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When the World Calls

Page 3

by Stanley Meisler


  Ambassador Kennedy assigned Shriver to help manage the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The building, one of the largest in the world, sorely needed high-paying tenants. Using his persuasive charm, the young and energetic Shriver succeeded in attracting a host of well-known clients such as NBC and Eastern Air Lines into the building. The Mart became one of the most lucrative sources of the Kennedy family fortune. Shriver was soon regarded as an obvious favorite of the ambassador, and when Eunice agreed to marry him, it may have been as much because of her father’s pressure as Shriver’s entreaties.

  Bobby Kennedy, who did not have a high regard for his brother-in-law, had to find a role for him in the successful campaign. Shriver was an effective salesman, a president of the Chicago School Board, a civil-rights enthusiast, and an active socialite, yet Bobby perceived him as little more than a dilettante. “Bobby always spat on Sarge,” Charles Peters, who worked with the campaign and later with the Peace Corps, told biographer Stossel. “His people considered Sarge weak, a nonplayer.” Bobby put Shriver in charge of generating ideas about civil rights and urban affairs and of setting up farmers’, businessmen’s, and professional organizations for Kennedy—in short, all the Boy Scout stuff that the Kennedys did not regard as vital.

  Yet Shriver took part in one of the most vital moments of the campaign. His civil-rights coordinator, Harris Wofford, a young Notre Dame law professor, received a panic-stricken phone call from Coretta King one night two weeks before the election. Her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., had been sentenced to serve six months in jail on the ridiculous charge of driving in Georgia with an Alabama driver’s license. “They are going to kill him, I know they are going to kill him,” a sobbing Mrs. King told Wofford.

  Wofford, a friend of the Kings, thought it would help Coretta if Jack Kennedy took a few minutes to phone and offer his sympathy and concern. Wofford knew that the Kennedys, out of fear of losing several southern states, did not want Jack to ally himself publicly with King, but a demonstration of kindness to King’s pregnant wife would surely not hurt Kennedy. In fact, Wofford was sure, a symbolic act like that would swell the black vote for Kennedy.

  Wofford failed to reach anyone in the Kennedy entourage that night but finally phoned Shriver in Chicago the next morning. When Shriver heard Wofford’s idea, he did not hesitate. “Jack doesn’t leave O’Hare for another forty minutes,” he told Wofford. “I’m going to get it to him. Give me her number and get me out of jail if I’m arrested for speeding.”

  When Shriver reached Kennedy’s room at the O’Hare International Inn, he found the nominee with Ted Sorensen, press secretary Pierre Salinger, and aide Kenneth O’Donnell. He was sure the three would rail against the idea, so he kept it to himself. But he got his chance when Sorensen soon left to work on a speech, Salinger rushed off to meet reporters, and O’Donnell went into the bathroom.

  “Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy?” Shriver asked his brother-in-law. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected. But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Kennedy. “Why not? Do you have her number? Get her on the phone.”

  According to a grateful Mrs. King, Kennedy then told her, “I want to express to you my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

  When Bobby Kennedy found out about the call, he was furious. At campaign headquarters in Washington, he chastised both Shriver and Wofford, shouting, “Do you know that three southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

  Yet Bobby made a surprising and injudicious phone call to the Georgia judge, urging him to let King go. Feeling mounting pressure from others as well, including prominent Georgia officials, the judge released King the next day. After his release, King told reporters, “I am deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible. For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.”

  King’s father, an influential Atlanta pastor who had supported Nixon, announced, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  Shriver then arranged for the publication and distribution in black churches of more than a half-million copies of a pamphlet that told the story of the Jack Kennedy phone call and the release of King. The difference between candidates was clear. Nixon had made no symbolic gesture to the Kings. President Eisenhower, who had the authority to do even more, had done nothing as well.

  It is fanciful, of course, to attribute victory in a close election to one campaign incident rather than a myriad of others. But Theodore White, noting that the black vote for Kennedy was many times his margin of victory in Illinois, Michigan, and South Carolina, wrote that “the candidate’s instinctive decision [to phone Mrs. King] must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.” That “instinctive decision” would not have been made if Shriver had not embraced Wofford’s idea with boundless enthusiasm and then deftly figured out a way to carry it out. The ability to embrace and enact the ideas of others with wonderful verve would prove one of Shriver’s most valued traits as leader of the Peace Corps.

  As soon as Kennedy was elected, he entrusted Shriver with the job of chief talent scout. The president-elect wanted his brother-in-law to head a task force that would “find the most dedicated, bright, tough-minded, experienced guys in the country” to fill the cabinet and other perches of the new administration. Kennedy wanted Shriver to scour the academic, business, political, diplomatic, labor, and foundation worlds in the search for what the president-elect called “the brightest and the best.” Writer David Halberstam described Shriver as a “big game hunter,” as he brought in the likes of Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara (who took the job of Secretary of Defense) and Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy (who would serve as National Security Adviser).

  But there was no job for the hunter. Nothing had been offered after his discussions with the president-elect about senior positions for himself in the Justice, State, and Health, Education and Welfare departments. Sarge and Eunice returned to Chicago the day after the inauguration with vague thoughts about Illinois politics in his mind. But the new president phoned a few hours after their arrival.

  At least 25,000 letters had been posted to Kennedy asking for a chance to serve in the Peace Corps. Shriver and his talent scouts had also been bombarded with inquiries about it—but, of course, it didn’t exist. As a result, Kennedy wanted Shriver to head a task force creating the new Peace Corps. Shriver would joke later that Kennedy wanted him in charge because the president and his aides were sure his campaign proposal was too fanciful to get off the ground. “It would be easier to fire a relative than a friend,” Shriver wryly noted.

  Kennedy wanted Shriver to follow the model set down in a paper written by Professor Max Millikan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the election. Millikan had proposed a pilot program of a few hundred volunteers with the milquetoast name “International Youth Service.” The volunteers would work under the supervision of the U.S. foreign aid agency. His approach was cautious, experimental, and small, and Kennedy agree
d with it.

  “Because of the experimental nature of the program, and the limited information now available about needs,” Kennedy said in a press release accompanying the Millikan report, “it should certainly be started on a small scale.”

  But all Shriver’s public relations and sales instincts rebelled against the Millikan report. As Wofford, a member of the task force put it, the report was “contrary to every bone in Shriver’s body and every cell in his brain.” That kind of caution, Shriver believed, crippled America’s foreign aid program. Moreover, the polls showed that 70 percent of Americans favored the creation of the Peace Corps. How could you offer them something slow, piddling, and tentative? Shriver did not even invite Millikan to the first meeting of the task force on Monday, February 6, soon after the inauguration.

  Until the eve of that meeting, however, Shriver did not have a comprehensive, well-reasoned alternative to propose. But then he found a report titled “A Towering Task” among his papers in his room at the Mayflower Hotel. The report was written by Warren Wiggins, the thirty-four-year-old deputy director of Far East operations for the International Cooperation Administration (ICA; soon to be renamed the Agency for International Development, or AID), and William Josephson, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer in the agency. They took the title of the paper from a line in Kennedy’s first State of the Union address. Talking about the need to expand the economy of the entire non-communist world, Kennedy had said, “The problems in achieving this goal are towering and unprecedented—the response must be towering and unprecedented as well.”

  According to Peace Corps lore, Shriver’s excitement after reading the report led to what was known as “the midnight ride of Warren Wiggins.” In a flash of drama, Shiver dispatched a telegram to Wiggins at 3:00 a.m., asking him to show up at the meeting that morning. Shriver has always maintained he sent that telegram. But in an interview more than thirty-five years later, Wiggins said he never received any telegram, but, hearing rumors about the meeting, he managed to persuade someone on Shriver’s staff to let him in as a high official of the foreign aid agency. Josephson was out of town that week.

  When Wiggins arrived at a conference room in the Mayflower, he was startled to see copies of the report at the place of every task force member. Shriver opened the meeting. “Now I’ve never met this man before this morning,” he said. “But before we begin today’s meeting, I want you all to read his report because it comes closest to representing what I think should happen.”

  “My heart was pounding,” Wiggins recalled. “I thought then that I had made my connection with the new administration. That was what I wanted. I had hooked myself into the administration with that sentence by Shriver, and that is what I wanted.”

  Wiggins’s feelings reflected the new mood in Washington. In just a few weeks, Kennedy had made young people feel that his administration, his New Frontier, would be active, smart, stylish, and caring and would sweep away the crust and creakiness of the old Eisenhower administration. Young bureaucrats such as Wiggins and Josephson wanted to take part in the changes. They had written a couple of papers, one warning that the political situation in Vietnam was deteriorating, the second proposing reforms in foreign aid, but the papers made no impact. Instead, Josephson recalled, “Everybody wanted our views about the Peace Corps.” Wiggins finally persuaded Josephson that “if we were to have any input into the Kennedy Administration, we had to write about the Peace Corps, because that is what it wanted to hear from us.” Wiggins and Josephson then set down their ideas about the new Peace Corps and sent the paper to their bosses, to Shriver, and to people close to him like Wofford.

  What attracted Shriver the most in “A Towering Task” was Wiggins and Josephson’s insistence that the Peace Corps must be large enough to make an impact on the developing world, to satisfy the aspirations of tens of thousands of young Americans, and to swell the American public’s pride in the accomplishments of its government. Wiggins had worked on the Marshall Plan, and he believed that this program for European economic recovery after World War II would have failed if it had started too small to make an impact.

  “In other words, it is here postulated,” Wiggins and Josephson wrote, “that a ‘small,’ ‘cautious’ National Peace Corps may be worse than no Peace Corps at all. It may not receive the attention and talent it will require even for preventing trouble. A slow, cautious start may maximize the chance of failure.”

  The paper stressed speed as well as size. In a section evidently suggested by Josephson, the paper proposed that President Kennedy launch the Peace Corps even before it was authorized by Congress. This could be done by executive order, Josephson believed, and it would be the only way to speedily accommodate the thousands of college applicants who would graduate in a few months.

  All this was exactly what Shriver wanted to hear. “Anyone who knows Shriver,” said Peace Corps information officer Donovan McClure in an interview years later, “is aware that convincing him to start big wasn’t the hardest sell that Wiggins would ever have to make. Indeed, if Wiggins hadn’t come through with ‘A Towering Task,’ Shriver doubtless would have sent out for it through room service.”

  The paper, however, had a major flaw. Wiggins and Josephson’s sense of big was, to say the least, grandiose. If “A Towering Task” had been an exercise in art criticism, it would have deemed Michelangelo’s David a failure for not being as immense as Mount Rushmore. Wiggins and Josephson talked of sending “a few thousand” volunteers to Mexico, 5,000 to 10,000 to Nigeria, and “it is not impossible to imagine a 50,000 Peace Corps teacher force in India.” The paper devoted fifteen of its thirty-one pages to a proposed model program that would send 17,000 English teachers to the Philippines over a five-year period, with no more than 5,000 serving in a single year. Even Wiggins admitted years later, “In most ways, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”

  The Wiggins-Josephson paper gave Shriver the intellectual rationale for starting boldly and for rejecting all the admonitions about the need to take only halting, experimental steps. The American public would have lost interest in an experiment comprising a few hundred volunteers. Eager young college graduates would have lost patience and enthusiasm and moved on to other pursuits. The new agency needed the acclaim and celebrity that would greet its well-publicized early missions to the Third World.

  But Shriver’s embrace of the paper spawned a major problem as well. All the lore about midnight rides and towering tasks encouraged the future bureaucrats of the Peace Corps to think too big. No one ever talked about 17,000 volunteers in the Philippines or 50,000 in India again. The realities of programming would soon make such figures laughable. But officials would easily fall in love with numbers, trying to make their programs bigger than anyone else’s. An overzealous Peace Corps official in the field, for example, might not look too closely at a ministry’s request for a hundred volunteers and then discover to his dismay, when the volunteers showed up, that there were only jobs for eighty or even fewer.

  This problem was enhanced by Shriver’s decision to name Wiggins director of program development and operations, and later deputy director, of the Peace Corps. During the first five years, in fact, Wiggins was surely the most influential figure in the Peace Corps aside from Shriver. Wiggins proved an able and intelligent administrator, but he never lost his love of size. Neither did Shriver.

  The task force completed its report to the president in a little more than two weeks. Several members of the team contributed to the writing, with Wofford handling the final draft. Shriver pored over every line. The report laid down their vision. The Peace Corps must not be tentative and insignificant. It must be independent, not an appendage of the ICA. “This new wine should not be poured into the old ICA bottle,” the report said. In a concession to universities and nongovernmental organizations, the report promised that the Peace Corps would contract these groups to run most of the programs overseas. (This concept
was dropped quickly; the Peace Corps, with rare exceptions, decided to run all its overseas programs.) The president also was urged to ensure “that the Peace Corps be advanced not as an arm of the Cold War but as a contribution to the world community.”

  Finally, speed was of utmost importance. The report was sent to Kennedy on Friday, February 24. “If you decide to go ahead,” Shriver wrote in a memo accompanying the report, “we can be in business Monday morning.” Kennedy did not move that fast, but fast enough. On Wednesday, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, creating the temporary agency of the Peace Corps. Although Congress did not pass legislation authorizing the permanent Peace Corps until more than six months later, the date of the executive order—March 1, 1961—is regarded as the official birthday of the Peace Corps.

  Shriver sent President Kennedy a list of several leading academics who might serve as director of the Peace Corps. But the president wisely threw the list away and selected Shriver. Shriver protested and came up with excuses: the stigma of nepotism, his suitability for other jobs in the administration, his hopes for a political career in Illinois. But Kennedy rejected all these arguments, and in the end, Shriver gave in to his brother-in-law.

  Sarge now led the newest agency in government, the first outpost of Kennedy’s New Frontier. But what was the Peace Corps? It was a name, a concept, and little more. Shriver didn’t have a building in Washington to hang the Peace Corps’s shingle. He had no staff beyond his tiny task force. He had no requests from any country in the world for help. And, of course, he did not have a single Peace Corps Volunteer.

 

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