A reporter and a photographer from Time magazine showed up one day at the house of Tom Livingston in Dodowa, a village of 2,500. Tom, who had taught in Itasca, Illinois, was teaching in the Ghanata secondary school in Dodowa. He slept on a straw mattress on an iron bed under a mosquito net, shaved and bathed out of a bucket, and used a metal can embedded in a wooden box as a toilet. His house had the only electricity in town, but it worked for only three to four hours, and only at night. Tom wrote his family that he felt as if he were living in a “delightful summer camp.”
Tom was closer to the image that Americans back home had of a Peace Corps Volunteer than most of his colleagues, which is precisely why the Time team showed up. “Can we get a picture of you drawing water from the well?” the photographer asked. Tom replied that he didn’t know how to draw water from a well. His cook did that job.
“Come on,” the Time man persisted, “let’s get the picture.”
Tom refused. “There may be other Volunteers who have to draw their own water,” he said, “but I’m not one of them.”
As several hundred Volunteers travelled to countries around the world during the first weeks, Shriver, despite his perpetual optimism, fretted that something could go wrong somehow, somewhere, and crush the wonderful mood in the United States of goodwill and admiration for the brave young Americans heading into the unknown. He knew that good moods and good publicity could be ephemeral and that the Peace Corps was politically fragile. One disaster could unleash the doubters, and the new agency might not be able to withstand a well-founded attack of derision.
And a crisis did come, a little more than six weeks after the first Volunteers arrived in Ghana. It took place in the nearby West African country of Nigeria. None of the nightmares at the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington had envisioned the kind of embarrassment that erupted. It was a complete and sudden surprise.
The first Nigerian contingent of thirty-nine Volunteers, all teachers, had arrived in Lagos at the end of September and moved to the University College of Ibadan fifty miles north for a few more weeks of training before heading to their schools. Ibadan was usually described as the largest indigenous metropolis in Africa. It had become a great city on its own, not because the British colonialists had decided to create a center of administration or commerce there.
Ibadan had modern neighborhoods with European-style structures—the university college, a grand hospital named after Queen Elizabeth II, and government buildings, including a new House of Assembly, to administer the Western region of Nigeria. But what impressed a newcomer most were the teeming dirt streets crowded with men and women draped in the blue-dyed cloth favored by the Yoruba tribe, the cacophony of cries from the open-air markets, the endless jumble of shacks in cement or mud brick with corrugated iron roofs, the paucity of sidewalks, and the smelly rivulets of open sewer that seemed to course the sides of every pathway a stranger took.
None of this escaped Margery Michelmore, a Volunteer from a Boston suburb with a great deal of potential. She was twenty-three and had graduated magna cum laude from Smith College. Peters, the director of evaluation, had met her while she was training for seven weeks at Harvard, and he wrote Shriver later, “Margery was as sensitive and intelligent a Volunteer as we ever had in the Peace Corps.”
On Friday evening, October 13, 1961, Margery wrote a picture postcard to her boyfriend, Robert V. Storer, a young lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Cambridge. The card had a scene of life in Ibadan on one side. She tried to cram her impressions of the city into a small space on the other side:
Dear Bobbo: Don’t be furious at getting a postcard. I promise a letter next time. I wanted you to see the incredible and fascinating city we were in. With all the training we had, we really were not prepared for the squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions rampant both in the city and in the bush. We had no idea what “underdeveloped” meant. It really is a revelation and after we got over the initial horrified shock, a very rewarding experience. Everyone except us lives on the streets, cooks in the streets, sells in the streets, and even goes to the bathroom in the street. Please write.
Marge
P.S. We are excessively cut off from the rest of the world.
Margery could not recall later whether she had actually put the card with a group of others that she had deposited in a mail receptacle in her dormitory. She may have dropped the card on campus, or some postal clerk may have spotted it and passed it on to a student friend. In any case, the card never left Ibadan for the Boston area. Instead, a group of University College students mimeographed hundreds of copies of the postcard, distributed them throughout the university, and rushed to rallies to denounce the Peace Corps.
Copies were left at every place in the dining halls where Volunteers usually ate. The students were furious. Nigeria had been independent for only one year, and Margery’s exaggerated description of primitive conditions in Ibadan stirred all the resentments about their inferior status when the British ruled them. The Students Union, in one rally, passed resolutions by acclamation that denounced the Volunteers as “America’s international spies” and their teaching program as “a scheme designed to foster neo-colonialism.” The Nigerians refused to eat at the same tables with the Volunteers and barred the Volunteers from the Students Union building. Some students chanted “Yankees, go home” at the Volunteers.
A crestfallen Margery wrote a letter to the students apologizing for her “senseless letter.” The Volunteers mimeographed the apology and distributed it throughout the campus. But it did not temper the furor. A group of Volunteers rushed with the bad news to the home of Murray Frank, the nearest Peace Corps official in Ibadan. Frank, the associate director of the program in Nigeria, had left training in the hands of the university faculty while he checked on schools to make sure they had openings for the Volunteer teachers. Frank still had no telephone service in his home and drove to the U.S. Information Service library in Ibadan to phone Nigeria Peace Corps director Brent Ashabranner in Lagos. Ashabranner cabled Washington. Frank and Ashabranner agreed that it was best that Margery leave Ibadan as soon as possible. Joseph Greene, the U.S. deputy ambassador, was in Ibadan that day, and he drove Margery to Lagos.
The senior staff of the Peace Corps, fraught with panic and fear, frustrated by the distance and the lack of detail, gathered at headquarters in Washington on Sunday afternoon. They feared, as Wiggins recalled, that “the Peace Corps could be thrown out at any moment. It could be the domino theory—first we’re kicked out of Nigeria, then out of Ghana, and so on. Anything was possible.” Then a cable from Margery reached Shriver. She felt it would be best for both her and the Peace Corps if she resigned and returned to the United States immediately. That gave the staff direction, and arrangements began to bring her back.
By Monday morning, the postcard and the protests were worldwide news. Any hopes of Shriver and his aides that the fuss might make only minimal impact in the United States were dashed when they picked up their copies of the Washington Post that morning. An ominous headline on the front page glared at them. “Nigeria Students Urge Deportation of American Peace Corps Members,” it said.
Shriver and his aides were obviously guided by four goals during the next few days. They wanted to whisk Margery out of Nigeria, to keep her away from U.S. press and television, to paint the protesting Nigerian students as communist-inspired and, finally, to demonstrate compassion by standing behind a Volunteer who had committed an indiscretion but did not deserve the wrath falling upon her.
Timothy Adams, who had left the San Francisco Examiner to join the Peace Corps staff, found himself heavily involved in damage control. The son of the renowned New York columnist Franklin P. Adams, Tim was a highly respected reporter and editor of great care and integrity. Shriver, in his public statements, tried to feign great calm about the notorious postcard, but Adams, a recent addition to the
Peace Corps information office, said, “There was panic in Shriver’s heart. There really was. That postcard had created a cause célèbre. It was temporarily the talk of the universe. So, above all, Shriver wanted to stop the talk. To do so, he felt he had to outsmart the press—divert them—get their minds off Margery and the Peace Corps and on to something else.”
Shriver decided that Margery should fly from Lagos to London and then to Bermuda, accompanied by Dick Ware, an AID official in Nigeria who was joining the Peace Corps staff. Tom Mathews, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was now Shriver’s deputy director of information, waited in Bermuda to escort Margery to the Peace Corps training camp in Puerto Rico. There, Shriver hoped, Margery would spend a good number of days or even weeks talking to Volunteers about cultural sensitivity. That would keep her out of the limelight for a while.
But Shriver’s elaborate and circuitous scheme collapsed when stormy weather shut down the Bermuda airport. BOAC decided to divert its flight to Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) airport in New York. Adams managed to make his way to Idlewild before the BOAC plane landed. So did a horde of newspaper, magazine, and television reporters and cameramen from the New York area—so many, in fact, that Adams felt sure that they must have come for something else, perhaps the arrival of a super-celebrity like Grace Kelly. But when he asked why they were there, one of the press people replied, “It’s the Peace Corps girl.”
When Ware and Margery alighted, Adams maneuvered them to a Customs area separated from the reporters and photographers by glass. He phoned Shriver, who told him, “Tim, I don’t want the press to talk to Margery.”
Tim could see the impatient press people gesturing at him. “Sarge, there’s no way to avoid that,” he responded. Shriver did not reply.
Adams pleaded the case. “Sarge,” he said, “Margery does not have two heads. She’s a very intelligent girl. She’s holding up. I have every confidence that she’ll handle herself well.” Shriver kept silent.
“Sarge, Margery will now meet the press. Gotta run.” Tim hung up.
Adams rushed outside the Customs area, stood on a chair, and announced that Margery was fatigued but would reply to questions. She would spend five minutes with newspaper and magazine reporters and five minutes with television crews. Margery told the press that she thought the whole incident was “pretty much blown up.” When asked if she agreed with Shriver’s insinuations that communists had orchestrated the distribution of her postcard message and the protests, she replied that she had no idea who was behind it. She acknowledged her postcard was indiscreet and said with a wan smile that she should have written, “Having wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Her boyfriend, Bobbo, had come to Idlewild and was near her as she spoke.
When she finished, Adams, who accompanied Margery on a flight from Idlewild to Puerto Rico, told other Peace Corps officials to tell Sarge that “she was so great that a lot of reporters ended up muttering, ‘It must have been the goddamn Nigerians.’” Margery had been bolstered by a handwritten note from President Kennedy that was delivered to her in London. “We are strongly behind you,” the president wrote, “and hope you will continue to serve in the Peace Corps.”
Margery did not like the Puerto Rico assignment. Making her talk to trainees about cultural sensitivity felt like punishment to her. It was an Outward Bound camp, and the director insisted that she join the trainees in all their strenuous exercises. She demanded to return to the United States, and after a couple of days, the Peace Corps complied. She was hired to work in Washington, helping to put out the first issue of an official magazine for Volunteers. The six-page issue of the Volunteer included a four-paragraph factual account of the postcard incident. The story was headlined, “End of a Hubbub.” In a few months, Margery resigned from the Peace Corps and married her boyfriend.
The postcard incident encouraged critics of the Peace Corps and political enemies of President Kennedy to gloat and heap scorn on the most celebrated and popular achievement of his administration. Some especially mean-spirited words came from former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Addressing a Republican rally for the losing mayoral campaign of Louis J. Lefkowitz in New York City, Eisenhower derided the Peace Corps as a “juvenile experiment,” and he cited “postcard evidence” that the Volunteers “did not even know what an undeveloped country was.” “If you want to take a trip to the moon,” he said in mocking tones, “send a Peace Corps there. It is an undeveloped country.”
But the Peace Corps had many defenders as well. Poet Carl Sandburg, visiting the White House, dismissed Eisenhower’s barbed comments as “easy and careless blast.” In the New Yorker, novelist John Updike echoed the sentiment of many Americans when he wrote that “the fellow-student who picked up the dropped card and, instead of mailing it, handed it to the local mimeographer seems guilty of a failure of gallantry. One may or may not cook in the streets, but one does not read other people’s mail and then demonstrate because it is insufficiently flattering.”
The postcard incident also inspired a musical, Hot Spot, that reached Broadway a couple of years later. The story centered, as the New York Times drama critic put it, on “a Peace Corps girl with a warm heart and a knack for getting herself and her country into trouble.” Since the role was played by the delightful Judy Holliday, the Peace Corps could hardly complain about the attention. In any case, the musical folded after a few weeks, one of the most disappointing flops of 1963.
Once Margery left Nigeria in 1961, there was hardly any likelihood that the Nigerian government would throw out the Peace Corps. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the courtly, conservative prime minister, would not offend the United States just to please protesting students and noisy tabloids. In any case, the mood was changing. In Ibadan, Aubrey Brown, a Volunteer, announced that he would eat no food at all if the Nigerian students continued to shun the Peace Corps in the dining hall. Some Nigerians brought trays of food to his room, but he refused to take them. The students finally gave in and ended their boycott. The Volunteers and Nigerians dined at the same tables as they had before the postcard. In November, Prime Minister Balewa personally welcomed several members of another group of arriving Volunteers in Lagos.
About six months later, long after the Volunteers had left the campus for their teaching assignments, I spent ten weeks at the university as a Ford Foundation Fellow. The students and young faculty members that I met, whenever we talked about the incident, were a bit sheepish about their part in all the shouting and protesting, acknowledging now that they had overreacted.
Still, the postcard left its mark on Peace Corps history. At another Rose Garden ceremony in the summer of 1962, President Kennedy said farewell to almost 300 Volunteers heading off to Ethiopia with Harris Wofford, who had decided to leave his job as the White House special assistant on civil rights to direct the first Peace Corps program in that venerable African empire. At the end of the ceremony, Kennedy said to Wofford with a big grin, “Keep in touch, but not by postcard.”
A few days after Christmas 1961, a third contingent of Volunteers arrived in Nigeria. Nigerian officials handed every Volunteer a welcome kit, containing maps, pamphlets about Nigerian life, and a few picture postcards with Nigerian scenes. A Volunteer accosted Ashabranner, the Peace Corps director in Nigeria, asking, “What are they trying to do, trap me?”
More than twenty years later, Warren Wiggins described the postcard incident in almost glowing rhetoric as a vaccination against far worse publicity. “The greatest thing that could have happened to the Peace Corps in the beginning,” he told the writer Coates Redmon, “was a postcard from a Volunteer mentioning that people pee in the streets in Nigeria. It was like a vaccination . . . . Never again would a major newspaper, under the worst of conditions, streamer anything negative about the Peace Corps. Since then, the Peace Corps has had rape, manslaughter, bigamy, disappearances, Volunteers going insane, meddling in local politics, being eaten by crocodiles, but n
ever again did it get a bad play in national news. The vaccination took; we were immune.”
Chapter Four. The Battle of Britain
Shortly after the creation of the Peace Corps, Associate Director William Haddad, a former reporter for the New York Post, persuaded Sargent Shriver to set up an evaluation division. The idea was to send “our guys” to find out about the training at the universities and in the volunteer programs overseas. “If there’s something wrong,” Haddad told Shriver, “we’ll be the first to know and correct it before the press gets onto it and starts screaming.” As Shriver explained to an historian years later, he envisioned evaluation as “getting the Time magazine story before Time magazine.”
They assigned Charles Peters to head the evaluation division. Peters was a thirty-five-year-old former West Virginia state legislator who had worked hard to help Kennedy win his state’s Democratic primary. Influenced by his campaign boss, Bobby Kennedy, Peters had looked on Shriver as no more than a “nice lightweight.” But the idea of the Peace Corps excited him, and he asked some contacts in the administration to help him work there. Shriver, who did not want his Peace Corps to become a dumping ground for politicians who were owed favors, was reluctant at first but finally accepted Peters. Shriver soon surprised Peters about “how good he was . . . what a great leader he was,” and Shriver soon learned to respect Peters as far more than a politico.
Peters and his first evaluator, David Gelman, a former New York Post reporter, scurried around training sites in the United States and programs in the Third World to find out how the infant Peace Corps was doing. Their main sources were the Volunteers themselves. If Volunteers had problems, they were happy to gripe to an official from Washington who stopped by and asked how things were going. It helped even more if the evaluator struck them as unbureaucratic.
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