Judy was eager to know Africans—sometimes too eager. Soon after she arrived in Bafang, she waved and said “Hi” to a young soldier. He quickly sent her a gift of eggs and potatoes. She found out that that was the customary first step of a marriage proposal in Bafang. She stopped waving at him.
Unlike many other Volunteers in Cameroon, Judy never left her town on weekends. She loved Bafang. She also loved teaching in her overcrowded, old, rundown classroom and was growing more active in town. She taught an extra class in English at a nearby mission school and had plans to start a town library. “It’s too early to tell the kind of impact Judy will have on Bafang,” I wrote. “But I don’t have any doubt there will be an impact.”
As evaluators battled the expansionists, we felt like advocates for Volunteers like Judy Erdmann, trying to make sure that their experience would not be diminished by bureaucrats more interested in numbers than individuals. In 1965, I evaluated the program in Ethiopia with Richard Lipez (a former Volunteer in Ethiopia and now a successful mystery novelist). The program was faltering under the weight of numbers.
The Peace Corps had 550 Volunteers in Ethiopia, including 458 teachers who made up a third of the faculty of all the secondary schools in the country. The staff kept adding teachers as if the need could never be satisfied. A batch of more than a hundred had arrived a few months before the evaluation, and a quarter of them were still underemployed. Despite this, the staff was requesting even more teachers for the future. Some schools had so many Volunteers—fourteen or more—that the Ethiopian headmasters felt that the Peace Corps was usurping their authority.
Over half the Volunteers lived in five towns. In the capital, Addis Ababa, there were 159 Volunteers, the largest Peace Corps concentration in the world. There were more Volunteers in Addis Ababa, in fact, than in twelve of the other Peace Corps countries in Africa. The Volunteers spent almost all their leisure time with each other. They had almost no social contact with Ethiopians. To make matters worse, there was a breakdown in relations between the staff and the Volunteers. The staff had little time to visit the Volunteers because so much of their energy was devoted to drawing up expansion plans for the future.
After a month in Ethiopia, Lipez and I sat down with the Peace Corps director in his office in Addis Ababa to discuss some of the problems. We concentrated on underemployment, low Volunteer morale, poor staff-Volunteer relations, and clustering of Volunteers. But he did not seem to listen. We had scarcely finished our comments when he eagerly pulled out a fancy chart with his projections for a double-sized Peace Corps in 1968. We were exasperated.
India was an example of how a first-rate program could be weighted down by White House pressures to expand. In 1966, India had more than 700 Volunteers, the largest Peace Corps program in the world. In March, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited Washington, and President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to make a dramatic gesture of help at a time of impending famine in India. He promised to ship 6 to 7 million tons of food grains to India and, in a message to Congress, proposed sending U.S. agricultural experts to India as “part of an agricultural training corps or through an expanded Peace Corps.”
Warren Wiggins, by then deputy director, seized on Johnson’s words. He quickly cabled Jack Hood Vaughn, Shriver’s successor as director, who was at a conference in New Delhi. “I believe situation in India as dramatized by Prime Minister’s visit and President’s message,” Wiggins wrote, “offers unique opportunity to respond in full to need for agricultural experts and corpsmen through dramatic expansion in size and emphasis PC/I [Peace Corps/India] program.” He proposed sending a massive group of a thousand more agricultural Volunteers before the end of 1966.
The evaluation division felt that India could be expanded, but only if it solved its problems of inadequate program planning and site selection, a severe shortage of staff, and poor relations between Indian officials and the Volunteers. “We are afraid they [the problems] will be ignored in a dramatic White House drive to help India,” an evaluation report said. Brent Ashabranner, the careful and competent country director in India, was even more pessimistic. He protested that the Wiggins expansion would court disaster. But Ashabranner, about to leave India to take up a new post as director of all Peace Corps training, was regarded as a lame duck and ignored. Wiggins won the day.
In 1967, a team of evaluators led by Hapgood studied the result. They reported that “the Peace Corps’ attempt to save India . . . seems to have failed.” In all, seven hundred new Volunteers had been sent to India in six months. Wiggins had envisioned that a portion of them would be experienced specialists who would lead the others, but these experts could not be recruited. Almost all the Volunteers were generalists with a BA degree and no agricultural background. They were trained hurriedly and poorly. There was not enough staff in India to check out whether there were real jobs for them at every site. A bitter joke went around that the staff had placed the Volunteers with a Ouija board. Indian officials were fed up with Volunteers they could not use. “They don’t want any more Volunteers shoved up their ass with a Ouija board,” said a member of the staff.
A minority of the Volunteers managed to find some kind of work for themselves. But, as Ashabranner wrote in his memoirs, “The majority either resigned and came back to the United States or spent their two years in India with the frustration of knowing that they had not really been a help to the Indians.”
The evaluators found that idle Volunteers would divert themselves with drug use, heavy drinking in public, escapist travel to areas like the beaches of Goa, and an obsession with purchasing extra things for themselves, like monkeys and big refrigerators. They also suffered more bouts of illness than other Volunteers.
One Volunteer sent a bitter letter to the Peace Corps magazine the Volunteer after she and her husband failed to find work for a year. “How many other Volunteers are stuck without jobs, were sent into ‘unstructured’ programs and told to be ‘creative,’ and found only emptiness?” she wrote.
In 1967, Vaughn tried to use evaluation as a weapon to destroy the excesses of a program even before it really got started. The Peace Corps was sending more than five hundred Volunteers to Micronesia, a loose grouping of ninety inhabited islands and another 2,000-odd uninhabited islands in the Pacific that was shoddily run by the U.S. Department of Interior as a U.N. trusteeship. A recruiting leaflet, titled “The Peace Corps Goes to Paradise,” called for Volunteers to take on the troubles in this Paradise—poverty, poor schools, inadequate health care.
The program, planned under Shriver, was the creation of Ross Pritchard, the director of East Asia–Pacific regional operations of the Peace Corps. Pritchard, a future university president, embraced numbers as much as Wiggins. Ashabranner wrote that Pritchard “firmly believed that the Peace Corps could not make an impact in a country without a large Volunteer presence which would form a ‘critical mass’ for promoting new ideas.” In a memo to Shriver promoting his plans for Micronesia, Pritchard said the Peace Corps would have a chance “to play a major formative role in a revolution that would be almost completely in our hands.”
Vaughn was wary of the swollen new program that he had inherited. He took the unprecedented step of asking the evaluation division to send an evaluator to Micronesia right after the first Volunteers arrived. He hoped that the evaluator would call attention to any problems before they got out of hand. In a turn of bureaucratic gamesmanship, however, he asked us not to reveal that he had ordered the evaluation.
By then, I was deputy director of the office of evaluation and was assigned by Peters, my boss, to write a letter alerting the team in Micronesia that an evaluation was imminent. I prepared a rather shameless composition for delivery to the new country director as he arrived in Micronesia. I explained blandly that, as he knew, every Peace Corps program was evaluated once a year and that Micronesia’s turn will come up in a couple of weeks. I tried to make that sound routine, kind of ho-hum.
But Vaughn could not face up to Pritchard’s anger. For the sake of bureaucratic peace, he tore up the letter and cancelled the evaluation that he himself had secretly ordered. When the program was evaluated a year later, it proved as disastrous as the hurried, massive program to turn back the famine in India. Many years later, when both of us had long left the Peace Corps, Vaughn and I were sipping drinks in a bar in Mexico City. He acknowledged, a little wistfully, that he should never have cancelled that early evaluation of Micronesia.
The biggest complaint about evaluation by Peace Corps staff overseas was that the reports were too sprightly. “This may be good journalism,” said one country director about the report on his program, “but it’s poor evaluation.” They resented being judged by journalists and other professional writers rather than by their peers.
Tom Quimby, who was named director of African operations after serving as the Peace Corps representative or rep (as the country directors were known) in Liberia and Kenya, praised the evaluation division because “it’s good to have a burr under the saddle.” “But,” he went on, “one of the things that bothered me was the emphasis on getting good writers to go out in the field and write highly readable reports, rather than getting good development people to go out and analyze the development problems. I thought that too much attention was being paid to getting down on paper the fine phrase that would titillate Sarge.”
In 1967, the staff in India invoked an awful pun to defend their program against the latest evaluation. Alluding to the notion that evaluation reports supposedly read like pages from Henry Luce’s Time magazine, the staff accused the evaluation division of publishing “its newsmagazine exposés of Luced prose where cuteness of expression and pre-stated conclusions take precedence over accuracy of content and objective investigation.”
Peters resigned from the Peace Corps in 1968 to found a magazine called the Washington Monthly. His plan was to evaluate the machinations of the agencies and departments of the U.S. government just the way he had evaluated the operations of the Peace Corps. Vaughn appointed Lawrence J. O’Brien to take his place.
O’Brien, who had run unsuccessfully in 1962 as a Democratic candidate for the state senate from New York City, was a brilliant staff officer overseas, serving as deputy director in Cameroon and a director in Gabon. But he came to the evaluation division with all the attitudes of an overseas staffer. His first symbolic act was to cancel an evaluation trip by the New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin. He did not want reports by professional journalists. He wanted them written by people “with some interest in the technical part of development.” And he wanted the evaluators, rather than acting like complete outsiders, to take part in the planning of future programming through their reports.
His ideas, very far from the Peters concept of hard-hitting, smoothly written evaluations by outsiders, were never fully tested. The Nixon administration took over in 1969, and the new director of the Peace Corps, Joseph Blatchford, did not show much interest in evaluation reports. O’Brien resigned in August of that year. The Peace Corps maintained some kind of unit called “evaluation” for the rest of its history, but evaluation never again had the power, influence, and importance of the early years. It takes a powerful, self-confident director to put up with the continual blandishments of someone like Charlie Peters. It is much easier to listen to underlings tell you what you want to hear.
Chapter Five. Friday, November 22, 1963
In Huarocondo, 11,000 feet high in the Andes of Peru, Nancy Norton and her roommate liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings. The two schoolteachers had to wake at 6:00 a.m. on schooldays. On this Saturday, an incessant knocking on the door woke them at seven. It was a Peruvian friend, Vilma.
“Tu presidente está muerto,” Vilma shouted.
“Whose president?” asked a bewildered, barely awake Nancy.
“Señor Kennedy.”
After Vilma left, the two Volunteers reassured themselves that it was only a rumor, but nonetheless, they dressed and headed for the train station to buy a newspaper.
On the way, several teary-eyed teachers from the school stopped them to express sympathy. The sobbing mayor met them at the station, and the Indian women selling food there were unusually quiet. When the Cuzco train arrived, everyone rushed towards the newsboy to buy a paper. The headlines were large and very black. DEATH OF JOHN KENNEDY—THE WORLD MOURNS, they said, in Spanish. He had died the day before, eighteen hours ago. A student came over to the two Volunteers. “Señoritas,” he said, “please, don’t cry.” But he, too, was crying.
The two Volunteers returned to their home and donned black. The townspeople came by all day to express sympathy. Several students, very subdued, sat by the Volunteers. The church bells tolled. A special mass was planned for Sunday.
“The paper said the whole world is mourning,” Nancy wrote to her parents that night. “I don’t know about the whole world, only about Huarocondo. Huarocondo is mourning. Everyone knows the President of the United States. They would be stricken if we weren’t here. But they know we are here because of John Kennedy. They know we are sad because he is dead. They loved us, so they are sad, too. Were I not here, I would never have believed that the world really cared.”
When the first batch of Volunteers arrived in Togo in the fall of 1962, they were welcomed personally in Lomé by Sylvanus Olympio, the courtly, well-educated president, a hero of African independence. Four months later, Olympio died in a military coup led by disgruntled soldiers. It was the first of many coups in independent African countries that would disillusion outsiders about the future of the continent. Olympio was assassinated on January 13, 1963, as he ran towards the U.S. embassy in hope of refuge.
In Atakpamé in southern Togo, Peggy Anderson, a Volunteer teacher and a future best-selling author, recalls the mood as “desperately sad.” “Our Togolese friends could hardly function,” she says. “I remember people moving stunned and slow around the school grounds, where . . . they’d come just to be with colleagues. We consoled them as best we could with our poor French and our grossly inadequate emotional language. Deep down, I—and no doubt others among us in the Peace Corps—gave silent thanks that nothing like this could ever happen in America.”
On November 22, ten months later, Peggy was a teacher in Kpalimé, another town in southern Togo. She was visiting a young French professor across the street from her house when she noticed a Peace Corps jeep stop at her front door. Sylvia Feinman, a Volunteer, had driven there from her village six miles away. She was accompanied by Mr. Anthony, who ran the only shop in Sylvia’s village, selling basics like tomato paste, tinned sardines, palm oil, and kerosene.
It was near midnight, and Peggy wondered what could have brought them to her house so late.
Wearing a muumuu that she had made from royal blue, printed cloth bought in the local market, Peggy rushed across the sandy, unpaved road. As she neared them, Sylvia said, “The president’s been killed.” Peggy turned to Mr. Anthony, struggling to find the right words to console him for his second loss so soon after the first. “No,” Sylvia said, “our President Kennedy.”
“The next day,” Peggy recalls, “it was the Togolese who consoled me. And with every premise of my life suddenly jolted off its moorings, I realized as if lightning had struck that we really are all together in this small boat—that whether rich or poor, black or white, African or American or whatever else, we are bound as humans by the capriciousness of the universe and our helplessness in the face of it. That was the profoundest lesson I learned in the Peace Corps and probably in life.”
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In Iran, Volunteer Donna Shalala, future university president and secretary of Health and Human Services, spent all night listening to the funeral services. The next day a beggar approached her in the street. “No, I don’t have any money,” she said. He replied, “I don’t want money. I just want to tell you how sorry I am that your young president died.”
Kennedy was assassinated while Dick Lipez was at the movies in the old Haile Selassie I theater on Friday night in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Knowing nothing of it, he went to bed, awoke Saturday morning, and headed off to do his weekly shopping at the Italian grocery in the Cherkos Kebele neighborhood near the Shimelles Habte school where he taught. At the grocery, an Ethiopian whom he did not know walked up to him and asked, rather brusquely, “Sir, are you an American?” Wary, Dick said he was.
Lipez, now a well-known writer of detective novels under the pen name Richard Stevenson, recalled recently, “This place was near the insane asylum, and some of the inmates sometimes wandered around the neighborhood. I figured this guy was a probably ‘a mad,’ as the students would have called him. He looked at me and announced, ‘Your president is dead!’ More annoyed than anything, I asked him what he meant by that. He said Kennedy had been shot and killed.”
Dick turned to the Italian manager of the shop. She looked fearful, stricken, near tears, and she nodded once. Dick paid for his groceries and headed home, passing the headquarters of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group on the way. The building’s U.S. flag was at half mast. Inside, a stunned soldier showed him a U.S. Information Service dispatch about the killing. Dick read that the assassin was named Lee Harvey Oswald. Who? What? He thought it was surreal.
At home, he sought more news on the radio but was continually interrupted by visitors, mainly students and fellow teachers. The Ethiopians spoke quietly of their sorrow over his loss. “All of these people felt Kennedy’s death as a loss, too,” said Lipez. “Kennedy was famous and well liked. He was young and looked like he belonged in a movie—which until the Peace Corps arrived was how most Ethiopians got their information about America—and he was an internationalist and he sent people in rockets in space and he welcomed the Ethiopian emperor and took him seriously.”
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