Another personnel crisis erupted in August 1982, when President Reagan appointed Edward A. Curran as the new deputy director of the Peace Corps. Curran, the former headmaster of the all-girls National Cathedral School in Washington, had just been fired by Secretary of Education T. H. Bell from his post as director of the National Institute of Education, the research arm of the Department of Education. When the Reaganites came to power in 1981, they were determined to abolish the department. They looked on it as an instrument for spreading leftist, socialist ideas into U.S. schools. The worst offender of the department, in their view, was the National Institute of Education.
Bell was a bitter disappointment to the ideologues. They looked on him as a traitor. He had no intention of leading his department into oblivion; worse, he encouraged social science research. Curran, one of the disappointed ideologues, wrote a letter to President Reagan urging him to abolish the National Institute of Education. The letter, however, arrived at the White House while Reagan was overseas, and an aide automatically forwarded it to Secretary Bell. Bell, incensed at Curran for going behind his back to seek White House intervention in the department, fired him immediately.
Ruppe could hardly be expected to feel pleased when Curran then showed up on her doorstep. She took it as a slap in the face. As far as she was concerned, Curran was a right-wing ideologue appointed by the White House to spy on her, and his actions supported that impression. Curran started to question Ruppe’s appointment of country directors who did not qualify as true Reaganites. Curran, according to the Heritage Foundation, also proposed programs to “combat socialism in Third World countries.” On top of this, Ruppe suspected him of feeding gossip to the right-wing Washington Times to fuel unflattering stories about herself and the Peace Corps.
After a little more than six months, an exasperated Ruppe decided that she had had enough of Curran. She cut down his duties, reduced his staff, barred him from senior staff meetings, and refused to let him serve as acting director when she traveled overseas. When the White House insisted she had no right to do this, she called Curran into her office and secretly tape-recorded their conversation, evidently trying to trap him into saying something disloyal, embarrassing, or stupid. The incident reportedly attracted enough White House notice for Fred Fielding, the presidential counsel, to rule that the taping, though a violation of federal regulations, was not illegal.
The Ruppe-Curran feud grew intense enough finally for the White House to withdraw Curran and nominate him as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The outcry from the academic world was so great, however, that the Senate rejected the nomination.
In December 1984, a month after President Reagan’s reelection, the Heritage Foundation issued a report entitled, “The Peace Corps: Out of Step with Reagan.” The report, written by a freelance writer named Mark Huber, listed all Ruppe’s “sins,” especially her campaigns against Pauken and Curran, and concluded:
Now, on the eve of Reagan’s second term, the Peace Corps still largely ignores the Reagan Agenda. Not only have the agency and its director snubbed Reagan policy, they have actually fought against it on Capitol Hill. In numerous ways, the Peace Corps has been an annoying thorn in Reagan’s side, disregarding White House directives, making personnel appointments without proper White House clearance, and dragging its heels on vital foreign policy initiatives. As a result, many opportunities have been missed for extending the Reagan mandate to the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps community, of course, read the report with pride and excitement. By testimony of the influential, right-wing Heritage Foundation, their wonderful director, a Reagan appointee, had proven a thorn in his side and had protected the Peace Corps from succumbing to the Reagan mandate. Every complaint in the report was treated like a medal of honor by the Peace Corps. The report, however, helped persuade Ruppe to act with slightly more caution and far less controversy in her second four-year term.
The report obviously amounted to a call for her removal, but Ruppe was able to withstand any campaign against her because President Reagan liked her, and personality usually counted far more with him than ideology. Ruppe often told the story of the state visit in 1983 of Prime Minister Ratu Mara of Fiji. The White House invited Ruppe to join a meeting of Mara and his delegation with Reagan, Vice President Bush, the cabinet, and other officials.
While seated around an enormous table, Ruppe recalled, “They talked about world conditions, sugar quotas, nuclear-free zones. The president then asked the prime minister to make his presentation. A very distinguished gentleman, he drew himself up and said, ‘President Reagan, I bring you today the sincere thanks of my government and my people . . .’ Everyone held their breath, and there was total silence. ‘. . . for the men and women of the Peace Corps who go out into our villages, who live with our people.’ He went on and on. I beamed. Vice President Bush leaned over afterwards and whispered, ‘What did you pay that man to say that?’”
A week later, Ruppe said, Reagan received a copy of the budget with a proposed cut for the Peace Corps. But Reagan refused it. “Don’t cut the Peace Corps,” Reagan said. “It’s the only thing I got thanked for last week” during the Fiji state visit. The cut was restored.
Despite her spirited nonpartisanship and the admiration she attracted and merited, Ruppe also had her share of mistakes. The most significant flaw during her tenure was her embrace of Central America. In many ways, this mistake was understandable. Ruppe wanted the Peace Corps to be relevant, to be noticed by the White House and Congress, to play a vital role in the economic development of the Third World.
But relevance can be a trap. Many politicians have tended to look on the Peace Corps as relevant only when it lined up and assumed a supportive role in U.S. foreign policy. The Reagan administration was obsessed with Central America, intent on overthrowing the Sandinista-led regime in Nicaragua and preventing leftist insurgencies from triumphing elsewhere, and Ruppe fell into the trap of trying to make the Peace Corps relevant within this political cauldron.
The Reaganites came to office bristling with anger at President Jimmy Carter for his failure to prevent the Sandinistas from overthrowing the stalwart anti-communist (though dictatorial) regime of President Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. The Sandinista victory was regarded by the new administration as a major defeat in the Cold War. In its new Central American strategy, the Reagan administration engaged in two main belligerent adventures—sponsoring the anti-Sandinista contras, who used Honduran bases to fight a civil war in Nicaragua, and accelerating military aid to a Salvadoran government guilty of atrocities and human rights abuses while battling a leftist insurgency.
With the Vietnam War still a troubling memory, many news commentators and Democratic members of Congress grew restive over these involvements in Central American wars. In response, President Reagan appointed a bipartisan commission headed by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1983 to recommend long-term U.S. policies toward Central America “that will best respond to the challenges of social, economic, and democratic development in the region, and to internal and external threats to its security and stability.”
Ruppe asked the commission to recognize the potential of the Peace Corps in this endeavor. She testified that the Peace Corps, with “the lasting friendships, understanding, and respect created by the Peace Corps Volunteers, not only with the people but also with their country’s leaders, is of paramount importance to our long-term foreign policy objectives.” The commissioners heeded her plea. In its report in January 1984, the Kissinger Commission urged “a dramatic expansion of [Peace Corps] volunteers in the region from the current 600 to a figure five or six times as great, largely in education.”
But the Kissinger Commission report brimmed with Cold War cant. While it called for “greatly expanded support for economic growth and social reform,” it also advocated “a significantly larger program of military assistance.” The co
mmission accepted the Reagan administration’s questionable thesis that the insurgencies depended on Cuba and the Soviet Union, and the report warned that “there are circumstances in which the use of force, by the United States or by others, could become necessary as a last resort.”
The Reagan administration treated the Kissinger Commission report as a green light for the expansion of its military programs in Central America. This led to a significant increase in economic aid as well. The Reagan administration knew that Congress would not appropriate funds for military assistance unless even more was requested for economic assistance.
Honduras became one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America. Only El Salvador, in fact, received more. The United States provided Honduras with ten times more aid in 1981–1985 than it had in 1975–1980. A quarter of the aid in the 1980s was direct military spending. By 1985, U.S. funds paid for 76 percent of the Honduran military budget. The outpouring of U.S. money did not reflect an outpouring of generosity. It is hard to see it as anything else but payment by the Reagan administration for allowing an estimated 15,000 contra troops to operate out of Honduras under U.S. training and supervision.
A small portion of the increased foreign assistance covered an increase in the Peace Corps programming. Although one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Honduras had not usually hosted large Peace Corps programs. In 1970, it had only the twentieth-largest Peace Corps in the world, with 128 Volunteers. The Honduran program grew as more U.S. attention turned to Central America in the late 1970s. By 1979, it was the fifth-largest, with 193 Volunteers. This accelerated with the contra war until 1986, when Honduras became the largest Peace Corps program in the world with 310 Volunteers. For the rest of the decade, Honduras either remained in first place or found itself eclipsed only by the Philippines, a country with twelve times the population.
The Peace Corps, by associating itself with the Nicaraguan obsession of the Reagan administration, troubled many friends. In What You Can Do for Your Country, her extraordinary 1991 collection of Peace Corps oral histories, Karen Schwarz wrote that “many Volunteers took it for granted that they had been dispatched to Honduras to serve as ‘the smile button’ on the lapel of United States foreign policy.”
Francine Dionne, speaking for the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Committee on Central America, insisted, “They have declared the Peace Corps an instrument of U.S. foreign policy and a tool of the Reagan administration.” Chuck Geisler, an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell and a former Volunteer, told the New York Times, “I’m very much against expanding our Peace Corps operations and expanding our military operations simultaneously. It’s just a tragedy to give this mixed message and to make Volunteers in the field feel like they’re part of a mopping-up operation.”
The confusion of roles upset Ron Holcomb and his wife, Kathy McCann, while they were in training in Honduras in 1986. “We . . . came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be able to ignore our being representatives of the U.S. government, which had no business meddling in Honduras’s internal affairs,” Holcomb told Schwarz. “The Peace Corps appeared to be a piece of the puzzle, and even though it may have been a very small piece, we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” Both Holcomb and McCann quit the Peace Corps just before the end of training.
The hurried race to outperform supposed communists led, in one case, to a mediocre project. With Peace Corps encouragement and U.S. funding, Honduras launched Plan Alfa, a campaign to teach illiterate Honduran peasants to read and write. This was an obvious attempt to match the successful Sandinista literacy program in Nicaragua. The Volunteers were assigned to supervise and train literacy teachers and prepare reading materials.
But the program foundered. It had not been planned well. The Honduran government fell behind in its salary payments to teachers. In addition, there were delays in the delivery of materials. Hard-working farmers found it difficult to give up an hour every weekday to a literacy class. Attendance dwindled.
Yet there were great needs in impoverished Honduras, and most Peace Corps Volunteers found satisfying work in agricultural production, tree planting, freshwater fisheries development, soil conservation, public health communication, elementary school teaching, and other projects. For the most part, they set aside concerns about the political role of the Peace Corps.
When Bill Mabie was in training in Honduras in 1985, he blurted out his concern during a lecture, asking from the back of the hall whether the Peace Corps had become just “window dressing for intervention.” “Who said that?” the lecturer demanded. “I shrunk down in my seat so he couldn’t see me,” Mabie recalled more than twenty years later. “I didn’t want to get tossed out.” The lecturer dismissed the question as cynical.
Mabie was trained to help Hondurans build fishponds as a source of food. The Peace Corps assigned him to the town of Danli, in the province of El Paraiso in southeastern Honduras. He was in contra staging territory, barely twelve miles from the Nicaraguan border.
“When things would heat up on the border,” says Mabie, “the U.S. military would roll into Danli. They would occupy a local restaurant a half block from my house as a command post. I tried to walk in once. They were reading a big map spread out on a dining table. A soldier shooed me away.”
During the Easter Holy Week of 1986, the contras launched a major offensive but were swiftly repulsed by the Nicaraguan army. The Nicaraguans did not stop at the border but pursued the contras to a town just east of Danli. Soon, as Mabie puts it, “the war went into high gear . . . . I started hearing military convoys rumbling through and around Danli at night. During the day, groups of U.S. Chinook helicopters would fly overhead with artillery guns or jeeps hanging below them. This was no longer a proxy war; the U.S. was now overtly engaged.” The Peace Corps pulled Mabie out of Danli.
Mabie was reassigned to a barrio in the town of Trujillo on the northern Caribbean coast. But that did not provide an escape from the contra war. In May 1987, the United States and Honduras staged a military exercise in the north, practicing how to turn back a Nicaraguan invasion if it came by sea. The exercise involved 3,000 Honduran soldiers and 7,000 U.S. troops.
“I literally had [U.S.] soldiers crawling up the beach into my little barrio,” Mabie recalls. “That night, some of them got into fights with locals which I had to break up. There was quite a bit of drama about a Navy SEAL’s wristwatch that had gone missing during his visit to the local bordello. The SEAL stormed through my barrio chasing a little boy, demanding his watch. Again I had to intervene to protect the kid, who eventually returned the watch . . . . During all of this, I couldn’t help but fear that all the goodwill I had been developing with the locals was being erased by a two-day military exercise.”
The goodwill did not dissipate. “I established wonderful relationships with Hondurans,” Mabie, who was now the chief of staff of a California state senator, said in 2009. “I really enjoyed the experience. It . . . had a huge impact on my life in a variety of ways. And I believe that my service had a positive impact on the little corner of Honduras I called home . . . . My service was very tangible. I built a hatchery. Every day was an adventure. It was the best job I ever had.”
Carole Levin and her husband, Andy, were assigned to La Libertad in central Honduras, located about two hours by bus on a gravel road from the provincial capital of Comayagua. Although helicopters from a U.S. air base sometime flew over La Libertad, the town was not caught in the war. Carole worked with a cooperative that supplied loans, equipment, and training to farmers to start aviaries for the production of honey.
“I had a great experience and felt that I really made a difference,” says Carole. “These farmers were dirt poor, and they could have cared less what my government was doing . . . . While I was not happy with what my government was doing, it did not interfere with my work.”
Similar testimony came from Steve Lenzo, who wo
rked as a forester helping communities protect and reforest the watersheds surrounding the springs and creeks that supplied water. He was assigned to Agua Caliente de Linaca in the south the first year and to Morazán in the north the second year. “It was extremely rewarding and a worthwhile effort and much appreciated,” he recalled recently, “regardless of the politics that brought so many of us to Honduras.”
Honduras proved so hospitable and worthwhile that it continued to be one of the largest Peace Corps programs in the world long after the contra war, the Reagan administration, and the Cold War came to an end. Yet the satisfying and useful experiences of the Volunteers there did not alter the fact that the Peace Corps, by rushing more Volunteers into Honduras alongside Reagan’s troops in the mid-1980s, had allowed more chipping away of the Peace Corps’s aura of independence.
Even such a distinguished and admired Peace Corps director as Loret Ruppe did not understand this. She was obviously surprised and puzzled over the criticism that the organization received for its activities in Central America. Jody Olsen, the future deputy director, said recently that Ruppe’s puzzlement did not stem from naivete.
“She would have been so surprised because her feeling for Peace Corps was so strong,” Olsen said. “It was a feeling that we can make it happen . . . . Knowing that the Peace Corps could do well became consuming.” And, of course, the Peace Corps Volunteers did do well in Honduras.
Chapter Fourteen. 200,000 Stories
Jody Olsen, the deputy director of the Peace Corps from 2001 to 2009, insists that the work of the Peace Corps defies labeling because “we are upwards of 200,000 stories. That is what we are,” she says. There is hyperbole in her description, but not much. A case can be made, for example, that the experiences of many of the high school teachers in former British Africa were similar enough to invite labeling. But, by and large, the experience of most Volunteers tended to be unique. This became more obvious after the first two decades. As the Peace Corps matured and diminished in size, it began placing more and more Volunteers alone in remote villages. Each one had a separate story to tell.
When the World Calls Page 20