When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  The White House had no doubts about his party loyalty. He had run for Congress as a Republican in a heavily Democratic district in southern California in 1968 and come close to an upset. But Nixon wanted Ehrlichman’s office to “come up with some proof as to his strength of character and his general ‘toughness’” before final approval. Ehrlichman evidently did so, but Nixon would continue to harbor some doubts about his toughness.

  Blatchford was not the White House’s first choice. Ehrlichman had first offered the job to a classmate at Stanford Law School, Lewis H. Butler, a Republican lawyer in San Francisco. Butler would probably have been welcomed enthusiastically by the Peace Corps, for he was one of its own. He had served as the first director of the Peace Corps in Malaysia and later worked for Charles Peters at the evaluation division. But Butler turned down Ehrlichman’s job offer. Butler had been assigned temporarily to the Department of HEW and liked the work there. “Besides,” as he now recalls, “who wants to run the Peace Corps in the middle of the Vietnam War with Richard Nixon as president?” It was a prescient attitude. Butler instead accepted an offer to serve as assistant secretary of HEW.

  Once he became director, Blatchford felt the need to put his personal stamp on the agency and issued a series of “New Directions” during his first year supposedly designed to help the Peace Corps, born in the 1960s, catch up with the 1970s. The most important was his call for more skilled and mature Volunteers. After his first trip abroad as director, to Kenya, Libya, and Iran, he told his staff, “Everywhere the cry was for men and women with higher-priority skills—who can also work with people—to fill higher-priority development needs.”

  Blatchford may have put too much stock in what he was told by officials in these countries. It was easier for Third World officials to request highly skilled technicians than to acknowledge a need for young Americans just out of college. The officials may simply have been asking for as much as they could. But there is no doubt, in any case, that they gave Blatchford an earful.

  Recruiting skilled technicians was not as novel an idea as Blatchford made it sound. The Peace Corps had long been interested in attracting older Volunteers with special skills—agricultural specialists, doctors, nurses, experienced science teachers, and so on. But they were difficult to recruit. They would have to give up two years of lucrative pay for the pittance the Peace Corps set aside for them as Volunteers. The Peace Corps would have to make special arrangements for those with families.

  Some country directors did not favor older Volunteers, who often had a more difficult time learning a foreign language than younger Volunteers. Even more important, some older Volunteers tended to fester with frustration if their expertise were not fully utilized. These disadvantages, in the view of other country directors, were more than balanced by the popularity of older Volunteers among younger Volunteers, who depended upon them for advice and support.

  But Blatchford’s recruiting campaign was much stronger than those in the past. He enlisted the aid of labor unions and the Smithsonian Institution to spread the word among skilled laborers and scientists that they were welcome. He encouraged families. At one news conference, he showed off a dozen Volunteers and spouses and their twenty-five children, en route to Ghana.

  The publicity generated by Blatchford’s recruiting campaigns had one major drawback. It tended to denigrate the role of the BA generalist who still made up the bulk of the numbers of the Peace Corps. Even Henry Kissinger was troubled by this. After Blatchford presented his plans to the White House, Kissinger warned in a memo to Nixon that the recruitment of older, skilled Volunteers “blurs image of a highly motivated and youth-oriented undertaking.” In some instances, Kissinger went on, the Peace Corps would be creating “a virtual counterpart to the local AID operation.”

  Blatchford also used the image of an older Peace Corps to ward off complaints that the Peace Corps had become a hotbed of young anti–Vietnam War radicals. After Col. Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s military assistant, asked for reaction to the Volunteer protest during Vice President Spiro Agnew’s visit to Afghanistan, Blatchford wrote to Haig, “We have sharpened our focus in selection procedures so as to encourage greater cross-section of skilled Americans with emphasis on maturity.”

  In a similar way, Blatchford sent a memo to the seventeen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, listing the steps that he was taking to deal with the rash of Peace Corps protests. He devoted a good deal of space to the “initiation of a policy of recruiting different types of Volunteers—people with more maturity, greater experience, and training such as skilled technicians from the ranks of labor, farmers, professional people in the fields of engineering, architecture, etc.”

  Blatchford’s recruitment drives did change the makeup of the Peace Corps somewhat. The average age of the Volunteers rose, and the Peace Corps could boast about a new array of skills. Moreover, though the recent liberal arts graduate remained the mainstay of the Peace Corps, Blatchford’s emphasis on skills reinforced the intense training that had started in the last years under Vaughn. New Volunteers might not be the experienced professionals that foreign officials wanted but most would be sufficiently trained for the middle-level jobs they filled.

  Blatchford’s call for older, more skilled Volunteers would be echoed afterwards every ten years or so by Peace Corps directors acting as if they were announcing a brand new idea. In 2008, for example, the Christian Science Monitor ran a story from Addis Ababa quoting Ethiopian officials who demanded Volunteers with “expertise, not youthful zeal.” Director Ronald Tschetter had already moved in that direction, the story went on, recruiting through the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and organizations of retired teachers. “The same kind of passion that . . . young people have, these people have . . . but they have thirty years of experience to bring along with it,” Tschetter said.

  (Yet the Peace Corps, as always, would remain youthful. Although almost 7 percent of the 7,761 Volunteers and trainees in 2009 were more than fifty years old, including one aged eighty-five, the median age was twenty-five.)

  There is a strong possibility that Nixon and his aides began to look on Blatchford as almost a “liberal,” taking on attitudes from an agency steeped in idealism, naivete, and fervor. Soon after Blatchford took office, Nixon was upset by a Foreign Affairs article that accused the Volunteers in Micronesia of meddling in local politics. The president asked Blatchford “to investigate this situation carefully and recommend corrective action.”

  Instead, Blatchford sent back a well-reasoned defense of the work of the Micronesia Volunteers. Micronesia was a unique Peace Corps venue, for it was not a foreign country at all. A group of 2,100 islands (only 90 inhabited) scattered across an enormous area of the Pacific Ocean, Micronesia was a U.N. trusteeship administered by the United States. Before World War I, it had been a German colony. After Germany’s defeat, it became a mandate of the League of Nations administered by Japan. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the United States took it over. So the Volunteers were dealing with a people subject to U.S. colonial masters. These colonial masters were officials of the Department of Interior that administered the trusteeship for the United States.

  Although the population of Micronesia was only 100,000, there were more than 500 Peace Corps Volunteers there. Some were lawyers who helped both Micronesia legislators and private citizens prepare petitions, reports, and letters to the U.N. Trusteeship Council. This upset Interior Department officials, who bore the brunt of the complaints. It also upset the State Department because the Volunteers, by helping Micronesians communicate with the United Nations, were interfering with U.S. foreign policy.

  In his memorandum, Blatchford cited the case of one Volunteer who had helped the people of Bikini Island petition the United Nations for the right to return to their island. They had been evacuated years earlier to make way for American nuclear testing there. “By a strict interpretati
on of Peace Corps policy of non-involvement in politics,” Blatchford wrote, “this resolution should never have been written. But as a Peace Corps Volunteer with a commitment to the people he serves, it was a move which will ultimately be of great benefit to the Bikinis.”

  Blatchford’s defense was not well received. Ehrlichman told him that the report had been reviewed by both Nixon and Kissinger, and that “Dr. Kissinger remarked that the most troublesome element in Micronesia apparently is a group of young attorneys in the Peace Corps who have made themselves obnoxious to the Micronesia government and to the (Interior) Department people.”

  In September 1969, Blatchford sent an unsolicited paper to Ehrlichman and Kissinger, setting down his views “on the need for a new dynamics in U.S. policy on Latin America.” Basing the paper on his own experience, Blatchford concluded that “the attitude of the United States must be one which respects Latin culture, which treats Latin Americans as friends, and which encourages them to manage their own development.”

  These high-minded sentiments on Latin America surely made no impact on a White House proud of its realpolitik. Far from fretting over the need to make more friends in Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger would soon become obsessed with the election of left-wing President Salvador Allende in Chile and the need to get rid of him.

  In late 1970, Blatchford received word from George Schultz, the director of the Office of Management and the Budget, that the Peace Corps budget for the new year would be slashed by 30 percent. “I was really stunned,” says Blatchford. “But I didn’t think Nixon was behind this. I blamed it on Schultz.”

  A puzzled Blatchford then lunched with Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, who would become involved later in the White House cover-up of the Watergate burglary. “There are people who think you’re another Leon Panetta,” Mardian told him, “that you’re kind of a liberal.” Panetta, a Republican, had been accused by right-wingers in the administration of applying too much zeal to his post as director of civil rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Panetta quit and switched to the Democratic party. Blatchford protested to Mardian that he was a conservative Republican. “I knew in my heart,” Blatchford recalls, “that Nixon didn’t think of me that way [as a liberal].”

  But by mid-1971, there was evidence in the diaries of Haldeman that Nixon looked on Blatchford as lacking right-wing toughness. The president, Haldeman wrote on May 24, is “worried about the Peace Corps and thinks we’re making some mistakes there.” To deal with this, according to Haldeman, Nixon proposed “that we should really look into this; put a tough guy on it who hates the left-wing press and do something about it.” None of this lack of confidence was communicated to Blatchford.

  Schultz’s office had been considering ideas to streamline the executive branch and make it more efficient. The suggestions included the possible merger of the Peace Corps and VISTA. Blatchford says he decided to write a memorandum to Schultz embracing this idea. “I thought it would protect both Peace Corps and VISTA,” he says. He believed they would be less vulnerable to budget slashers if they were out of sight. The White House soon announced the merger.

  Many Peace Corps advocates feared that the merger would bury the Peace Corps. Sargent Shriver asked Congress to block the reorganization, but Congress refused. On July 1, 1971, Nixon created a new agency, ACTION, that combined the Peace Corps with VISTA, the Foster Grandfather Program, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, the Senior Corps of Retired Executives, and the Active Corps of Executives. Blatchford was named the first director of ACTION.

  He did not last very long. On the day after Nixon was elected to a second term in 1972, the White House asked the head of every government agency to submit a letter of resignation. Not all of them were accepted, but Blatchford’s was.

  The days at ACTION were humbling days for the Peace Corps. While Volunteers overseas were still identified as part of the Peace Corps, the organization in Washington was officially “the International Operations Division of ACTION.” Peace Corps directors, now known as associate directors of ACTION, could not use the Peace Corps logo on their stationery. Several Peace Corps officials were reprimanded, staffer Deborah Harding recalls, for announcing “Peace Corps” when they picked up their phones. A procession of associate directors in charge of the International Operations Division came and left, little known to the public. Shriver complained, with some regret and some scorn, “Peace Corps isn’t even listed in the phone book anymore.”

  But it was never tested whether Nixon intended the burial of Peace Corps within ACTION as a first step toward oblivion. Nixon had far more to worry about in his second term. He and the White House became obsessed with the Watergate burglary, the cover-up, the threat of impeachment, and finally, his resignation. With all that to contend with, the machinations of the International Operations Division of ACTION hardly mattered.

  The Peace Corps managed to survive the administrations of Nixon and his successor, President Gerald Ford. Blatchford deserves some credit for this. He was a strong believer in the Peace Corps and felt a need to protect it. Despite all his talk about New Directions, his most noteworthy achievement was to reinforce the best ideas from the past.

  The Peace Corps enrollment of Volunteers and trainees continued to slide from a little more than 12,000 in 1969 to a little under 6,000 in 1976. From now on, the Peace Corps remained a small but significant operation—never again reaching as many as 10,000 Volunteers and trainees in the field, but never falling as low as 5,000, either. It would never again face a danger as great as the twin threats of Nixon and the Vietnam War. And the Peace Corps enjoyed a growing constituency of former Volunteers who would staff, train, lobby for, and protect it.

  Chapter Ten. The Fall of the Lion of Judah

  For better or worse, no country has ever felt the impact of the Peace Corps as much as Ethiopia did in the 1960s and 1970s. A generation of educated Ethiopians grew up in which every member had been taught in high school by at least one Peace Corps Volunteer, and probably many more. These educated Ethiopians spoke English better than any generation that came before or afterward and pondered modern and democratic ideas that were both exciting and subversive in the hoary empire of Haile Selassie I. A case can be made that the Volunteers contributed to the revolution that brought down the emperor. But the Peace Corps has never boasted about this.

  Ethiopia was then one of the most impoverished and least educated nations on earth, and it was still ruled by one of the icons of the tumultuous years that prefaced World War II. Haile Selassie had stood in the hall of the League of Nations in Geneva in June 1936 and called on the world to save his country from the poison gas and marauding troops of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The plea pricked the consciences of many but not enough to galvanize their governments into action, and the Italians soon occupied Ethiopia, one of the last independent lands of Africa. Haile Selassie remained in exile until British troops drove out the Italians in 1941 during World War II.

  Except for the few years of Italian occupation, Ethiopia had escaped colonialism. That had helped instill a stubborn self-confidence in many of its people but left the country with few paved roads, schools, clinics, or modern ideas. Haile Selassie ruled a people hampered by ways that seemed to belong in medieval feudal Europe. In 1968, 70 percent of Ethiopian farmers were tenants who paid for the use of the land by turning over large portions of their crop to landlords, sometimes as much as half. They saw little point in adapting new techniques that would enrich their landlords.

  Ethiopia had a parliament, a cabinet, and other democratic trappings, but the autocratic emperor ruled by fiat. He reigned over a court of schemers and whisperers and sometimes made decisions based only on the insinuations of favored courtiers. By tradition, he supposedly could trace his lineage to the seduction of the Queen of Sheba by King Solomon, and official proclamations of the state described him as “Conquering Lion of the T
ribe of Judah, Haile Selassie I, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia.”

  The United States served as a bulwark of the regime. U.S. aid to Ethiopia, including both military and economic, was the largest for any country in Africa. The Ethiopian army of 39,000 and its air force of 2,300, with more than 100 planes, would be crippled without U.S. support. U.S. policymakers looked on the large assistance program as the rent they had to pay for the Kagnew communications base in the northern province of Eritrea. U.S. officials were always vague about the purpose of Kagnew, but it was obvious that this U.S. base, in an era before space brimmed with satellites, was eavesdropping on the Soviet Union, trying to decipher secret messages. More than 3,000 Americans worked at the base.

  Another 3,000 Americans worked elsewhere in Ethiopia. Some were U.S. special forces advising the Ethiopian army in its perennial campaign to stifle guerilla warfare in Eritrea. Eritrea, a former Italian colony that Ethiopia annexed after World War II, chafed under the rule of Haile Selassie and his Amharic people. Most Americans, however, were civilians, largely employed by AID. AID projects included dam and power station construction, training for Ethiopian Air Lines, and the creation of an agricultural college, a public health college, and a business school.

  Support of modern education, in fact, was a major U.S. contribution, and, as a result, the United States became both the major support for the traditional authoritarian rule of the emperor and the major agent of change leading young Ethiopians away from traditional ways. Fellowships for study in the United States were awarded to five hundred Ethiopians a year. Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, supported by both AID and the Ford Foundation, was heavily staffed by Americans. The dean of its law school and much of his faculty were American. And the Peace Corps, with one of its largest programs in the world, became the backbone of secondary education throughout Ethiopia.