When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  “How many of you who are going to be doctors,” he demanded, “are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.”

  Joking that “this is the longest short speech I have ever made,” Kennedy concluded by asking their support for the election campaign and “for this country over the next decade.” The speech lasted barely three minutes. Before he reached his room for the night, he told his aide Dave Powers that he thought “he had hit a winning number.”

  Kennedy had not proposed a peace corps, but he did plant its seed in that brief encounter at the University of Michigan. A plaque on the Michigan Union building now proclaims, “Here at 2:00 a.m. on October 14, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy first defined the Peace Corps.” The definition, however, was rather vague and tentative. Kennedy’s words, moreover, had no national impact. Russell Baker of the New York Times, one of America’s most illustrious journalists, was among the reporters covering the Kennedy campaign. Kennedy’s little speech had come too late to make the Friday edition of the Times. For the Saturday paper, Baker wrote a delightful, front-page piece about Kennedy’s revival of old-fashioned whistle-stop campaigning. Describing the candidate’s brief speeches as the train stopped in towns throughout Michigan on Friday, Baker wrote, “Mr. Kennedy, to be sure, said nothing that was new . . .”

  The idea of a kind of peace corps was not original with Kennedy. Representative Henry Reuss, a Democrat from Wisconsin, had introduced a bill earlier in the year calling for the study of a possible youth corps. Congress approved the bill and appropriated $10,000 for the project. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, using the term “Peace Corps” for the first time, introduced a bill later in the year establishing such an agency. That bill languished, but Humphrey campaigned for a peace corps during the presidential primaries, which he lost to Kennedy. Kennedy had asked Goodwin to look into these proposals, and several academicians prepared studies for the campaign. Kennedy supporters like Gen. James Gavin included calls for a youth or peace corps in their campaign speeches. The youth wing of the party had even distributed a mimeographed leaflet promising that the candidate was exploring the possibility of a youth peace corps. Businessman Milton J. Shapp lobbied for one in a meeting with Sorensen. Later, when he campaigned successfully as the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Shapp claimed he had put the idea of the Peace Corps in Kennedy’s head.

  But Kennedy and some of his staff, though sympathetic, were also wary of the idea. It had the potential for ridicule. Coming from a young candidate, it could be dismissed as the foolish and fuzzy project of a starry-eyed amateur. Yet, as the campaign drew closer to the end, Kennedy clearly warmed to the proposal.

  Harris Wofford, the future senator from Pennsylvania who worked on the campaign, tried years later to analyze why Kennedy raised the issue during his brief speech at the university. Wofford wrote that “the best guess anyone on the staff could give” was that Kennedy, still angered by Nixon’s insinuation during the debate that the Democrats were a war party, wanted to counter with a Democratic peace proposal. Kennedy may also have been troubled by rumors, later proven false, that Nixon was contemplating a peace corps proposal of his own. In any case, Kennedy made no proposal that night. Faced with thousands of enthusiastic young men and women, he simply decided to test an idea.

  Although it attracted no notice beyond the Michigan campus, many students eagerly accepted the test and its challenge. The challenge came at the right time. The 1930s had been the years of economic hardship and leftist militancy for many young Americans. The 1940s had been the years of war and the G.I. Bill of Rights. But the 1950s, with few serious veterans left on campus, had been the bland years. “The message during the fifties,” said Alan Guskin, a Michigan graduate student in social psychology, “was ‘Don’t sign anything. Keep quiet and get your Ph.D.’” Now, as the 1960s dawned, a new mood was stirring, a need to take an active part in life outside campus, a need to enlist in causes. The new nations of Africa were in the news. Ghana, in fact, had attracted attention and admiration as the first black African colony to win independence, and Kennedy’s challenge to help Ghana and other developing countries fit the new mood.

  A few nights later, Representative Chester Bowles of Connecticut, a Kennedy foreign policy adviser, talked to the students in the Michigan Union ballroom. During the question-and-answer session afterwards, Bowles was asked about the Kennedy speech. To explain what Kennedy had in mind, Bowles described the work of his son and daughter-in-law, Sam and Nancy Bowles, who were teaching in the British colony of Nigeria as part of a program sponsored by a private organization, the African-American Institute.

  Inspired by both Kennedy and Bowles, Guskin and his wife, Judy, a Michigan graduate student in comparative literature, sat down in a nearby restaurant after the Bowles speech and, setting their thoughts down on paper napkins, began writing a letter to the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper. Their letter, which was published, noted that both Kennedy and Bowles had “emphasized that disarmament and peace lie to a very great extent in our hands and requested our participation throughout the world as necessary for the realization of these goals.” The Guskins then pledged, “We both hereby state that we would devote a number of years to work in countries where our help is needed.”

  After the letter was published, Samuel Hayes, a professor of economics who had written a paper on a possible youth corps for Kennedy, joined the Guskins in forming a committee to drum up support for a peace corps. They convened a meeting and persuaded 250 students to sign a pledge that they would volunteer. Hundreds more signed the pledge later. The word spread to other college campuses, and letters from would-be volunteers in many schools began to reach the mailboxes of Democratic headquarters in Washington, D.C., astounding party officials.

  As letters from young people mounted and reports came in about hundreds of signatures collected at the University of Michigan, Kennedy and his aides lost their caution about a peace corps. They decided to adopt the idea as their own and make a campaign promise that Kennedy, as president, would launch a peace corps. They figured that, at the very least, that kind of dramatic proposal would enhance Kennedy’s dynamic image during the last days before the election.

  Sorensen, Goodwin, and Archibald Cox wrote the draft for what they called the “peace speech.” Kennedy delivered it before 20,000 enthusiastic supporters at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 2, six days before election day. Although the speech was steeped in the rhetoric of the Cold War, Kennedy said, “The generation which I speak for has seen enough of warmongers. Let our great role in history be that of peacemongers.”

  After ridiculing Vice President Nixon for enlisting President Eisenhower to campaign alongside him [Kennedy likened Nixon to a circus elephant hanging on to the tail of another], Kennedy said he wanted to discuss “two areas where peace can be won”—disarmament and “our representations abroad.” He dealt with the issue of disarmament swiftly, promising that his administration would produce enhanced research to enable U.S. disarmament negotiators to work in an informed and innovative way.

  The bulk of his speech, however, was devoted to the problem of representation abroad. First, he warned that the communists were doing a far better job of training their young people to work for communism outside their own countries. “For the fact of the matter is,” he said, “that out of Moscow and Peiping and Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany are hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, studying in those institutes, prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism.”

  Against this impressive communist co
mmitment, according to Kennedy, the United States could muster only an inept foreign service with lackluster overseas missions. The United States had chosen too many ambassadors who were “ill-equipped and ill-briefed” and whose “campaign contributions have been regarded as a substitute for experience.” He insisted that “men who lack compassion for the needy here in the United States were sent abroad to represent us in countries which were marked by disease and poverty and illiteracy and ignorance . . .”

  He was scathing in his accounting of the foreign service’s lack of fluency in foreign languages. He said that 70 percent of the new foreign service officers could not speak any language besides English. In Athens, he said, only six of the seventy-nine Americans in the embassy spoke Greek. In Belgrade, only three of the forty-four Americans spoke Serbo-Croatian. And no one in the New Delhi embassy could speak Hindi or any other Indian language.

  After completing this litany of U.S. failure, Kennedy said, “I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service, well-qualified through rigorous standards, well-trained in the languages, skills, and customs they will need to know.” He said that these workers would be directed and paid by the U.S. foreign aid agencies. Summing up the proposal, he said, “We cannot discontinue training as soldiers of war, but we also want them to be ambassadors of peace.”

  Unlike his remarks in Michigan, this speech attracted nationwide notice. The double-decker headline on the front page of the New York Times proclaimed, “Kennedy Favors U.S. ‘Peace Corps’ to Work Abroad; Calls for Volunteer Service as Alternative to Draft—Taunts Nixon on Coast.”

  The speech, of course, drew barbs from Nixon. He denounced the proposed Peace Corps as “a cult of escapism” and “a haven for draft dodgers.” But it was impossible to dampen the youthful fervor for the new idea.

  On the Sunday after the San Francisco speech, two days before the election, a convoy of cars with University of Michigan students drove the sixty miles from Ann Arbor to the Toledo, Ohio, airport to meet Senator Kennedy in the midst of a hectic campaign swing. The meeting had been arranged by Mildred Jeffrey, a Michigan Democratic Party committeewoman whose daughter, a student at Michigan, had kept her informed about all the signing on campus. The Guskins presented their statement, with eight hundred signatures, to a pleased Kennedy.

  “Are you really serious about the Peace Corps?” Alan Guskin asked the candidate.

  “Until Tuesday, we’ll worry about this nation,” Kennedy joked. “After Tuesday, the world.”

  After Kennedy left to speak in Toledo, the Guskins joined Sorensen and Goodwin in the airport coffee shop. “Is this the first platoon of the Peace Corps?” Sorensen asked with a smile. In fact, within a year, the Guskins would be Peace Corps Volunteers assigned to Thailand.

  The Kennedy campaign team was in a confident mood as Election Day approached—more confident, in fact, than they should have been. Although the polls promised a substantial victory, the margins, as it turned out, were inflated. Kennedy did defeat Nixon to become the thirty-fifth U.S. president, by a margin of 303 to 219 electoral votes; but in the popular vote, Kennedy led by fewer than 200,000 votes out of a total of more than 68 million cast. A few shifts of sentiment could have completely reversed the results.

  A few years later, in his biography of Kennedy, Sorensen described the 1960 campaign as devoid of any “clear-cut, decisive issue.” “Kennedy did not attempt to create any single specific issue,” Sorensen wrote. “Instead, he jammed his speeches with a whole series of facts and figures to express his dissatisfaction with standing still, his contention that America could do better.” In fact, Sorensen said, Kennedy made only one new proposal during the entire campaign: the creation of the Peace Corps.

  This uniqueness makes it easy to exaggerate the importance of the Peace Corps, both to the campaign and to Kennedy himself. In a news analysis published by the New York Times on the Sunday after the election, reporter Peter Kihss listed the four foreign policy campaign pledges that President-elect Kennedy “considers . . . the most important.” They were a nuclear test ban treaty, the evacuation of Nationalist Chinese troops from the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the unleashing of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and a Middle East peace conference. The Peace Corps was listed in the story but was not included among the most important promises.

  In Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, long regarded as the model for a narrative of a presidential campaign, the account of the closing weeks of Kennedy’s election campaign does not include any mention at all of the impromptu challenge to the students at the University of Michigan, the peace speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, or any call for a Peace Corps. White obviously did not regard the idea of the Peace Corps as a significant vote-getter.

  The Kennedy proposal, in any case, was only lightly sketched. The few details suggested that Kennedy envisioned a junior U.S. government corps of foreign aid workers, smarter and better trained than their seniors but still taking orders from them. If the Peace Corps had started out that way, it probably would not have endured. Someone else, as we will see in the next chapter, was needed to create the Peace Corps in the guise that we know it.

  Yet there would not have been a Peace Corps at all had Kennedy not taken hold of the idea and challenged many thousands of young people anxious to make their lives useful and meaningful. Many came forward simply because he called them. This was even more true after he delivered those famous lines in his inaugural address that still serve as a mantra for the Peace Corps, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” For many years, even after he was assassinated, the Peace Corps Volunteers were known in some Latin American countries as los hijos de Kennedy—“the Children of Kennedy.” It may sound somewhat corny, but it was an apt description.

  Chapter Two. Sarge’s Peace Corps

  R. Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, was a brother-in-law of the new president. The Kennedys prided themselves on their closeness and their hierarchy, however, and in-laws had no rights to the highest rung of family power. On vital family matters, such as the election of a Kennedy, assignments came down from on high, and Shriver carried them out with great enthusiasm and competence.

  Shriver was handsome, gregarious, smart, thoughtful, and full of curiosity, but not full of himself, and the Kennedys did not always know what to make of him. Shriver’s embrace of liberal causes and his work as head of the Chicago Interracial Council led some Kennedys to joke he was the House Communist. Bobby Kennedy liked calling him a Boy Scout.

  The family made it clear that Shriver’s own ambitions were secondary. Perhaps unrealistically, he had once harbored hopes of running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois in 1960. But when the family patriarch, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, heard a rumor about this in 1959, he told Shriver, “Under no circumstances are you to run for governor next year.” 1960 was going to be Jack Kennedy’s year, and everyone in the family, including Shriver, was obligated to work for Jack’s election as president.

  The Kennedys were descended from an impoverished Irish Catholic farmer who had sailed for the United States and settled in Boston after the potato crop failed in 1848. Shriver’s American roots were deeper.

  The first Shriver family, German Protestants known as the Schreibers then, had arrived in the New World long before the American Revolution. The Shrivers, working as tanners in the German-speaking region of southern Pennsylvania, soon moved to the Catholic colony of Maryland and converted to Catholicism early in the nineteenth century. By now, Shriver regarded himself as part of the Maryland Catholic aristocracy. “We’re nicer than the Kennedys,” Shriver’s mother once told Time magazine. “We’ve be
en here since the 1600s. We’re rooted in the land in Maryland.”

  Shriver was adamant about his religious observance, and this piety must have reinforced his Boy Scout image among the Kennedys. His moral strictures were so strong that he threw up when a girlfriend, whom he intended to marry, confessed that she had once slept with a suitor. The Kennedy brothers were bemused by his long, frustrating courtship of their sister Eunice. It took five years before the reluctant Eunice agreed to marry Shriver, and, according to biographer Scott Stossel, he was still a virgin on his wedding day at the age of 37. That kind of morality was dissonant from the lifestyle of the Kennedys. After all, Ambassador Kennedy and his son, the president, were notorious womanizers.

  Shriver owed his livelihood, and perhaps his marriage, to the elder Kennedy. The fortune of Joseph P. Kennedy, known as one of the wealthiest and ruthless men in the United States, was grounded in banking, Wall Street, Hollywood, the liquor industry, and real estate. He had achieved more celebrity by serving President Franklin D. Roosevelt as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Britain. When Shriver started dating Eunice, the ambassador showed more enthusiasm than his daughter and offered the young man a job.

  Shriver did not grow up in poverty, but his father’s investment company was bankrupted by the Depression. His father then supported the family on low-level, poor-paying Wall Street positions. Sarge managed to work his way through Yale on a scholarship and odd jobs and went on to Yale Law School only when the father of a friend decided to pay the tuition. After combat duty as a naval officer in the Pacific during World War II, he found himself dissatisfied by work in a law office and then worked as an assistant to the editor of Newsweek magazine. When his future father-in-law offered him a job, he asked the advice of a Newsweek editor, Raymond Moley, who had been one of Roosevelt’s closest counselors in the early days of the New Deal. “Don’t go anywhere near the bastard,” Moley told him. “. . . He’ll eat you alive.” Despite the advice, Shriver accepted the job.