The most embarrassing cross-pollination of the Peace Corps and the CIA came in a way that Shriver and President Kennedy least expected. Edward Lee Howard, a Volunteer in Colombia in the early 1970s, joined the CIA in 1981. Under its rules, designed to assuage the sensitivities of the Peace Corps, the CIA would hire former Volunteers only after at least five years had elapsed since the end of their Peace Corps service.
Howard rose rapidly in the service. The CIA was preparing to send him to the coveted post of Moscow as a spy. But he failed a lie detector test in 1983, trying to hide some drug use and petty theft in his younger years. Instead of posting him to Moscow, the CIA fired him.
Howard, infuriated over the firing, decided to sell secrets of the CIA operation in Moscow to agents of the Soviet Union. According to one CIA agent, Howard “wiped out Moscow station” with his betrayal. The CIA traced its problems to Howard, and FBI agents descended on his home in New Mexico. But Howard slipped out of the FBI trap in 1985 and showed up a year later in Moscow. The former Peace Corps Volunteer and former CIA employee died there in 2002.
Chapter Nineteen. Obama and the Future
In December 2007, while trolling for support in the Democratic presidential caucuses of Iowa, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stopped at Cornell College in Mount Vernon to deliver a brief campaign speech on the value of national service. The college, a liberal arts school with only 1,200 students, had an unusual history and curriculum. A woman earned her diploma there in 1858, marking Cornell as the first college in Iowa to graduate a woman. In 1870, the trustees changed its charter to allow the admission of students of all races. In modern days, the school was noted for requiring students to study only one subject at a time, switching to a new course every three and a half weeks.
This was the earliest stage of Obama’s presidential campaign, and little attention was devoted nationally to what he said in Iowa. The most influential pundits did not believe he had much chance of upsetting Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and her well-financed campaign machine.
During the speech, Obama pledged to more than triple AmeriCorps, create a new Classroom Corps, increase the size of the Foreign Service, and encourage high school and college students to devote from fifty to a hundred hours a year to community service. As for the Peace Corps, Obama promised, “We will double the size of the Peace Corps by its fiftieth anniversary, in 2011.”
As the campaign progressed, Obama became vaguer about Peace Corps numbers, but his early promise became a slogan for advocates of a bigger Peace Corps. The National Peace Corps Association, the organization of former Volunteers, set up a committee called More Peace Corps to drum up public enthusiasm and lobby Congress for a doubling of the number of Volunteers by the anniversary year.
The committee was headed by young, enthusiastic, and tireless Rajeev K. Goyal. The American-born Goyal, who grew up on Long Island, was the son of immigrants from India. His father, a medical doctor, and his mother, a scholar of Sanskrit, left Rajasthan for the United States in 1973, as Rajeev puts it, “to seek adventures and greater opportunity in America.” Rajeev served as a Volunteer in Nepal from 2001 to 2003, working in sixteen rural villages in remote hill country. Since his tour there, Goyal had returned to Nepal ten times, helping to build five schools in traditional Nepalese architecture.
When President Obama took office in January 2009, he faced an enormous budget deficit and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A total of $700 billion had been set aside for bailing out banks and other desperate financial houses, and Obama spent $787 billion to stimulate the economy. Many other matters, including a large increase in the Peace Corps, had to be shelved.
For his 2010 budget, President Obama proposed $373 million for the Peace Corps, an increase of $33 million over the previous year’s appropriation. This was a great disappointment to the Peace Corps community. The funds would probably have increased the total number of trainees and Volunteers from 7,600 to a little more than 8,000 in 2011, nowhere near the campaign promise of 15,000 to 16,000.
This did not stop Goyal from lobbying. Although the goal of a doubling by the anniversary year was clearly unattainable, Goyal set out to put the Peace Corps on a path toward comfortable growth. He enlisted the aid of Rep. Sam Farr of California, a former Volunteer in Colombia, who persuaded the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations to increase the appropriation to a substantial $450 million. That was accepted by the House.
But Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, objected to the increase, and the Senate voted for exactly what President Obama had requested. After a conference committee session worked out a compromise, Congress passed an appropriation of $400 million.
Goyal hailed the vote as a victory. It would provide $60 million more than the previous year, the largest increase in an annual appropriation in the history of the Peace Corps. Figuring it cost $3 million to open a country program and $30,000 to send a single Volunteer overseas, Goyal estimated that the new appropriation would allow the Peace Corps to open operations in five new countries and increase the numbers of Volunteers overseas by 1,500, to more than 9,000 during the anniversary year. That would be a much more manageable increase than the doubling promised by candidate Obama, and it would swell the Peace Corps to its largest size in forty years.
Much of the struggle for funds took place without an Obama appointee as head of the Peace Corps. The president did not nominate a director until six months into the administration. Senate confirmation was swift, but it still took a month, and the new director did not take office until August 24, 2009.
Soon after Obama’s inauguration, rumors had spread that he intended to appoint James Arena-DeRosa as director. Arena-DeRosa was head of the Peace Corps’s New England recruiting office in Boston. The gossip aroused a good deal of dismay in Peace Corps circles. Arena-DeRosa had never been a Volunteer and had never served overseas in his nine years as a member of the staff. Even though his extensions were legal, some critics even carped about his managing to evade the five-year limit on employment.
Arena-DeRosa, who also taught at Brandeis University, had strong support for the job from Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a good friend of Obama’s. That struck many as a disheartening example of cronyism. There was a great deal of relief when the rumors proved unfounded, perhaps because Peace Corps dismay had persuaded the White House to find someone else. In July 2009, Obama nominated Aaron Williams, a former Volunteer and an experienced hand at overseas development, as the eighteenth director of the Peace Corps.
Williams and his story appealed to Peace Corps enthusiasts. There is no doubt that the Peace Corps had set his life’s course. When he arrived in the Dominican Republic in 1967 as a Volunteer, he had never set foot in a foreign country before. He had never even flown in an airplane before. Indeed, he had not even left home to go to college. An African American born in Chicago, he grew up, as he puts it, “in a modest home on the south side . . . never dreaming that one day I would have a career in international development.” His father was a supervisor at the post office.
Williams graduated from little-known Chicago State University, majoring in geography and education. He started teaching in the Chicago school system but, encouraged by his mother and a classmate, soon applied to the Peace Corps. His education degree and brief teaching experience attracted notice. The Peace Corps assigned him to a rural teacher training program in the small town of Monte Plata. He had to reach fifty elementary school teachers in the countryside by motorcycle, horseback, or foot and help them complete high school and improve their teaching skills. “I bonded with these teachers,” Williams told television interviewer Tavis Smiley, “and I said, ‘My God, what an awesome responsibility. These people are depending on me to deliver on something they need to improve their lives.’”
Willia
ms met his wife, Rosa, a Dominican high school science teacher, while serving as a Volunteer. They were married in the Dominican Republic, and afterward, he stayed on for a third year in the Peace Corps as a professor of education at the Católica Universidad Madre y Maestra in Santiago.
After the Dominican Republic, he was employed as a recruiter for the Peace Corps in Chicago before earning an MBA from the University of Wisconsin. Armed with his business degree, he worked for a pair of multinational corporations, International Multifoods and General Mills, for five years and then joined AID in 1978.
He put together an extraordinary career in his twenty-two years at AID, serving in Honduras, Costa Rica, Haiti, Barbados, and South Africa, among other places. He received both the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service and the AID Distinguished Career Service Award, and he was in charge of AID’s $1-billion foreign assistance program in South Africa during the administration of President Nelson Mandela.
After AID, Williams was named executive vice president of the International Youth Foundation, a nonprofit organization that solicits corporate donations to assist young people in the developing world, and later he became vice president for international business development at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute founded by Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University. He was at RTI International when President Obama nominated him to head the Peace Corps.
Williams had many admirers. They described him as a manager who listens carefully to the views of others but does not hesitate to make a decision when the time comes. He was no ideologue, they said, but a pragmatic actor. Williams was also lauded as professional, efficient, and leavened by a pleasant sense of humor. In an interview, he struck me as genial, unassuming, self-confident, thoughtful and non-dogmatic. So he did not have any difficulty getting the job.
Williams did not come to the Peace Corps determined to turn it upside down. After a few months on the job, he professed three goals: “measured, targeted growth” by entering new countries and by expanding successful projects; creation of an office of innovation to look into new approaches like partnership with international humanitarian organizations overseas; and an increased effort to help Americans understand the Third World.
Despite his impressive credentials and accolades, one significant aspect of Williams’s career troubled some former Volunteers and staff—his strong association with AID. AID has long been a creature of U.S. foreign policy. Its own Web site boasts that one of its goals is “furthering America’s foreign policy interests.” During the George W. Bush administration, it even became part of the State Department. The administrator of AID holds the rank of undersecretary of State.
Throughout its fifty-year history, it has not been easy for Peace Corps directors to resist the frequent pressure from the White House and Congress to step in line with U.S. foreign policy and interests, and some have succumbed. Would Williams, with his strong AID background, allow the independence of the Peace Corps to bend? That was the fear of some in the Peace Corps family.
His AID career posed another question. From time to time, the Peace Corps has placed Volunteers in AID projects or in the projects of contractors funded by AID. Since the Peace Corps has not developed these projects, they sometimes do not allow the kind of person-to-person contact that is one of the main goals of the Peace Corps. Instead of Volunteers fitting into a well-conceived and well-organized Peace Corps experience, they may become no more than cheap labor for AID and its contractors. Skeptics wondered whether Williams would be tempted to engage in too many projects for AID and its contractors.
One skeptic was Hugh Pickens, the former Peru Volunteer who edits Peace Corps Online (www.peacecorpsonline.org), an independent news Web site with an extraordinary range of information about the Peace Corps, offering far more detail and far more discussion of controversial issues than carried on the bland official Peace Corps Web site (www.peacecorps.gov).
Reporting on the Williams confirmation hearings by a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, Pickens wrote, “There were a couple of issues discussed in the hearings that were a little unsettling. One was the idea that one of the purposes of the Peace Corps is to bolster U.S. foreign policy and that the State Department should take a large role in deciding which countries the Peace Corps should go into.
“Another concern is Williams’ many years working with USAID,” Pickens went on. “The debate has raged for decades on whether the Peace Corps should work more closely with USAID and the consensus has been that Peace Corps is a people-to people program—not a junior USAID . . . . We would caution that Williams needs to be careful about applying the USAID model of foreign aid to the Peace Corps.”
Pickens’s concerns seemed to reflect the tone of the questions of the senators rather than the tone of the replies of Williams. But in his own public statements later, Williams sounded somewhat ambiguous about these issues. In an interview with the National Journal in September 2009, Williams was asked why the Peace Corps had programs in countries like Fiji, Vanuatu, and Cape Verde, where “the U.S. has no strategic interests.” Williams replied that the Peace Corps needed to look at a couple of things in selecting countries for Peace Corps programs. “First of all, where are there countries that desire Peace Corps Volunteers?” he said. “And also, what about U.S. interests? I’m going to look at both sides of that equation.”
Later in the interview, Williams was asked about former senator Harris Wofford’s view that linking the Peace Corps “with American foreign policy, no matter how benign, may hurt its credibility around the world.” Williams replied, “I think not only is that Senator Wofford’s view, it’s also Sargent Shriver’s view and it was also Kennedy’s view, and I stand by that. It’s been a successful way of viewing the Peace Corps for nearly fifty years.”
His two replies appeared contradictory, as if he had given an AID answer to the first question and a Peace Corps answer to the second. But, in our interview, Williams said he had used the phrase “U.S. interests” in the earlier interview in a very general way. What he was trying to convey, he said, was “you also want to be in a place where you want to develop friendship between American society and the society of that particular country, and that’s in America’s best interests and it’s also in the best interests of those countries.”
Williams recognized that his long career in AID might raise concerns about his loyalty to Peace Corps ideals. But, he said, “I’m here because I love the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps changed my life forever.”
Most members of the Peace Corps family were clearly pleased with the appointment of Williams. But as the fiftieth anniversary approached, it was still much too soon to assess his impact on the work, idea, and spirit of the Peace Corps.
Afterword. Does the Peace Corps Do Any Good?
In 1964, twenty-one-year-old Nancy Deeds, a new Peace Corps Volunteer, hunted for a place to live in a rundown, dirt-poor neighborhood in the fishing port of Chimbote on the Pacific coast of Peru. Joel Meister, another new Volunteer, helped her in the quest. The staff had imbued them with the Peace Corps housing ethos. Nancy needed quarters that brought her close to Peruvians and cost little enough for her meager living allowance.
But poor neighborhoods are overcrowded neighborhoods, and the first few houses had no room for her. The Volunteers encountered a teenager in front of the next house, a polite high school student with dark Indian features wearing black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. He listened carefully to their explanations in recently acquired Spanish and, after promising to see what he could do, slipped into the house.
The house was adobe, with no electricity or running water. An open sewer dribbled behind it, and the well lay 150 feet away. Scrawny dogs roamed the unpaved street without leash or supervision. The teenager’s father made bricks in the back yard. His mother added to the family income by selling fruit and vegetables out of a fro
nt window. The house had only three bedrooms, and all were occupied by the parents and nine children.
The teenager proposed that his reluctant parents rent the little room from which the mother sold fruit and vegetables. The American woman could pay more than the mother earned from her sales. The parents agreed, and Nancy rented the room—known as La Tiendita, or “little store”—for 150 soles ($7) a month.
The teenager—seventeen-year-old Alejandro Toledo—was the first member of his family to reach as far as high school. He shined shoes and sold snow cones to make up for the loss of family income caused by the time he had to spend in school. Chimbote was a step ahead for the Toledo family. They had come down from the impoverished village of Cabana in the nearby Andes highlands more than ten years earlier. Many other highlanders had joined them in the migration. The Toledos were a large family cut down by poverty, disease, and lack of sanitation. Seven of Alejandro’s fifteen brothers and sisters had died as infants.
Alejandro and the Peace Corps Volunteers grew close during the next two years. Joel, who lived two blocks away, and Nancy became counselors to the social and sports club that Alejandro and his friends had organized. Alejandro, in turn, helped the Volunteers with their summer camp, Campamento Atahualpa, and other community development projects.
Alejandro and Nancy would talk in her room, lit by a kerosene lamp. He would ask her questions about the world outside Chimbote. “There’s no doubt that I woke up and said, ‘Maybe I can go somewhere,’” Alejandro told a reporter more than forty years later.
A year after their arrival, Nancy and Joel Meister married in Chimbote with Alejandro’s parents, Anatolio and Margarita, standing in for the absent parents of the Peace Corps Volunteers at the wedding ceremony. Later that year, Alejandro won a small grant from a local civic organization to travel to the United States to study at a university.
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