamentarians tell me is almost unprecedented.” In 1961 the Peace Corps bill had barely escaped from the Rules Committee; it was allowed to the floor by only a slim 8–7 margin. What a difference a year made: In 1962 the Peace Corps bill passed unanimously out of the Rules Committee.

  Shriver’s handling of Congress was so skillful that Hubert Humphrey wrote him a letter to express his admiration and offer assistance after watching some of Shriver’s congressional testimony in late March.

  You are setting a wonderful example for other administrators, and as long as you follow the standards that you have set for yourself, you will have no trouble here on Capitol Hill. If something goes wrong with the program, come tell the committee. If you need some changes in the law, don’t try to get a legal interpretation that ignores the intent of Congress, instead, just ask Congress to change the law. You can get what you want from this Congress simply because what you are asking for you can justify.

  At an appropriations hearing in April, Otto Passman accused the Peace Corps of causing a teacher shortage in the United States by stealing all the best teachers and sending them abroad. Shriver withstood the grilling with his usual panache, producing survey statistics indicating that most Peace Corps teachers would not be in the profession if they had not joined the Peace Corps. Before April was out, the House had passed the Peace Corps legislation by a staggering 317–70 vote; in the Senate, support for the bill was so strong that no more than a voice vote was needed to pass it.

  Almost as gratifying as the size of the vote was a letter Shriver received from Georgia Delano, the wife of the Peace Corps’ general counsel William Delano. “Dear Mr. Shriver,” she wrote,

  As … I sat in the Senate gallery today listening to your verbal bouquets from the Senators, I thought it was about time you received a bouquet from a Peace Corps wife.

  On one of the nights Bill was away, some non–Peace Corps guests from New York, after much talk about the Peace Corps itself, asked “What is it like to be a Peace Corps wife?” There was a short silence and then I said it was like being married to a dedicated doctor. It is rare and beautiful when interest, concern, hope, and one’s bread-and-butter combine in one job to be done. The chance to be part of a job like this for one period of life is a wonderful gift and I want you to know that I appreciate it for Bill.

  But the congressional victory rapidly became bittersweet. On April 22, 1962, Lawrence Radley and David Crozier became the first Peace Corps volunteers to die on the job, killed when their plane crashed into a mountain in Colombia. Shriver knew that eventually, given the number of volunteers he was sending abroad, deaths during Peace Corps service were inevitable. That didn’t make the loss, or his feeling of responsibility for their demise, any easier to bear. In June he traveled to Puerto Rico with the deceased volunteers’ parents, to dedicate the new Peace Corps field training center there in honor of the two volunteers.

  While there, Crozier’s parents shared with Shriver some of the letters their son had written home to them from Colombia, where he had been working in community development. “Should it come to it, I would rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them,” Crozier wrote in one letter. “It is better to live humbly for a cause than to die nobly for one,” he wrote in another.

  The unfortunate deaths of Crozier and Radley did not cause the crises of bad publicity that some had feared. Part of the reason was that their demise had come not, as doomsayers had predicted, at the hands of murderous natives or a rare tropical disease but rather as a result of a simple accident, a commercial airplane crash that also killed many Colombians. More important, however, was the outpo
uring of sympathy from both the American and Colombian people that the volunteers’ deaths elicited. “I render homage with admiration, gratitude and love to the members of the Peace Corps who died in the terrible airplane crash,” Colombian president Guillermo León Valencia said in his inaugural address that August. “They came … to understand us, to help us … to suffer our misfortunes and dangers.” Their dying alongside Colombians represented “the cornerstones of a new American understanding” of the developing world. David Crozier’s parents wrote to Shriver, thanking him for giving their son the opportunity to serve in Colombia. “We are not sorry he went,” they said. Elena Radley and Gordon Radley, Larry Radley’s younger sister and brother, both joined the Peace Corps to finish what their older brother had started.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Psychiatrists and Astrologers

  During the 1950s a rash of books by prominent social scientists appeared, lamenting the drab, conformist, consumerist culture of the Eisenhower era. The first and most famous, David Riesman’s book The Lonely Crowd (1950), observed that Americans were becoming more conformist (or “other-directed,” as Riesman put it) and less individualistic (“inner-directed”). Other books, like C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951) and William Whyte’s Organization Man (1956), followed, combining with dozens of magazine articles on the subject to raise alarm about the increasing dullness, weakness, and moral softness of American life. Although some argued that America’s conformist, collectivist mentality was what was driving its tremendous postwar economic growth, by 1960 the general consensus among thoughtful Americans was that their country had gone soft in the belly.