Stanley Meisler - When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years

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When the World Calls

The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years

Stanley Meisler

Beacon Press, Boston

To Sam, Mike, Michle, Joshua, Gabriel, and Jenaro

Contents

Introduction

The Peace Corps was only an afterthought during John F. Kennedys election campaign in 1960. But it was an afterthought that excited the imagination of thousands of college students. The enthusiasm swelled with the admonition of President Kennedys inaugural address, And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. The outpouring of letters from college students was so great that Kennedy feared he could not set up the Peace Corps in time to accommodate the first wave of graduates. The Peace Corps, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, is surely Kennedys most enduring legacy.

I was not there at the madcap, exciting, glorious beginning. I started my work at Peace Corps headquarters just after the election of Lyndon B. Johnson to a full term as president, a year after the assassination of President Kennedy. Accepting a job offer from the Peace Corps was not an easy decision to make. I was in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press then, and I looked on the federal government as our antagonist. The federal government hid information from the American people, and it was the job of the Washington correspondent to ferret it out. Joining the federal government was sort of like joining the enemy.

But the Peace Corps was different. It was an oasis of idealism and goodness in the vast Washington bureaucracy. Everyone, even Washington correspondents, loved the Peace Corps. The Volunteers were heroic figures. And since I had spent a year studying and traveling in Africa as a Ford Foundation fellow, I had the kind of background that might help them out. After a couple of weeks of reflection, I pushed aside my misgivings and accepted the offer to work in the evaluation division.

I soon found out how different the Peace Corps was. On my first day of work, I walked out of my office at the scheduled closing hour and noticed that no one else was leaving. So I slipped into the office of one of my colleagues, Richard Richter, the future ABC television news producer, and asked him what was going on. He laughed and explained that everyone liked to show their commitment by working well past closing time and coming in on Saturdays. Since he had already finished his work for the day, he agreed with me that it seemed pointless to hang around, and we headed to the bank of elevators. As we did so, our boss, Charles Peters, spotted us from afar. What do you two guys think this is? he bellowed. The Department of Agriculture?

I took lengthy trips, usually a month or longer, for the Peace Corps. I went to Ethiopia twice, to Cameroon twice, and once each to Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, India, and Iran, interviewing Volunteers about their experience and hearing their comments and complaints. In Washington, especially after Peters named me his deputy, I followed the machinations of the staff, for even an agency as unbureaucratic as the Peace Corps had its share of bureaucratic infighting.

After I left the Peace Corps and joined the Los Angeles Times, I still watched the Peace Corps, most closely when I was based in Africa. I called on Peace Corps staff and Volunteers whenever I could. Sometimes old friends on the staff treated me as if I still worked for the Peace Corps. These contacts proved vital in Ethiopia when the authoritarian regime of Emperor Haile Selassie was unraveling because of student furya phenomenon that was ignored by almost all Americans on the scene except for the Peace Corps Volunteers and staff. I have devoted a chapter in this book to the little-known but remarkable story of the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.

Any history of the Peace Corps must follow two threadsthe work of the Volunteers overseas and the tensions of the policymaking in Washington. I have tried to move from one to another as smoothly as possible. They are, of course, interconnected. The incessant campaign to increase the size of the Peace Corps in the early days, for example, sometimes led to fraternity-like clusters of Volunteers in the main cities.

I have also tried to be selective. Any attempt at an exhaustive history would bog down and become meaningless. By September 30, 2009, the end of the 2009 fiscal year, a total of 198,809 Volunteers had served in 139 countries. The varieties of the interplay of lives and experiences are enormous.

The ups and downs in Washington have also been too numerous to understand easily. During the first fifty years of the Peace Corps, there have been nine U.S. presidents and eighteen Peace Corps directors. The Washington part of my narrative deals mainly with those who left important imprints on the Peace Corps and on those involved in controversies that tell us a great deal about the meaning of the Peace Corps.

The Peace Corps has sometimes bent its programs to meet the whims of the White House. In the 1980s, Honduras received the largest Peace Corps program in the world as a reward for letting the United States use the country as a base for the contras attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. When the Cold War ended, the Peace Corps foolishly rushed volunteers to Eastern Europe as agents of capitalism. During both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars, many volunteers wondered if they were serving overseas as the smile on the face of the imperial American tiger.

A good deal of my narrative explores this tension between the independence of the Peace Corps and the demands of U.S. foreign policy. This tension reflects a great danger, for the Peace Corps would lose its credibility and its acceptance if it lost its independence.

The Peace Corps has one great inner resource. The strength of the Peace Corps has always depended on the energy and commitment of the Volunteers. No matter how asinine the director in Washington, no matter how much the U.S. president despises the agency, no matter how faulty and lackluster the program in their countries, most volunteers have persevered, determined to do the best they can. That quality has persuaded many countries to ask for more Volunteers, year after year.

One aspect of the story astounded me as I studied the Peace Corps after so many years away: the impressive array of talent among former Volunteers. The alumni roster includes two U.S. senators, nine members of the House of Representatives, two governors, three mayors, twenty ambassadors, a host of university presidents, the board chairs of Levi Strauss and the Chicago Bears, and the founders of the Nature Company and Netflix. Novelist Paul Theroux, television news anchor Chris Matthews, and New Yorker writer George Packer are also former Volunteers. It is obvious that the United States itself has benefitted a great deal from the Peace Corps.

I have tried throughout this history to set down a narrative. I have not shied away from adding analysis to illuminate the story, but it is the story that interests me most. It has been an exciting, even astonishing, and yet sometimes combative fifty years, and I have tried to capture the narrative that fueled that mood.

Chapter One. The Challenge from JFK

Senator John F. Kennedy, now revered as a president, was not a figure of great stature when he was nominated by the Democratic Party in 1960. He was young, only forty-three, handsome, kind of dashing, brimming with energy, full of smiles, but also short of experienceperhaps, many thought, even shallow. The Democrats had made the mistake of scheduling a special session of Congress after their nominating convention. The session accomplished little, and even worse, it made obvious the fact that the Senate was dominated by the partys vice-presidential candidate, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, not the partys presidential candidate. Kennedy looked like no more than a hanger-on.