When the World Calls
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After Washington reporters and television crews rushed to the scene, H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, the domestic affairs adviser, continually demanded that the Peace Corps throw the interlopers out. But Blatchford made the decision to do nothing so long as the demonstration was peaceful. “If I had thrown them out,” Blatchford recalls, “the White House would have thought I was the greatest thing since Spiro Agnew.” But Blatchford’s mind was chock-full of images of Kent State and rioting at the 1968 Democratic convention and massive demonstrations at the University of California in Berkeley. “I didn’t want the Peace Corps to become a casualty of the Vietnam War,” he says.
Ehrlichman urged Blatchford several times to issue an order for the forcible evacuation of the demonstrators. But Blatchford replied he would do so only if expressly ordered to by President Nixon. Ehrlichman never came back with such an order.
Haldeman kept phoning Thomas F. Roeser, the Peace Corps public relations chief, inside the building. “The president wants them the hell out of there,” Haldeman ordered on the first call. “He wants you to get a few staffers together, go to the fourth floor, get off the elevator there, grab the intruders, and remove them bodily the hell out of there. That’s an order.” Roeser, who thought erroneously that the occupiers were armed, warned Haldeman that the White House order might provoke the killing of Peace Corps staffers. “Get back to you,” said Haldeman.
Haldeman wrote notes to himself that show how the feelings in the White House changed during the day. “Bust the Peace Corps. Get it rough,” he wrote at first. Then, as the model of Kent State began to trouble the White House, he added, “No soldiers do anything—let the kids break windows.” But the mood shifted again. “Get Peace Corps out,” he wrote.
Finally, the White House gave up and was rewarded for its patience. In the middle of the second night, the demonstrators slipped out of the building. Ehrlichman phoned Blatchford the next morning. “Why did they leave?” he asked. Blatchford replied sarcastically, “I don’t know. I’m pissed because they didn’t call me.”
Although the Peace Corps never did serve in Vietnam, not even after the war ended, it did find itself intertwined with the Vietnam War in one program overseas—the operation in nearby Thailand. Throughout the war, the Peace Corps kept 200 to 420 Volunteers in Thailand. The U.S. military, meanwhile, used Thailand as a staging base for air raids into North Vietnam and as a rest and recreation center for worn out soldiers. Almost 50,000 airmen and airwomen operated the base while 6,000 troops came to Bangkok and other tourist sites every month for R and R. On top of this, an unknown number of CIA operatives used Thai territory as headquarters for various missions throughout Southeast Asia. As Michael Schmicker, who arrived in Thailand in 1969 as a Volunteer teacher, put it, “The ‘War Corps’ dwarfed the Peace Corps in Thailand.”
Sometimes a Volunteer foolishly poked into U.S. military and even intelligence business. In his second year, Schmicker began moonlighting by writing articles for the Bangkok World. One assignment took him to neighboring Laos, where he boarded a small Air America plane that dropped ninety-pound sacks of rice to CIA-backed guerrillas who were fleeing from the communist group Pathet Lao. As everyone, including Schmicker, knew, Air America was a supposedly civilian airline owned and operated by the CIA throughout Southeast Asia.
When the article appeared in the Bangkok World, it sported a phony byline; Schmicker had adopted a nom de plume. But that did not fool Kevin Delany, the Peace Corps director in Thailand. Since its founding, the Peace Corps had taken extraordinary measures to make sure that it had no entanglements with the CIA, and Schmicker had jeopardized all this. Delany called Schmicker into headquarters for a lecture and punishment.
“I had done an incredibly stupid thing,” Schmicker wrote in his memoirs. “Imagine the communist propaganda headlines if something had happened, the plane went down, and I got picked up by the Pathet Lao instead of the good guys. How about ‘CIA Plane Carrying Thai Peace Corps Volunteer Downed Outside Luang Prabang.’ I felt sick to my stomach. My selfishness and stupidity could have had disastrous consequences.”
Delany informed Schmicker that he would be thrown out of the Peace Corps. The Volunteer begged for a second chance. “I didn’t think it through,” he explained. “I just knew it would make a hell of a story, so I went for it.” That rationale struck a chord with Delany, a professional newsman who had worked with the New York World-Telegram & Sun and CBS News before joining the Peace Corps staff. He relented but warned Schmicker, “OK, but if I ever catch you doing something that stupid again, you’re gone.”
The temptation to fraternize with fellow Americans was greatest near the U.S. air base in the northeast. James I. Jouppi, a Volunteer civil engineer who came to Thailand in 1971 to help build dams for fish ponds, was assigned to Nakorn Panome province, not far from the base. “A few months after I arrived, I began making GI friends,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I’d sometimes visit them in the evening, and when John [another Volunteer] arrived to see me, he’d want me to pay them a visit so that he could tag along and talk to them. The GIs I knew had a standard evening routine. They’d gather around a marijuana bawng and talk about what was on their minds which, as often as not, involved the trials of being part of the American machine when they didn’t believe in the War.”
The proximity to Vietnam encouraged Volunteers in Thailand to continually examine the rationale for the war; mostly, they found it wanting. Several Volunteers wanted to stage a protest march on the U.S. embassy, but faced with a threat by the Thai government to shut down the Peace Corps, settled for a two-hour meeting with the U.S. ambassador instead. When Vice President Spiro Agnew arrived in Bangkok for an official visit, six Volunteers greeted him with protests against the war.
The greatest impact of the Vietnam War on the Peace Corps was surely on the size of the agency. In 1966, the year Shriver gave up the helm, the Peace Corps counted 15,556 Volunteers and trainees in the field. The total began to decline after then, dropping by 1,000 to 1,500 a year, until it dipped below 10,000 in 1970. By the time the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon in 1975, the total number of Volunteers and trainees had dropped to 7,015. For the rest of its first fifty years, it would never reach the numbers of the Shriver era again. In fact, it would never climb over 10,000 again. The Peace Corps’s numbers would remain in the 5,000 to 8,000 range.
There are a number of reasons for the long decline, including the insistence by Vaughn and his deputy director, Brent Ashabranner, that no Volunteer go on post until the Peace Corps was sure that a real job existed and the Volunteer was thoroughly trained for it. The suspension of the draft also cut down the number of male applicants.
But the two most important reasons were the enmity of President Nixon and the war in Vietnam. Nixon did all he could to cut the budget of the Peace Corps and subsume it underneath another agency. As we will see, the blows against the Peace Corps by the Nixon White House were brutal and incessant, but the Peace Corps might have recovered if it were not for the specter of the Vietnam War.
The furor over the war and its seeming senselessness rendered the Kennedy call for service both quaint and specious to many young Americans. If you asked yourself, Kennedy-style, not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country, the answer left a bad taste. You knew what your government wanted. It wanted you to serve by killing Vietnamese and risking a terrible death yourself. Joining the Peace Corps, in the view of many young Americans, would only help divert attention from the American guilt in Vietnam.
In a thunderclap, the war shut down the optimism and hopes that had emanated from the brief Kennedy years. Applying to the Peace Corps was no longer chic, fashionable, or, for some, even honorable. There was something disdainful, in fact, about working for any agency of the federal government. Applications to the Peace Corps dropped from 42,000 in 1966 to just under 14,000 in 1977. Of course, not every young America
n felt this way. As the furor over Vietnam dissipated, the anti–Peace Corps and anti-government rhetoric dissipated as well. But this did not bring back the old Peace Corps buzz and the old Kennedy magic.
But in some ways, the slimmed Peace Corps was a stronger Peace Corps. Training was more intense and meaningful. Officials, no longer focused on the numbers game, examined job openings with more intelligence and care. The small Peace Corps did not make the kind of major impact that Shriver and his colleagues once envisioned. But it still performed significant work and continued to produce a cadre of Americans with unusual sensitivity, insight, and experience in the desperate problems of the poor nations of the world.
Chapter Nine. The Wrath of Richard Nixon
President Richard M. Nixon had every reason to despise the Peace Corps. Even before it started, he had denounced it as a haven for draft dodgers. John F. Kennedy’s espousal of the idea in the final days of the campaign probably contributed, at least in a small way, to his defeat of Nixon in the close 1960 election. The outburst of youthful enthusiasm for the agency and the fawning attention by the press had made the Peace Corps a showcase for the enchanted Kennedy era. For many onlookers, the Volunteers were still the children of Kennedy. That made it difficult for Nixon and his White House to embrace them.
After a year in office, Nixon assigned speechwriter Pat Buchanan and former Des Moines Register reporter Clark Mollenhoff to investigate, as Buchanan put it, “the Peace Corps’s egregious blunders with an eye, as we understand, to doing away with the thing.”
Buchanan, a future candidate for the Republican nomination for president, was young, right-wing, tough, and master of a style so aggressive and harsh that even Nixon sometimes felt it necessary to tone him down. In the case of the Peace Corps, however, Buchanan counseled slow steps and patience.
“As for abolition,” he wrote in a February 20, 1970, memorandum to Nixon, “I would not counsel such drastic action. It would put us crosswise with a number of our friends who have swallowed the propaganda that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Also, the Kennedyites would create a real storm.” Instead, he proposed leaking tales of Peace Corps blunders to members of Congress “again and again to create a climate of opinion that would receive the executive [sic] a little better.”
Buchanan’s advice took hold and the White House soon embarked on a campaign that would not abolish the Peace Corps in a swoop but would try instead to render it impotent through a thousand cuts. Mollenhoff sent Nixon a report on what the White House regarded as the Peace Corps’s most egregious blunder: It had become a hothouse of protest against the war in Vietnam. Mollenhoff reported that Volunteers had become involved in “political demonstrations in more than a dozen countries in the last two years.”
Mollenhoff proposed more thorough FBI background investigations “to avoid selection of Peace Corps Volunteers who are likely to become involved in defiance of the rules.” He also suggested that the Peace Corps needed an influx of new staff “who will be able to spot potential problem areas and deal with these problems with restraint and balance.”
The idea of a Peace Corps with different Volunteers and staff appealed to Buchanan. He endorsed Mollenhoff’s report with a memo to Nixon that proposed “changing its [the Peace Corps’s] nature to a more altruistic outfit than it seems to be today with the young leftists dominant.”
A few weeks later, in mid-March, Nixon was angered by a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal that described the work of the CRV and its argument that the Peace Corps serves “as an insidious way of furthering questionable ‘imperialistic’ aims of the U.S. government.” The article quoted Paul Cowan, a disillusioned ex-Volunteer from a hapless community development project in the slums of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Cowan concluded that Peace Corps projects like his own were just tokenism—they did nothing to solve the problems of a poor country but instead prepared young Americans to serve later in the foreign policy establishment of the United States.. “It’s a kind of graduate school for imperialism,” Cowan said.
The article appeared a couple of months before the CRV would infuriate the White House by seizing a floor of the Peace Corps building to dramatize its opposition to the war in Vietnam. But the article was enough to reinforce Nixon’s distaste for the Peace Corps. The president issued a directive to phase it out. For good measure, he coupled VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), the domestic volunteer program of the War on Poverty, with the Peace Corps, aiming for the two organizations to suffer a similar fate. The directive, which came in the form of a memo to Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser, and John Ehrlichman, the domestic affairs assistant, stated that the president “feels a quiet phasing out of the Peace Corps and VISTA is in order. He notes that the place to begin is to get the appropriations cut. He requests that you have Mr. [Bryce] Harlow begin to work quietly on this.” Harlow was the White House liaison with Congress.
Harlow received his instructions in a memo attached to a copy of Nixon’s directive. In the memo, presidential aide Lamar Alexander, the future governor of Tennessee and senator, advised Harlow, “Because more young people are interested today in solving problems in America rather than abroad, and because the Peace Corps is not working out as well in foreign countries as it once did, there may be some room here to get a cutback in appropriations.”
This set off a bizarre maneuver in which the Republican White House quietly tried to persuade the Democratic Congress to appropriate less money for the Peace Corps than the White House had requested in its own budget. The maneuver encountered snags from time to time.
The Nixon White House, of course, could count on Otto Passman, a powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee, who luxuriated in the role of an implacable, irascible, and obsessive foe of foreign aid. This Louisiana Democrat never had joined all the oohing and ahhing over the Peace Corps. “I say without fear of contradiction or any factual statistics to the contrary,” he told Congress, “that the so-called misnamed Peace Corps is the most useless and, in all probability, most detrimental to our foreign policy of any agency in our federal government.”
Yet the Peace Corps still had enough congressional admirers to prevent crippling slashes of its budget. A disappointed White House staffer reported to Ehrlichman in mid-May that “we didn’t do as well as expected” when the appropriations committee voted more money for the Peace Corps than the White House wanted. But that did not discourage Nixon. H.R. Haldeman reported in his diary in July that the president still “wanted to cut Peace Corps and Vista budget down far enough to decimate them.”
The conspirators in the White House kept one key administration official in the dark about their plot to squelch the Peace Corps. Joseph H. Blatchford, the director of the Peace Corps, knew that the White House wanted to cut out wasteful spending by the agency. He also knew that Nixon believed the Peace Corps staff was chock-full of liberal Democrats. In a meeting with Nixon, Blatchford reported he was hoping to reach the goal of a 30 percent reduction in staff by the end of the administration’s first year in office. “The president responded,” according to an official account of the meeting, “by requesting Mr. Blatchford to keep on cutting, to get more young men like Mr. Blatchford and ‘to get rid of the other sort.’” But Blatchford was never told that Nixon wanted to get rid of the Peace Corps itself.
Blatchford seems to have been beguiled by Nixon. Whenever he met the president, the president appeared pleased by the Peace Corps and positive about his work. “He never said a thing negative about me and the Peace Corps,” says Blatchford. “I always thought I had the support of the president.” The president invited Blatchford and his wife to dinners at the White House with the president of Colombia and with the president of Venezuela. “When I met him in the Oval Office,” Blatchford recalls, “he gave me a lot of time.” Blatchford realized that Nixon had been annoyed by the anti–Vietnam War protests by Volunteers overseas and by the
former Volunteers in Washington, but Blatchford assumed he was satisfied with the Peace Corps’s disciplinary action and new recruitment policies. Blatchford knew that some people around Nixon scorned the Peace Corps. “But,” he says, “I didn’t think there was any intentional plan to get rid of the Peace Corps.”
It was a stealth campaign. Nixon wanted to rid himself of the Peace Corps but not be seen doing so. In 1972, Blatchford found himself embroiled in a public fight with Passman, the chairman of the foreign aid appropriations subcommittee. Passman had cut so much out of the Peace Corps budget that Blatchford insisted he would have to recall more than 4,000 Volunteers from their posts overseas. Nixon could have remained aloof and let the Peace Corps fall apart. But that would have made it obvious where he stood. So instead he transferred emergency funds to the Peace Corps, making himself look like the savior of the Peace Corps, not its nemesis. That made it harder for Blatchford to regard him as anything but a friend.
The appointment of Blatchford had not been welcomed by the Peace Corps staff. Jack Vaughn, a registered Republican, had hoped that the new Republican administration would let him remain as director. Secretary of State William Rogers, in fact, had told Vaughn to inform the Peace Corps staff that he was “staying on.” This set off happy celebrations at headquarters. But Rogers had meant Vaughn was staying only until a new director was named. In March 1969, the White House announced the nomination of Blatchford, a complete outsider. The appointment was looked on by the Peace Corps as a great betrayal.
In other circumstances, Blatchford might have been regarded as a welcome choice. He could boast a lot of Peace Corps–like credentials. He was a thirty-four-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who had founded a private volunteer program in Venezuela known as Accíon. He had first visited Latin America as part of a touring band of jazz musicians from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Since he was also a member of UCLA’s championship tennis team, Blatchford competed with Latin tennis players wherever the band traveled. He enjoyed motorcycle riding, and after his confirmation, he often showed up for work on a Yamaha motorcycle, parking it in the lobby of the Peace Corps building.