But he had his unquenchable enthusiasm, his extraordinary energy, and his good sense. “To get an agency going takes others two or more years,” said Peter Braestrup, who covered the beginnings of the Peace Corps for the New York Times. “Shriver did it in six weeks.” There was a madcap air to all the excitement and hysteria at the start, and, as Scott Stossel would point out later, it resembled a Frank Capra movie or a screwball Hollywood comedy.
One annoying doubt hung over the beginnings. Although Kennedy had immediately signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps, he had not yet agreed to accept it as an independent agency. His aides were not pleased with the image of the Peace Corps envisioned by the task force’s report. When he read it, Sorensen was disappointed and told Shriver he had expected them to propose something different. Wofford ran into presidential assistant Ralph Dungan in the White House restaurant and was surprised to hear that the White House wanted the Peace Corps to serve as a component of the new Agency for International Development (AID); the Volunteers would work as junior staffers in overseas AID projects run by AID senior officers. “Not if Sarge has anything to say about it,” Wofford told him.
Influential advisors, like the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, agreed with AID director Henry Labouisse that it made most sense to put all U.S. foreign assistance programs under a single umbrella and a single chief. It was difficult to argue with the logic of such a neat organizational chart. But Shriver was sure it would emasculate the Peace Corps. In a letter to Labouisse, Shriver tried a more political argument. “I believe it would be a grave political error,” he wrote, “to tie the Peace Corps so closely to foreign aid as to compromise its new wide base of support.” In short, the Peace Corps was too popular to let it be tarred by the unpopular foreign aid program. Shriver said that Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the leaders of Congress agreed with him.
Shriver lamented to Wofford that there were only “about twenty people in Washington who have our concept of an autonomous Peace Corps.” But he believed his brother-in-law was among the twenty, and that was all that mattered. Shriver felt confident enough before the issue was settled to depart on an overseas trip to persuade presidents and prime ministers to invite Peace Corps Volunteers into their countries.
In late April, while Shriver was overseas, the White House held a meeting to decide the matter. President Kennedy was too busy with the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco to chair the session. Dungan did so instead. He rejected the arguments of Wiggins and Josephson, the Peace Corps representatives, and told them that the Peace Corps “could not be favored or given extraordinary treatment at the expense of overall government considerations.” Shriver had prepared a special memorandum for Kennedy on the question, but Wiggins and Josephson were not sure Dungan had passed it on to the president. Wiggins cabled Shriver in New Delhi, “Peace Corps not repeat not to have autonomy. Dungan describes himself as acting on behalf of the President.”
The cable shocked Shriver. “I can remember sitting on the bed out there, dripping with sweat—it was hotter than Hades— . . . and saying to myself, ‘Oh, boy, that’s the end,’” he recalled twenty years later. Shriver paced up and down the room. Then some colorful and vehement words of Lyndon Johnson echoed in his head. The vice president was chair of the Peace Corps Advisory Council and a strong advocate of independence for the agency.
“This town is full of folks who believe the only way to do something is their way,” Johnson had lectured Shriver and others in a recent meeting. “That’s especially true in diplomacy and things like that . . . . You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service and they’ll put striped pants on your people when all you’ll want them to have is a knapsack and a tool kit and a lot of imagination. And they’ll give you a hundred and one reasons why it won’t work every time you want to do something different . . . . If you want the Peace Corps to work, friends, you’ll keep it away from the folks downtown who want it to be just another box in an organizational chart.”
Shriver phoned Bill Moyers in Washington. The twenty-six-year-old Moyers had been a high-ranking assistant to Johnson, and the vice president had agreed with great reluctance recently to accept his resignation so he could join the Peace Corps staff. Shriver asked Moyers to persuade Johnson to make the case for independence in a private meeting with Kennedy. Johnson agreed with his usual gusto. He cornered Kennedy, linking the practical case for independence with the political admonition that it made no sense to cloak the wildly popular Peace Corps with the widely unpopular foreign aid program.
Faced with pressure from both his brother-in-law and his vice president, Kennedy gave in and overruled Dungan. The Peace Corps would be an independent agency of the federal government. The White House staff chafed at Johnson’s end run past them. When Dungan passed Moyers in a hallway, he said, “Well, you sons of bitches won.” Wofford called Kennedy’s change of policy “the biggest early decision” in the history of the Peace Corps. Shriver proclaimed Johnson “a founding father of the Peace Corps.”
The trip to solicit invitations for volunteers from Third World leaders fulfilled all Shriver’s hopes. The traveling team comprised Sarge, Wofford, Franklin Williams, a lawyer who had just left the staff of the California attorney general, and Ed Bayley, a former Wisconsin newspaperman. The pace was frantic. In three weeks, they rushed to nine countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Burma, Malaya (now Malaysia), Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore. Bayley muttered more than once, “Why does Sarge insist upon running the Peace Corps as if it was the last stage of a presidential campaign?” The most important stops were in Ghana and India.
Ghana came to independence in 1957, the first black African colony to do so, and its leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, regarded himself as a prophet of pan-Africanism and a natural chieftain of emerging Africa. He also became infatuated with his own power, encouraging a worshipful atmosphere where people hailed him as Osagyefo (the Victorious Leader). Nkrumah also knew the United States well, for he was a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a college long regarded as the black Princeton. Williams was a classmate of Nkrumah, one reason Shriver took him on this trip.
When the team arrived in Accra, the capital of Ghana, Shriver had a rare attack of laryngitis, either from strain or a cold, and he told an airport news conference in a hoarse voice, “We’ve come to listen and learn.” The embassy was in a nervous mood. The Ghanian Times, an influential newspaper, had just denounced the Peace Corps as an “agency of neo-colonialism” and an “instrument for subversion.” “We reject all twaddle about its humanitarianism,” the editorial said.
But Nkrumah agreed to receive Shriver and his aides, and when they met, Nkrumah, in a philosophical mood, did most of the talking. “Powerful radiation is going out from America to all the world, much of it harmful, some of it innocuous, some beneficial,” he said. “Africans have to be careful and make the right distinctions, so as to refuse the bad rays and welcome the good.” Citing the disastrous recent attempt by the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro with an invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, Nkrumah said that the CIA was a dangerous ray that must be resisted.
“From what you have said, Mr. Shriver,” Nkrumah went on, “the Peace Corps sounds good. We are ready to try it and will invite a small number of teachers. We could use some plumbers and electricians, too. Can you get them here by August?”
Nkrumah then elaborated. He wanted volunteers who would teach, “but not propagandize or spy or try to subvert the Ghanian system.” For that reason, he suspected teachers of social science and didn’t want any of them. But teachers of science, mathematics, and English were welcome. Shriver agreed to all conditions, knowing that this blessing by Nkrumah would encourage invitations from the rest of Africa.
India was an even bigger prize, for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was regarded as the leader of the non-aligned nations, the countries that refused to a
lly themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. John Kenneth Galbraith, the new ambassador, warned the team that it would be difficult to persuade Nehru to accept the Peace Corps.
When they met, Nehru, wearing the trademark red rose in his tunic, leaned back in his chair, displaying a fatigue that made him seem to doze off during Shriver’s spiel about the Peace Corps. When Shriver finished, Nehru spoke in a languid, condescending way. “In matters of the spirit,” he said, “I am sure young Americans would learn a good deal in this country and it could be an important experience for them. The government of the Punjab and the Minister for Community Development apparently want some of your volunteers, and we will be happy to receive a few of them—perhaps twenty to twenty-five. But I hope you and they will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came.”
Shriver’s team members did not realize it at the time, but Nehru’s words, though overstated, were prescient about some of the future problems the Peace Corps would face. What mattered far more at the time was that Nehru, despite his annoying, patronizing tone, had offered them an official invitation. Shriver was elated. With both Nkrumah and Nehru accepting volunteers, very few of the other Third World leaders would reject them.
An incredible amount of work had to be done in a very short period of time before the Peace Corps could dispatch a volunteer to Ghana, India, or anywhere else. Shriver needed talented staff, and he was continually on the prowl for anyone who seemed imaginative, different, energetic, and down to earth, and when he found such people, he lost no time hiring them. When Shriver had decided to hire Franklin Williams, for example, Williams told him he couldn’t leave his job in the California Attorney General’s office immediately, Shriver replied, “Yes you can” and phoned Mosk right then. “Stanley,” he said, “we got to have your assistant, Williams.” And he got his way.
Shriver offered Jack Hood Vaughn, who was the chief of AID operations in Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania, the job of director of Latin American operations, but then he reneged because he thought he had too many former AID officials in top Peace Corps positions already. He was afraid that he would tarnish the Peace Corps with the slow, inflexible reputation of the foreign aid program. When Wiggins heard about the withdrawal of the offer, he rushed to Shriver. Did he realize that Vaughn had boxed for many years? He had won the amateur featherweight championship of Michigan, fought professionally in Mexico under the name Johnny Hood, coached the University of Michigan boxing team, and sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson in Detroit. “My God, how did I miss that?” said Shriver. He immediately renewed the offer. Recalling the story long afterwards, Vaughn, who would succeed Shriver as director of the Peace Corps, explained, “Shriver always loved jocks.”
Shriver could not resist hiring a well-known mountain climber, Robert Bates, president of the American Alpine Club, to head the Peace Corps program in Nepal. After months of flattering phone calls, he finally persuaded the renowned cardiologist Charles Houston, Bates’s partner in climbing K-2 in Pakistan, to head the program in India.
Assessing the pioneer Peace Corps staff decades later, Moyers wrote, “Not since the early days of FDR’s New Deal had such a critical mass of unconventional talent descended on Washington.” The work exhilarated them. “We walked to the office each morning,” Charles Peters recalled, “alive with the sense that we had important business to attend to, serving a country and a president we believed in.” No one was intent on making the Peace Corps his or her career. Since Shriver intended to keep the Peace Corps free of bureaucracy, he insisted that no member of the staff could remain longer than five years. This would be enshrined by Congress in its Peace Corps legislation.
Shriver and his staff moved into the Maiatico Building at 806 Connecticut Avenue, across Lafayette Park from the White House. The building had once housed the U.S. officials who managed the Marshall Plan, so it seemed like a fitting home for this new enterprise. The Peace Corps faced an enormous number of tasks in those early months.
The growing staff had to sift applications, test applicants, select potential volunteers, and reject others. Officials had to travel overseas, confer with foreign officials, and set up jobs for the volunteers. Universities had to be contracted to train volunteers. The volunteers, mostly BA graduates without any notable specialty, would need two to three months of training in language, history, culture, and the skills that they would impart to others. Staff had to move overseas to supervise the volunteers. The host governments would house volunteers, but the Peace Corps would have to rent homes for its overseas staff and their families.
The Peace Corps could not forget Congress. Legislation creating the Peace Corps had to be passed, and Congress had to confirm Shriver as director and appropriate funds for the organization. The wooing of Congress was largely left to Shriver. He was a master at this because it was difficult to resist his energy, charm, and dazzling grasp of detail. He met almost four hundred senators and representatives one by one during 1961, usually over breakfast at the Congressional Hotel. An admiring President Kennedy later called his brother-in-law “the most effective lobbyist on the Washington scene.”
Some members of Congress did resist. Rep. Frances P. Bolton called the Peace Corps “a terrifying thing” because she feared Americans would go overseas “without an understanding of the places they are going and without any certain knowledge of what they are doing.” Rep. H. R. Gross, echoing Richard Nixon during the campaign, denounced the Peace Corps as “a haven for draft dodgers.”
This kind of rejection was echoed outside Congress by the Daughters of the American Revolution. At the 80th Continental Congress of the DAR in April 1961, the 2,500 delegates passed a resolution that warned of dire consequences once the Peace Corps Volunteers were “separated from the moral and disciplinary influences of their homeland.” The DAR also fretted that the “brains and brawn” of Americans would be drained “for the benefit of backward, underdeveloped countries.” CBS commentator Eric Sevareid dismissed the Peace Corps as “pure intentions supported by pure publicity.”
But the idea of the Peace Corps had excited the imagination of many more Americans. The Peace Corps had become a phenomenon, the most popular new enterprise of the Kennedy administration. It was different and modern and full of style. The Peace Corps was so fashionable that the New Yorker devoted five cartoons to it during 1961. The magazine also ran a hilarious Thomas Meehan story about a fifty-two-year-old self-pitying advertising man who bungles a suicide and decides to join the Peace Corps instead.
Almost anything the Peace Corps did was newsworthy. The New York Times ran announcements of new staff appointments, no matter how low-ranking, as if they were the new chiefs of staff for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. The first applicants selected for Peace Corps training were listed in the Times as if they were Guggenheim fellows. Hometown newspapers eagerly ran stories and photos of their native sons and daughters whenever they were accepted by the Peace Corps. The ex-journalists hired by Shriver to spread the word about the accomplishments of the budding agency had an easy time.
The atmosphere was frenetic, sometimes frantic, and enervating. The Washington Post published a photograph of the lights glowing in the Peace Corps building at a time late at night when all the other government buildings were dark. Everyone worked late, no matter what job they had. Alyce Ostrow, a young administrator assigned to test and select applicants, recalls leaving the building exhausted near midnight one evening and finding an exhausted Shriver in the same elevator. One member of the staff told Peter Braestrup of the New York Times, “Shriver mercilessly drains people. He won’t take ‘tomorrow’ for an answer.”
Shriver liked to make policy decisions after collegial meetings. “My style was to get bright, informative, creative people and then pick their brains,” he said. Everyone at the meetings called him “Sarge.” He met often with his senior staff an
d encouraged them to speak their minds and argue with each other. He had hired people who were unafraid to contradict him. He was unafraid to answer back. “The way I most like to resolve a matter in my own head is to get conflicting points of view argued in front of me,” he said.
There is no doubt that the final decisions were always his. Some aides, like Wiggins, were more influential than others. But no one was an éminence grise. The Peace Corps that emerged in the summer of 1961 was Sarge’s Peace Corps. The Kennedy in-law usually charged with secondary assignments had done so well he was now a national celebrity. The Peace Corps was a wonderful achievement, but it still felt a little hollow. Not a single volunteer had yet set foot in a foreign land.
Chapter Three. The Pioneer Volunteers and the Postcard
The historic first contingent of Peace Corps Volunteers—twenty-nine men and twenty-one women, all teachers—arrived in Accra, Ghana, on August 30, 1961, after a twenty-three-hour Pan Am charter flight from Washington. U.S. Ambassador Francis Russell arranged what he called a “high-level reception” of Radio Ghana reporters and Ghanian dignitaries for the first Peace Corps Volunteers to reach their host country anywhere in the world. In a cable to Washington, the ambassador had proposed that the debarking Volunteers sing a traditional Ghanian song that they had learned in training. Fortunately, the group boasted several fine singers, including Alice O’Grady, who performed in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado on weekends in San Francisco, and the singers practiced during the flight. When the fifty young Americans descended and grouped, they began to sing “Yen Ara Asase Ni (Land of Our Birth),” a Ghanian anthem in the Twi language. The best singers carried the tune while the others mouthed the words silently. It was a public relations coup of a high order, and Time magazine duly reported that the singing had moved the Ghanians deeply.
When the World Calls Page 4