Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Indeed, it was in large part as a reaction to this consensus that Jack Kennedy conceived the Peace Corps; the calls to “sacrifice” and to “idealism” that suffused his campaign rhetoric and inaugural address were designed to wake Americans from their self-perceived torpor. And many of Shriver’s early public statements on the Peace Corps consciously made reference to the hardship that volunteers would be willingly subjecting themselves to; this was supposed to demonstrate, as Shriver often said, that Americans were not as “soft” as they were thought to be.

  The vogue for “generational” studies in the 1950s and early 1960s brought together the disparate realms of politics, pop psychology, and research psychiatry. In the summer of 1962, one young clinical associate at the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) found himself charting a new course across all three of these realms.

  That July, Joseph English was wrapping up his third year of psychiatric residency at NIMH. English had been in college when the generation just ahead of him returned from wartime service. As a college student he had been struck by how different the formative experiences were between his own generation and the veterans getting reassimilated into “normal” American life. The veterans, only a few years older than he was, seemed eons more mature. The experience of war had clearly transformed them, made them grow; English’s own generation had no shared experience like that to bond them together or to forge their individual and collective identities so distinctly.

  Not that life was easy for the veterans, English learned. As he began studying psychiatry in medical school, he read studies about what a difficult time some combat veterans had adjusting to life after the war. The contrast between peace and war was so stark that many veterans were suffering what amounted to severe culture shock. Even though life was safer and easier for veterans during peacetime, it had lost some of its moral clarity. During the war, these men had been fighting for freedom from tyranny; their enemies—Nazism, fascism, Japanese imperialism—were clear. Now, although the cold war had restored some clarity (Soviet communism was now the enemy), daily life, in all its golden-era material abundance, felt disorienting.

  For English, these observations presented an interesting empirical question: Was there something intrinsic in the nature of 1950s youth, or in their upbringing, that made them seem at once self-centered and conformist? Or was this self-centeredness rather a function of the times in which they lived—a function of there being, in other words, no great mobilizing idea or war or experience to inspire them? Most social scientists believed (along with Kennedy and Shriver) that it was the latter. The times—the 1950s of Truman and Eisenhower—were simply not conducive to inspiration and idealism.

  As a concept, the Peace Corps had piqued English’s interest because it had created an outlet for youthful idealism. He also wondered about the psychological adjustments volunteers would have to make as they moved into and later out of foreign cultures. But English was trying to build a psychiatric career; the Peace Corps wasn’t his concern.

  At 806 Connecticut Avenue, however, it was becoming apparent that there were a growing number of problems overseas. Some of these problems had to do with the political problems of the host countries. But most seemed to stem from one of two related general causes: The first was poorly administered, insufficiently structured overseas programs; the second was unhappy volunteers. The evaluation reports of Charlie Peters’s staff made clear that many programs were ineffectual and that many volunteers were frustrated and angry.

  The volunteers were, as Shriver constantly emphasized, the lifeblood of the Peace Corps. Fundamentally, if the volunteers were unhappy, then the program was in a very important sense a failure. Shriver and his staff read and discussed some of the more unfavorable program evaluations. In some cases, the causes were clear and the problems easily resolved: Some jeeps might be sent to this country (where the volunteers had trouble getting to their work sites), or the Peace Corps representative might be replaced in that one (where administrative mismanagement was clearly the problem). But in many places, finding the source of the problem was trickier. If volunteers felt feckless and unhappy, was that an indictment of the host country (in which case countries needed to be better chosen)? Of the overseas management and program design (in which case the Peace Corps needed to design its programs more carefully and hire better administrative personnel)? Of the volunteer selection and distribution process (in which case screening needed to be refined)? Or was it, in fact, simply the nature of the beast? That is, if you sent people from an affluent society to a developing society for a long period of time, was it inevitable that they would suffer periods of culture shock or depression? And, if so, how should the volunteers—and the Peace Corps as an organization—cope with that?

  Shriver’s reaction to all these questions was, in May 1962, to hire a team of Peace Corps psychiatrists to evaluate the situation and then to help the agency craft solutions. This was a controversial decision. First, the practice of psychoanalysis had become relatively widespread in the United States after World War II (in part because many important psychoanalysts had fled as refugees from Europe to the United States before and during the war), but many people not familiar with the field still thought of it as quackery. And outside of science research institutes and espionage agencies (where psychiatrists studied propaganda techniques and the like), one wasn’t likely to find many psychiatrists on the federal payroll. Yet here was Shriver, proposing to make them an integral part of the Peace Corps operation.

  Shriver’s rationale for hiring psychiatrists was rooted, in part, in his experiences with the Kennedy Foundation. When he and Eunice canvassed the country’s universities, they found that many of the few people working in mental retardation research were in departments of psychology or psychiatry. Shriver, English later wrote, “knew far more than most men in government about psychiatry. He recognized that Peace Corps volunteers would be more vulnerable to psychological stress than to amoeba.” Shriver was also motivated by desperation. He needed answers fast; psychiatry might provide them.

  Peace Corps psychiatrists, as Shriver discussed with his medical staff at a meeting in June 1962, could help the program in at least several ways. First, they could help the Medical Division during volunteer training to select out the medically unfit. Second, they could help to “select in” those individuals psychologically equipped to cope with stressful situations abroad. Third, they could meet one-on-one with volunteers-in-training to help provide forewarning of culture shock: a process of “strengthening the healthy” for their service abroad. And, finally, the psychiatrists could be made available to travel to host countries to meet with volunteers on an as-needed consulting basis.

  Through a byzantine series of connections, Shriver got Joe English’s name and brought him in for an interview at 806 Connecticut. “Look,” Shriver told him, “despite our best efforts we may have a volunteer who succeeds in assassinating a foreign minister of government. And then I’m going to find myself up in front of some hostile congressional committee, getting grilled by Otto Passman. And they’re going to ask me how I could have let anyone into the Peace Corps who would do something like this. In that situation, I have to have somebody to punt to—and that’s going to be the psychiatrist.”

  When English returned to NIMH after a few days’ vacation, he was summoned to the office of the institute’s director, who told him he had been requested by the Peace Corps to serve as chief of psychiatry and that he was to report to 806 Connecticut immediately. On English’s second day of work, a Tuesday in August, a secretary tracked him down and said that Shriver was on the phone and wanted to speak to him. “Be at the airport Thursday morning,” Shriver told him. “And make sure you’ve got your passport and have had your shots. We’re going to the Far East.”

  This was only the second conversation Shriver had had with English, and he was telling him to get ready—in forty-eight hours—for a trip to the Far East. Why him? When he asked some of his new colleagues they said,
“Well, you’re a doctor aren’t you? You’ll probably be responsible for ensuring Shriver doesn’t get stricken by some horrible tropical disease—and for curing him if he does.”

  English reported dutifully to the airport Thursday morning and met his travel companions: Shriver; Bill Kelly, the Peace Corps’ director of contracts and logistics; Dick Graham, the deputy associate director for public affairs; and Douglas Kiker, the new director of public information. Shriver’s goal for this trip was to visit existing Peace Corps programs in Laos and the Philippines, where there had been widespread volunteer discontent, and to talk to heads of state about bringing programs to Indonesia and Singapore.

  Larry Fuchs, the Peace Corps representative in the Philippines, greeted the Shriver team at the airport in Manila. Shriver’s traveling companions were exhausted. “All we wanted was to go to our hotel and lie down in a bed, a real bed, and go to sleep,” English recalled. “But what does Shriver insist we do first? Go to a gym to work out.”

  That night, English awoke in his hotel room at 3:00 a.m. with piercing stomach pains. He immediately suspected what was wrong: appendicitis. He took a cab to the local hospital, San Juan de Dios, and promptly got wheeled in for emergency surgery. Before he was put under general anesthesia, English asked to be anointed with the last rites of the Catholic Church. When he awoke the next morning to the sight of a giant lizard that had crawled into his room, English thought at first that he had died and gone to hell.

  Meanwhile, Shriver’s first full day of meetings with volunteers had not been pleasant. The volunteers complained that they were poorly managed; they had no clear direction from the Peace Corps staff, they said, and found the Peace Corps’ Manila office unresponsive to their needs. The staff in Manila, in turn, was surly and defensive. Everyone was unhappy. And now, Shriver learned, the man he had brought along with him specifically to deal with this situation, a psychiatrist trained in such matters, was incapacitated with appendicitis.

  But as word got around that the Peace Corps’ director of psychiatry was lying in San Juan de Dios Hospital, recovering from an appendectomy, a group of curious volunteers decided to pay him a visit. “I was lying on my back with my sutures still in,” English recalled, “and was not in that position the most intimidating figure.”

  This was fortuitous. English’s vulnerability humanized him to the volunteers. Immediately, much of their suspicion of and hostility toward the Washington staff dissipated. Had he appeared in his white doctor’s coat, looking official, the volunteers might indeed have suspected English of being there merely to “brainwash” them. Instead, they came in, sat on chairs in his hospital room, and began what English calls “some of the most remarkable conversations of my life.” “They told me what the problems with the Philippine Peace Corps program was,” he recalled, and he began to formulate ideas for how to help them cope psychologically with the stresses of culture shock.

  When Shriver returned to Manila after several days flying around the far-flung Philippine islands visiting Peace Corps sites—200 volunteers scattered over 4,000 miles—he stopped by the hospital. After talking to many of the Philippine volunteers and to all of the Peace Corps staff in Manila, Shriver felt reassured that the situation was perhaps not as dire as it seemed. The first group of volunteers to arrive in the country had experienced the greatest difficulties; subsequent arrivals, although they still experienced many frustrations, were on the whole happier than the first group had been at the same stage. This was simply because, as Shriver explained to the Washington staff when he returned, the first group had been settling in at the same time as the administrative staff. Many of the logistical problems had been ironed out. And Shriver was in the main quite impressed with Larry Fuchs and his staff.

  Shriver was even more impressed with some of the volunteers. He spoke with particular admiration of a twenty-two-year-old woman who had grown up on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and attended Vassar—and who was now rising every morning to walk 3 miles, then paddle a boat 2 miles across a bay, then climb a 1,500-foot mountain to get to the school where she was teaching.

  Shriver had also come to understand better some of the frustrations inherent in the volunteers’ situation. Many constantly fought feelings of torpor and uselessness. This, Shriver learned, was the reality of the Philippine barrio, the phenomenon of bahala na. The underlying meaning of bahala na (“it doesn’t matter, never mind”) was that the fundamental conditions of barrio life, with all its hardship and squalor, could not be changed. This was what the Filipino people believed—and it was what the volunteers were having to contend with, and they found it deeply discouraging.

  Many volunteers also expressed resentment of the Washington headquarters. It seemed to them that the staff at 806 Connecticut was more concerned with Congress than with the volunteers in the field. And they resented all the glowing publicity the Peace Corps was getting (and which they were reading in the weekly news publications that Shriver had mailed to them each month). “It seemed we were being lionized before we had done anything, and I resented references to our courage and sacrifice,” a female volunteer complained to Fuchs. Many other volunteers also commented on the gap between the glowing accounts of what the Peace Corps was supposedly accomplishing and the anemic bits of productive work they were actually able to get done.

  Most of all, the volunteers explained, they hadn’t anticipated the feelings of loneliness and cultural isolation they would feel. Many in the first group of volunteers, Larry Fuchs later wrote, were “emotionally exhausted” after a few months. During a few “tense, frightening weeks” as many as half of the first group of 128 volunteers had said they would resign if they could do so honorably. By the time Shriver arrived in mid-August 1962, the acuteness of this feeling had abated, but the loneliness and isolation persisted. This reinforced Shriver’s conviction that psychiatric evaluation and, especially, preventive counseling were essential to the Peace Corps’ continued success.

  On August 16, Shriver, Kiker, Graham, and Kelly departed Manila for Bangkok, Thailand. (English stayed behind for a few days, waiting for his sutures to be removed.) After four days in Thailand, Shriver flew to Malaya, where he met for half an hour with the Malayan prime minister, Abdul Rahman, who was so enamored of the Peace Corps that he told Shriver he would like to produce and appear in a movie that would “explain the purposes and successes of the Peace Corps.”

  After stopping in Singapore, which, it was determined, did not need volunteers, Shriver traveled to the rugged lands of Borneo. Shriver had planned to visit newly arrived volunteers in rural villages in the north, but when he arrived at the American Embassy, officials advised him not to go. Fierce tropical storms could make the going difficult and could flood the rivers along the way, making travel impossible. Shriver laughed off these admonitions and, to the alarm of Graham, Kiker, and Kelly, dragged his team with him off into the wilds. They arrived in the north before heavy rains fell but then remained trapped by monsoons in North Borneo for several days. When English, just released from the hospital in Manila, arrived at the embassy, the staff there was growing worried. They had not heard from Shriver and his team, who were now several days late in returning.

  English joined a search party that headed upcountry to rescue Shriver. When they found him, he hardly seemed in need of rescuing. He and his colleagues were drenched from the days of rain and from crossing swollen rivers on a homemade raft, but Shriver was clearly enjoying every moment of his adventure. Reunited with English, the Peace Corps team returned to civilization.

  Shriver’s original itinerary had called for him to return home from Borneo. But a day before he was scheduled to return, he was contacted by the government of Indonesia, which lay just south of Borneo across the Java Sea. Indonesia was one of the largest developing countries in the world, and the Peace Corps staff in Washington had long thought it would be a good place to send volunteers because of the many needs of its large and impoverished population. Some of the standard political motivations
obtained as well. Indonesia had won official independence from the Netherlands in 1949 and had, since the end of World War II, been seeking to distance itself from its former colonial patrons. But President Sukarno, the leader of the independence movement, had through the 1950s actively allowed Communist representation in the government to increase significantly. By the early 1960s, the Indonesian Communist Party was a force of considerable influence; the government was importing military hardware from the Soviet Union; and Sukarno himself had become something of a despot.

  Thus President Kennedy and the State Department applied the usual pressures on Shriver to bring the Peace Corps to Indonesia, as a means of importing a model of democracy to that region of the Far East. Shriver, however, could not send volunteers where they had not been invited—and Indonesia had yet to invite the Peace Corps in for even a conversation. Anti-American sentiment had run high in the country since 1958, when the CIA had supported a coup against Sukarno. But in August 1962, while Shriver was elsewhere in the Far East, President Kennedy had helped Sukarno resolve (if only temporarily) a territorial dispute with the Dutch over West New Guinea, at the far eastern edge of Indonesia. Now Shriver and company returned from their journey across the waters of Borneo and Sarawak to find that relations between Washington and the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, had momentarily thawed. When the Peace Corps director found a personal invitation from Sukarno waiting for him at the American Embassy in Pontianak, he accepted.