When her Peace Corps assignment ends, she finds that her readjustment “proves more unsettling than leaving the U.S. in the first place.” “There is life after the Peace Corps,” she writes, “but it’s not the same. I really miss Honduras.”
These memoirs by returned Volunteers raised some issues about placing Volunteers alone in isolated sites. There is no doubt that each Volunteer was far more enmeshed in a foreign culture than they would have been if they had another American nearby to support them. But the cost was incipient alcoholism in Zaire and trauma over an attempted rape in Guatemala. Only Barbara, the older Volunteer in Honduras, flourished in her isolation (and she had another younger Volunteer in her village for one year). As its fiftieth anniversary approached, the Peace Corps was resisting pressure—like that of the Dayton Daily News series discussed in chapter 12—to change its policy of assigning most of the Volunteers to posts by themselves.
The memoirs reflected a changing Peace Corps. By the 1980s, the Peace Corps had become an elite institution of Americans working in remote sites, often alone, coping with poverty and inertia, doing the best they could to change what little they could. They were better trained than Volunteers of the 1960s and 1970s and, most important, were better versed in language. They also escaped the great clusters of Volunteers that drained Peace Corps programs in the past. All in all, based on the evidence in these memoirs, the more recent Volunteers struck an old evaluator like myself as a heroic band.
Chapter Fifteen. A New Name and a New World
Paul D. Coverdell, a fifty-year-old Georgia politician appointed by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Loret Ruppe as director in 1989, could not fathom why the Peace Corps was not known as the “U.S. Peace Corps.” The U.S. government, after all, paid to send the Volunteers overseas and supervise their work. “I do not believe we should hide the name of the country that has sponsored the wonderful things we have done around the world,” he told the Washington Post. So, in less than a year, he changed the name, emblazoning “U.S. Peace Corps” on letterheads, posters, walls, and the facade of the headquarters, then on K Street in Washington.
Several veteran Peace Corps staffers tried to talk him out of it. When they approached his office, Jody Olsen, his chief of staff, told them, “Don’t try, because you won’t succeed.” He was adamant. Their arguments made no headway.
Without realizing it, Coverdell was turning the agency’s history on its head. The law creating the agency called it a Peace Corps, not a U.S. Peace Corps, and made it clear that the Volunteers were working as private citizens. Except for a few administrative details like assistance in voting, the Peace Corps Act said, the Volunteers “shall not be deemed officers or employees or otherwise in the service or employment of, or holding office under, the United States for any purpose.”
Coverdell’s nomenclature damaged the tradition—albeit a tradition that was often buffeted—that the Peace Corps was not an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. John Coyne, then a director of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, called the name change “a breach of the original intention of the Peace Corps.” Senator Alan Cranston wrote Coverdell, “I think you are sending exactly the wrong message to volunteers, prospective volunteers, and other Americans by actively stressing an association of the Peace Corps with the U.S. government or with U.S. foreign policy interests in some fashion.” On top of this, Cranston went on, “I cannot imagine any commercial venture that had a name as good and effective and with as much positive connotation as the ‘Peace Corps’ fiddling around with its name.”
But Coverdell never budged: he kept the name “U.S. Peace Corps.” That lasted throughout the administration of the first President Bush and then disappeared after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The controversy over the name did not arouse much excitement. It was not front-page news. An account appeared on page 17 of the Washington Post. The Peace Corps was now a small agency that attracted little attention. Its director attracted no more attention.
Coverdell began a procession of eight directors who have lead the Peace Corps in the last twenty years. Although he clearly did not understand the fuss kicked up by his foolish name change, he was a warm and creditable administrator with affection and enthusiasm for the Peace Corps and the Volunteers. Friends describe him as an unpretentious, gregarious man with a wide smile and a folksy manner. He liked to unwind over a drink or two before dinner. “He seldom spoke about himself,” recalled David Lamb, a longtime friend and a foreign and national correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, “but loved talking about the direction he hoped to take the Peace Corps.”
Coverdell’s two-and-a-half-year administration coincided with dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe. In 1989, Solidarity came to power in Poland, the Velvet Revolution brought down the government in Czechoslovakia, and the East Germans crumbled the Soviet-built wall that separated them from West Berlin. Unlike his predecessors, who suppressed democratic rebellions in 1956 and 1968, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, did not interfere. The Cold War was soon at an end.
It was natural for these new democratic countries to embrace as many Western European and U.S. institutions as they could. They wanted to feel part of the real Europe and part of what Americans liked to call the Free World. The East Europeans wanted membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Word came to Washington from U.S. ambassadors in Europe that countries like Poland and Hungary would even welcome Peace Corps Volunteers. There was hesitation among some Peace Corps officials about trying to fulfill these unusual requests. But Coverdell did not hesitate.
Coverdell and President Bush generated an excitement that mimicked those heady early days of Sargent Shriver and President John F. Kennedy. The new director rushed off to several Eastern European countries, leading Peace Corps delegations that promised Volunteers. A traveling President Bush told the students and faculty of Karl Marx University in Budapest that the Peace Corps would soon send sixty teachers to Hungary. While President Vaclav Havel was visiting Washington, he and Bush announced that Peace Corps Volunteers were coming to Czechoslovakia.
On the eve of their departure, the first Volunteers to Poland and Hungary were greeted by President Bush in the White House Rose Garden just the way Volunteers were once saluted by President Kennedy. With Coverdell at his side, Bush told the new Volunteers, “Paul says that in many ways it as if the Peace Corps had been in training for this historical moment. It shows that our mission, our desire for peace, knows no political or geographic boundaries.”
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1990, the Peace Corps also began sending Volunteers to the former Soviet socialist republics that were now independent states. By 1995, the Peace Corps had Volunteers in the former Eastern Bloc countries of Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Slovak Republic; the former Soviet Union republics of Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, the Ukraine, and Uzbekistan; and Russia itself. Most Volunteers were involved in the teaching of English and the development of small business. The Peace Corps was imparting capitalism and the language of capitalism to what was once the world’s most powerful communist region.
Unfortunately, the Peace Corps’s frenzied drive to rush Volunteers to Eastern Europe in 1989 and the early 1990s caused some of the same problems that the frenzied drive to rush Volunteers anywhere in the world had created when the Peace Corps began in 1961. The hurry hampered programming. None of the early lessons were heeded.
After a study of the Peace Corps in Poland, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, and Russia, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress in 1994, “Many of the steps necessary to introduce effective programs were rushed, done superficially, or not done at all. Consequently, many of the new programs we examined were poorly designed and faced a host of other problems, including the lack of qualified staff, the assignment of volunteers to inapprop
riate or underdeveloped projects, insufficient volunteer training, and volunteer support systems that did not work. These problems frustrated many volunteers who had joined the Peace Corps to contribute to the region’s development and contributed to a relatively high resignation rate among the volunteers.”
The staffing was inadequate. “Many of the staff we met,” the GAO report said, “told us they had little knowledge of the local language and culture before they arrived, which they said significantly hindered their effectiveness.” Country directors resigned or were pulled out within the first year in half the eighteen Peace Corps countries in the region. Bulgaria alone had four directors and one acting director in a twenty-month period. In Poland, the staff work was so inadequate that half the small-business Volunteers had to be moved to new sites. “Volunteers assigned to teach English in secondary schools told us that their schools had large numbers of skilled English teachers and that it was hard to justify their continued presence in the schools,” the GAO said.
Peace Corps officials knew little about operating in a former communist country. Transferring funds, for example, became a major problem. On a trip to Vladivostok on the far eastern coast of Russia, Ellen Yaffe, then a consultant, recalls, “I was carrying forty thousand dollars in cash on my body under my coat.”
Programming had its cowboy antics. When Tim Carroll took up his post as the first country director in Poland in 1961, he planned on the arrival of sixty Volunteer teachers of English. He was soon told to expect twice that number. It seems that Edward Piszek, a Philadelphia industrialist of Polish descent, was disappointed with the original number. So he solicited funds from friends, added $1.2 million of his own, and sent it off to the Peace Corps to finance another sixty Volunteers. This was a rather bizarre way for the Peace Corps to allocate and assign Volunteers.
The push into the former communist countries raised an important question about the mission of the Peace Corps. Was it neglecting, or at least diminishing, its original goal of helping the impoverished Third World? Gerard A. Roy, the agency’s inspector-general, reported that “as Peace Corps expanded into new major programs in Eastern Europe, some of the existing Peace Corps programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America underwent actual budget cuts, while others received increases that nevertheless failed to keep pace with local inflation.” As a result, Roy wrote, there was “evidence of strain, confusion, and chaos” within the Peace Corps.
Some in the Peace Corps feared that the new assignments would lack the traditional rigors of working in the Third World. This attitude was derided recently by Carroll, who directed programs in Poland and later in Russia. Carroll, who had served as a Volunteer in Nigeria in the 1960s, said, “I suggest that standing in line for a public latrine in subzero weather in Ukraine will match any ‘suffering’ the Third World had to offer our hearty crew.”
Yet the Peace Corps in the Ukraine bore no resemblance to the traditional Peace Corps in Nigeria. In 1994, Meg Small, a thirty-nine-year-old Volunteer in Kiev, was flying continually to Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, and other western European cities to negotiate contracts for a new MBA program in the Ukraine. Jerry Dutkewych, the country director, told his Volunteers they needed suits and business cards. In 2009, Volunteer Claire St. Amant, a recent college graduate teaching English in the Ukrainian town of Tysmentsya, wrote that “many of my colleagues in Ukraine could be my grandparents; they include academics and former business executives.” By then, the Ukraine, with 247 Volunteers, was the largest Peace Corps country in the world.
Coverdell cannot be faulted for thinking beyond the Third World, however. The term Third World, in fact, was a relic of the past. It had been coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 to describe the underdeveloped nations who were not aligned with either of two powerful and antagonistic worlds—the NATO alliance of the United States and Western Europe and the communist bloc of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But, more than thirty-five years later, with the world of capitalism and the world of communism no longer at war, the term Third World had lost its meaning.
The Peace Corps’s push beyond the Third World into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was indiscriminate. It surely made sense for the Peace Corps to work in countries like Moldova and Uzbekistan, which were ranked by the UN Development Programme on the same level of development as traditional Peace Corps countries like Honduras and Guatemala. But the rationale for bringing the Peace Corps to countries such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic was far more questionable. All three were European countries with literate, skilled populations that probably needed investment far more than they needed Peace Corps Volunteers.
Despite questions about the wisdom of the new programs, many Volunteers tended to have satisfying experiences. “I don’t think it was totally necessary for the Peace Corps to be in Poland,” Amy Utzinger, who taught in Olesno in southern Poland, wrote recently. “After all, it is an industrialized nation with a good education system. But I do think it was helpful for the Peace Corps to be in Poland.”
“In some ways it was a typical Peace Corps experience,” she went on, “although in other ways it wasn’t. I mean, although I had access to electricity and running water, when I first arrived in Poland, there were food shortages. I never went hungry, but I ate the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for month after month. Lots of potatoes . . . And once when I went into a grocery store, the only thing on the shelf was vinegar.”
But, most important, she said, “I know I had an impact on my students . . . . I brought fresh ideas and modern teaching methods, which were greatly appreciated by the students. I didn’t ‘save’ anyone from hunger or disease or ignorance, but I taught them about the world, which they had been denied knowledge of by the Soviet system.”
Eventually, both the Peace Corps and the host countries recognized the anomaly of assigning Volunteers to industrialized nations. Faced with a budget cut in the mid-1990s and the need to open new programs in poorer counties, Peace Corps director Mark Gearan reexamined the rationale for the Eastern European commitment. “How do we remain in Prague and not serve in Haiti?” Gearan, recalling his thinking at the time, said recently. “How can we be in Warsaw and not in Bangladesh? How can we not accept Peace Corps Volunteers for Jordan and South Africa and stay in Budapest?”
Gearan ended the programs in Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1997 and set in motion the end of the Peace Corps in Poland four years later. By 2002, the Peace Corps had left the Slovak Republic and the Baltic Countries as well. A year later, President Vladimir Putin ended the Peace Corps program in Russia. The Peace Corps continued only in those Eastern European countries and former Soviet republics that resembled those of the Third World.
Despite all his travel overseas, Coverdell began to attract attention for his trips to his home state of Georgia. This travel, if it were personal travel paid in full by Coverdell, was somewhat understandable since his wife, Nancy, an airline stewardess, had never moved to Washington. She maintained the family home in Atlanta. But according to records obtained by the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, the Peace Corps had paid, in full or in part, for twenty-six trips to Georgia during Coverdell’s first eighteen months as director—an average of more than once a month. Post reporter Al Kamen, a former Volunteer, wrote there was “widespread speculation in the agency that the veteran Georgia politician intends to run for office in Georgia.”
Coverdell, while not ruling out a future run for office, insisted that his Georgia travel was prompted by recruiting; he was trying to drum up interest in the Peace Corps among southerners and non-whites, two groups underrepresented among Volunteers. He said Atlanta was an obvious target “because it is the home seat of so much of the minority population of the country.”
Coverdell was soon excoriated by Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy both for the Georgia trips and for the rush into Eastern Europe. McCarthy derided Coverdell as “a
self-promoter keeping himself visible to the home folk for the day when he jumps back into Georgia politics.” The columnist also accused Coverdell of making the Peace Corps “an arm of Bush Administration foreign policy.” Third World programs should not be shunted aside, McCarthy said, “because Bush officials now see Eastern Europe as the politically fashionable place to be.”
Nine months after the article about his trips to Georgia, Coverdell announced his resignation as director of the Peace Corps and his candidacy for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia. The announcement, in the eyes of his critics, confirmed their suspicion that he had used the Peace Corps as a launching pad for his ambitions. Coverdell won the seat in a close election that required a runoff, and he remained in the Senate until he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2000 at the age of sixty-one.
Coverdell had proven a quiet though influential senator. “In a time of rising partisan rancor,” Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote after the senator’s shocking death, “Coverdell chose the role of mediator or facilitator . . . . He was admired and cherished.” Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, described Coverdell as a model of those who look on public service as a noble calling. “People like Paul Coverdell exist in the world—good, honorable, trustworthy people who call us to our better nature,” she told the Senate.
The wave of emotion over the death of a fellow legislator did not dissipate in the Senate, and several Senators came up with the idea a few months later of naming the Peace Corps headquarters after him. It seemed like a logical move to the senators: Coverdell had served as a Peace Corps director and championed the Peace Corps in the Senate. The sponsors, mostly Republicans, knew little about Peace Corps history and would not have cared even if they had known.
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