John Coyne, who has often explored the history of the Peace Corps with his Babbles blog and Peace Corps Writers Web site (both now at www.peacecorpsworldwide.org), suggested that I write this history. John, whom I first met when he was on the Peace Corps staff in Ethiopia, forwarded much vital material to me as I worked on the project.
Several Peace Corps directors agreed to lengthy interviews for the book, either by phone or in person: Jack Hood Vaughn, Joseph Blatchford, Richard Celeste, Carol Bellamy, Mark Gearan, Mark Schneider, and Aaron Williams. Jody Olsen, who served as deputy director during the George W. Bush administration and acting director afterward, also spent several hours talking with me.
Many others, most having served the Peace Corps as Volunteers or staffers or both, helped me, usually through interviews or e-mail correspondence. The list includes David E. Apter, Megan Blackburn, Carroll Bouchard, Lewis H. Butler, Tim Carroll, John Demos, Christine A. Djondo, Aaron Drendel, Josef Evans, Jane Fazio-Villeda, Frederick Fox, Mark Gearan, Rajeev K. Goyal, Eric Griffin, David Gurr, Gretchen Handwerger, Andy Hanson, Deborah Harding, Barbara E. Joe, Kirby Jones, William Josephson, James Jouppi, Aaron Kauffman, Susan Klee, Robert Klein, David Lamb, Steve Lenzo, Carole Levin, Adrian Lozano, Bill Mabie, Frank Mankiewicz, Edie Martinez, Eugene B. Mihaly, Lawrence J. O’Brien, Philip B. Olsen, Hugh Pickens, Allison Price, Ross J. Pritchard, Kate Raftery, Daniel Rapoport, William Reese, Michael Retzer, Joan Richter, Janet Romero, Paul Sack, Bob Satin, Ruth Saxe, Bennett Schiff, Michael Schmicker, Theodore C. Sorensen, Robert Steiner, Sal Tedesco, Robert B. Textor, Collin Tong, Amy Utzinger, Theodore M. Vestal, Roberta (B. J.) Warren, Kevin Wheeler, Harris Wofford, and Ellen Yaffe.
The archivists at the National Archives and the Nixon Library, both at College Park, Maryland, were always helpful, as was the staff of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas in Austin. Senior archivist Regina Greenwell of the LBJ Library saved me countless hours of work by steering me to the pertinent files.
My editor at Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik, wielded a gentle but remarkably deft pencil. My agent, Scott Mendel, realized early that Beacon Press was the right home for the book.
I had my usual family cheering section. The book is dedicated to six of them. The others are Julie, Hunter, Sarah, Ronella, Jake, Luke, Claire, John, Ava, Elodie, Solal, Patricia, Sophia, Penelope, and Mallory.
As I have mentioned in previous books, my wife, Elizabeth Fox, does not suffer as I research and write. She simply has too much to do, especially in her work at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she is, in fact, surrounded by many former Peace Corps Volunteers. It was amazing to watch her take on, without missing a beat, the extra duties that came with the terrible earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. I continue to look on her with love and awe.
Appendix
Table I
Annual Numbers of Volunteers (at end of fiscal year)
1962 2,940
1963 6,646
1964 10,078
1965 13,248
1966 15,556
1967 14,968
1968 13,823
1969 12,131
1970 9,513
1971 7,066
1972 6,894
1973 7,341
1974 8,044
1975 7,015
1976 5,958
1977 5,752
1978 7,072
1979 6,328
1980 5,994
1981 5,445
1982 5,380
1983 5,483
1984 5,699
1985 6,264
1986 5,913
1987 5,219
1988 5,812
1989 6,248
1990 5,583
1991 5,866
1992 5,831
1993 6,467
1994 6,745
1995 7,218
1996 6,910
1997 6,660
1998 6,719
1999 6,989
2000 7,164
2001 6,643
2002 6,636
2003 7,533
2004 7,733
2005 7,810
2006 7,628
2007 7,896
2008 7,876
2009 7,671
Sources: Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Peace Corps.
Table II
Directors of the Peace Corps
R. Sargent Shriver, 1961–66
Jack Hood Vaughn, 1966–69
Joseph Blatchford, 1969–71
Kevin O’Donnell, 1971–72*
Donald Hess, 1972–73*
Nicholas Craw, 1973–74*
John Dellenback, 1975–77*
Carolyn R. Payton, 1977–78*
Richard F. Celeste, 1979–81*
Loret Miller Ruppe, 1981–89
Paul D. Coverdell, 1989–91
Elaine Chao, 1991–92
Carol Bellamy, 1993–95
Mark D. Gearan, 1995–99
Mark L. Schneider, 1999–2001
Gaddi H. Vasquez, 2002–6
Ronald A. Tschetter, 2006–9
Aaron S. Williams, 2009–present
* Peace Corps was part of ACTION during these years.
Source: Peace Corps
A Note on Sources
No history of the Peace Corps can be written without consulting four pioneering books: Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Coates Redmon, Come as You Are: The Peace Corps Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); Karen Schwarz, What You Can Do for Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps (New York: William Morrow, 1991); and Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998). My debt to them, especially in my discussion of the early years, will be obvious to anyone who knows these books.
I was fortunate enough to benefit as well from the research of the recent biography Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver, by Scott Stossel (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004).
Hugh Pickens, a former Volunteer from Peru, has created an extraordinary Web site, www.peacecorpsonline.org, which includes historical documents, news archives, late reports, Volunteer directories, and a host of other Peace Corps information. His Web site was invaluable. So were the commentaries of former Ethiopia Volunteer John Coyne on www.peacecorpsworldwide.org. I have also consulted extensively the archives of three newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.
Comprehensive tables listing all Peace Corps countries, the numbers of Volunteers who have served in each, and the prominent alumni from each country can be found at www.beacon.org/whentheworldcalls.
Sources
Chapter 1. The Challenge from JFK
James MacGregor Burns’s John Kennedy: A Political Profile (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960) discusses the campaign problems of Kennedy’s attitude toward Joe McCarthy, pp. 131–55, and Kennedy’s Catholicism, pp. 237–58. Ted Sorensen’s quote on Kennedy and McCarthy is from his memoirs, Counselor (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 155. The protest against The Bicycle Thief was reported in the New York Times, February 16, 1951, in the story, “K. of C. Marches on Movie Theatre; Showing of ‘Bicycle Thief’ Canceled.”
For my analysis of the campaign, I have depended on Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961); and Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row), pp. 168–210. Transcripts of the televised debates are available on the Web site of the Commission on Presidential Debates, www.debates.org.
For the narra
tive of the University of Michigan events, I have followed the accounts of James Tobin, “JFK at the Union: The unknown story of the Peace Corps,” Michigan Today, January 2008 (found on the www.michigantoday.umich.edu Web site); participants who sent comments to the same Web site; Coates Redmon, Come as You Are: The Peace Corps Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 3–7, 11–14; Karen Schwarz, What You Can Do for Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps (New York: William Morrow, 1991), pp. 27–29; Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (Pittsburgh, PA.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), pp. 244–50; Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 120–21; and Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 18–22.
The text of Kennedy’s remarks to the Michigan students can be found on the Peace Corps Web site, www.peacecorps.gov. Russell Baker’s front-page article on the campaign in Michigan appeared with the headline “Kennedy Resumes Whistle-stopping” in the New York Times, October 15, 1960.
The text of Kennedy’s San Francisco speech can be found on the American Presidency Project Web site of the University of California at Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. The New York Times front-page article “Kennedy Favors U.S. ‘Peace Corps’ to Work Abroad” was written by Harrison E. Salisbury and published on November 3, 1960. The negative reaction can be found in Wofford, p. 243, and in the Tobin article.
Chapter 2. Sarge’s Peace Corps
For details on the early life of Sargent Shriver, I have depended heavily on Scott Stossel, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004), pp. xxi–xxx, 3–139. The quote from Shriver’s mother can be found in “The Peace Corps: It Is Almost As Good As Its Intentions,” Time, July 5, 1963.
Shriver’s role in the 1960 campaign, and the phone call to Coretta King, is covered by Wofford, pp. 11–66, and Stossel, pp. 155–69. The Peters quote on Bobby Kennedy is in Stossel, pp. 157–58. White’s assessment of the importance of the King phone call can be found in White, p. 323.
The hunt for Kennedy administration talent is described in Stossel, pp. 173–86, and Wofford, pp. 67–99. The Kennedy quotes about talent are from Stossel, p. 174. The David Halberstam quote is from his book The Best and the Brightest (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1973), p. 272.
The work of the Peace Corps task force is covered in Stossel, pp. 189–208, and in Wofford, pp. 252–61. The public version of the task force’s report can be found on the National Archives Web site at www.arcweb.archives.gov. There is extensive material about “A Towering Task” in the January 1997 issue of RPCV Writers & Readers. The Wiggins/Josephson report itself can be found on www.rpcv.org. Wiggins’s recollections are from an interview by John Coyne in the January 1997 RPCV Writers & Readers issue, p. 15, and from the blog “John Coyne Babbles,” March 17, 2008 (which can be found at www.peacecorpsworldwide.org/babbles⁄ ). The Donovan McClure quote is from p. 24 of the same issue. Josephson put down his recollections in an e-mail to me on June 16, 2008. The Braestrup quote comes from Stossel, p. 217.
The fight over the independence of the Peace Corps is covered in Stossel, pp. 218–25, in Wofford, pp. 262–67, and in Rice, pp. 60–67. Shriver’s April 21, 1961, letter to Labouisse are in the files of the vice president, 1961–63, Box 82, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) Library. Shriver’s recollection about receiving the Wiggins cable in New Delhi comes from his oral history, August 20, 1980, LBJ Library.
The Shriver trip to solicit invitations for Peace Corps programs is detailed in Wofford, pp. 268–74. It is also covered in Stossel, pp. 226–32 (the Bayley quote is on p. 231); Rice, pp. 71–73; and the Peace Corps News, vol. 1, no. 1, June 1961. The anti–Peace Corps tirade in the Ghanian Times is quoted in Robert Klein, “Being First: A Memoir of the First Peace Corps Volunteers, Ghana I 1961,” unpublished manuscript, 2001, p. 11.
Re: the Peace Corps talent hunt, the Franklin Williams story is covered in Redmon, pp. 69–70; the Jack Hood Vaughn story comes from “How I Became Director of the Peace Corps,” a chapter from his unpublished memoir, “Kill the Gringo”; Vaughn’s quote about Shriver and jocks comes from a telephone interview on April 16, 2008; and material on the Bates and Houston hires come from Redmon, pp. 81–84. The Moyers quote comes from Stossel, p. xiii. The Charles Peters quote comes from his memoir, Tilting at Windmills: An Autobiography (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), p. 120.
The Maiatico building is described in Stossel, p. 211.
The JFK quote praising Shriver as a lobbyist comes from Peter Braestrup, “Peace Corpsman No. 1—A Progress Report,” New York Times Magazine, December 17, 1961.
Rep. Frances Bolton’s quotes come from the Associated Press (AP) story, “Rep. Bolton Hits Peace Corps Plan,” New York Times, March 8, 1961. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) resolutions come from Wofford, p. 243; AP, “D.A.R. Move Asks Peace Corps Ban,” New York Times, April 19, 1961; and United Press International (UPI), “D.A.R. Sends Plea to Congress to Check Reds in the Caribbean,” New York Times, April 20, 1961.
The five New Yorker cartoons ran in the issues of March 25, August 19, September 16, November 25, and December 2, 1961. The Meehan piece of humor ran in the August 26 issue of that same year.
Alyce Ostrow’s story comes from an interview with her on April 13, 2008, and an e-mail on July 23, 2008. The quote about Shriver draining people comes from the Braestrup magazine article. Shriver’s quote about picking brains comes from the blog John Coyne Babbles, October 9, 2007. Shriver’s quote about conflicting points of view comes from Wofford, p. 279.
Chapter 3. The Pioneer Volunteers and the Postcard
The story of the first Ghana Volunteers is fully documented in Klein’s unpublished 2001 manuscript. One pioneer Ghana Volunteer, Arnold Zeitlin, wrote a very useful and engaging memoir, To the Peace Corps, with Love (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
For the section on Ghana, I have consulted the evaluation reports by Charles Peters, April 1962; Robert Lystad, December 11–20, 1962; and Richard Richter, January 6, 1965, in Peace Corps Country Program Evaluations 1961–1967, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
The UCLA training anecdotes come from the Klein manuscript, a follow-up telephone conversation with Klein on July 7, 2008, and a telephone interview with David Apter on June 29, 2008. The quotes from the Apter-Shriver interview and the Apter-Nkrumah phone call were recalled by Apter in that interview. The Nkrumah phone call episode is also described by the Klein manuscript, pp. 28–29. The quote about learning soccer and the creation of the cigarette lighter pun come from comments by John Demos in the First Annual Peace Corps Report (Washington, D.C.: Peace Corps, 1962), pp. 36–38.
Shriver’s pep talk to the Ghana Volunteers in Washington is covered in the Klein manuscript, p. 35. The White House reception, including the comment by Klein, is covered by Tom Wicker, “Kennedy Praises 74 in Peace Corps,” New York Times, August 29, 1961. The text of Kennedy’s remarks was carried in the New York Times the same day under the headline, “President’s Talk on Corps.” Newell Flather’s comment to the president comes from the Klein manuscript, p. 36; Klein describes the Ghana ambassador’s party and aftermath on pp. 36–37.
The statistics about the Ghana secondary school system come from the Lystad evaluation. The problem of memorization in African schools was discussed in my article, “Peace Corps Teaching in Africa.” Africa Report, December 1966. The concept of “chew and pour” is described in the Klein manuscript, pp. 52–53, while the incident about Tom Peterson’s Greek classes comes from the same source, p. 51. The problem of misunderstanding accents and meaning is covered in the Klein manuscript, p. 49.
The Peters quote about the role of Volunteer teachers comes from his evaluation report. The goals of the Peace Corps are set down in Sec. 2, Declaration of Purpose, of the Peace Corps Act, Public Law 87
–293, which can be found at www.archives.gov/education/lessons/peace-corps/images. This declaration of purpose is usually broken down and simplified in Peace Corps publications as the three goals; see, for example, First Annual Peace Corps Report, p. 5.
Volunteer housing is discussed by Demos in the first annual Peace Corps Report, p. 37; Tom Livingston, “A Peace Corps Teacher Writes Home,” Peace Corps News, January 1962, and the Klein manuscript, p. 45. Klein also discusses the servant situation and the Laura Damon incident on pp. 42 and 68. The summer vacation conflict is covered by the Klein manuscript, pp. 79–81. The ease of involvement in Ghanian life for teachers living off the compound is demonstrated throughout Zeitlin’s book.
For the Peace Corps problems with Nkrumah, I have consulted Zeitlin, pp. 145–50; two cables from Ghana Peace Corps director George Carter to Washington on December 3, 1962, Subject File of the Office of the Director, 1961–66, Peace Corps files, National Archives; and the Klein manuscript, pp. 76–79. Zeitlin describes the Nkrumah farewell party, pp. 347–50.
Shriver’s visit to Ghana was described in the Klein manuscript, pp. 94–96, and in a John Demos phone interview on July 8, 2008. The Time photographer/reporter team story comes from Schwarz, p. 42. The living quarters of Livingston were described by him in his article in the Peace Corps News.
For the Nigeria postcard episode, I have consulted “The infamous Peace Corps postcard” at www.peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers and the more elaborate version in John Coyne’s blogs in ten parts, August 30, 2007–September 11, 2007, which can be found at www.peacecorpsworldwide.org/babbles; Redmon, pp. 118–28; Stossel, pp. 251–55; Brent Ashabranner, A Moment of History: The First Ten Years of the Peace Corps (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 81–92; and Rice, pp. 241–44.
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