A Postscript
Peace Corps programs in Africa were often battered during the 1960s and 1970s by war, political turmoil, and caprice. In a bizarre and senseless retaliation, Guinea threw out its sixty-two Volunteers in November 1966 after Ghanian police arrested a group of Guinean officials and took them off a Pan-American Airways flight that had stopped in Accra. Guinea blamed Pan-Am for the incident and, mistakenly assuming that the airline was a U.S. government agency, decided to wreak its vengeance on another U.S. government agency—the Peace Corps. In a similar escapade, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, insulted by the low-ranking representation the United States had sent to the funeral of his predecessor and influenced by French advisors who did not like the Peace Corps, satisfied his anger by throwing out the fifty-seven Volunteers of the Peace Corps in December 1967.
After coups in 1969, the new military governments of Libya and Somalia expelled the Peace Corps, evidently feeling that the Volunteers were too identified with the old regime. In Malawi, on the other hand, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda decided not to replace the 141 Volunteers who departed in 1971 because he thought too many sympathized with the illegal opposition.
U.S. foreign policy hampered the Peace Corps elsewhere in Africa. Mauritania expelled its twelve Volunteers after breaking relations with the United States in 1967 because of U.S. support of Israel in the Six-Day War. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere decided not to replace the 394 Volunteers after their tours expired in 1968. He was angered by the war in Vietnam, and he was trying to fashion a new African school system that would break the mold of British colonial education and believed that the Volunteers would not fit in.
The Peace Corps itself decided to withdrew all its 105 Volunteers from Uganda in September and October 1972 after unruly soldiers shot and killed a trainee, Louis Morton of Houston, at a roadblock. The soldiers, poorly trained and undisciplined, were upset by an invasion of Ugandan exiles in an abortive attempt to overthrow President Idi Amin. The Peace Corps, fearful of enraging Amin, did not announce the evacuation; it withdrew the Volunteers in small groups and asked each Volunteer to lie that he or she had made a personal, individual decision to quit.
The Nigerian civil war also crippled the Peace Corps program, which was the largest in Africa at that time. Peace Corps officials pulled the Volunteers out of all battleground and potential battleground areas. As a result, the program, which comprised 719 Volunteers in 1967, dwindled to 66 Volunteers in 1970.
Despite such problems, work in Africa remained one of the mainstays of the Peace Corps. The developmental problems of Africa were so great that there were always need for some Volunteers somewhere on the continent.
Chapter Eleven. The Militant Sam Brown
After the nightmare of the Nixon years and the election of Jimmy Carter as president in 1976, the Peace Corps community felt relief and renewed expectation. They were sure the Democratic president would lift the organization from its doldrums. After all, Carter’s own mother, known by all as “Miss Lillian,” had served in the Peace Corps as a nurse in India in her late sixties when her son was governor of Georgia. Carter satisfied the Peace Corps staff when he announced that their new leader would be the celebrated antiwar militant Sam Brown. But there was some puzzlement as well. Brown was not named director of the Peace Corps. He was named director of ACTION. Carter was going to maintain the Nixon umbrella organization that kept the Peace Corps in shadows.
Brown was only thirty-three when Carter was elected president, but he was already a familiar figure on television, with his lush head of hair and bushy moustache. He was best known for organizing and serving as the main spokesman of the Vietnam Moratorium, a protest demonstration against the war held in 1969. It was called a moratorium because Brown and his colleagues thought the word strike would sound too harsh to most American ears. The euphemism seemed to work, for 2 million Americans showed up in the streets throughout the country on October 15 to protest against the war. About 250,000 marched in Washington, D.C., in a follow-up demonstration on November 15.
Although a fervent opponent of the war, Brown, unlike some other young antiwar militants, was not a radical intent on tearing down the system. Brown always worked within it instead. Washington Post political writer David Broder once described the suppression of a Brown editorial in a student newspaper in college days as a “radicalizing” experience for him, but added parenthetically, “if one can use that term for a political organizer as circumscribed by convention as Brown is.” In 1968, Brown was the youth coordinator of Senator Gene McCarthy’s failed but romantic campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Eight years later, however, when McCarthy ran as an independent, Brown switched to Carter, the Democratic candidate.
Brown grew up in Iowa where his father owned Brown’s Better Shoes, a group of shoe stores. At Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs, Brown won accolades as an outstanding ROTC cadet. He became involved in student politics at the University of Redlands, beginning as a leader of the young Republicans there. He received a master’s degree from Rutgers University and was continuing graduate work at Harvard Divinity School when he began to work for the Gene McCarthy campaign. After the Vietnam War started to wind down, he joined his father’s company. In 1975, he ran successfully for the post of treasurer of the state of Colorado, giving it up when Carter named him director of ACTION.
There was a good deal of enthusiasm over the appointment. “We would have stood on our heads if that’s what he wanted,” an ACTION official told the Washington Monthly. “This place was euphoric, absolutely overjoyed, about the appointment. We all thought he was going to be our savior.” But disappointment would soon set in, especially at the Peace Corps.
As chief of ACTION, Brown did not intend to let the Peace Corps go its own way. He had several grand ideas for change and no hesitation about ordering the Peace Corps staff to carry them out swiftly. It took him nine months to find a suitable director of the Peace Corps: Carolyn Payton, a professor of psychology at Howard University and the head of the counseling service there. She had been involved in selecting and assessing Volunteers under Sargent Shriver and the country director of the eastern Caribbean islands under Jack Hood Vaughn. She was the first woman and the first African American to head the Peace Corps during its first fifty years. Like many others who knew the Peace Corps well, she found the strictures of Brown too sweeping and impractical, and they were soon embroiled in conflict.
Brown insisted that the Peace Corps should wean itself from its large teaching programs in Africa. The school systems, created in colonial days, turned out hordes of elitist graduates who refused to work with their hands and instead sought office and administrative jobs more fitting with their self-image. Since white-collar jobs were few, the streets of African towns filled with unemployed and aimless youths. Instead of bolstering such school systems, the Volunteers, in Brown’s view, should concentrate on helping to take care of “basic human needs” in such fields as health, irrigation, agriculture, and fisheries.
Brown also believed that the Peace Corps should concentrate on the poorest of the poor. He wanted to phase out of countries such as South Korea, Malaysia, Brazil, and the Ivory Coast that, in his view, did not need Volunteers as much as poorer countries did. Arguments that a country like Brazil, despite its relative wealth, had masses of poverty and misery did not sway Brown.
Brown’s ideas were influenced by theories of Third World development that had been embraced by President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Nyerere was a saintly figure in Africa, for unlike most leaders there, he showed no signs of greed or hunger for power. He lived simply, tolerated no corruption, and pondered the problems of African poverty.
The intellectual Nyerere read deeply into the latest treatises on development and churned out thoughtful papers of his own about the needs of Africa. He was an admirer of René Dumont, the French agronomist who had caused a sensation in French-spe
aking Africa with his book L’Afrique Noire est mal partie (published in English under the title False Start in Africa). Dumont mocked the colonial school systems that produced useless elitists while their countries needed technicians who could make small changes in agriculture that would enable their economies to take off. Nyerere invited Dumont in the 1960s to assess Tanzanian agriculture and received a scathing report from the agronomist about its primitive state.
Nyerere’s sense of justice persuaded him that his government was obliged to use its meager funds to help the poorest areas of Tanzania first. In doing so, he defied a tenet of most economists who advised it made most sense to help the richest of the poor first, for they needed only a small nudge to make great progress.
During the height of the Vietnam War, Nyerere had phased out the Peace Corps, partly as a protest against the war, partly because the Volunteers were mainly teachers in a school system that he wanted to overhaul. On a trip to the United States in August 1977, he had met Brown and discussed the possibility of inviting the Peace Corps back. Brown visited Nyerere five months later at the president’s country house in Boutiama, Tanzania, and the president, dressed in gardening clothes and with his hands muddied from planting trees, told the ACTION director that he needed Volunteers trained in fisheries, agriculture, mechanics, and desert prevention. But he did not want teachers because the teaching of English was “a stage of development that has gone by.”
Nyerere’s ideas, always seductive on paper, usually proved impractical in real life and, in fact, did not work in Tanzania. His lieutenants were ham-handed in trying to carry them out, and most Tanzanians did not understand what was expected of them, either. Moreover, Nyerere tried to achieve his goals through the forced organization of village communities that many people resisted.
These ideas, when interpreted and proclaimed by Brown, did not work in the Peace Corps either. Many Peace Corps officials had long been sympathetic to the theories of Dumont and Nyerere but thought it ridiculous to adopt them wholesale. Most of all, the Peace Corps did not want to abandon the school systems. Most countries other than Tanzania maintained these systems, and Peace Corps officials believed that a good Volunteer teacher could play a vital role in imperfect schools by reducing elitism, eliminating rote learning, and encouraging creativity. The Peace Corps also looked on the English language as an important resource in the modern interrelated world and thought it short-sighted for a country like Tanzania to give up English teachers.
Brown dismissed resistance to his changes as nostalgic, a hanging on to a Peace Corps past. “It [the Peace Corps] is one of the few remaining symbols of our innocence,” he said. “But in the minds of many nations that is an era that has past. We can’t use the Peace Corps as a way to grab back a mood that is no longer prevalent.” What Brown called nostalgia, however, was regarded by the Peace Corps as experience based on fifteen years of trial and error. In the view of his detractors, Brown was turning his back on the achievements and evidence of tens of thousands of Volunteers.
Payton and other Peace Corps officials were reluctant to carry out the orders of Brown. In African countries like Ghana that wanted American teachers, the Peace Corps tried to keep supplying them even as it opened new programs in “basic human needs.” “The governments were always asking us for teachers, teachers, teachers,” said Reginald Petty, the Peace Corps director in Swaziland and later Kenya. “Sam Brown just didn’t understand the value of knowing English in these countries.” To satisfy both Brown and the governments, Peace Corps officials overseas resorted to artful programming. “I used to tell the government ministers, ‘If you let me bring in five skill-trained Volunteers, I’ll get you ten more English teachers,’” Petty told the writer Karen Schwarz. But the Peace Corps could not save programs in the countries that Brown wanted to leave. By 1981, the Peace Corps had departed from Brazil, South Korea, and the Ivory Coast. Two years later, it was gone from Malaysia.
Aside from their arguments over policy, Brown and Payton seemed caught in a clash of cultures, of genders, and of generations. Although his deputy was a woman, Brown was often accompanied by male aides in their early thirties, many wearing cowboy boots. Payton was fifty-two, a generation older, and, in the eyes of Brown and his cohorts, she drew much of her support within the Peace Corps from other women. When Brown and Payton met privately, according to Payton, he would show up with his agenda typed on a piece of paper. “The funny thing is,” said Payton, “he would never look at me directly.” It was rare for Brown and Payton to see eye to eye about anything, and both were stubborn about their views.
The tension burst into open conflict in 1977 when Brown proposed sending 200 unemployed youths from Oakland, California, to the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Brown wanted his “Jamaica Brigade” to work at land terracing or some similar activity for three months and then apply their new skill back in the United States as members of VISTA, the other large volunteer program in the ACTION agency portfolio.
The project, according to Brown, would attract a new kind of Peace Corps Volunteer (namely inner-city blacks), would foster a new relationship between the Peace Corps and VISTA, and would involve the Peace Corps in a new kind of short-term project. “The world has changed drastically since the 1960s,” he said, “and if the Peace Corps is going to make sense, it has to stay on top of where the world is and stop wishing it could go back to where it was fifteen years ago.”
But Payton dismissed the Jamaica Brigade as one of Brown’s “crackpot ideas.” Jamaica did not need an influx of unemployed Americans; it had tens of thousands of its own unemployed. A skill like land terracing would have no relevance back in the inner city. And, most important, Peace Corps officials had always avoided short-term do-gooder projects. They were more like tourism than development. When the Peace Corps began, Shriver and his lieutenants wanted Volunteers who would commit themselves to at least two years of meaningful work. There seemed to be no point in changing this now just to satisfy Sam Brown’s obsession with change.
Vehement opposition from Payton and her director in Jamaica, Loretta Carter-Miller, forced Brown to abandon the Jamaica Brigade. Carter-Miller, in fact, resigned during the bureaucratic infighting. “I just decided that Sam wasn’t going to use me to use those kids to make some kind of splash,” Carter-Miller told the Washington Post. “Then, when the shit hit the fan because of this dumb idea, I was going to have to be the lady to hang around and clean it up. I got tired of fighting with him, so I quit.”
The feud between Payton and Brown reached a bitter climax at a meeting of the directors of Peace Corps programs in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific in November 1978. They met in Morocco in a Mediterranean resort between Rabat and Casablanca called Mohammedia. Brown believed that Payton, for two months before the conference began, “was on the phone every day trying to undercut me in every way possible.” Payton believed that Brown had ignored her during the conference and tried to take it over. His strategy, she felt, “obviously was ‘Get Carolyn.’” She was also upset that, in her view, Brown was budgeting too little for the Peace Corps. The two continually contradicted each other in front of the country directors.
After one day’s session of the conference, Brown phoned her in her hotel room after midnight. Several of her associates, including Ruth Saxe, the deputy director of the Peace Corps, and Ellen Yaffe, the executive officer in charge of the budget, were in the room with her and could hear his loud, angry voice. “Carolyn, why the fuck don’t you get out of here?” he said. She hung up, and Brown showed up fifteen minutes later, banging on her door.
The noise was so great, Yaffe recalls, that “you would probably call the police if you were somewhere else.” “The voice was angry,” she says. “The banging was angry. Who knew what he was going to do? He might have intended to fire her on the spot.” But Payton refused to open the door. [Brown acknowledged knocking on the door but told the Wall Street Journal he had not banged o
n it.]
After they returned to Washington, Brown demanded Payton’s resignation. At first, Payton agreed, saying she would resign “in the best interests of the Peace Corps.” But she soon changed her mind. She would resign only if President Carter asked her to do so, she said. The White House then backed Brown, asking for the resignation, and Payton resigned.
Brown won the battle against Payton but soon lost the Peace Corps itself. Within four months, Brown asked forty-one-year-old Richard F. Celeste, the former lieutenant governor (and future governor) of Ohio, to serve as the new director of the Peace Corps. Celeste knew the Peace Corps well. He had worked in the Washington headquarters of the agency in 1963, and later, as a special assistant to Ambassador Chester Bowles in India, he had watched the Volunteers in action. He was too wise a political operator to accept a job that would subject him to the whims of Sam Brown. He agreed to take the job but only on condition that the Peace Corps have renewed autonomy.
That was not what Brown had in mind, but he accepted the condition. “It was not a slam dunk,” says Celeste. “We negotiated it.” Bill Josephson, Shriver’s old general counsel, took time off from his private practice to help Celeste and Brown work out the details. President Carter soon signed an executive order that gave the Peace Corps complete autonomy even while keeping it in ACTION. Brown’s umbrella agency would support the Peace Corps with payroll services, public relations, and recruitment campaigns, but in all other matters “the Peace Corps director will direct and control the operations of the Peace Corps.”
When the World Calls Page 17