The U.S. embassy held a memorial service a few days later. “I think I went,” said Lipez, “but I have no clear memory of it. I just remember the madman and the Italian grocery lady and the sorrow that was felt all over Cherkos Kebele.”
A few hundred Volunteers had already completed their overseas tours when Kennedy was assassinated. Among them was Maureen Carroll, who years later would serve the Peace Corps as director of the Botswana program and as director of the Africa region.
Maureen had worked as a teacher’s aide in the Philippines. She recalled that small children in her barrio, when they wanted the Volunteers to pay attention to them, would chant outside the windows of the Americans, “Ken-ne-dee. Ken-ne-dee.”
A few weeks before the assassination, Maureen had received a letter from a Filipino schoolteacher. “No American during the fifty years they governed us could really fathom the true Filipino,” the letter said. “It was President Kennedy who sent you [the Peace Corps] to establish the true friendly relationships that were only assumed previously.”
Maureen wrote about her feelings in the Peace Corps’s Volunteer magazine. “I feel that the Peace Corps is a living and breathing answer to Kennedy’s famous, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,’” she said. “One source of consolation for me over the loss is that I was in the chorus that answered him.”
Jack Hood Vaughn, then director of the Latin American region for the Peace Corps, was lunching on Friday with several Volunteers and staff in a restaurant in San José, Costa Rica. For more than a year, a nearby volcano had been spewing ash over the city. Every step anyone took sent up bursts of ash that stuck to their clothing.
A fire siren began to sound during their meal. They listened for it to stop, but it kept wailing. The incessant noise persuaded Vaughn that there had been some calamity. He left the restaurant and headed for the U.S. embassy four blocks away.
“By the time I got to the door,” he told Coates Redmon, “people were running around just screaming and waving their arms. The ash was flying everywhere. You could have choked to death on it. I tried to get through the door of the embassy but they were just closing it. Bam. That was it.
“All of a sudden I was surrounded by about fifty people—charladies, paperboys, vendors—who were all falling to their knees in front of the U.S. embassy on the sidewalk, praying and crossing themselves and moaning. It was mad. It was ghoulish. It was out of Dante. I just stood there, frozen, at the door of the embassy. But now I knew. Kennedy was dead.”
Sargent Shriver was lunching at the Lafayette Hotel on Friday with Eunice and their four-year-old son, Timmy. The old hotel, which no longer exists, was near both the White House and Peace Corps headquarters. Eunice was then six months pregnant.
The lunch was interrupted by a phone call from Shriver’s secretary Mary Ann Orlando. Shriver left the table to take the call. When he returned, he told Eunice, “Something’s happened to Jack.” He said her brother had been shot. A second call followed quickly, telling Shriver that the president’s condition was critical.
The Shrivers rushed across Lafayette Park to the Peace Corps building. Eunice phoned her brother Bobby, the attorney general, who told her, “It doesn’t look good.” A Peace Corps official then brought them the dreaded wire service flash: the president was dead in Dallas. The Shrivers and two Peace Corps staffers knelt by Shriver’s desk and chanted “Hail Mary, full of grace.”
Shriver assembled a dozen tearful senior staffers in his office and assured them that the Peace Corps would continue running as normally as possible. He ordered similar reassurance cabled to all posts overseas. Shriver said later that he did not want Volunteers “to worry that the Peace Corps had died with the President.” There were now almost 6,000 Volunteers overseas.
The Peace Corps, of course, did not die with John F. Kennedy. But the assassination would affect the Peace Corps in significant ways. First of all, the emotional anguish that raged for weeks, even months, would make Americans embrace all things that bore the stamp of their beloved and martyred president. Nothing bore that stamp more than the Peace Corps. For a young American, joining the Peace Corps would become a way of trying to infuse some meaning into an awful, senseless death. It would be a way of making a sacrifice, of performing a powerful service, at the calling of the fallen hero. The “ask not” mantra would have more meaning and more verve than even before.
As a result, the Peace Corps could expand with relative ease. Thousands of young people were more ready than ever to volunteer, and the naysayers in Congress were less ready than ever to carp against a program so favored by the revered late president.
The assassination, however, would also push Sargent Shriver away from the Peace Corps. This would leave the agency and the Volunteers without their charismatic leader, without the symbol of their celebrity chief so linked by family to John F. Kennedy. Shriver would leave the Peace Corps slowly, reluctantly, step by step, and the departure would come as he found himself caught in both family and White House politics.
As soon as Kennedy died, Shriver took charge of all the complex and massive arrangements for the extraordinary funeral in Washington. It was natural that he do so. Bobby Kennedy stayed close to the president’s widow, Jackie Kennedy, in the White House, relaying her many wishes for historical flourishes to Shriver. Senator Ted Kennedy, the other surviving son, and Eunice flew to Hyannis Port to comfort their parents. As the senior Kennedy son-in-law, Shriver was left to run the most important and sensitive family business of that moment.
He did so with extraordinary skill and care. One of the most delicate and difficult aspects of his role was the negotiation of the demands of the family with the demands of Lyndon Johnson, the new president. The family, especially Bobby, looked on Johnson as a usurper moving too swiftly to push aside the heroic president. To demonstrate the continuity of office, Johnson wanted to move into the Oval Office right away, but Shriver persuaded him to wait a few days because the grieving family still looked on it as Kennedy’s hallowed office. Johnson wanted to address Congress on Tuesday, the day after the funeral, but Bobby wanted him to wait until Wednesday. Johnson asked Shriver to try to persuade Bobby to change his mind, but Bobby turned down his brother-in-law with a brusque, “Why does he tell you to ask me?” Johnson waited until Wednesday.
Johnson knew that most in the Kennedy family, especially Bobby, would never reconcile themselves to Johnson taking the place of the martyred son and brother. Bobby, in fact, before his own assassination in 1968, would break with Johnson, oppose the war in Vietnam, and run for the Democratic nomination for president. Shriver, on the other hand, had worked with Johnson in the early days of the Peace Corps and treated him with the respect and honor that Shriver believed he deserved as president of the United States.
But it was more than gratitude that led Johnson to look on Shriver as a significant member of his new administration. Shriver was useful to him. Johnson could feud with Bobby and yet demonstrate his loyalty to Jack Kennedy and his admiration for the Kennedy family by favoring Shriver. Two months after the assassination, Johnson decided that he wanted Shriver to organize and lead the War on Poverty that would be a centerpiece of Johnson’s Great Society. It struck Johnson as an inspired choice. The success of the Peace Corps had favored Shriver with the aura of a national celebrity. The success also demonstrated that Shriver knew how to mold a new organization out of the sparsest beginnings. And, of course, Shriver was Kennedy family.
Johnson practically bullied Shriver into the job, while dangling hints of promises, even the vice presidency, before him, and warning him that he had enemies (presumably Bobby most of all), who wanted to block his way to higher office. Shriver was reluctant, but not reluctant enough to stand up to the vaunted Johnson treatment.
Johnson announced his War on Poverty in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. A few weeks later,
while Shriver was visiting Peace Corps sites in Asia and handing letters to world leaders from the new U.S. president, Johnson summoned Bill Josephson, now the agency’s general counsel, to the White House. Budget Director Kermit Gordon and Civil Service Commission Chairman John Macy, who served Johnson as a talent scout, also attended the meeting. The president told Josephson that he intended to name Shriver head of the poverty program. Josephson was handed two black briefing books on the new program. He was ordered to absorb their contents, find Shriver, and describe the plans to him.
Josephson flew to Hawaii, where Shriver planned a stopover on the way home. Shriver descended from the plane carrying a pink-and-white pagoda, more than two feet high, encased in a glass box. His honorary doctorate from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok was inscribed on the pagoda. Josephson showed his boss the briefing books and announced that Johnson had tapped him for the poverty job. “He was not exactly happy,” Josephson recalled years later.
On the flight home, Josephson summarized the main themes of the books and tried to persuade Shriver to absorb some of the contents. But it was not easy. “When Sarge did not want to hear something, he was very good at trying to avoid hearing it,” said Josephson. “My recollection is that the last thing he wanted to hear from me was that he was to head the War on Poverty or what the details of that program were.” When they reached Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, a presidential car was waiting to rush Shriver to the White House.
Johnson took him for a walk in the Rose Garden and told him, “Now you know we’re getting this War on Poverty started, Sarge. I’d like you to think about that, because I’d like you to run the program for us.” It sounded like the president was giving Shriver time to make up his mind, but that was not Johnson’s intent.
Johnson phoned Shriver at home the next day, Saturday, February 1. “Sarge, I’m gonna announce your appointment at that press conference,” he said.
“What press conference?”
“This afternoon.”
Shriver pleaded for a delay. Throughout this phone call and others with Johnson that day, the usually self-confident and articulate Shriver would sound diffident and hesitant. “God,” he said. “I think it would be advisable, if you don’t mind, if I could have this week and sit down with a couple of people and see what we could get in the way of some sort of plan.”
That made no sense to Johnson. “I want to announce this and get it behind me . . . . You’ve got to do it. You just can’t let me down. So the quicker we get this behind us the better . . . . Don’t make me wait till next week, because I want to satisfy the press with something. I told them we were going to have a press meeting.”
Shriver, now pleading he needed more time to prepare the Peace Corps, asked Johnson, “Could you just say that you’ve asked me to study this?”
“Hell no! They’ve studied and studied. They want to know who in the hell is going to do this, and it’s leaked all over the newspapers for two weeks that you’re going to do this, and they’ll be shooting me with questions.”
“The problem with it is that it’ll knock the crap out of the Peace Corps,” said Shriver, who then asked if he could remain as Peace Corps director.
“I am going to make it clear,” replied Johnson, “that you’re Mr. Poverty, at home and abroad, if you want to be. And I don’t care who you have running the Peace Corps. You can run it? Wonderful. If you can’t, get Oshgosh from Chicago and I’ll name him . . . . You can write your ticket on anything you want to do there.”
Then Shriver asked a couple of housekeeping questions. He wondered if the poverty program ought to be run by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). Michael R. Beschloss, who has edited and annotated the taped telephone conversations of Johnson, believed that Shriver may have been “gently suggesting” that he should be secretary of HEW. Johnson, perhaps encouraging Shriver, said any placement of the poverty program within HEW would have to wait until after the 1964 presidential election.
Shriver also asked if he could have Bill Moyers back as deputy director of the Peace Corps. The highly regarded young Moyers had left the Peace Corps to work in the White House with his old boss, Johnson, right after the assassination. But Johnson squelched any idea of Moyers returning to the Peace Corps. “I need him more than anybody in the world right here,” he said.
After the call, Shriver, according to his biographer Scott Stossel, told Eunice, “I don’t really want to run this thing.” In that case, Eunice told him, make that clear to Johnson. Shriver phoned the president, reaching him a half-hour before the news conference.
But his reluctance wasn’t strong enough to allow him to insist that he did not want the job and demand that Johnson choose someone else. Instead, Shriver repeated that it was a bad time for him to abandon the Peace Corps. Johnson reminded him he did not have to give up the Peace Corps. Shriver then repeated he needed more time to prepare. That argument made no more impression on Johnson than it had before. Johnson was dismissive.
“Why don’t you let me leave it where we were?” said Johnson. “Now I’m here with all this staff trying to get ready for the three o’clock meeting, and I haven’t had my lunch . . . . I need it for very personal reasons.”
After Johnson announced the appointment at the televised news conference, Shriver phoned the White House again. This time Moyers took the call first. Shriver mused to his former deputy about the jobs he’d rather have—secretary of HEW, governor of Illinois, or “this Vice President thing.” “What I would look to do sometime is talk to him and find out where I stand,” he said.
Then Johnson took the phone. First of all, the president explained why he had to make the announcement so swiftly. “Now I don’t want to make you feel bad,” he said, “because you’re too successful and I’m too proud of you to ever pour cold water on you. But up to one minute before I appeared, I was meeting violent protest to naming you. Now I couldn’t let that grow and continue.”
Johnson described the ringleader and his associates as “about as powerful people as we have in this government.” Both Beschloss and Stossel interpreted this as a hint that the opposition had been led by Bobby Kennedy.
Then the president offered Shriver wisps of future rewards. He praised Shriver, insisting “I think that as an administrator and as a candidate [presumably for vice president] that you have great potentialities.” If Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ever left the administration, Johnson said, “you could have the damned job—tomorrow. And we got few of them we can rely on that way, Sarge.” In another phone call that day, Johnson kidded Shriver that Moyers is “in there swinging every hour” to persuade Johnson to pick Shriver as his vice presidential candidate later that year.
Johnson never named Shriver secretary of defense, secretary of HEW, or his vice presidential candidate (though Shriver would run for vice president in 1972, when Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern selected him to replace Senator Thomas Eagleton after the latter admitted he had received electric shock therapy for mental illness). Shriver tried with spirited energy to carry both jobs—Peace Corps and the War on Poverty—at the same time for two years. He tried to devote Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays to the War on Poverty and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays to the Peace Corps. He carted two briefcases of poverty business and two briefcases of Peace Corps business in his car at all times. He still read all Peace Corps evaluation reports and commented freely in the margins. His senior staff meetings at the Peace Corps were still as lively and far-ranging as ever, but they were far less frequent.
But the demands of the two posts, especially the War on Poverty, became too troublesome for a part-time director, as mayors complained bitterly about young organizers stirring up trouble and as unfriendly members of Congress kept looking for signs of scandal and waste in the programs. On March 1, 1966, Shriver invoked the five-year term limit rule on himself and resigned from
the Peace Corps to devote himself fully to the War on Poverty. It was the fifth anniversary of the day President John F. Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps. In three months, at the end of the fiscal year, the Peace Corps would boast that it now had more than 15,000 Volunteers and trainees serving forty-six countries.
Chapter Six. U.S. Troops Invade the Dominican Republic
The Peace Corps has always brimmed with pride over the deportment of the Volunteers during the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic during a civil war in 1965. The Volunteers in the capital of Santo Domingo refused to leave despite heavy fire and bloody mayhem. They rushed to hospitals that were bereft of power and supplies and, amid awful, searing scenes, cared for the wounded, some cut down by U.S. marines and paratroopers. Despite muzzles from Washington, they sided with their impoverished Dominican friends and cried out against U.S. intervention. It was a glowing moment in Peace Corps history.
In Dominican Diary, his book-length account of the invasion, New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc singled out seven Volunteer nurses as “the real heroines of the civil war.” And he dedicated his book as a whole to “the Peace Corps volunteers in Santo Domingo.”
More recently, the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute commissioned Josef Evans, a young playwright with the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis, to write a play about the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. His play, The Only Americans Welcome, which was performed twice in 2008, at George Mason University in Virginia and the University of Maryland in Baltimore, depicted the Dominicans revering the Peace Corps despite their anger against the Yankee invaders. In lines that give the play its title, Lt. Col. Francisco Caamaño, the leader of the Dominican constitutionalists, as the rebels called themselves, announces, “Peace Corps Volunteers will be allowed through all Constitutionalist checkpoints. From this point forward they are the only Americans welcome in our section of the city.”
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