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When the World Calls

Page 12

by Stanley Meisler


  The Dominican intervention was not the only time he tried to bend the Peace Corps to his political will. In late 1965, he suspended foreign aid to both India and Pakistan as punishment for their war over the territory of Kashmir. When he issued his edict, a group of Volunteers was on its way to India. Johnson, declaring the Volunteers a part of U.S. foreign aid, refused to let them continue. The Volunteers shuttled from Israel to Guam to the Philippines as Shriver implored the president not to use them as punishment. Finally, after six weeks, Johnson relented and allowed the Volunteers to fly to India.

  The Dominican intervention also taught Johnson that the Peace Corps, though an instrument of foreign policy, could backfire. Johnson was in an angry mood at his office on the LBJ ranch in Texas one night in November 1965 when Bill Moyers reached him on the phone. Johnson had read a news report about a Peace Corps recruiter encouraging anti–Vietnam War protestors at the University of Michigan to join the Peace Corps. “He is going to reward these folks who want to destroy our democracy,” Johnson told Moyers. He instructed his assistant to get a report from Shriver on the incident.

  “This is what we ran into in the Dominican Republic,” Johnson went on. “They [the Volunteers] were the first ones to jump us.”

  Chapter Seven. Johnny Hood

  President Lyndon Johnson needed a Peace Corps–type ambassador to repair some of the damage in Panama. The U.S. Canal Zone lay across Panama like a swath of imperialism, the last Big Splinter from Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick. According to the treaty imposed upon Panama at the turn of the century, the United States would control the canal and five miles on either side “in perpetuity.” This presence of the U.S. Canal Zone in an era of diminishing empires caused a good deal of tension, and the United States agreed in 1962, as a goodwill gesture, that the Panamanian flag would always fly alongside the U.S. flag within the Canal Zone. But that agreement kept tempers down for only a couple of years.

  In January 1964, American students, defying U.S. officials, raised the U.S. flag in front of Balboa High School inside the Canal Zone and stood guard to prevent anyone from putting up a Panamanian flag. Crowds of Panamanian students rushed into the zone to confront the young Americans and attempt to raise their own flag. This provoked rioting that was finally put down by U.S. troops stationed in the Canal Zone. At the end, twenty Panamanians and three Americans died in three days of violent riots.

  Panama broke off diplomatic relations. They were not resumed until April, when the United States agreed to open talks that might lead to a renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty. Special White House Assistant Bill Moyers, who had been deputy director of the Peace Corps until Johnson succeeded Kennedy, suggested that the president nominate Jack Hood Vaughn as the new ambassador. Vaughn was then director of Latin American programs for the Peace Corps.

  “You met in Senegal,” Moyers wrote to Johnson. “He is bi-lingual, has worked long years in Latin America, yet is young and lean and tough. Take my apologies, too, for always recommending Peace Corps people—but they are good people.” Moyers added an official Peace Corps biography that reminded the president that Vaughn had been the featherweight champion of Michigan as an amateur and fought professionally in Mexico as “Johnny Hood.”

  Johnson had first encountered Vaughn in Dakar while on a vice-presidential trip to Africa in April 1961. Vaughn, then the AID director for Senegal, led Johnson on a half-day tour of fishing villages up-country. Johnson did not like Vaughn’s thin brush of a moustache but otherwise found the ex-boxer a congenial guide and interpreter. Johnson enjoyed politicking among the Senegalese, handing out old Johnson Senate campaign pens and promising to send one village a new Johnson outboard motor. When the motor arrived a month later, villagers paraded it in Dakar and up and down the coast.

  Vaughn, who had worked for the U.S. foreign aid program in Panama for several years, brashly told the vice president that it was a mistake to let the Pentagon set policy for the Canal Zone; diplomats should be running the zone, not generals. Johnson made it clear that he felt bored as vice president and confided, according to Vaughn, that he regarded Bobby Kennedy, then attorney general, as a “piss-ant little runt.” Vaughn enjoyed his adventure so much that, as he wrote later, “I was beginning to question my lifelong Republican inclination and knee-jerk voting.”

  Johnson had not met Vaughn since then, but he obviously had good memories of the day, for he quickly accepted the suggestion of Moyers and nominated Vaughn as ambassador. During his years as a foreign aid officer in Panama, Vaughn had arranged grants for a thousand Panamanians to pursue postgraduate studies in the United States. When he arrived in Panama City as ambassador at 4:00 a.m. on April 17, 1964, ten young Panamanian professionals stood at the airport despite the hour and unfurled a twenty-five-foot canvas sign that read, “Jack, the scholarship holders remember your work and greet you.”

  Vaughn quickly developed a reputation as a sensitive ambassador who immersed himself in the country, dealing with the complexities of Panamanian poverty as well as the tensions of the Canal Zone. He did so well that he was promoted ten months later to the position of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs.

  Vaughn took up his new job in Washington a few weeks before the Dominican invasion. He was not a major player in the crisis. His predecessor as assistant secretary, Thomas Mann, now an undersecretary of state, took charge as Johnson’s main State Department advisor. Vaughn had a supporting role, handling assigned tasks and defending the administration’s policies before Congress.

  One of his assignments turned disastrous. Johnson had invaded the Dominican Republic without consulting the Organization of American States. That broke at least the spirit of the treaty creating the OAS. So Johnson phoned Vaughn a few days later and ordered him to write “a complete scenario” of how Washington had urged individual members of the OAS before the invasion to do something about the civil war in Santo Domingo. Johnson said he wanted the report to include “everybody we talked to and everybody we urged to do anything.”

  Putting together such a report proved exceedingly difficult for Vaughn, mainly because its premise was false. Johnson had not consulted any other government before dispatching troops. Vaughn set up a cot in his office and worked on the report without coming home for three nights. He listed every contact, in Washington and overseas, between a State Department official and a Latin ambassador or minister, no matter how perfunctory, no matter what was discussed. His drafts sounded tentative and bland. He finished eight versions, each one fatter and worse than the one before.

  The president met with members of his Dominican task force three days after his phone call to Vaughn. When he entered the room, Vaughn found Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, and a dozen other officials along the lengthy table. Johnson sat at one end of the table, a copy of Vaughn’s report in his hands. Vaughn took a seat near the other end. He thought the president looked “very sad and ugly.”

  Johnson said that “the news media don’t know that we notified OAS and urged them to act.” Vaughn’s report, the president lamented, would never change that impression; it was a failure. He excoriated Vaughn in vivid Johnsonian imagery. “He really reamed me,” Vaughn recalls. “He cast aspersions on my genealogy, patriotism, and manhood.” The president then tossed the report across the table, bouncing it into Vaughn’s lap.

  Vaughn stood up, pale and shaking. “You will have my resignation, Mr. President,” he said, “as soon as I can get to a typewriter.”

  An exasperated Johnson stared at Vaughn and told him, “Sit down, you little shit.” Vaughn sat down, and the president went on to other business.

  Moyers slipped a note to Vaughn. “Welcome to the club,” it said. A second note came from another presidential assistant, Jack Valenti. “You are now a celebrity,” said Valenti (who would go on to become the president of the Motion Pictur
e Association of America). “I want to be your agent.”

  President Johnson was notorious for his brutal chastisement of staff. They were expected to shake off the expletives and continue to serve, and this episode did not seem to harm Vaughn’s career. Vaughn continued to serve loyally. Although critics of the Dominican invasion usually castigated Undersecretary Mann as the main villain who had persuaded Johnson to launch the adventure, there is no evidence that Vaughn ever disagreed with Mann on the subject. Like Mann, Vaughn, with hardly any evidence, reported to Johnson soon after the rebels rose up, “Involvement of communist elements in this has become clearer and clearer.”

  As assistant secretary for Latin American affairs, Vaughn, a soft-spoken man with occasional flashes of temper, had to defend the invasion in public. These defenses annoyed the main critics in Congress, including Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

  Vaughn shared the anti–Bobby Kennedy sentiment that emanated from Johnson and pervaded the White House. He did not know Senator Kennedy well but harbored at least one unpleasant memory. When he worked for Shriver at the Peace Corps, he had attended several interagency meetings chaired by Kennedy as attorney general. After the first session, he walked alongside Kennedy and asked him, “Mr. Kennedy, why do you keep referring to your brother-in-law and my boss, Sargent Shriver, as the Boy Scout?” Kennedy, according to Vaughn, replied, “None of your fucking business. You Peace Corps types are all the same. Haven’t grown up yet.”

  In November 1965, Senator Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, embarked on a heavily publicized three-week tour of five countries in South America. Before setting out, Kennedy attended a briefing at the State Department. Vaughn, in charge, assembled a large team of specialists, including State’s desk officers for the five countries and representatives from AID, the U.S. Information Agency, the Peace Corps, and other agencies. Mankiewicz, who would soon become Kennedy’s press secretary, represented the Peace Corps.

  “The briefing was a calamity,” Mankiewicz recalled years later. “Jack Vaughn was extremely hostile, completely out of character . . . . Just set a very angry tone right at the beginning.” Vaughn agrees it was “an ugly meeting.” But he blames Kennedy, insisting that the senator was trying to bait him with questions that seethed with unfair attacks on Johnson administration policy. Vaughn felt that he had to defend the policy.

  In one exchange, Kennedy asked what he should say when Latin Americans questioned him about the Dominican invasion. Vaughn replied, “Well, you could always tell them what your brother said at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.”

  “Which comment of President Kennedy’s was that, Mr. Vaughn?” said Senator Kennedy.

  Mankiewicz did not hear Vaughn make any reply. But Vaughn recalls he said that President Kennedy told the world he would react to the missiles in a way dictated by our national interest.

  “I hope you are not quoting President Kennedy to support your intervention in the Dominican Republic,” Kennedy admonished him.

  Kennedy also was angered by Vaughn referring to the assassinated president as “your brother.” The senator evidently regarded that as disrespectful and offensive. He wanted Vaughn to call his brother “President Kennedy.” Yet Vaughn, according to Mankiewicz, ignored Senator Kennedy’s obvious displeasure and kept referring to “your brother.”

  The exchanges grew worse, and, according to Mankiewicz, reached their nadir when Kennedy, bristling with sarcasm, said to Vaughn, “Well, then as I understand it, what the Alliance for Progress has come down to is that you can lock up your political opposition and outlaw political parties and dissolve the Congress, and you’ll continue to get all the aid you want from us; but if you mess around with an American oil company, we’ll cut you off without a penny. Is that right?”

  Vaughn stared at him and replied, “Well, that’s about the size of it, Senator.”

  The two men were so angry at this point that it is doubtful they could hear each other clearly. Vaughn, in fact, says he wanted to punch Kennedy in the mouth. “It was a very messy thing,” said Mankiewicz, “and I thought at the time that Vaughn probably was put up to it . . . probably by Thomas Mann.” But no one needed to put Vaughn up to this. He had looked on Bobby Kennedy as a bully for a long time—a feeling that only increased under the influence of Lyndon Johnson; he felt that Bobby was trying to bully him during this confrontation, and Johnny Hood was not going to stand for it.

  After the briefing, Vaughn walked unsteadily to his office. He was shocked at his own behavior, surprised at himself. He had almost punched a U.S. senator in the face. His career might be at its end. “I really blew it,” he decided. Then his phone rang. It was a call from the White House. Someone at the briefing had reported all the details of the ugly meeting. The operator told Vaughn that the president was on the line. “Good going, son,” said Johnson.

  Vaughn did not campaign to succeed Shriver as director of the Peace Corps. He did not ask anyone in the White House for the job, and he never expected an offer. The most logical choice was Bill Moyers. There is no doubt that Moyers, who was recently appointed White House press secretary, would have liked to return to the Peace Corps as director. But, as Shriver put it later, “Johnson knew exactly how valuable Moyers was to him, and he had no more intention of letting Moyers out of the White House to do anything, including running the Peace Corps, than he did of jumping into the Potomac River.”

  A good number of candidates were discussed at the White House, including G. Mennen Williams, the former governor of Michigan who was now assistant secretary of state for African affairs; John Bartlow Martin, the magazine writer who had served as ambassador to the Dominican Republic; and Congressman John Brademas of Indiana, the future president of New York University. All were better known nationally than Vaughn.

  In the end, however, Johnson surprised Vaughn by selecting him. In fact, the president gave Vaughn only three hours’ notice before making the announcement at a news conference. Vaughn believes the deciding factor was Bobby Kennedy’s contempt for him.

  As evidence, Vaughn, in his memoirs, cites a recorded phone call between Johnson and Undersecretary Mann in January 1966 in which they discuss the possibility of Vaughn taking over the Peace Corps. “From his own point of view,” Mann said, “it’s time for a change.” The reason, Mann went on, was that “Bobby and some of the other boys are trying to get him.” They were trying to force him out of his position as assistant secretary for Latin American affairs. Mann, under Johnson’s questioning, identified the “other boys” as Senators J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Wayne Morse of Oregon. Mann said both Democrats were under Bobby’s influence. The conclusion that Vaughn draws from the transcript of the call is “that I owe Bobby a very big debt.”

  There is no doubt that Vaughn’s distaste for Bobby Kennedy may have been a strong influence in Johnson’s choice. But even more important was Vaughn’s friendship with Bill Moyers. Moyers had worked with Vaughn at the Peace Corps and always had a high regard for his good sense and commitment.

  Many Peace Corps officials had been gossiping for months about the possible candidates for director. Some thought that Johnson would ask Shriver to appoint his successor. But Charles Peters, the director of evaluation, told Peace Corps publicist Coates Redmon at the time, “Shriver is a lame duck . . . . So forget all those people that Shriver is supposed to be appointing. Only the White House can appoint. And that means Moyers. Because who else at the White House has the interest or the power to appoint a new Peace Corps director?” Johnson usually deferred all Peace Corps matters to Moyers and surely relied on his advice more than anything else in the decision to name Vaughn.

  Vaughn, in any case, did not boast in Peace Corps circles about his tattered relations with Bobby Kennedy. By 1968, most of the Peace Corps community—staff, current and returned Volunteers, and former staff—had become followers of Senator Kennedy
in his opposition to the war in Vietnam and his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy, like his brother, was a Peace Corps hero, and, when assassinated like his brother, he became a Peace Corps martyr as well. There is no evidence that Vaughn, who was still a registered Republican, ever tried to persuade his colleagues or the Volunteers that their faith in Bobby Kennedy was misplaced.

  As director of the Peace Corps, Vaughn lacked the dynamism, charisma, influence, and national standing of Shriver. But so did every other director who followed Shriver in the past half-century. Shriver was the last director with pizzazz. Vaughn, who served only three years, endowed the Peace Corps with steadiness and maturity. He knew the Peace Corps well. He understood the worth and needs of the young generalist Volunteers and initiated significant changes in training and job assignments. He traveled often, spending a third of his time meeting staff, Volunteers, and trainees throughout the world. He seemed always low-key, always attentive, seeking the views of all. In many ways, he became a model of competence and foresight.

  In his perceptive memoir, Brent Ashabranner, who served Vaughn as deputy director, wrote, “It has always seemed to me that Shriver was most preoccupied with the image of the Peace Corps—as I think in those formative years he should have been—and that Jack Vaughn became most concerned with the substance of the Peace Corps: how to be sure that there was a real piece of work for Volunteers who were sent overseas, how to see that they were best prepared for that work, how to give them the best support possible.”

  One night, Ashabranner and Vaughn sat in the director’s office discussing the probable decline in the size of the Peace Corps. Numbers would decline as the staff learned to scrutinize Volunteer job assignments more closely, training became tougher and more intense, and the growing resentment over the Vietnam War dampened enthusiasm for joining any U.S. government program. Ashabranner and Vaughn wondered what the press and Congress would make of a decline. Vaughn, lighting his pipe, said, “They’ll say we’re losing our charisma and that the fire is gone. But what I’d like to do is make the Peace Corps as good as Sarge said it was.”

 

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