A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Kennedy’s statement represented a significant revolution in the attitude of the American government. He affirmed two principles: freedom of research on population matters and freedom of every nation to use the resulting knowledge in determining its own policy. In handling the question this way, he dispelled all doubt, if any remained, about the capacity of a Catholic President to decide public issues on their merits. Actually, with the growing reappraisal within the Church itself, the policy provoked little criticism among his co-religionists. Catholic concern seemed now to narrow to the relatively small point—and one on which they received reassurance—that the government should not ship out contraceptives. The Kennedy years thus further strengthened the American attack on world poverty by preparing the means to keep population growth from nullifying the development effort.

  5. FOOD AND PEOPLE

  The original plan for aid reorganization had contemplated absorbing both Food for Peace and the Peace Corps into the Agency for International Development. After all, they too provided forms of assistance; and the logic of those who wanted to run government by the book was to put them all in the centralized operation. This logic was not perhaps irresistible. Nothing could take the heart out of new ideas more speedily than an old bureaucracy. If Food for Peace and the Peace Corps were to fulfill expectations, there was an argument that they had to retain their own identity and élan. “These two programs,” as I wrote Richard Neustadt shortly after the aid message, “have more political potential than anything else in the foreign aid picture. It seems to me there is a strong argument for holding them close to the President. Would F.D.R. ever have let such programs get out of his immediate grasp?”

  The heads of both agencies vigorously shared this view, and each had strong support in his fight for autonomy—George McGovern from the agricultural committees on the Hill, and Sargent Shriver from the Vice-President, as chairman of the Peace Corps’s National Advisory Committee. And Kennedy himself held the Rooseveltian view that there were things in life more important than the symmetry of organization charts. I often wondered later how Food for Peace and the Peace Corps would have fared had they been permitted to vanish into the opaque depths of AID.

  Food for Peace was the great unseen weapon of Kennedy’s third world policy. McGovern’s imaginative direction of the program received Kennedy’s direct and personal support; and, after McGovern was elected Senator from South Dakota in 1962, the work was carried forward by Richard Reuter of CARE, shipments under Public Law 480 averaged nearly $1.5 billion annually in the Kennedy years. This assistance not only played a notable humanitarian role in averting mass starvation in India, Egypt, Algeria and other nations; but the use of food as wages carried it beyond a relief program to serve, in effect, as a means of financing development. In addition to its profound impact abroad, the program greatly eased the problems created by American agricultural productivity, reduced surplus storage charges, increased farm income and purchasing power and even, under the stipulation that the food be transported in American ships, helped subsidize the maritime industry. Food for Peace, as Hubert Humphrey once put it, was “a twentieth century form of alchemy.”

  But the part of the aid effort which best expressed the distinctive spirit of the New Frontier was the Peace Corps. In the late fifties Humphrey and Richard Neuberger in the Senate and Henry Reuss in the House had advanced variations on the general idea of sending volunteers overseas for technical assistance work. Humphrey even occasionally used the phrase “Youth Peace Corps,” and in June 1960 he introduced a Peace Corps bill into Congress. General James Gavin urged a similar plan on Kennedy. Kennedy himself advanced the idea a little tentatively during the campaign—it was mid-October and two in the morning—to an audience of students at the University of Michigan. The response was unexpectedly warm. A few days later a Michigan delegation greeted Kennedy at Toledo with a petition signed by several hundred prospective volunteers. Later, in California, Kennedy called for the establishment of a peace corps, broadening it from Humphrey’s original conception to include women as well as men and older people as well as young.

  In its origins, the Peace Corps was undoubtedly suggested by Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps of 1933; and the Republicans of 1960 reacted dependably in the manner of their fathers a generation earlier. Hoover’s Secretary of Agriculture had described the CCC as “utterly visionary and chimerical”; now Eisenhower called the Peace Corps a “juvenile experiment,” and Nixon, with customary taste, observed solemnly that Kennedy “proposed to send as America’s representatives to other nations young men whom he calls volunteers but who in truth in many instances would be trying to escape the draft.” Even some Democrats thought it a nice but impractical idea thrown out for campaign purposes.

  But the response of the young had already touched Kennedy. “I want to demonstrate to Mr. Khrushchev and others,” he said toward the end of the campaign in Chicago, “that a new generation of Americans has taken over this country . . . young Americans [who will] serve the cause of freedom as servants of peace around the world, working for freedom as the communists work for their system.” These remarks, which were not in the advance release of the speech, expressed, I think, a particular ground for his growing commitment to the Peace Corps. He often envied the communist capacity to mobilize popular idealism, especially of the young. I remember his remarking almost wistfully about Cuba: “Each weekend 10,000 teachers go into the countryside to run a campaign against illiteracy. A great communal effort like this is attractive to people who wish to serve their country.” He was sure there was a comparable fund of idealism among the youth of America; and the Peace Corps seemed a means of demonstrating the reality of this idealism to the world.

  “President Kennedy picked me to organize the Peace Corps, I was told,” Sargent Shriver later wrote, “because no one thought the Peace Corps could succeed and it would be easier to fire a relative than a political friend.” There were other reasons. If the Peace Corps was to be a vehicle of American idealism, Shriver was an authentic and energetic idealist, well qualified to inspire both staff and volunteers with a sense of purpose and opportunity. Moreover, he could be both tactful and persuasive in his relations with Congress. Shriver promptly convoked the usual task force, began a systematic analysis of problems of function and recruitment, overrode those who objected to the name “Peace Corps” on the ground that the word “peace” had been expropriated by the communists and on March 1, 1961, submitted a report to Kennedy recommending immediate establishment. The objectives of the Peace Corps, according to the report, were threefold:

  It can contribute to the development of critical countries and regions.

  It can promote international cooperation and good will toward this country.

  It can also contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent participation in the world.

  On the same day Kennedy set up the Peace Corps by executive order and sent a message to Congress requesting legislation. The first reactions to the idea, he said, were “convincing demonstration that we have in this country an immense reservoir of dedicated men and women willing to devote their energies and time and toil to the cause of world peace and human progress.” Shriver assembled a remarkable staff, luring Vice-President Johnson’s ablest aide, Bill D. Moyers, to become his deputy and eventually annexing Richard Goodwin to head the International Secretariat working with other countries to form peace corps of their own. By the spring of 1961 recruitment and training were well under way. Soon the volunteers began to leave on their assignments.

  Having defended the autonomy of the Corps in Washington, Shriver was determined not to let his men become involved in diplomatic or intelligence activities overseas. Their only job, he told them, was to help people help themselves; and in personal visits around the world Shriver convinced mistrustful governments that he meant exactly what he said. Despite communist assertions that Shriver was a “bloodthirsty Chicago butcher and sausage maker” and his organization a
“nest of spies,” neutral states began to ask for volunteers to aid village development and public health, to improve farming methods and, most important of all, to teach their own coming generations of national leaders. The original authorization of 500 grew to 5000 by March 1963 and to 10,000 in another year, and volunteers were soon working in forty-six countries. Congressional doubt turned into enthusiasm: even Barry Goldwater applauded the Corps.

  The Peace Corps in action was an immensely moving sight. Here were young American men and women who had given two years of their lives to serve in unknown places in remote lands, with little recognition or reward beyond their own sense of achievement and growth. I saw them in India in 1962 and again in Venezuela in 1963. In the Punjab they were agricultural specialists, working with the farmers in the villages. In Caracas I was taken deep into a barrio, along alleys turned into mud by several days of rain. We finally reached a playground, at one end of which a young Negro from Denver was presiding over twenty-five dead-end kids sawing and hammering away on pieces of lumber. A soap-box derby was impending, and Jerry Green, the Peace Corps man, had dug up some boards and set the boys to work. We talked about the boys and their prospects. He described an alliance he had struck with the local Catholic priest both to encourage the boys to stay in school and also to make the local school better. Later he drove us in a battered jeep to his quarters. The walls along the way were chalked with amiable slogans—Muera Betancourt and Muera Kennedy*—but Jerry received friendly waves and greetings every few steps. I later asked Allan Stewart, our ambassador in Caracas, about the Peace Corps. He said, “It has been wonderful here. It has worked miracles in changing the Venezuelan image of North Americans. Before the Peace Corps, the only Americans the poor Venezuelans ever saw were riding around in Cadillacs. They supposed them all to be rich, selfish, callous, reactionary. The Peace Corps has shown them an entirely different kind of Americans. It is transforming the whole theory they have of the United States.”

  This was the point—this, and the extent to which the experience gave the volunteers a new understanding of the world and themselves. Critics said that the few thousand Peace Corpsmen were a handful of sand cast into the vast sea of underdevelopment. They argued that the emphasis on what Peace Corps doctrine in an uncharacteristic lapse into bureaucratese termed “middle-level manpower” was nothing more than a revival of the old creed of technical assistance. They suggested that Eagle Scout good deeds had scant impact on the basic problems of capital investment and social reorganization on which economic growth depended. Yet watching the volunteers as they carried to dark slums and sullen villages examples of modesty, comradeship, hard work and optimism, one wondered whether they were not bringing some inkling of the meaning of a democratic community to places hitherto inaccessible to the democratic idea, and whether future Nyereres and Sékou Tourés, even perhaps future Nkrumahs and Castros, might not catch fire from their liveliness and devotion. One simply could not dismiss what the foreign minister of Thailand called “this important idea, the most powerful idea in recent times, of a Peace Corps, of youth mingling, living, working with youth,” nor discount his surprise that this idea

  should come from the mightiest nation on earth, the United States. Many of us who did not know about the United States thought of this great nation as a wealthy nation, a powerful nation, endowed with great material strength and many powerful weapons. But how many of us know that in the United States ideas and ideals are also powerful?

  The Peace Corps ideas and ideals were indeed powerful; and the most potent of all was set forth by David Crozier in a letter from Colombia to his parents before he was killed in an airplane accident. “Should it come to it,” the young volunteer wrote, “I had rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”

  6. DOGMATISM VS. PRAGMATISM

  Kennedy’s third world policy represented a considerable break from the Washington world view of the fifties, and it foreshadowed a fundamental reconstruction of our total foreign policy. In the Eisenhower years the conduct of foreign affairs had rested on a set of abstract and unitary doctrines—about the uncommitted world, which we regarded as immoral; about the ‘free world,’ or, as it was known in public documents, the Free World, which we hoped would conform to the principles upon which we fancied American society was based; and about the communist world, which we saw as a centralized conspiracy. Now each of these dogmas was undergoing revision.

  As we stopped regarding neutralism as a sin, so we receded from the insistence that nations which received our aid should adopt our economic creed. In the fifties Washington had been deeply convinced of the superiority, not to say sanctity, of the system of free private enterprise. No one seemed to care that this system, as described in the official literature, did not correspond to the reality of our own society, which had long since evolved into a mixed economy and a welfare state, or even to the actuality of our own past, marked in pre-take off days by considerable initiative on the part of the so-called public sector. Indeed, the official model had so far departed from contemporary reality that India, styling itself a ‘socialist’ society, averaged in 1958 and 1959 less than 13 per cent of central government expenditures in the gross national product as against more than 19 per cent in the last Eisenhower years in ‘capitalist’ America.

  Since Democrats had no ancestral hostility to purposeful government and social reform in America, they were less inclined to demand such hostility of foreigners. Kennedy’s own views were strictly empirical. Declining to regard the choice between private and public means as a matter of moral principle, he rejected equally the theologians of the private sector and the theologians of the public sector—those on the right who regarded public enterprise as inherently sinful and those on the left who regarded private enterprise as inherently sinful. In his judgment, the only issue was which means could best achieve the desired end, and this to be answered not by doctrine but by experiment. We were not, in short, to worry too much about the ideological character of economic development. “We do not condemn others for their differences in economic and political structures,” Robert Kennedy told the students at Nihon University in Tokyo. In the United States, he said, we had time “to permit the intertwining of many small units into the great systems that the modern age requires, and, under government regulation, time to permit the continuation of private control. In many of the newer nations, government appears to be the only mechanism capable of performing these feats within a reasonable length of time. This we can understand and appreciate. It neither offends us, nor can we deem it hostile.”

  These views did not command much support or understanding in the Congress. In 1962 the Hickenlooper amendment to the aid bill called for the suspension of aid to nations which expropriated American business without prompt, adequate and effective compensation; the Clay committee endorsed this policy; and this ideological outburst found in the Bokaro steel plant in India a conspicuous casualty. “The simple truth is this,” Galbraith protested unavailingly from India, “and we cannot repeat it too often: if our case opposes capitalism to communism, as Clay would have it and as capitalism is regarded in this part of the world, we can hardly win. If our case opposes the widest possible choice of free development to communism, we can hardly lose. That, sirs, is it.”

  That may have been it, but it was not easy to bring even the executive branch of the government, steeped in ancient habits, to tolerate other economic systems or, at first, to describe our own with much accuracy. The United States Information Agency until well into 1961 dispatched a weekly economic commentary portraying the American economy, as if George Humphrey still reigned in Washington, as a system of rugged individualism unhampered by government control. One such essay, offered for distribution to the local press, affirmed the national commitment to free enterprise by likening the United States to a giant corporation with the people as stockholders, the bureaucracy as management, the Congress as board of directors and the Pres
ident as chairman of the board. Galbraith sent this prose poem to the President suitably underlined and annotated, concluding with the irreverent suggestion that the nation had elected the wrong Kennedy; obviously it should have been the father rather than the son. The President delightedly read the document, complete with gloss, over the phone to Edward R. Murrow, pausing after every sentence to say, “Is this what you really believe, Ed?”

  Murrow did not need prompting, however, to begin his revamping of USIA. He proved a brilliant chief, and in Donald M. Wilson he had an exceptionally able deputy. One felt that Murrow finally came into his own in Washington. In the fifties he had been a solitary voice of courage and reason in commercial television; but there had seemed to be gathering within him a searing disgust with the medium and a sad frustration about his own life. He was a harrowed, gloomy presence at New York dinners, punctuating his incessant cigarettes with brief and bitter cracks and leaving the impression that all idealism in the world had vanished with the Battle of Britain. He had no faith at all at this time in Kennedy. One day in the midst of the 1960 campaign Theodore H. White and I lunched with Murrow at the Century. He told us that, if McCarthyism seemed to Kennedy’s advantage, Kennedy would become a McCarthyite overnight. Nothing White or I said could dissuade him from this view.

  All this now changed quickly in Washington. Kennedy gave Murrow his full confidence; no government information chief, including even Elmer Davis, had been so close to a President; and Murrow, the professional doubter, at last had found someone since Churchill in whose intelligence and purpose he could wholeheartedly believe. He revitalized USIA, imbued it with his own bravery and honesty and directed its efforts especially to the developing nations, where, instead of expounding free-enterprise ideology, it tried to explain the American role in a diverse and evolving world. USIA became one of the most effective instruments of Kennedy’s third world policy; and Murrow himself was a new man, cheerful, amused, committed, contented. When his fatal illness began, he must have had the consolation, after those glittering years of meaningless success, that at the end he had fulfilled himself as never before. Under Ed Murrow the Voice of America became the voice, not of American self-righteousness, but of American democracy.