But many former Volunteers felt insulted by the idea. In their view, Coverdell had served as director for only two and a half years, challenged tradition by sticking “U.S.” in front of the Peace Corps name, rushed heedlessly into Eastern Europe, and used the Peace Corps shamelessly as a springboard to the Senate. If the headquarters were to be named after anyone, it ought to be Sargent Shriver. Or, if a Republican-controlled Congress had to find a Republican to honor, it ought to be Loret Ruppe.
Barbara Ferris, an official of the National Peace Corps Association, the organization of returned Volunteers, tried to whip up a letter-writing campaign to Congress against the legislation. She wrote former Volunteers, “I personally am disgusted by the thoughtlessness of this idea, the political posturing and the insult to all of us who have chosen to serve . . . . Paul Coverdell may have been a nice guy, but he was also a very controversial director.”
But it was a hopeless battle against a determined, Republican-controlled Congress. Opponents had to be careful not to insult the memory of Coverdell. Senator Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut and the only former Volunteer in the Senate, urged his colleagues to act more deliberately in attaching a name to Peace Corps headquarters. “The concerns I raised . . . have nothing whatsoever to do with my admiration and respect for Paul Coverdell,” Dodd said during the Senate debate. “They have to do with an institution with which I have been closely identified and affiliated for forty years, the Peace Corps.”
Dodd said that the Peace Corps community had never believed in naming itself or its headquarters after anyone. Too many people had contributed to its strength to single anyone out. “Over the years,” he said, “we have talked about the Peace Corps not as John Kennedy’s Peace Corps or Hubert Humphrey’s Peace Corps or Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps or Loret Ruppe’s Peace Corps or my Peace Corps; it has been the nation’s.” He chided the senators for perpetuating a process in which they were always “sort of racing to the finish line as to who gets to put a label on some building or monument.”
Dodd’s plea was unheeded. The Senate passed the bill on a voice vote, and the House passed it by a margin of 330 to 61. President George W. Bush signed it into law at a ceremony in the ornate Indian Treaty Room on July 26, 2001, a year after the death of Coverdell. The law proclaimed that the headquarters of the Peace Corps, no matter where it was housed, would be known from then onwards as the “Paul D. Coverdell Peace Corps Headquarters.” The name would remain a permanent irritant.
Chapter Sixteen. The Expansive Mood of the Clinton Years
The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 ushered in eight straight years of Democratic rule in the White House. The Peace Corps had not experienced that many consecutive years of Democratic rule since the early years of the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. Of course, the fortunes of the Peace Corps did not always depend on the fortunes of the political parties. Although created by Democrats, the Peace Corps did fairly well during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan, thanks to the protective care of Loret Ruppe, and fared poorly during the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter, thanks to the confrontations with Sam Brown. Nevertheless, the Peace Corps was in an expectant and expansive mood when Clinton took office.
Loret Ruppe had often called for an expansion of the Peace Corps, but her calls were heeded by neither the White House nor Congress. There was hope that this mood would change under Clinton, but there was another dividend as well. Clinton had pledged during the campaign to appoint a former Volunteer as director of the Peace Corps. This campaign promise was fulfilled, though it took several months to persuade Clinton’s choice, Carol Bellamy, the former president of the New York City Council, to take the job.
Bellamy came out of those euphoric first years of the Peace Corps. One night in 1962, she had fallen asleep while studying in the stacks of the library of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. When she awoke, she found the library closed and locked—she literally could not leave. Whiling away the hours, she came upon a brochure about President Kennedy’s new agency, the Peace Corps. She had heard about the Peace Corps, of course, but she knew little about it. The brochure was persuasive. By the time the librarians arrived to open the doors that morning, she had resolved to apply.
The Peace Corps invited Bellamy to train for work in Guatemala after graduation. She arrived in Guatemala in 1963 among the first batches of Volunteers ever assigned there. Based in the town of Santa Elena, in the isolated northern province of Peten, as a community development worker, she ran a school lunch program, raised chickens, and broadcast a daily Spanish-language program on radio called “The Housewife’s Hour,” full of suggestions for good health and a wholesome diet.
The Peace Corps, she told the New York Times, taught her that “there’s a whole big world out there and you ought to give it a try.” It also taught her how to deal with failure. “What I took out of the Peace Corps,” she said, “was that you need to be willing to try a lot of different things and actually fail in some things. You get up and wipe your bloody nose, and head forward.”
After the Peace Corps, Bellamy entered New York University law school, intent on working some day for AID, which she regarded as “a Peace Corps with flush toilets.” But she found herself more interested in courses on contracts and corporations. Moreover, by the time she received her law degree in 1968, the anger over the Vietnam War had intensified, and young idealistic Americans like herself found it unseemly to apply for work in the federal government.
After a few years practicing law, Bellamy, who grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, embroiled herself in New York state and city politics, achieving a notable run of electoral successes for more than a decade. She was elected three times to represent a Brooklyn district in the New York State Assembly and then was elected in a runoff to be president of the City Council in New York—the first woman to hold that job.
But electoral failures mounted afterwards. She lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for mayor and then, in a major disappointment, she failed by three percentage points to oust the incumbent Republican state comptroller, one of the highest statewide positions, in 1990.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, while Bellamy was working as an investment banker, Bill Clinton made his pledge to put the Peace Corps in the hands of a former Volunteer. After his election, Bellamy, one of the most prominent former Volunteers, seemed a logical choice.
Two former Volunteers—Donna Shalala, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut—and Harold Ickes, an old friend of Bellamy and a member of the White House staff, urged Bellamy to take the Peace Corps job. But she had other plans that had nothing to do with the Clinton administration.
A couple of weeks after Clinton’s inauguration, state comptroller Edward V. Regan, the Republican who had narrowly defeated Bellamy two years earlier, announced that he was resigning to head an economic institute. Under New York law, the two houses of the state legislature would meet to choose someone to complete the final two years of Regan’s term. Bellamy put herself forward once more as a candidate for the post.
Taking over the Peace Corps “had not been in my game plan,” she told the New York Times later. “My game plan was that I run for the state comptroller’s position.”
New York politics, in any case, attracted her more than national politics. “I know there’s a pecking order out there where people think that really smart people are in the federal government, and the kind of mezzo-mezzo people and real idiots are at the state and local level,” she said. “But my whole life I happen to believe it’s the other way around. So Washington government just never really turned me on.”
But Gov. Mario Cuomo and other leading Democrats supported another candidate, H. Carl McCall, and the Democratic-controlled legislature followed their lead in the special election in May, inf
licting another major defeat on Bellamy. “It left the worst taste of any campaign I’ve been involved in,” she said.
The Peace Corps directorship was still open, and Bellamy, no longer reluctant, accepted the offer this time. “It’s like someone said to me,” she told the New York Times, “Sometimes when windows close, doors open.”
For the most part, former Volunteers were pleased that one of their own had been chosen. “We’re thrilled that after all this time, there is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who has been named to head the agency,” said Charles F. Dambaugh, the executive director of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (which later became the National Peace Corps Association). Not only was she the first former Volunteer to head the Peace Corps, but as a prominent politician in New York City, the media capital of the United States, she was the best-known appointee to take the job since Sargent Shriver.
But her renown troubled some former Volunteers, who feared that she would mimic Coverdell and use the Peace Corps as a convenient channel back into state politics. In a related concern, John Coyne, the editor of the Peace Corps Writers newsletter, observed, “It remains to be seen if, after a lifetime of politics in New York, she still has the heart of a Volunteer.”
Bellamy proclaimed her enthusiasm. “I’m ready to shout from the rooftops about the Peace Corps,” she said. “I want to get on the road at once, not only overseas but in this country as well. I want people to know that the Peace Corps is alive and well.”
Bellamy never fit the fuzzy image that some in the public had of former Volunteers as soft-hearted do-gooders wearing their idealism on their sleeves. Instead, she proved a hard-working, tough, intelligent taskmaster who expected her staff to measure up to her high standards.
“She was a workaholic,” said one of her staff, an admirer. “She was manic. She would send e-mails at 1:00 a.m. She was action-oriented. She wanted everyone to move, move, move. She was a micromanager. No detail was too small for her to check.” Ellen Yaffe, who was Bellamy’s chief financial officer, said, “She was a good director, but she was a tough cookie. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. If she thought they weren’t up to the job, she was all over them like a cheap suit.”
But she was admired by the Volunteers overseas. Coyne, who was working on the Washington staff during Bellamy’s reign, said she could talk with the Volunteers in the field and acted as their advocate in all staff and congressional discussions in Washington. He described her as cautious, not warm, but a “good person,” and concluded that, despite his earlier worries, “she did have the heart of a Volunteer.”
But he, like many others, was disappointed by the brevity of her term as director. In a year and five months, she resigned to become executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the most glamorous agency in the U.N. system. Her surprise appointment was evidently a by-product of the continual feuding at the United Nations between U.S. ambassador Madeleine Albright and U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
By tradition, an American was always appointed head of UNICEF. But when James P. Grant, the popular American executive director, died in January 1994, Boutros-Ghali indicated that he might break that tradition. Partly he was responding to pressure from European governments that felt it was Europe’s turn to head the agency. In addition, the Europeans pointed out that Europe now contributed twice as much to the UNICEF budget as did the United States.
But the controversy played out against the background of the antipathy between the U.S. ambassador and the U.N. secretary-general. Boutros-Ghali found Albright aggressive and undiplomatic. She found him stubborn, continually ignoring the wishes of the United States. Albright proposed Dr. William H. Foege, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the job. But Boutros-Ghali announced it was time for a woman to take over UNICEF, and he indicated that he probably would appoint the European candidate, Elizabeth Rehn, a former defense minister of Finland. So Albright quickly withdrew Dr. Foege’s candidacy and came up with a list of a few American women. Bellamy was the most prominent of these candidates, and Boutros-Ghali, finally giving in to the U.S. pressure, chose her.
In one of her final interviews as Peace Corps director, Bellamy told the Los Angeles Times that she did not feel it was a tremendous advantage for a director to come from the Volunteer ranks. “I think we’ve had some terrific directors of the Peace Corps who had no past connections with [it],” she said, “but, like all of us, have learned to love it and still do . . . . Nevertheless, I hoped that, at least as I visited Volunteers in the field, I could bring kind of a simpatico for both the highs and the lows, the joys and the sorrows, the difficult moments, the lonely moments and yet the wonderful exhilarating moments that Volunteers experience. I think it’s important to be out there and reach out and touch those Volunteers . . . . I don’t think you have to be a returned Volunteer to be the director, but I hope I brought it something a little different.”
Bellamy set a kind of precedent. Although she was succeeded by Mark Gearan, the White House communications director, who had not served in the Peace Corps, three of the four directors after Gearan were former Volunteers. The presidents of the twenty-first century found it difficult to resist the pressure from the Peace Corps community and reach outside the organization for a director.
When Bellamy left the Peace Corps in 1994, there were 6,745 Volunteers serving throughout the world. There was nothing unusual about that. Since 1970, the Peace Corps had remained small, mainly in the 6,000s, reaching a high for that twenty-five-year period of 7,341 in 1973 and dropping to a low of 5,219 in 1987.
Sargent Shriver found this situation intolerable. “If you ask me what I think,” he told an oral history interviewer for the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in 1990, “I can tell you that the Peace Corps ought to be at least three times bigger than it is today, maybe four or five times bigger. It’s only a third as big as when I left there in 1965 . . . . I think that’s a disgrace.” When Shriver left, the Peace Corps Volunteers numbered 13,248; a year later, under Jack Vaughn, the total was 15,556, the highest ever.
Preaident Clinton appointed Gearan, his thirty-nine-year-old director of communications, to succeed Bellamy. There was some grumbling. Although Gearan was youthful enough to resemble some of the Volunteers, he had never been one. This lack disappointed many former Volunteers, but Donna Shalala came to his rescue. “We have worked closely together for the past two and a half years,” she told the annual meeting of the National Peace Corps Association. “He is a decent, thoughtful, energetic and caring man . . . [and] will do a great job for all of us. Please support him.”
Gearan possessed a keen sense of public relations and an intelligence open to new ideas. His creation of a Crisis Corps was a significant innovation—a program that rushed former Volunteers on temporary duty to areas in emergency need. After the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami on the day after Christmas in 2004, the Crisis Corps sent twenty-seven former Volunteers to Thailand and twenty-five to Sri Lanka to such assignments as constructing a water treatment plant and providing education and research for homeless people forced to live in camps. The Crisis Corps also sent 272 former Volunteers to the U.S. Gulf Coast after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. (The name “Crisis Corps” was changed by Peace Corps officials during the George W. Bush administration to the prosaic and bureaucratic “Peace Corps Response.”)
Gearan, reviving an old proposal of Loret Ruppe, persuaded Clinton to support a spirited campaign in 1998 and 1999 to expand the Peace Corps. Clinton, in one of his weekly radio talks, called on Congress to augment the budget enough to increase the number of Volunteers to 10,000 by the year 2000.
There was a good deal of bipartisan support for the bill in Congress. At a hearing of the House Committee on International Relations, for example, Representative Benjamin Gilman of New York, the Republican chairman, said, “Rarely in our public service has there
been a government program as effective, cost efficient, or as popular as our Peace Corps.”
A half-dozen members of Congress who were former Volunteers testified in favor of the bill. They included Senator Christopher Dodd, who served in the Dominican Republic; Representative Sam Farr of California, a Democrat who served in Colombia; Representative Tony P. Hall of Ohio, a Democrat who served in Thailand; Representative Thomas E. Petri of Wisconsin, a Republican who served in Somalia; Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a Republican who served in Fiji; and Representative James T. Walsh of New York, a Republican who served in Nepal.
Shays began his testimony with a greeting in Fijian, and Walsh did the same with a greeting in Nepalese. “I am a city kid from Syracuse, New York,” Walsh, mocking himself a little, told the committee, “and I drew upon my vast agricultural background of cutting the lawn and trimming the hedges to going to Nepal and teaching people how to grow rice, but it was a marvelous experience.”
Another prominent Republican, Senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia, the former Peace Corps director, also testified in favor of the bill. After the testimony, a member of the Peace Corps staff told the Los Angeles Times, “We used to criticize Coverdell when he was director for spending all that time in Georgia looking for votes. Now we’re glad he was elected.”
Further support came from Secretary Shalala. Shalala, born in Cleveland to Lebanese immigrant parents, charmed the committee with the story of her family’s reluctance to let her join the Peace Corps. “My father offered me a car as a bribe to keep me from joining the Peace Corps,” she said. “However, my Lebanese grandmother settled the situation. She announced to the family that . . . I would be fine. As I left for the Peace Corps, she gave me a letter. It was in classical Arabic addressed to the head man of the village I was going to visit. I presented the letter to the mullah of the village and found out later that my grandmother had written, ‘This is to introduce the daughter of a great sheikh in Cleveland, Ohio. Please put her under your protection.’”
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