Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  As usual, Shriver horrified the American Embassy staff in Jakarta by insisting on visiting, unannounced, a slum on the outskirts of the city. “The embassy types were aghast,” Joe English recalled. “The area, they claimed, was ‘heavily communist.’ They insisted the visit was politically volatile and physically dangerous.”

  Ignoring the importunings of embassy officials, Shriver and his small entourage went to the slum. English later wrote an account of the visit.

  As we walked along the intricate pathways we saw, through the open doorways, pictures of John F. Kennedy as well as of President Sukarno. Finally, Shriver stopped beside one neat, little dirt-floored home. Through an interpreter, he asked the woman in the doorway if he might enter. She stood there, uncertain and awed, but finally nodded. Then, Shriver stepped forward, bent down, took off his shoes, and walked inside.

  It was all there, in that simple gesture, the giving of respect without the loss of dignity. And so they stood there, that tiny Indonesian woman and the towering American. They talked of her neighbors and of his brother-in-law, the American President. And, as they talked, first ten, then fifteen, then fifty, and soon more than a hundred children crowded around the doorway.

  When we left, the children gathered about Shriver. With a few words from his interpreter, he tried to talk with them. They laughed and answered and followed us back towards the city. We left that “dangerous, communist-ridden” slum with the shouts and laughter of some 150 children ringing in our ears.

  Shriver had little notion of what to expect from his audience with Sukarno. The chargé d’affaires at the embassy said he didn’t think anything of substance would be accomplished. Shriver asked Joe English to accompany him to the presidential palace for the meeting. “Why me,” English asked, “and not an expert on Indonesia, or a Peace Corps programmer?” “Because,” Shriver explained, “Sukarno is known to often consult with astrologers. I don’t have any astrologers. But I do have a psychiatrist.” Sukarno, as it turned out, “was delighted with the notion” that psychiatrists were the American equivalent of Indonesian astrologers. Sukarno brought in all his astrologers to meet with English and compare notes on their methods.

  As English conversed with the presidential astrologers, he noted that Shriver and Sukarno seemed to be hitting it off quite well. The conversation they were having, however, seemed quite puzzling. Shriver kept trying to steer the conversation toward matters of political substance—and Sukarno kept peppering him with questions about Hollywood. “Do you know this actor?” the Indonesian president would ask him, referring to a Hollywood celebrity. “How about that one?” Shriver answered as best he could, but he couldn’t understand why Sukarno was continually steering the conversation back to the entertainment business.

  “Sarge,” English hissed. “I think he thinks you’re Peter Lawford!” Shriver considered this for a moment and then laughed. English was right. Sukarno knew that President Kennedy had a brother-in-law who was a movie star; and he knew that President Kennedy had a brother-in-law who ran the Peace Corps—he just didn’t know that the two men were not the same brother-in-law.

  Unsure how to correct the Indonesian leader’s misimpression without embarrassing him, Shriver decided to live for the moment with his mistaken identity. “The actress, Marilyn Monroe,” Sukarno said. “What really happened to her? How did she die?” As English recalled, Shriver looked momentarily alarmed. “Well, gee, it’s hard to say and there’s a lot of speculation,” he stammered. Then, recovering his composure, Shriver said, “But Dr. English is a psychiatrist. He can tell you.”

  English was beginning to try to explain that Monroe’s death was most likely a suicide, but that it was hard to say for sure, when Sukarno cut in. “No, it was not suicide,” Sukarno said. Both Shriver and English were taken aback. “It wasn’t?” English said. “No,” Sukarno said. “Let me tell you what happened.” And the Indonesian president proceeded to explain patiently to Shriver and English that what surely had happened was that Monroe had taken her sleeping pills, fallen asleep, and then been awakened by a phone call. Forgetting that she had already taken her sleeping medication, the actress took a second dose, this time overdosing. “Which is very common, isn’t that right, doctor?” Sukarno said to the astonished English.

  As the conversation veered from psychiatry and astrology to Marilyn Monroe, Shriver tried to steer the conversation in a more serious direction, but Sukarno merely brushed him off and called for more refreshments. Just as Shriver was beginning to despair of accomplishing anything with his visit, he thought he overheard Sukarno saying, “And when the Peace Corps comes to Indonesia.…” Shriver wasn’t even sure he had heard right, but he forged directly ahead. “When the Peace Corps comes to Indonesia,” Shriver said, “where would you like the volunteers to go?” Sukarno responded with a list of towns and villages where he was already making arrangements to accommodate volunteers. As easy as that, the Peace Corps was on its way to Indonesia. Shriver, after a short trip to Bali, was on his way back home in time for Labor Day 1962.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Growing Pains

  Shriver returned to 806 Connecticut that fall to find a new crisis on his hands: The simmering conflict between Warren Wiggins’s Planning, Development, and Operations Division and Charlie Peters’s Evaluation Division had erupted into full-blown warfare. Many on the Wiggins team had long resented and disliked Peters, whose job—or so it seemed to them—was simply to criticize them and make their jobs harder. Now they were openly angling for his head.

  In March 1962 Peters had gone on an extended tour of Peace Corps sites in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East and had found the programs riddled with problems. The people in charge of the Pakistan programs, where less than a quarter of the volunteers had productive jobs, Peters told Shriver, “ought to be fired for lunatic stupidity.” After reading Peters’s report, Shriver agreed; he fired the heads of the Pakistan program. This did not endear Peters to the PDO Division. Now “the PDO people really hated me, were out to get me,” Peters recalled. “Sarge had taken my word over theirs. They were livid.”

  By late summer 1962, as Shriver was touring the Far East, Bill Haddad was warning Peters, “You are an inch away from being fired.” Haddad was Peters’s boss, and probably his biggest supporter in the organization, but he recognized that the situation had become untenable. So many people were clamoring for Peters’s dismissal that it was clear Shriver would have to do something: either come out with a public statement in support of Peters or fire him. So Peters sat down and wrote a long memo to Shriver explaining his view of everything he had found wrong with various Peace Corps programs. Peters concluded the memo by saying, in effect, “I realize there is disagreement as to what the truth about the Peace Corps is. But only you can decide what is right. I believe that you should go out almost immediately and have a look at our field operations. Observe closely; talk to the volunteers, who are themselves the truth, and then come back to this memo and compare what the Division of Evaluation says to what the PDO says, and decide which is right.”

  Shriver did as Peters suggested. In late October 1962, Shriver stuffed all of Peters’s evaluation memos in his suitcase and set off for Africa. This took a certain boldness on Shriver’s part. The Peace Corps, after all, was receiving highly positive press attention. Congress loved him. It would have been tempting simply to bask in the adoring glow, especially since almost the entire PDO Division was claiming that Peters’s evaluations lacked merit. But Shriver wanted to know the truth.

  The timing of Shriver’s trip reflected another kind of boldness, or perhaps an otherworldly sense of optimism, as well. On Monday, October 22, President Kennedy had announced to the American people that the Soviets were building nuclear missile launching sites in Cuba. Kennedy was evacuating troops from Guantanamo Bay and was blockading Cuba with American warships. He also served notice on the Soviet Union that the launch of missiles from Cuba would be tantamount to a declaration of nuclear war—and that
the United States would respond to such a declaration in kind. The nation stood closer to open (and nuclear) conflict with the Soviets than at any time since the dawn of the cold war. The world held its breath.

  Yet at 7:30 in the morning on Thursday, October 25, Donovan McClure, the Peace Corps’ director of public affairs, got a telephone call from Mary Ann Orlando, telling him to get over to the hospital for inoculations immediately, since he would be leaving for East Africa that night. “In my shock and panic at this message,” McClure recalled, “I formed the brief but totally insane notion that with the Russian missiles pointed at us, Shriver, always resourceful, was aiming to set up a government-in-exile.” On the plane from Idlewild that evening, after Shriver had fallen asleep, McClure talked with his colleagues Joe Colmen and Joe Kaufman, who were also accompanying Shriver on this trip. All of them wondered why, when the world teetered on the nuclear brink, this trip to Africa was so urgent. Couldn’t it be delayed? While his deputies twisted uncomfortably in their seats, Shriver slept peacefully under his seat, as was his custom—a practice that was described in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece after skeptical newsmen denied that such a thing was possible. He was evidently unconcerned by momentous world events unfolding around them.

  After landing in the city of Asmara, Shriver set about trying to see as many of the 275 volunteers in Ethiopia as possible. “He was racing around in a jeep from sunup to sunset, shattering the poise of countless volunteers by suddenly appearing in their classrooms or at the doors of their houses, hand extended: ’Hi! I’m Sarge Shriver.” On Shriver’s last day in Ethiopia, he was unexpectedly invited to the imperial palace for a formal dinner with Emperor Haile Selassie. Although Shriver had been hoping to meet with Selassie, he had not anticipated such an official audience and had not packed any formal attire. Fortunately, an aide to Arthur Richards, the US ambassador to Ethiopia, was on hand to lend Shriver a tuxedo; unfortunately, the aide was half a foot shorter than Shriver. The pants were too short and, as Donovan McClure recalled, “if worn normally, the cuffs missed the shoe tops by six inches. If he tugged the pants down to meet his shoes, the trousers left a wide expanse beneath the vest.” What to do?

  Shriver realized that if he pulled the trousers down to his shoes and walked hunched over, no gap between his vest and his pants would be apparent. Shriver’s back began to hurt, but he dared not straighten up for fear of exposing his belly. This absurd situation proved fortuitous. It was later reported to Shriver that Emperor Selassie had been “much impressed” with Shriver’s deferential manner, and with the lengths to which he had gone to disguise the significant height difference between himself and the tiny emperor.

  After dinner with the emperor, Shriver, still hunched over, was taken on a tour of the palace grounds that included a visit to the outer garden where Emperor Selassie kept his pet lion, Tojo. When Shriver asked if he could pet Tojo, Joe Colmen turned to Joe Kaufman and asked, “What is the line of succession at the Peace Corps, anyway?”

  After leaving Ethiopia, Shriver and company spent five days visiting volunteers, by jeep, in Tanganyika. From Tanganyika it was off on a decrepit DC-3 to Somalia, which Charlie Peters had reported as being one of the most problematic locations in the Peace Corps. The visit was not a good one. The Somalia program was a disaster. The Peace Corps representative there seemed to resent the volunteers’ lack of toughness, and he treated their adjustment problems with disdain. The volunteers, in turn, felt frustrated, homesick, directionless. Shriver initially was personally impressed by the Somalia representative, who had the swashbuckling, charismatic style he found irresistible. But after meeting with many of the volunteers he reluctantly decided that the representative needed to be replaced. He cabled back to headquarters in Washington. “Tell Peters his reports are right,” it said. The cable quickly circulated throughout 806 Connecticut. Peters’s job was clearly safe, and his stature in the organization instantly elevated. He had weathered the storm.

  The Peace Corps continued to grow quickly—too quickly, by some estimations. Charlie Peters, for instance, believed that many of the problems in the field were caused by a rate of growth that produced more volunteers than were needed or could be supervised. Nine new countries received the Peace Corps in early 1963, bringing the total from thirty-seven to forty-six, and the size of the program’s budget appropriation doubled. Volunteers were being sent to places that weren’t yet equipped to accommodate them. Despite the clear evidence from the Evaluation Division that such rapid growth was taking its toll on both morale and effectiveness, Shriver still led a “manic drive” to put more volunteers in the field.

  The Peace Corps, in Shriver’s mind, could never be too big. If anything, he believed, the program needed to get even bigger, even faster. “Our country and our times have had plenty of experience with programs that were too little, too late,” he wrote in 1963. Besides, he argued, more pressure was put on the Peace Corps to grow by developing countries demanding volunteers than by people within the organization itself.

  The rapid rate of growth continued to produce botched programs, including some—like those in Somalia, Pakistan, and parts of Bangladesh—that were complete failures. Under great time pressure, program planners in Washington had drawn up completely unrealistic program outlines. On balance, however, given how rapidly the organization was growing, most Peace Corps programs were remarkably successful.

  THE FIVE-YEAR FLUSH

  Even as the program grew, Shriver managed to preserve the distinctively non-bureaucratic character of the organization. Partly he did that by keeping the staff small. But he also did it by insisting that the Peace Corps remain a service, or a tour of duty, not a career. This was unprecedented in the annals of the federal government, where lifetime appointments and comfortable sinecures were the norm. Shriver codified this in a policy, sketched out in a 1963 memo by Franklin Williams titled “In, Up, and Out,” which came to be known in the Peace Corps as the “Five-Year Flush”: Terms of service in the agency’s administration would be limited to five years. No one, not a director or a secretary, would be able to stay longer.

  This caused some consternation both among more-experienced government executives and among the organization’s congressional liaisons, who worried that the constant turnover would cause disruption or that it would lead to “administration by rookies.” As the Wall Street Journal reported, “This transient turnover, antithesis of the orderly promotion and tenure procedures espoused by the Civil Service Commission, has been institutionalized at the Peace Corps. Over the objections of the Civil Service chief John Macy, Mr. Shriver persuaded the just-adjourned Congress to clamp a five-year service ceiling on Peace Corps officialdom.” Shriver, the Journal reported, “seems not to recognize a requirement for a permanent cadre of civil servants to manage major Federal activities; in his view, the inspired amateurs can quickly acquire the necessary, though bothersome, bureaucratic competence. Lest initiative and imagination be stifled, the … Peace Corps shun[s] organizational stability and job security. Most of all, the Shriver system of … staffing calls for constant tension, turmoil and turnover to infuse freshness and force into the federal bureaucracy.”

  Critics scoffed, and the Civil Service protested fiercely. “Shriver’s Peace Corps policy is ridiculous,” lamented one critic. “If you’ve got a good running organization, why routinely force out a large proportion of the staff each year?” But Shriver was adamant. He appointed Bill Moyers, whom he had made his deputy director in February 1963, the head of a task force whose mandate was embodied in the title of a memo—“To Keep the Peace Corps Flexible.” Shriver and Moyers felt strongly enough about keeping careerists out of the Peace Corps that they endeavored to have the Five-Year Flush written into federal law. White House aides and the Civil Service Commission blanched. “This approach is so fundamentally in conflict with the idea of the career service,” the commission chairman told Shriver, “that I believe, even under the special circumstances of the Peace Corps, that this limitati
on would constitute inappropriate public policy.” Moyers wrote a memo to the White House that tried to make the case. “Sarge is also concerned to … assure that the Peace Corps will retain its fresh, critical, and spirited approach to business. A five-year limitation on employment will guarantee constant injection into the Peace Corps of new ideas and energies.” It took two years, but the Five-Year Flush was written into law in October 1965.

  “THEY PADDLED THEIR OWN CANOE”

  The Peace Corps’ breakneck growth continued. Over the summer of 1963, the first volunteers arrived in Guinea, Indonesia, and Uruguay. Meanwhile, countries that already had Peace Corps programs in place were preparing to bid good-bye to their first round of volunteers and welcome their second. In almost every country the number of volunteers requested was holding steady or growing; almost nowhere was it shrinking.

  This led to a problem. Although the Peace Corps did not publicly admit this, it was beginning to face a serious shortage of volunteers. In the initial flush of enthusiasm following Kennedy’s election and inauguration, Shriver and his small staff received more volunteer applications than they could handle. The deluge of applications continued to flood 806 Connecticut as the early publicity for the program made it sound patriotic and exciting. The Peace Corps became in some way the repository for the hopes and dreams of the (mostly young) Americans touched by the hopefulness of the New Frontier.

  Now, however, the rate of applications had declined somewhat, even as the need for volunteers was growing; the demand for qualified volunteers abroad was threatening to outstrip the supply. At a staff meeting Shriver announced,

  We’re almost at the point where the requests for volunteers will outnumber our supply. We didn’t expect this to happen so quickly, since we started out on opening day with over 20,000 banging on our doors and we didn’t even have a single request from overseas.… But by this time next year I predict we’ll be in fifty countries and the ones we’re in already are asking for as many as triple the number they now have. So we’ve got to be much more aggressive about the way we recruit. Much more imaginative.