When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  The articles, which were also carried or summarized by other newspapers, accused the Peace Corps of unwisely placing Volunteers in remote and dangerous villages, failing to make sure Volunteer housing and other living conditions were safe, understating the numbers of crimes committed against Volunteers, and refusing to reveal all details about the circumstances of some deaths. In short, according to the Dayton Daily News, the Peace Corps was both incompetent and obsessed with preserving its image.

  The Dayton Daily News bolstered its accusations with a long series of dramatic case histories. In 1999, for example, the body of Brian Krow, twenty-seven, of Fremont, California, was found on a path seventy-five feet beneath a footbridge in Cherkassy, Ukraine. The Peace Corps listed the death as an “unintentional accident.”

  But the writers implied it should have been ruled a suicide. No one had ever accidentally fallen off the bridge before. Krow, a trainee, had received a letter from the Peace Corps threatening him with expulsion. He was accused of talking about drugs and seeking Ukrainian women. On top of this, his hosts, the Ukrainian family with whom he lived, had caught him masturbating.

  The Peace Corps, which has no police powers, insisted that it had to rely on local authorities for determining the cause of death, and they ruled Krow’s death an accident. But Okeksandr Bachysche, the local prosecutor, told the Dayton Daily News that he had not been informed by the Peace Corps about the expulsion letter. “Taking into consideration the new information you told me,” he said, “I think he committed suicide.”

  On the night of Christmas 1996, according to another typical story in the series, Diana Gilmour and two other women Volunteers from Guatemala were visiting Volunteer Tom Luben in El Salvador. He was stationed in Agua Fría, a tiny village near the Pacific resort of El Cuco. The four were savoring the breezes of the beach in the moonlight when they were accosted by a gang of armed men. While one held Gilmour back with a pistol and others pinned Luben to the ground, the two other women were gang-raped. Then one of the men raped Gilmour. The gang herded their victims to some high grassland, evidently intent on killing them. But another Volunteer approached, swinging a flashlight, and the rapists fled.

  Salvadorean police later arrested six men in the case. Three were convicted of rape and sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. But Gilmour believed the Peace Corps bore a good deal of guilt as well. She said the El Cuco area was a known hotbed of criminal activity, and the Peace Corps should neither have stationed Luben there nor allowed the women to visit him.

  “We told them we were going to Tom Luben’s site,” she told the Dayton Daily News. “They knew where we were going. You have to fill out an itinerary . . . . Of course none of us had any clue as to how dangerous it was. We were never warned about going to El Salvador . . . . It should never have happened.”

  The Dayton Daily News articles received some support in the Peace Corps community. John Hale, who had served as assistant inspector general from 1991 to 1993, insisted, “While zealots may continue to defend the status quo . . . the Daily News has said what an adult looking at the facts would say.” Unfortunately, he wrote, the Peace Corps had too many personnel “who dismiss unpleasant facts when they contradict Peace Corps myth.”

  But the series angered many former Peace Corps Volunteers, who found it misleading and exaggerated. “I find the authors of this series verging on irresponsibility for their failure to provide readers a fair or even knowledgeable context for the charges they seem to be leveling,” wrote Peggy Anderson. Anderson, a former Volunteer in Togo and a former evaluator, was the author of two distinguished books on medical practices in the United States: Nurse and Children’s Hospital.

  “What most astounds me,” she went on, “is that they fault the Peace Corps for providing precisely what most people—all putatively adults—join it for: the adventure of going off the beaten path, the opportunity to develop one’s own resourcefulness toward a larger good in settings where resourcefulness and the sincere application of it can be useful to recipients.”

  The Peace Corps was so worried about the series that even before the articles came out, it issued a press release castigating Carollo. The Peace Corps said that, based on its conversations with Carollo, “we believe the upcoming series . . . will provide a misleading picture of the Peace Corps and Peace Corps Volunteer service, particularly with respect to safety and security.” The press release also said the Peace Corps had “great concerns about the intentions of” Carollo, accusing him of asserting that he was interested only in the problems of the Peace Corps, not its positive achievements.

  The series did amount to a relentless attack on the Peace Corps, but its impact was diminished by its obvious exaggerations, the spirited defense of the Peace Corps by many Volunteers and former Volunteers, and the failure of more prominent newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post to follow through with articles of their own.

  In later years, the Peace Corps began issuing detailed annual reports on the safety and the health of Volunteers, and these statistics and analyses revealed a more realistic picture than the sensational series in the Dayton Daily News. From 1961 through 2008, 274 Volunteers died while serving in the Peace Corps. More than a third died in traffic accidents. The other major causes of death, in order of frequency, were drownings, accidents from falls and other mishaps, murders, cardiovascular diseases, suicides, and plane crashes.

  The death tolls varied from year to year. In some years, there were none. But there were spikes of fourteen dead in both 1966 and 1970 and thirteen dead in 1971, 1972, 1976, 1978, and 1981. The death rate since 1990 remained at the lowest in Peace Corps history. There were only three deaths in 2006, four in 2007, and two in 2008. The Peace Corps experience was so different that it was difficult to compare its mortality rate with that of other Americans. But, on average, the Peace Corps numbers of deaths per thousand Volunteers was about the same as the rate for other young Americans.

  The numbers of women Volunteers expanded continually over the years, and this forced the staff to focus on the problem of rape. In 2007, the 4,794 women Volunteers made up 59 percent of the total Peace Corps. There were seventeen reported incidents of rape that year, one less than the previous year. The percentage of women reporting rape remained more or less the same for a decade.

  The Peace Corps believed that the statistics understated the problem. Volunteers filled out an anonymous survey every two years about life in the Peace Corps. In the 2008 survey, nineteen Volunteers said they had been raped. Of these, only six said they had reported the rape to the Peace Corps. Six said they had not reported the crime, and seven did not reply whether they had reported the rape or not.

  Yet the vast majority of Volunteers insisted safety was not a major problem. According to the 2008 survey, 94 percent felt safe where they worked, 92 percent felt safe where they lived, 82 percent felt safe traveling in the countryside, and 79 percent felt safe visiting the capital—the site of Peace Corps headquarters.

  While it could be argued that a Volunteer faced no greater criminal threat in the Peace Corps than elsewhere, there was no doubt that service exposed many to tropical illnesses they would probably not encounter in the United States. In 2007, for example, the Peace Corps reported 5,605 cases of diarrhea and other gastrointestinal illnesses (a significant decrease from the previous year), 195 cases of malaria (a decrease), 152 cases of mosquito-borne dengue fever (a significant increase), and 43 cases of either bilharzia disease or bilharzia infection (an increase).

  To deal with these and other medical problems, the Peace Corps contracted with at least one medical officer—usually a local nurse or doctor—to work in each country. If an illness or injury could not be handled by the medical facilities in the country or in a nearby country, the Peace Corps sent the Volunteer back to the United States for further treatment. There were 150 medical evacuations to the United States in 2007.

  The statis
tics underscored the issues. Security was a problem, though surely an exaggerated one. Getting mugged in Guatemala may sound worse to some ears than getting mugged in Boston. But it really isn’t. On the other hand, the medical statistics could not be shaken away. Life in the Peace Corps was far different from life elsewhere, and that life entailed medical risks, many unpleasant, some awful. But most Volunteers, who had listened often in training to lectures on minimizing security and health problems, understood and accepted the risks.

  Chapter Thirteen. The Rich Lady in Her First Job for Pay

  The announcement from the White House in 1981 made many admirers of the Peace Corps cringe. Ronald Reagan, the new president, had nominated Loret Miller Ruppe, a wealthy brewery heiress who had never held a full-time job for pay in her life, as the new director of the Peace Corps. Her achievements and connections were all political. As the wife of Philip Ruppe, a former U.S. congressman from Michigan, she was close to Vice President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. She had chaired Bush’s campaign in Michigan for the Republican presidential nomination. When Bush lost but accepted the vice-presidential nomination, she then chaired the Reagan-Bush campaign in Michigan.

  The White House tried hard to stretch the credentials of the forty-five-year-old nominee. The announcement said that Ruppe “has spent most of her life in volunteer efforts.” That, of course, evoked the unfortunate image for the Peace Corps of a rich society woman setting aside a portion of her time for charity fundraisers and visits to orphanages. Ruppe, the White House went on, “has traveled extensively and shared ideals with past Peace Corps Volunteers in many countries.” It did not make clear what this sharing of ideals meant or how it took place.

  Ruppe, of course, had a strong Republican allegiance. Philip Ruppe, a Republican, was elected to Congress in 1966, the same year that George H. W. Bush was elected to the House of Representatives. Barbara Bush organized an informal group of the wives of eleven new members of the House and Senate that year, and the Ruppes and Bushes became close friends. Bush served in the House for only two terms, but Ruppe was reelected five times before retiring in 1978. After Loret’s work in the 1980 presidential campaign, Bush persuaded Reagan to name her Peace Corps director.

  Loret Ruppe’s resume, which did not seem to qualify her for the job at all, reinforced the fears of many in the Peace Corps family about the new Republican president, who they saw as even more conservative than Richard Nixon, the Republican president who had buried the Peace Corps ten years earlier. But the fears would prove exaggerated. Many conservatives in the Reagan entourage were suspicious of the Peace Corps, but Reagan himself did not share the contempt for the Kennedy-bred organization that had seethed in Nixon. And neither did his nominee.

  Loret Ruppe, in fact, would prove an exciting surprise. It did not take her long to change the mood—and the minds—of the Peace Corps staff. A bureaucratic infighter, she protected the Peace Corps with determination and love. She looked on the idea of the Peace Corps with so much understanding and clear-minded insight that she worked doggedly to keep it out of partisan politics. She would ascend in the eyes of present and former Volunteers and staff until they acclaimed her as the most beloved and inspiring of all Peace Corps directors since Sargent Shriver.

  Her associates still talk about her with glowing respect. She listened carefully and quietly to advisers before making decisions. She laughed often and told good-natured stories. She thoroughly enjoyed traveling to impoverished countries to meet her Volunteers. She remembered those she met from one year to the next. She was fearless in the face of snarls from right-wing ideologues. In the end, she proved to be no dilettante—in fact, she served as director for eight years, longer than any other in the history of the Peace Corps.

  “She embodied in herself what Peace Corps was,” says Jody Olsen, one of Ruppe’s regional directors and a future deputy director of the Peace Corps. “She devoted all her time and effort to the Peace Corps. She was personable and charismatic. She inspired others to do the best they could.”

  When Ruppe’s nomination was announced, Peace Corps officials scurried to find out more about her. Her lineage through her father was easily traced. Her father, Frederick C. Miller, who died in a small plane crash in 1954, had run the Miller Brewing Company, which his grandfather founded in Milwaukee in the nineteenth century. Ruppe’s father also was a well-known local sports figure, for he had captained the Notre Dame football team in his youth and later helped bring the Boston Braves to Milwaukee.

  The background of her mother, Adele Kaualey Miller, was less well known. But as the Peace Corps would discover in the next few years, Adele was an outspoken woman who regarded herself as a social activist and a militant leftist. She embraced radical causes with a passion. The closeness of the Republican director and her “socialist” mother became a kind of running Peace Corps joke in those days.

  Loret would sometimes lunch with her mother and a few of her mother’s liberal friends on Capitol Hill. To prevent anyone from the White House from spotting her, she told one Peace Corps staffer, “I ought to wear a bag over my head.” Carroll Bouchard, the director of the Africa region, recalls lunching with Loret one day and finding her shaking her head. She had just received a phone call from her mother. Adele was down in Fort Benning, Georgia, with a band of protesters picketing the U.S. army’s School of the Americas. She and other militants insisted that the army trained Latin American military and police officers at the school in the techniques of repressing their people.

  Ruppe took over a Peace Corps in difficulty. Some outsiders called it “the Peace Corpse.” The Carter administration had failed to revive it after the nightmare of the Nixon years. The number of Volunteers had dipped below 6,000. Its budget was so paltry that Ruppe found the total listed in the federal budget under “Miscellaneous.” More money was set aside for U.S. military marching bands than the Peace Corps. The agency was so insignificant that no one at the State Department caught a typographical error before issuing a document that referred to it as “the Peach Corps.”

  On her first visit to the White House to meet the staff person assigned as liaison to the Peace Corps, she was kept waiting forty-five minutes. When the liaison finally showed up, he boasted that he had recommended doing away with the Peace Corps. She shook his hand and said, “I guess I’ll have to request another liaison.” She did, and he was replaced.

  She battled early with the White House over personnel. Sargent Shriver’s rule limiting Peace Corps officials to five years of service (with a year or two of extensions in some cases) was a boon then to any White House looking for openings to place the party faithful. Every year, a score or more appealing jobs opened at the Peace Corps.

  When Ruppe took over, she found ten applicants, selected by Richard Celeste, her Democratic predecessor, waiting for final approval as country directors. Instead of rejecting them and giving in to the White House demand for Republican substitutes, she appointed all ten. She also retained William Sykes, a Democrat, as her deputy director. When Sykes later left to join the staff of Celeste, the newly elected governor of Ohio, he thanked the Peace Corps staff for contributing to Celeste’s campaign. This infuriated the Reagan White House.

  But Ruppe was proud of her nonpartisanship. At her request, Congress later passed legislation that prohibited political appointments of country directors. The White House could no longer send over lists of party loyalists for the jobs. “We took Peace Corps out of the pit of politics and made it nonpartisan,” she boasted several years later. “It must always signify Americans pulling together for peace.”

  When Ruppe took charge, the Peace Corps, despite a great deal of autonomy, was still part of ACTION. This led to a crisis when the White House nominated Thomas J. Pauken as the new director of ACTION. Pauken had served as an army intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, and his appointment shattered a vital Peace Corps tradition.

  From the b
eginning, Shriver knew that many foreigners would assume that the Peace Corps was a convenient channel for the CIA to spread its spies into developing countries. To counter this image, Shriver exacted a public promise from the CIA that it would never attempt to infiltrate the Peace Corps. And to avoid any embarrassing disclosures in the future, Shriver decreed that no one with any background in the CIA could serve as a Volunteer or staff member of the Peace Corps. This also applied to anyone who had served as an intelligence specialist for any other U.S. agency within the past ten years. The prohibitions remained throughout the history of the Peace Corps.

  In short, Pauken’s nomination meant that the Peace Corps would be subject to supervision by an official who was ineligible to serve in the organization. His presence, moreover, could stain the image of the Peace Corps. Ruppe objected to the nomination on these grounds, but the Senate confirmed Pauken anyway.

  Senator Alan Cranston, a Democrat from California, then came to the rescue of Ruppe and the Peace Corps. Before his election to the Senate, Cranston, a journalist in his youth, had evaluated the Peace Corps program in Ghana for Charlie Peters in the 1960s. He returned from Africa brimming with praise for the Volunteers and later acted as one of the Peace Corps’s most enthusiastic boosters in Congress. After the squabble over Pauken, he introduced legislation that would separate the Peace Corps completely from ACTION. It would thus no longer matter to the Peace Corps who was head of ACTION.

  The White House opposed the bill, and Ruppe, unwilling to defy Reagan, said in public that she saw no need for the legislation. The right-wing Heritage Foundation, however, accused Ruppe of conducting “a successful behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign against the White House position.” Congress passed the bill, and the Peace Corps regained the complete autonomy that had been taken away by Richard Nixon.