Chapter Eight. The Specter of Vietnam
On January 6, 1966, two Peace Corps officials embarked on a secret, reckless trip to Vietnam. The goal of their mission was to find out whether Vietnam might be a suitable country for a Peace Corps program. That goal was foolish and fanciful. President Lyndon Johnson had already dispatched thousands of combat troops to South Vietnam and ordered the continual bombing of North Vietnam. Antiwar rallies were already dominating campus life on universities throughout the United States. Peace Corps Volunteers were joining protests. Any attempt to place Volunteers in Vietnam would have crippled the Peace Corps. Even news of the exploratory trip would have damaged the Peace Corps badly.
The two officials were Warren Wiggins, deputy director of the Peace Corps, and Ross J. Pritchard, director of Far East regional operations. Within the Peace Corps, Wiggins and Pritchard were known as the most fervent players of the numbers game—they relentlessly promoted massive new programs without worrying about meticulous planning. But it was not their idea to go to Vietnam.
Wiggins, who died in 2007, never discussed the Vietnam adventure publicly. But Pritchard, retired in Tennessee, says they flew to Vietnam because Johnson ordered them to go. Pritchard says he and Wiggins knew that a program in Vietnam “would ruin the Peace Corps, absolutely wreck it. Because of the mood on campuses, it would cut us off at the knees.” But Bill Moyers, the former Peace Corps deputy director who was now White House press secretary, told them that Johnson insisted they go. According to Pritchard, “We went with great, great reluctance.”
They should have resisted. But Johnson’s insistence came at a time when the Peace Corps bureaucracy was weak, practically rudderless. Sargent Shriver was in his last weeks as director, spending most of his time on the War on Poverty. Wiggins, who had almost no influence at the White House, was acting director much of the time. Jack Vaughn would be nominated to succeed Shriver a few weeks later but would not take over the agency until March 1.
Despite their reluctance, Wiggins and Pritchard sent a rather enthusiastic cable to the U.S. embassy in Saigon announcing their arrival. The cable, written by Pritchard, boasted, “Peace Corps elsewhere and its ability to provide significant numbers of Volunteers suggests there may be a useful role in Vietnam.”
“While it is important for the Peace Corps to maintain an independent, nonpolitical stance in order to avoid jeopardizing its worldwide acceptance,” the cable went on, “the ability of the Peace Corps to work with and attract host country participation may have potential in Vietnam now and more especially in the future.”
The two officials provided a cover story and assured their hosts that the Peace Corps was prepared to lie about the mission. “We desire to avoid publicity for this visit,” they said. “If questioned here [Washington], the Peace Corps will take the position that both men are in vicinity Southeast Asia on business and interested in exploring possible role for Peace Corps Volunteers and/or other international Volunteers with refugee work in Vietnam.” There was no need to invoke the cover story. The press never spotted the adventure. In fact, hardly anyone in the Peace Corps itself knew that Wiggins and Pritchard had left for Vietnam.
In Saigon, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. welcomed them and promised that the U.S. embassy would show them whatever they wanted to see. Wiggins and Pritchard looked at six sites, including the battleground city of Hue. In each case, their plane would spiral downward while landing to avoid gunfire.
Wiggins and Pritchard decided to explore neighboring Laos as well. Their reception from Ambassador William H. Sullivan in Vientiane was far different. Sullivan was supervising what would become known as the “secret war” in Laos. CIA agents were leading guerilla units against rebels and North Vietnamese troops. U.S. military pilots, wearing civilian clothes, were flying missions in support of the Laotian government. Sullivan did not want independent-minded Peace Corps Volunteers stepping into the cauldron.
“Sullivan was absolutely adamant that this was the stupidest idea he had ever heard of,” Pritchard recalls. “He chewed our asses out.”
After their ten-day trip, Wiggins and Pritchard wrote a report. They could not resist sounding expansive about the future. “Under different circumstances, you could put a thousand Volunteers into Vietnam,” they wrote, according to Pritchard. But in view of the dangers of the war and the backlash that a Vietnam program would unleash elsewhere in the Peace Corps, they strongly recommended against launching a program there.
The conclusions of the report did not matter in any case. Vaughn, the new director, made it clear: No Volunteers would go to Vietnam, no matter what the report recommended, no matter what Johnson demanded.
At Vaughn’s swearing-in ceremony at the White House, President Johnson made his case for the Peace Corps in Vietnam someday. While soldiers struggled to halt aggression by North Vietnam and Viet Cong insurgents and provide security in South Vietnam, he said, “other workers of peace . . . must lay the foundation for economic and social progress.” He counted on the Peace Corps to do just that in the future. “The day, I hope, will soon come,” the president said, “when the Peace Corps will be there, too. It must somehow find the day and the time that it can go and make its contribution when peace is assured.”
In at least four meetings during the next three years, Johnson pressured Vaughn to send Volunteers to Vietnam. Johnson promised they would work only in the “pacified” areas. The president said he would be satisfied even with a program of only ten to fifteen Volunteers. But Vaughn turned him down each time.
Yet even as it kept out of Vietnam, the Peace Corps could not escape the war. Gerald Berreman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, warned students in 1965, “The government wants the Peace Corps to be a playpen for activist students to keep them out of the kitchen while the adults are cooking up the war in Vietnam.” He urged them to stay out of the Peace Corps and protest the war instead.
Some idealistic Volunteers hoped that the leaders of the Peace Corps would stand up to such criticism by forthrightly defying President Johnson and denouncing the war themselves. Marlyn Dalsimer, a former Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, wrote a letter to Jack Vaughn. The letter, Dalsimer recalled later, told Vaughn that “I had observed his never having made a public statement about the war in Vietnam. I told him that as head of an organization with ‘peace’ in its name, I expected him to. We always hoped the Peace Corps would be different.” The Peace Corps was different, but not so different that its director could oppose the president openly and keep his job.
In 1965, an article opposing the war appeared in a Volunteer newspaper in Malawi. The article was written by Paul Theroux, a Volunteer teacher who would become one of the most distinguished American novelists of the next half-century. The article infuriated U.S. Ambassador Sam P. Gilstrap. He ordered the expulsion of the Peace Corps director, Michael McCone, for allowing the newspaper to publish a diatribe against U.S. policy. (Theroux, chastened but not otherwise punished, was later thrown out by the Malawi government for delivering letters for friends who were opponents of the dictator Hastings Kuzuma Banda.)
As the war intensified and the awful casualties mounted, Vaughn was forced to field protests from every side of the Peace Corps—even from his own staff. Kirby Jones, the Volunteer who helped write the letter of protest to Lyndon Johnson about the Dominican invasion, worked for the Peace Corps in 1967 as the Ecuadorean desk officer. Allard Lowenstein, the militant anti–Vietnam War protester and future congressman, persuaded Jones to join him in drafting a protest letter to President Johnson. Jones then started collecting signatures from returned Peace Corps Volunteers.
Vaughn asked him to stop, but Jones refused. “Then he [Vaughn] went through this long song and dance,” Jones recalled, “about how long it had taken him to establish credibility in the White House, since Johnson had always thought of the Peace Corps as a Kennedy creation, full of Kennedy
ites, and that this was going to adversely affect the relationship between the Peace Corps and the White House.”
“You’re going to have to fire me, because I’m not going to stop,” Jones said
“I’m not going to fire you,” said Vaughn.
The most publicized protest case involved a Volunteer who taught music at the University of Concepcíon, in Chile. Bruce Murray and more than ninety fellow Volunteers signed a letter in 1967 protesting the bombing of North Vietnam and calling for negotiations to end the war. The Volunteers planned to pay for the publication of the letter as an advertisement in the New York Times. But after local Peace Corps officials discovered what was going on, Ambassador Ralph Dungan warned the Volunteers they could be thrown out of the Peace Corps if the letter were published. A similar warning came from Vaughn.
Faced with these threats, the Volunteers abandoned their project. But Murray was angered by Vaughn’s restrictions on the rights of the Volunteers to speak out on American issues. In a letter to Vaughn, Murray accepted the stricture that Volunteers “should not meddle in the politics of the host country.” But he argued that this restriction should not prevent Volunteers from speaking out on “international policies of the United States which may be of interest to the host country.” He sent a copy of this letter to the New York Times, but the newspaper did not publish it.
The news agency United Press International (UPI) found out about the controversy and released an article describing the suppression of Volunteer antiwar protests by the Peace Corps. The article was published in the newspaper El Sur of Concepcíon. Murray felt that the UPI article did not state the position of the Volunteers fully, and he sent El Sur a Spanish translation of his letter to Vaughn. The Chilean newspaper published it.
The Peace Corps retribution was swift. Country director Paul Bell ordered Murray home, ostensibly for “consultations.” When Murray arrived in Washington, he found that no consultations were scheduled. He had already been dismissed from the Peace Corps.
“I was very distraught,” Murray recalled later. “I really loved Chile and wanted to stay another year . . . . People at the university were upset, too, because my dismissal was a contradiction of everything the Peace Corps had been saying—that we were independent agents and not called upon to toe the government line. I had voiced a protest and was gone—in the middle of a semester.”
The American Civil Liberties Union took up the case, and Murray filed suit against the Peace Corps for wrongful dismissal. Federal Judge Raymond Pettine in Providence heard the case and ruled against the Peace Corps. While the judge understood that the Peace Corps had “an interest in remaining apolitical with respect to host country politics,” he called the dismissal “a shocking, unconstitutional act on the part of the Peace Corps.” The government, in the judge’s view, could prove no national interest in preventing Murray from speaking out “about matters of vital interest to him as a human being, a United States citizen, and a Peace Corps Volunteer.”
In the wake of the Murray controversy, Vaughn retreated. He set down regulations, revised them, and, in any case, no longer disciplined anyone. As the war ground on, killing many young Americans and many more Vietnamese, the pressure on Volunteers to cry out intensified. Vaughn decided to trust in the good sense of the Volunteers.
A formula of sorts evolved. The Peace Corps administration agreed that the Volunteers, unlike members of the armed forces, had the right to speak out and protest U.S. policy if they saw fit. In turn, the Peace Corps wanted the Volunteers to accept two limitations on their freedom of speech: They must not interfere in the internal politics of the host country, and their actions must not harm the Peace Corps.
But the formula was fragile, dependent on interpretation. When Murray was dismissed, a spokesman for the Peace Corps had said, “The Vietnam War is a major issue in Chile, and it has been the policy of the Peace Corps not to get involved in any local political issue.” This, of course, was a good deal of a stretch—it would be difficult to find any controversial U.S. foreign policy that was not a political issue in most other countries.
The second problem of interpretation centered on what would harm the Peace Corps. Peace Corps officials tended to find any publicity about a protest “embarrassing” and therefore harmful to the agency. They feared that members of Congress might find the protests offensive and slice the budget. They told Volunteers that an angry White House might lose confidence in the Peace Corps.
Many Volunteers, in any case, tried hard not to embarrass the Peace Corps with their demonstrations. In 1968, for example, when President Johnson visited El Salvador, Volunteers Mark Schneider and his wife, Susan, organized an anti–Vietnam War protest. All Volunteers had been invited to a reception at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in San Salvador. Within the compound, the protesting Volunteers lined a small driveway leading to the house. When the president’s car drove by, they held up signs condemning the war. Then they put the signs away and joined the reception. The protest, out of sight of journalists, was not reported in either the Salvadorian or U.S. press. (Mark Schneider would be appointed director of the Peace Corps thirty years later.)
Peace Corps demonstrations intensified as the war continued under President Richard Nixon. From the beginning, the Nixon administration decided that it had to meet the Peace Corps protests with new toughness. Secretary of State William Rogers cabled every embassy and consulate in May 1969, “President Nixon and I have determined that the twin goals of service and mutual understanding can best be served if the Peace Corps continues to remain strictly apolitical . . . . Volunteers will be expected to refrain from all political activities in the countries in which they are stationed.”
A few months later, Joseph Blatchford, the new Peace Corps director, sent a letter to all country directors clarifying what the Rogers directive meant. While the Peace Corps continued to guarantee “the basic freedoms” of every Volunteer, Blatchford wrote, “we simply cannot have it both ways; we cannot both claim to be apolitical and insert American foreign policy issues into the host country scene.” In short, despite the ruling in the Murray case, the Peace Corps would regard a Volunteer’s public protest against the U.S. role in Vietnam as interference in the internal politics of the country in which the Volunteer served. If the Volunteers protested privately to the U.S. ambassador, however, there would be no disciplinary action, and their protest would be relayed to the White House or State Department.
By April 1970, Blatchford reported to Congress that he had dismissed twelve Volunteers and one staff member for publicly demonstrating against the war in four countries. Yet this did not dampen the fervor of many other protesting Volunteers. At least once a month, Peace Corps officials would read a dispatch in U.S. newspapers reporting a Volunteer antiwar demonstration overseas.
Several were especially embarrassing. In Afghanistan, a group of Volunteers wore black armbands and read an antiwar statement in front of the U.S. embassy just before the arrival in Kabul of Vice President Spiro Agnew. In Tunisia, a few Volunteers turned their backs on Secretary Rogers while he was addressing members of the U.S. mission.
These incidents drew adverse comments from critics of the Peace Corps. Richard Wilson, a columnist with the Washington Star, wrote, “The President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State have now had enough experience with the high spirits of the politically turbulent Peace Corps to wonder if this experiment in spreading youthful idealism over the world has not gotten badly off the tracks.” “These people were not hired to demonstrate either for or against our government,” said Representative William Scherle, a Republican from Iowa. “They should either shape up and do the job expected of them, or ship out.”
The most embarrassing Peace Corps incident came in early May 1970 in Washington, not overseas. This followed a week of political turbulence. Student protests had erupted on campuses throughout the country after Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambod
ia to shut down Viet Cong supply bases. Nixon, in turn, derided the protesters as “bums blowing up campuses.”
Then, in a terrible moment, National Guardsmen fired on protesting students at the Kent State campus in Ohio, killing four and wounding eleven. A photograph of an anguished student, kneeling by a fallen comrade and calling for help, made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. Tens of thousands of protesters poured into Washington during the next few days. An insomniac President Nixon, shaken by the Kent State killings, even made his way to the Lincoln Memorial before dawn one night to talk with protesters.
On May 8, two dozen former Volunteers entered the Peace Corps building, rushed to the fourth floor, the quarters for the Asian operations of the agency, ordered everyone to leave, and hung a huge Viet Cong flag from the windows of the building that faced Lafayette Square near the White House.
The protesters, members of a militant organization called the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV), remained in the building and issued a bitter anti–Peace Corps statement. “Once abroad, we discovered we were part of the U.S. worldwide pacification program,” it said. “We found that U.S. projects in these countries are designed to achieve political control and economic exploitation to build an empire for the United States. As Volunteers, we were part of that strategy; we were the Marines in velvet gloves.” The demonstration infuriated Nixon and his staff.
When the World Calls Page 13