When the World Calls
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All these good feelings led Congress to pass legislation in 1999 that authorized the 50 percent increase, with the goal of increasing the number of Volunteers past 10,000. The target, however, was delayed to 2003. The legislation was nevertheless looked at as a Peace Corps victory. Clinton’s signing of the law on May 24, 1999, is still listed as a significant moment in Peace Corps history on the agency’s Web site.
The Web site, however, fails to mention that Congress never appropriated the funds that were authorized, and that the total number of Volunteers never even reached 8,000. The Peace Corps was a victim of what Gearan calls the annual “political appropriations saga.” The appropriations committees of the House and Senate, usually more conservative than Congress as a whole, often vote to provide fewer funds for an agency than authorized.
Mark Schneider, a former Volunteer who succeeded Gearan as director during the Clinton administration, says that it is always difficult for the Peace Corps to persuade Congress to increase its appropriation because the Peace Corps lacks a “constituency.” In other words, there is no large mass of voters ready to pressure Congress on its behalf. Clearly, the 200,000 or so former Volunteers, who come from fifty different states, cannot pressure enough on their own. And the Peace Corps no longer generates the dazzling appeal it had for most Americans during the Kennedy years.
In any case, there are members of the Peace Corps community who are wary of campaigns to increase the size of the Peace Corps. Their fear is that the drive to fulfill the campaign goals—moving higher than 10,000 Volunteers or, more recently, doubling the Peace Corps by its fiftieth anniversary—would renew the old numbers game that weakened the Peace Corps in the early years. Many ailments of the Peace Corps in the Shriver and Vaughn years—huge clusters of Volunteers in the capitals, poor evaluation of jobs by harried and hurried staff, too many Volunteers with little to do—could be attributed to unthinking drives to expand the numbers of Volunteers.
Carol Bellamy is among those who dislike expansion campaigns. In a recent phone interview, she explained that she did not oppose expansion, but she felt that it should be guided by the needs of the countries overseas, not by the demands of a campaign in the United States.
“There should be more attention to what the countries want,” she noted. “It doesn’t make sense to have Volunteers crawling all over themselves. I don’t think you should put more Volunteers out there just to put Volunteers out there . . . . To me, the critical component is that the country must sign on.”
The sloganeers, of course, insist that they too oppose wild, chaotic growth and that they would increase the size of the Peace Corps in the orderly manner set down by Bellamy. But the experience of the Peace Corps in both the early years and in the later rush into Eastern Europe indicates that sloppiness and confusion usually seep in whenever Peace Corps planners have numbers on their minds.
Chapter Seventeen. The Quiet Bush Years
Christiane Amanpour, chief foreign correspondent of CNN, took part, in March 2008, in a George Washington University panel discussion on America’s role in the world. While discussing how the United States’ standing had fallen, Amanpour mentioned some of the factors that had contributed to American popularity in earlier days. “There was a Peace Corps,” she said as an example.
After the session, Jon Keeton, a former Volunteer in Thailand and a former country director in South Korea, rushed to the lectern and told Amanpour, “There still is a Peace Corps.” Amanpour blushed but pointed out that there must be something wrong if someone like herself did not realize the Peace Corps still existed.
Perhaps Amanpour’s ignorance was understandable. The early years of the twenty-first century were quiet ones for the Peace Corps. News about the agency rarely made headlines, and almost never onto a front page.
But there were flurries of controversy. President George W. Bush provoked a bit of a fuss at the beginning when he nominated a disgraced California politician as the new director of the Peace Corps. This was taken by the Peace Corps community as a gross insult.
The nominee, Gaddi Vasquez, was once regarded as a rising star in the Republican party. As a member of the Board of Supervisors of Orange County, he was the highest-ranking elected Republican Hispanic in California. His story was appealing. As a young boy, he and the family had moved continually in a trailer, for his father was a migrant farm worker. Then they had settled in Orange County when his father obtained work in a furniture factory and later became pastor of the Apostolic Church there. Vasquez, the first college graduate in his family, had started his career as a policeman before entering politics. In 1988, he excited the Republican National Convention with a rousing speech that mocked Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and his facility with the Spanish language. “The Democratic candidate may speak Spanish,” Vasquez told cheering Republicans. “But he doesn’t speak our language.”
But in 1994, a disastrous scandal astounded Orange County and clouded Vasquez’s future. Robert Citron, the county treasurer, revealed that he had invested the county’s funds in risky enterprises that had now plunged in value, for a loss of more than $1.5 billion. Orange County, one of the richest counties in the United States, declared itself bankrupt. The treasurer pleaded guilty to six felony counts, paid a fine of $100,00, and was sentenced to almost a year of house arrest.
The supervisors were not charged with criminal wrongdoing, but they were accused of negligence for failing to monitor the treasurer’s investments and failing to keep the public informed about the nature of the investments. Angry voters began filing papers demanding the ouster of the supervisors in recall elections. Three weeks after he was served with recall papers in 1995, Vasquez, by then chairman of the board, announced his resignation. The Los Angeles Times wrote that “Vasquez’s once-promising career has come to an abrupt end, at least temporarily.”
Vasquez slipped into the private sector easily, however, and soon was heading the public affairs department of Southern California Edison, the electric utility company. He still possessed a campaign war chest that he had filled when he was a supervisor, and, during the 2000 presidential election, he transferred $106,216 of these funds to the Republican party. In a biting column, Judy Mann of the Washington Post, who described Vasquez as “a discredited California party hack,” said his gift to Bush’s campaign “bought him a ticket to Washington.”
Many returned Volunteers and former staff mounted a campaign to persuade the Senate to reject the nomination. Joan Borsten, a Californian who had served in Panama, echoed many when she said the nomination “demonstrates that the president does not understand what the Peace Corps is about.” Roni Love, a former Volunteer in Malaysia, called the nomination “very insulting to those of us who have served this country, as it should be to all Americans.” Jack Vaughn, the former director of the Peace Corps and still a registered Republican, told his hometown newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, “It’s clearly a political payoff, and it would be a shame to see him approved.” Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vaughn testified that Vasquez “does not possess the qualifications, leadership tools, or the demonstrated financial management skills to head a large federal agency.”
Newspaper editorials scorned the nomination, too. The New York Times said, “It is distressing that Mr. Bush views the Peace Corps directorship as a place to park generous donors with mediocre resumes.” The Los Angeles Times said that the Bush administration “has demeaned the high purpose of an agency that requires vision, diplomatic skill and even bravery at the helm.”
But the campaign against Vasquez fizzled, largely because he had the support of many Hispanic organizations and of the two senators from California, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats. The Foreign Relations Committee approved the nomination by a vote of 13 to 4. Even Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a Democrat and the only former Volunteer in the Senate, voted for Vasquez. Dodd called th
e nomination troublesome but said he wanted to give Vasquez a chance. There was no roll call vote in the Senate. Vasquez was one of forty presidential nominations passed without objection on January 25, 2002.
President Bush tried to open the Vasquez era with some fanfare. In his 2002 State of the Union address, he announced plans to double the size of the Peace Corps to 15,000. At the Vasquez swearing-in ceremony a month later, Bush talked about his hopes for a program of Volunteers working in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Afghanistan. Neither goal was met. The size of the Peace Corps, much as before, never even reached 8,000 during the Bush administration. And the war in Afghanistan never subsided enough to allow Volunteers to work there.
Vasquez underwent open-heart surgery in June 2001, shortly before his nomination. Yet he proved an energetic director. When a group of Orange County officials visited him in his office during his first months on the job, he told them, “I traveled in two and a half weeks from the United States to Kabul, Afghanistan, to Islamabad, Pakistan, to Beijing, China, to Chengdu, China, and then Lima, Peru, to sign a bilateral agreement to reenter Peru. I was on such a high I never got tired.”
Despite his enthusiasm, Vasquez issued a series of confusing announcements in 2003 that smacked of the old Jimmy Durante routine, “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?” In late October, he suddenly announced that he was resigning, effective November 14. He would be leaving after only twenty-one months on the job. He told the staff and Volunteers that his resignation came with “mixed emotions,” and he thanked President Bush “for the high honor and confidence he had in nominating me to serve.” The White House praised his “tremendous leadership.” Vasquez told reporters that he needed to take care of his aging parents back in Orange County.
But Vasquez was still working in his office on November 15. He said that he had postponed his departure to take care of some important matters, like the signing of an agreement with Mexico to send Volunteers there. The Peace Corps announced it was now uncertain when he would leave.
A little over a month later, Vasquez had a new announcement. He explained that he had resigned earlier because “I was facing difficult challenges that prolonged medical issues can impose on a family.” He did not say that he and his family had successfully dealt with these issues. But he said, “In light of my continued desire to serve, and with the concurrence and support of my family, I intend to remain in my present role as director of the Peace Corps through the end of the current term.”
There was immediate speculation that this odd vacillation had nothing to do with aging parents. Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times suggested that Vasquez, much like Coverdell more than ten years earlier, had kept his eye on home state politics. Vasquez had announced his resignation just after the election of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California in a special recall election to unseat Democrat Gray Davis. Vasquez, as a prominent Republican Hispanic, according to this theory, anticipated a significant appointment in the new administration. “One wonders,” McGreevy wrote, “whether perhaps Vasquez concluded that the job picture in California wasn’t as rosy as he thought it was.”
While Vasquez was making up his mind about whether he wanted to go or wanted to stay, the Dayton Daily News in Ohio published its long series of articles about murders, accidental deaths, rapes, assaults, and other dangers in the Peace Corps, as described in Chapter 12. Vasquez stayed on the job as director for almost five years, resigning in September 2006 to accept a rather plush appointment as ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. Ronald Tschetter, an investment broker who, along with his wife, had served in India as Volunteers in the 1960s, was named director by President George W. Bush and served for the rest of the administration.
In 2007, while Tschetter was director, the Washington Post revealed that Vasquez had not been able to overcome his Republican loyalties while he ran the Peace Corps. He had allowed the White House to send a deputy of political adviser Karl Rove to brief two dozen staffers at the Peace Corps about the party’s prospects after the 2002 congressional elections. The session, though not compulsory and open only to political appointees, appeared to be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibited government employees engaging in politics. Vasquez was not alone in allowing such electioneering. The White House held similar briefings at the State Department, AID, and another dozen agencies.
Tschetter had to face withering questions about this from Senator Dodd and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dodd, insisting that “the good reputation the Peace Corps has built over forty years has been soiled,” warned he would “have heads” if the incident was repeated. Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, asked Tschetter to make sure the “Peace Corps is still the gold standard in nonpartisanship.”
Much like the Volunteers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Volunteers of the George W. Bush era lived through a war that turned more and more unpopular among the American public. But the Peace Corps did not have to worry as much about embarrassing protests as it had worried, to the point of distraction, during the war in Vietnam.
There were several reasons for the less frequent outbursts of Volunteer militancy against the war in Iraq. Perhaps most important, the draft was gone. In the early years of the Peace Corps, most of the Volunteers were young men whose service overseas deferred them from the draft but did not exempt them. They faced the grim possibility of completing their Peace Corps duty only to be rushed back overseas to face possible death in Vietnam. The draft pressed them like a nightmare and made them cry out against a war they feared and hated. That immediacy did not exist in the 2000s.
There also was a large difference in the mood of generations. The 1960s had spawned a militancy that struck out at more than the war in Vietnam. Young Americans joined the campaigns to register blacks in the South, and young students seized administrative buildings on campuses with demands that authorities make curriculums relevant. This kind of militancy was alien to Peace Corps Volunteers during the war in Iraq.
The diminished numbers of the Peace Corps also made antiwar demonstrations harder to organize. There were no longer large clusters of Volunteers in the major cities. Assembling a substantial number of Volunteers in front of U.S. embassies was a difficult task in the twenty-first century, especially in large countries with rutted dirt roads.
Would-be protesters in the twenty-first century also had to face what amounted to a Peace Corps zero-tolerance policy, at least in principle. As discussed in Chapter 8, the Peace Corps, after losing the Bruce Murray case in federal court, allowed criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam so long as the Volunteer, while exercising a U.S. citizen’s right to free speech, refrained from harming the Peace Corps or interfering in the local politics of the host country. That policy remained in the Peace Corps manual, but the Peace Corps, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, chose to interpret protest against the U.S. action as interference in local politics.
In the Dominican Republic, for example, Volunteers Aaron Drendel and Aaron Kauffman, even before the Iraq invasion began, planned a protest demonstration by Americans in the capital of Santo Domingo. The issue was still being debated at the United Nations, but there was little doubt that President George W. Bush intended to invade. Drendel and Kauffman expected sixty Volunteers to join their protest. They did not plan to identify themselves as Peace Corps Volunteers. “We didn’t want to do anything that would bring the Peace Corps in,” says Kauffman. But they wanted to show Dominicans that some Americans opposed the impending invasion.
At first, local Peace Corps staffers said they had no objection so long as the demonstration was not identified as a Peace Corps protest and the Volunteers broke no Dominican laws in staging it. But the mood changed when the invasion of Iraq actually took place and word about the planned demonstration reached Peace Corps headquarters in Washington.
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Under pressure from Washington, the local Peace Corps staff changed its stance and warned all Volunteers in the Dominican Republic that they could be thrown out of the Peace Corps if they took part in the demonstration. The Peace Corps insisted that the invasion of Iraq had become a local political issue because the president of the Dominican Republic “has taken a formal stand in supporting the U.S. against Iraq.”
In an e-mail to the Volunteers that was also posted on the bulletin board at Peace Corps headquarters in Santo Domingo, the local staff told the Volunteers that “one of the compelling reasons the Peace Corps has been so well accepted in this country and in more than 136 countries throughout the world over the past 42 years has been that it scrupulously avoids any political involvement.” The staff said the effectiveness of the Peace Corps has become impaired whenever “we have become publicly involved in political matters of local concern.” “Why should a small group of Volunteers,” the staff went on, “have the right to compromise the non-political nature and autonomy of our agency as a whole?”
Quoting from the Peace Corps manual, the staff therefore warned anyone planning to take part in the demonstration that a Volunteer’s words or actions involving local political controversies “may be grounds for administrative separation or other disciplinary action.” Faced with this threat, most Volunteers stayed away. Drendel, who was married and planned on working for the U.S. government after his Peace Corps experience, pulled out, fearful of jeopardizing his future career and livelihood.
Kauffman was already in Santo Domingo when he read the Peace Corps admonition. He had only two weeks before the end of his Peace Corps tour, but he knew that dismissal would stain his record. Nevertheless, he intended to defy the Peace Corps. He headed back to his village by bus, gathered up his belongings, made his farewells to Dominican friends and colleagues, and returned to the capital. He was sure he would soon be dismissed.