Robert Klein, one of the pioneer Ghana Volunteers, obviously found something simpatico about Peters even though he had advised Klein in training to get rid of his beard. “Charlie was soft-spoken,” Klein wrote, “a Southern gentleman. He was short and stocky with a chubby-cheeked face, unevenly punctuated with an off-center grin that underlined crinkly, mischievous eyes. You half expected him to take you aside to tell an off-color story.”
Ghana, the first Peace Corps country, struck Peters as well run, but he and Gelman found many woeful problems elsewhere. In Pakistan, only fifteen of the fifty-nine Volunteers assigned there had real jobs. “It was painful to see the idealism of the Volunteers squandered as they sat there with nothing to do,” Peters wrote. In Somalia, Gelman discovered that the program was run by a director who did not like the Volunteers. He dismissed them as crybabies, man babies, mama’s boys, and pains in the ass who went around Somalia yakketing, whining, sniveling, and behaving like six-year-olds. The program itself was a mess, with its teachers in only “minimum employment.” The Volunteers were so ensnared by the pleasures of the old colonial expatriate life that all twelve Volunteers in the town of Hargeisa had joined or applied for membership in the British club that excluded Somalis.
The program in the Philippines underscored the fantasies of the “Towering Task” paper that had first encouraged Shriver to envision a very large Peace Corps. Warren Wiggins and William Josephson had proposed a model program of 17,000 teachers in the Philippines during five years. But there was no shortage of teachers in the Philippines, and the first group of 123 Volunteers came to the country as “teacher aides” in the elementary schools. The job was so ill defined that every Volunteer had to work out with the Filipinos whether to serve as helper, advisor, co-teacher, or supervisor of non-classroom activities.
The officials who set up and ran these programs bristled at all the carping from Peters. They felt he exaggerated problems, misunderstood what was accomplished, and listened too much to a few complainers. There might be a few problems here and there, but in their view, the Peace Corps was off to an exhilarating start. This view was espoused most of all by Wiggins, the associate director for program development and operations, a powerful figure in the early Peace Corps.
“It got to the point,” Peters told the writer Coates Redmon, “where I knew . . . they wanted me out, and the sooner the better. I was feeling harassed and scared of their hostility to the point that I’d avoid them . . . . When I saw them coming down the hall, I’d duck into the men’s room or slip into someone’s office. I didn’t want to think about them, and I didn’t want them to think about me.”
The problem of Peters was discussed at meetings of Shriver with his top managers, and Haddad warned Peters in the summer of 1962, “You are an inch away from being fired.” A desperate Peters then came up with a desperate defense of his work. On the eve of Shriver’s departure for a tour of sites in Africa, Peters prepared a ten-page memo. On one side of each page was a summary of what his evaluation division had said about a program; on the other side was a summary of the claims by the staff running the program. He asked Shriver to look closely in each African country and judge for himself whose description was right.
Shriver took the memo with him. While on the tour, he sent cables back to the senior staff in Washington discussing both his activities in Africa and pending business at home. One cable, sent from troubled Somalia, included the line, “Tell Peters his reports are right.” That simple affirmation shut down any further talk about firing Peters and established the evaluation division as a powerful force within the Peace Corps.
By then, the role of evaluation changed significantly. Peters and his evaluators were vital to the Peace Corps, but not because, as Haddad and Shriver once hoped, they could help the agency clear up a problem before Time magazine found out about it. With its worldwide staff, Time had no trouble interviewing Volunteers and finding many foul-ups. In a long cover story in July 1963, Time described the frustration of “teacher aides” in the Philippines, the absence of jobs in Nepal, the nurses who showed up at a medical station in Bolivia only to find out that it no longer existed, and Volunteers in Colombia whose complaints about the inertia of local bureaucracy mocked the Peace Corps’s public boasts about the success of the program there.
Yet the foul-ups did not turn Time against the Peace Corps. “The Peace Corps, then, is a loosely ruled, badly dressed, often complaining, yet highly motivated melting pot of individualists scattered through jungle, slum, and mountain peak in some of the most backward countries of the world,” the article said. “At the same time, it is probably the greatest single success the Kennedy Administration has produced.”
Peters and the evaluators were vital to the Peace Corps because they gave Shriver an outside view of what was going on. The staff people who developed, ran, and supervised the Peace Corps programs overseas were in no position to offer a cold and objective description of their work. The staff, for the most part, could not admit, accept, or even see its mistakes—in fact, that is the problem of any bureaucracy. A leader needs to go outside the chain of command for a clear view of reality, and so the evaluation division became Shriver’s eyes and ears.
The system worked only because of Shriver. After all, the failures and the mistakes were at heart his failures and mistakes. He had approved the projects and hired the staff. But criticism did not upset Shriver. He had become a leader of great self-confidence who wanted and needed to know if something was going haywire in one of his far-flung and isolated stations. Moreover, he did not accept the evaluations as gospel. They provided him with a useful, outside look—no more. Sometimes he agreed with a report and acted on its recommendations, sometimes not.
Shriver would scribble his reactions in the margins of the report with a ballpoint pen. In the December 1962 evaluation of the Dominican Republic operation, for example, Peters reported that the Volunteers insisted that the hours in training devoted to “American Studies, World Affairs, and Communism” were a waste of time. Peters recommended that the Peace Corps abolish the course. This did not persuade Shriver. “I disagree,” he wrote. “We’ve also found that many Peace Corps Volunteers don’t know beans about American history, Communism, etc.” On the next page, Peters suggested that, at most, “Communism as it exists in the host area could be discussed instead of abstract instruction on Marxism.” “Fine,” Shriver responded in the margin, “that’s the way it should be plus the theoretical.”
The importance of an evaluation report depended on Shriver’s reception. A large number of Peace Corps people read these reports, often one hundred pages long, but only Shriver mattered. He was the audience. As the Peace Corps grew, Peters hired mainly journalists for his staff. Shriver would take the reports home to read in the evenings, and Peters kept them lively enough for Shriver to finish before falling asleep.
The evaluations were periodic, for an evaluator visited every Peace Corps country yearly, spending around a month assessing the work. That made it a unique operation in the U.S. government; many departments and agencies have inspectors-general, but they inspect only when there are accusations of wrongdoing or other whiffs of scandal.
Both Shriver biographer Scott Stossel and Peace Corps historian Gerard T. Rice, looking back on the early years of the Peace Corps, described Peters as “the conscience of the Peace Corps,” but as far as most of those evaluated were concerned, he was little more than a common scold. In fact, the evaluations were far more positive in tone than negative, but the staff chafed under any criticism by outsiders.
The system set up a perpetual antagonism between Peters and Wiggins, whose staff developed and ran all the overseas programs. “After the Shriver cable [to tell Peters his reports were right], Wiggins became publically respectful of Evaluation,” said Peters recently. “He would even praise me at times at staff meetings. But the undercurrent always was that we were the enemy, and, of course, the evaluators t
hought that they were the enemy.” As evaluator Phil Cook once said, “Charlie thinks we’re the RAF and this is the Battle of Britain.”
I was fortunate enough to become part of the evaluation staff for two and a half years during the mid-1960s. By then, Peters had assembled a formidable team. Most, like myself, were journalists. The newsmen had worked for the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco News, and the Associated Press. There were also a lawyer, a Mobil Oil political analyst, and two stylish freelance writers who worked part time. The team was augmented by former Volunteers who had returned from the early programs in Pakistan, the Philippines, Togo, and Ethiopia.
In addition, Peters called on guest evaluators from outside the Peace Corps to look at the programs overseas. Most of the guests were well-known figures such as Richard Rovere of the New Yorker, novelists Fletcher Knebel and Mark Harris, and California politician Alan Cranston (a future U.S. senator).
Peters and the evaluators had an obvious influence on the Peace Corps in several important ways during the early years. They exposed the slipshod nature of many training programs and forced vital improvements. Evaluators, echoing the Volunteers, hammered away at the failure of training to hone the skills needed in the work overseas and at the failure to provide adequate instruction in the local languages. Under this barrage of criticism, the Peace Corps withdrew contracts from universities that ignored languages, refused to set aside time for practice teaching and other practical training, or hired staff with little experience in the countries hosting the Volunteers. The Peace Corps, in fact, gradually took over its own training, hired former Volunteers to staff the sessions, and moved the training overseas.
There were two main programs in the early days of the Peace Corps—teaching in Africa and community development in Latin America—and the evaluators played a major role in improving both. Although there was some question about the relevance of the elite colonial education systems to Africa, the evaluators generally supported the teaching programs. They provided useful work, and Volunteers found it easy to fit into those roles. The big problem was the danger of falling into the trap of living like a colonial, especially in school compounds. For example, I found it disconcerting on my first trip overseas to lunch with a couple of Peace Corps Volunteer teachers in Cameroon and watch one of them tinkle a little bell to signal an African servant to patter in and clear the dishes. Evaluators managed to persuade the Peace Corps to break up the clusters of Volunteers in schools and to improve teaching by encouraging the Volunteers to spend time in the countryside learning about the village life that produced their students.
The evaluators were divided about the value of community development. Peters was wary of the whole idea; he wrote in his memoirs, “The community development workers tried to organize the local people to carry out self-help projects.The possibilities were revolutionary. The volunteers could empower the powerless and array the heretofore helpless campesino against the oligarchies who were oppressing them. The catch was that actually accomplishing all this required a volunteer who was a combination of Jesus Christ and John Kennedy, with a little bit of Tip O’Neill thrown in.”
Peters concluded that the community development Volunteers, with “a few heroic exceptions,” accomplished little. “The concept was so vague that few of them had a clear sense of what to do when they got out of bed in the morning,” he said.
But several of his most influential evaluators, such as David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, were enamored with the idea of community development, though they scorned the way it was carried out by the Peace Corps. In their book Agents of Change, Hapgood and Bennett describe how the Peace Corps dropped Volunteers into the villages of Peru with the goal of stirring the disenfranchised and exploited Indian masses, but gave them little training and support. “At best,” the evaluators concluded, “10 percent of the volunteers were creative enough and persistent enough to discover for themselves the way to go about the job.” They also related the success story of a Volunteer who helped form a local committee that brought a water pipe to the village of Blanquita in Colombia for the first time. Yet, because of the daunting difficulties of community development, the water pipe stopped working a year and a half after the Volunteer left.
But evaluators did not demand an end to community development. Instead, they demanded an end to the practice of Peace Corps officials assigning community development Volunteers to the hinterland of a country as if they were throwing darts at a map. Evaluators insisted on thorough advance inspection of sites, intense training, the assignment of Volunteers alongside local community development agents, extensive Volunteer study of village life, and long spells of patience. These suggestions were generally accepted.
If there was a Battle of Britain between the evaluators and the rest of the Peace Corps, it was largely over what was known as the numbers game. In this, the evaluators won many skirmishes, but they could never win the whole battle. The Peace Corps would try to repair the damage caused by sending too many Volunteers to a particular country, but the drive to expand overall would not slow down in the early years. Despite the problems, Shriver wanted rapid expansion.
Peters understood Shriver’s mood. “Part of Shriver knew that a good leader had to push to the maximum for growth,” said Peters recently. “He was torn. He rightly understood the principle that if you don’t grow, you go downhill.” Peters and the evaluators were not against expansion in principle. They were against stupid expansion, and there was a lot of it going on.
I believe the evaluators became so exercised by the numbers game because they had fallen under the sway of the Volunteers. No one attached to headquarters in Washington spent more time talking with the Volunteers. No matter how hard-bitten, street smart, and skeptical they prided themselves, the ex-journalists usually felt inspired and excited by the young Volunteers who were devoting themselves for two years, in near-total isolation, to helping poor people of an unfamiliar culture. The evaluators felt anger at officials who, in their zeal to impress Shriver with expansionist numbers, hampered the enthusiasm of Volunteers by assigning them to sites that had little work for them.
The evaluators often brightened their reports with flattering portraits of wonderful Volunteers. In his 1963 report on Nepal, for example, Kevin Delany described how Dave Towle and Bob Murphy set out from Kathmandu with a herd of two rams, three ewes, three pigs, and a bull named Sarge. Their aim was to stock an animal husbandry demonstration station for Towle in Bhojpur in eastern Nepal. “They were warned by Nepalis and Americans,” wrote Delany, “that they would never make it through the rugged terrain and across the swollen rivers during the monsoon season.” But they insisted they could do it.
They began by taking a truck fifty miles over a rock-strewn dirt road to the Indian border. Then they boarded a train for a five-day ride through India to Biratnagar in Nepal. The Volunteers slept with the animals in a cattle car. A truck then took them another twenty miles. That was their last passable road. Joined by a third Volunteer, John White, at this point, they set out on foot over thirty-five miles of high mountain passes that took ten days to cross.
They had to ford streams six times, but their biggest problem was crossing the wide Arun River in a large dugout canoe paddled by six men. With Sarge, the bull, lashed to the side and the rest of the animals inside, they paddled the dugout upstream, then maneuvered it into the current and allowed it to drift downstream to the landing on the other side. “Frankly, the river crossing has to be seen to be believed,” Delany wrote.
A tiger menaced them on the other side, but they scared it away with rocks and shouts. A final uphill climb brought them to Bhojpur. They had covered 350 miles in twenty-two days with one loss—a ewe dead from an ear infection. “The most important part of my job is over,” said the twenty-two-year-old Towle. “It was getting the animals here.” The demonstration proj
ect struck Delany as a success a few months later.
In my report on Cameroon in 1966, I included a portrait of Judy Erdmann, a vivacious young woman from South Dakota who was rated poorly in training, largely because of her weakness in French. Judy was assigned to the French-speaking area of Cameroon as a teacher of high school English. “On first glance, she might seem a sure bet to end up confused and lost in her town of Bafang,” I wrote. “But beneath her innocence and woeful French is a tough little girl intent on succeeding as a Peace Corps Volunteer come what may.”
Judy, the only Volunteer in town, made the most of her weak French. Luckily, her headmaster insisted that teachers of English in the lower grades like Judy use no French in the classroom. She was so popular with her students that pupils in a higher grade went on strike, demanding that she teach them as well. But Judy knew her limitations. Students in the higher grades must take a uniform examination that includes translations of English material into impeccable written French. They would be at a disadvantage with Judy in charge, and she declined taking on that class.
Her troubles with French did not hinder her everyday conversations. Judy rushed along in Bafang talking with everyone as if she were fluent. When the correct French word eluded her, she threw in the English word. Even the French expatriates in town, so particular about their language, always stopped to gossip with her. Judy said that her weakness in French even helped her relationship with African women. Their French was pretty bad as well, so they didn’t feel inferior talking with Judy.
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