The 25th Anniversary Conference mostly took place on the Washington D.C. Mall where 5,000 + gathered under the largest tent ever raised at the foot of the Capitol Dome and adjacent to the Air and Space Museum. The Mall was the brainchild of Bill Carey (India 1968-69) the executive director of the conference.

The late talented writer David Schickele (Nigeria 1961-63) wrote, “The tent was like the Peace Corps I was part of. Its muggy windless flaps said something about heat and hard work and improvisation, its massive nonchalance the perfect protection for the ideas being hatched beneath it.”

Over 70% of those at the conference had served in the first 10 years of the Peace Corps. Almost 45% had served in just 10 of the 82 countries represented at the conference. Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Liberia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Thailand and Turkey. People had come from all 50 states and 12 other countries.

Doug Siglin would tell the conference at the opening of the conference, “This is the largest gathering of RPCVs in 25 years. We are 120,000 strong.”

In the year 2011 we will be over 200,000 strong, but how many RPCVs will turn up in D.C.? 

The hope in 1986 was that the conference, and the gathering of RPCVs in Washington, would enlarge the vision of what the extended Peace Corps community might do to fulfill the dream of a more cohesive and effective alumni community. The question was asked: Can we achieve here at home with our rich heritage of common ideals and personal experiences what we accomplish overseas? 

That question was never answered. That hope, I believe, was never  fulfilled.

The truth is that the majority of  Volunteers don’t join the Peace Corps for life. They were overseas for two years and leave the experience behind them, as they left behind their undergraduate  years at college. The Peace Corps became only a moment in their lifetime, replaced by marriage, children and a career. Those Peace Corps years for most of us are  just a lot of bedtime stories told to sleepy kids.

Reunions, however, do have a way of rallying old emotions that stir us to go back and find out what happened to so-and-so….to see again a lost love, or have another beer with someone we once roomed with and haven’t seen in years.

Perhaps that is the only gift, and the best gift, we can receive from a trip down memory lane. There is nothing wrong with this. Life is full of such moments and those of us who were in the Peace Corps together, we are all lucky enough to have lived long enough for another weekend that ends with a sad goodbye.

Alan Guskin, as most people know, was one of the key influences in the creation of the Peace Corps and went from the University of Michigan to Thailand with the first group of PCVs. He has had a long career in education and is currently the President Emeritus of Antioch University, where he was President and then Chancellor from 1985-97. This is a short except from his essay, A Way of Being in the World: Reflections on the Peace Corps 30 Years Later. It was published in the The Antiochian in the Fall of 1991. It is republished here with Alan’s permission.

. . .

The Peace Corps began in a light drizzle at 2 a.m. in the morning on Oct. 14, 1960, near the end of a tumultuous presidential campaign.  John Kennedy won the election a few weeks later, the hopes of a new generation of the 1960s began to unfold and the Peace Corps became a reality on March 1, 1961.  Founded in spirit on that evening in an off-the-cuff impromptu speech to 10,000 waiting students at the University of Michigan, the birth of the Peace Corps owes much to the spirit of social justice embodied in the civil rights movement, the students’ stirrings for change on campuses throughout the nation, the innocence and incredible optimism of a new decade and the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa.

I was present on that rainy night 30 years ago, and along with a few others, formed a group that showed that students would respond to Kennedy’s challenge of whether we were prepared to serve in the developing nations.  It is said by chroniclers of the Peace Corps that Kennedy was moved by the Michigan student response.  A short time later he gave a major campaign address on the Peace Corps, just one week before election day.  He met privately with a group of us on the following day.  Eleven months later I entered the Peace Corps and served two and a half years in the first group to Thailand.

The Peace Corps reflected the spirit of John Kennedy;  in fact, in many countries Volunteers were called Kennedy’s children.  Kennedy was obviously not a radical, nor a revolutionary; neither was, nor is, the Peace Corps. Kennedy represented a new spirit and style domestically and internationally; so did the Peace Corps.

Kennedy’s significant influence on this nation was tied most directly to his spirit — his youthfulness, his willingness to take risks, his love of challenges, his ability to stimulate Americans and citizens of other nations to believe in the American dream of freedom, justice, and opportunity for all people, and his ability, at times, to act as a moral leader of a generation by asking people to serve others.  But Kennedy was full of contradictions.  For, while his spirit seemed real, so too was his fierce pragmatism, his Cold War mentality, and his seemingly macho personal image.

Kennedy’s strong support of the Peace Corps reflected the contradictions he seemed to express elsewhere.  He seemed clear in his commitment to tapping the idealism of America’s youth to help with the social, economic, and technological change in the newly emerging nations of Africa and Asia as well as the developing nations of Latin America.  But the Peace Corps was also seen as part of the Cold War.   In this regard, it was seen as this nation’s best international public relations tool.  Kennedy’s hard-nosed pragmatism probably demanded all of these perspectives as justification for his interest in the idealism of the Peace Corps.

Like Kennedy, the Peace Corps also had its share of seeming contradictions.  Volunteers were not typically the tough political idealists who marched in the South or rode the freedom buses.  While supporting these forms of activism for civil rights, they were more gentle liberals for whom the physical risks growing out of the confrontations in the South were personally too threatening.  Yet serving in the Peace Corps proved to be a significant personal and physical risk, the “toughest job you’ll ever love” — to quote the advertisement.  There was no physical violence against the Peace Corps, but few Volunteers escaped without significant illnesses, many life-threatening.  Some died from these illnesses.

Another seeming contradiction was that the Peace Corps’ creation and ultimate success was tied directly to the idealism of young people, those who served overseas were people who believed in making a difference by serving others in need.  But, the Peace Corps’ ability to function overseas, as well as be supported in domestic political circles, was tied to the international politics of the Cold War and the desire for the United States to be seen as a nation of peace facilitating significant economic and social changes in developing nations.   And it was tied to the Peace Corps’ identification with President Kennedy; not only his personal support but the fact that its director was the President’s brother-in-law.  This relationship was not lost on the leaders of the developing nations.

So, while cold war pragmatism swirled around the Peace Corps along with America’s more idealistic commitment to the development of third world nations, the real success of the Peace Corps, I believe, was and is the people-to-people, non-political nature of its programs and its specific assignments.  The impact of the Volunteers was on the individuals with whom they worked–specific, live human beings — and their own personal growth.  Peace Corps volunteers did not create broad-scale changes;  they effected individual people’s lives.  For the Volunteers, the Peace Corps was a noble and humble undertaking.  Returned Volunteers will tell everyone who will listen that we gained much more than we gave.

The Peace Corps today remains important in doing what it always did well — creating people-to-people programs where host country individuals and programs are well served and Peace Corps Volunteers are deeply affected by their service. My sense is that returned Volunteers truly understand this and foreign policy professionals have difficulty with it.  The Peace Corps is an effective instrument of U.S. foreign policy only to the extent that serving individuals and groups in other nations is considered as a good, and that developing an ever-growing cadre of Americans who are emotionally committed to the needs and interests of people in the developing nations is seen as a good.

In 1958 came The Ugly Americanby William Lederer and Eugene J. Burdick. This book went through fifty-five printings in two years and was a direct motivation in creating the Peace Corps, as Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman points out in her history of the Peace Corps, All You Need Is Love.
    
In a “Factual Epilogue” to the novel, Lederer and Burdick lay out the basic philosophy and modus operandi of what would later be the Peace Corps. Writing about how America should “help” developing countries, the authors declare:

We do not need the horde of 1,500,000 Americans - mostly amateurs - who are now working for the United States overseas. What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working, and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and - in some cases - their health. They must go equipped to apply a positive policy promulgated by a clear-thinking government. They must speak the language of the land of their assignment, and they must be more expert in its problems than are the natives.

The hero in The Ugly American is Homer Atkins, a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, and building bridges. He is called the “ugly” American only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lives and works with the local people in Southeast Asia and, by the end of the novel, is beloved and admired by them.

John F. Kennedy and others in his presidential campaign, including such Peace Corps founders as Sargent Shriver, Harris Wofford, Warren Wiggins, and Bill Moyers had read the book and responded to what Lederer and Burdick wrote about the ineptitude of American foreign policy.

By January 1959, Kennedy had sent this book to every member of the Senate, and the ideas expressed in it, i.e., our inadequate efforts in foreign aid, would be used by Ted Sorensen when he crafted the speech Kennedy gave on November 2, 1960, at the Cow Palace Auditorium in San Francisco six days before the election. It was in this final presidential campaign speech that Kennedy called for the establishment of a Peace Corps: “I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area [foreign aid] be supplemented by a Peace Corps of talented young men willing and able to serve their country . . .”

It was the first time that Kennedy used the name, “Peace Corps.”

One inspiration for the idea of a Peace Corps that Kennedy mentioned were the 10,000 students who had gathered at 2 a.m. on October 14, 1960, at the University of Michigan. These students heard his extemporaneous remarks about volunteering for overseas service and immediately began a grass-roots petition across Midwest campuses that generated thousands of signatures of support from college students. America, Kennedy said in San Francisco, was “full of young people eager to serve the cause of peace in the most useful way.”

Like the writers and artists of the 1920s who fled America, the young people coming of age in the 1960s, the so-called Silent Generation, were seeking to give voice to their own discontent here at home. It was a discontent that Kennedy, perhaps unwittingly, tapped into when he ran for the presidency in the last year of the decade.

Insiders in D.C. are telling me that Tony Patrick Hall, the former Democrat Congressman and PCV from Ohio, is on the short list to be the next Peace Corps Director. Tony recently served as the ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and chief of the U.S. mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome. Hall, I’m told, has expressed ‘interest’ in the position.

Also lobbying for the job is the former Regional Manager of the Peace Corps Recruitment Office in Boston. Not a PCV, it is unlikely that he will get the appointment.

Now that there is talk and even some planning by the outgoing administration for a 50^th reunion, I have notes from the 25^th  Anniversary Conference that was executed by the RPCVs of Washington, D.C. and a coalition of other groups, all chaired by Roger Landrum, (Nigeria 1961-63) and a guy name Doug Siglin (Zaire 1979-81) who was one smart organizer and might have been at one time the Director of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, (as the NPCA was then ungainly called) if the Board of Directors had had any sense. As Roger told the crowd of RPCVs gathered under the huge tent on the Washington Mall, “We wanted to have this national anniversary conference in Washington to bring as many alumni together as possible. We told the Peace Corps that we were going to have some fun but we were not going to burn down the White House.”

Roger would rally the crowd with paragraphs of enthusiasm that predated the current MorePeaceCorps campaign by some twenty plus years. “We can build the Peace Corps back to 10,000 PCVs. (Remember this was 1986!) If we have Peace Corps alumni,” Roger said, “in every Congressional District in the U.S. contact their Congressmen by phone and ask them to report back how they vote on the Peace Corps budget, then within five years, we’ll have the budget for a Peace Corps of 10,000 Volunteers.”

Let’s remember, girls and guys, some good ideas have been around for awhile.

Credit must be given to those Volunteers who joined the Peace Corps in the early Sixties. They were all kids who had come of age in the final years of the Fifties, schooled in novels like Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, published in 1955, and the non-fiction The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s philosophy as articulated in her novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Every man, philosophized Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.

None of us knew in the winter of 1961 if joining the Peace Corps would mark us for life, like being a member of the Communist Party, or worse, a member of the Republican Party (just kidding!).

The real heroes were the “Originals,” those PCVS who joined in 1961. Of that inaugural class of 864, 300 gathered at the 25th Anniversary Conference in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1986 to attend a Congressional Reception and hear Senator Kennedy tell them, “You have reminded us anew-as you did with your example twenty-five years ago-of what is best in ourselves and what is best about our country. The idea of the Peace Corps - and the spirit of service that it inspired-captured the imagination of the American people. The passing of time has not dimmed the response or diminished the achievements of the Peace Corps and the qualities that made it so special and so important to the people of the United States.”

Then with his voice cracking with emotion, he summed up, “You have kept President Kennedy’s dream alive. I only wish he was here today to share the pride of your achievement.”

My lament about the lack of attention by the White House to the MorePeaceCorps campaign, and the lack of juice by the NPCA, created an outcry (well, at least from one recent employee of the Peace Corps), who came out of the woodwork in defense of Jody Olsen. And I wasn’t even attacking Jody!

You can read his comment to me.  Roger, who is a good guy, was upset at my tone, I guess, and that I had called Jody a Utah “Republican.”

He has a point. Calling anyone a ‘Republican” today is a slap in the face,  Sorry, Jody!

You can read what Roger says in his comment: “Your public vitriol about Jody Olsen is misplaced, inappropriate, inaccurate, and unattractive. Jody may be Republican - who knows? - but that is totally irrelevant to her performance, dedication, and thoroughly decent personage….”

First, all I said about Jody  (besides being a Republican) was that she was “passing out hall passes in the Peace Corps.” I’m saying that metaphorially, Roger!

However, the recent piece about the Peace Corps in the Boston Globe had the reporter calling Jody for a comment on the decline in numbers within the agency and she refused to comment, won’t even come to the phone. What else is she not doing at the agency?

What I know about Jody is what other Peace Corps women have said about her.  When Jody first returned to the agency in the Bush administration (see, I don’t have to say, Republican) the women who knew her and worked with her when she was with Paul Coverdell said she was a lovely lady with no back bone.

We know she let Gaddi Vasquez, who was not an RPCV, walk all over her when he was head of the agency. Gaddi took off on those jaunts overseas and Jody–the only RPCV in the senior staff–never once left the U.S. Did they not trust her with PCVs or foreign officials because she was an RPCV or a woman? 

When I mentioned to my women friends how the men that I knew thought Jody was just great, they’d smile and shake their heads and say, “boys are such easy lays when it comes to pretty girls.”

Yesterday, the President signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. At the White House signing, Obama drew attention to what the Kennedy Family has done in the name of service. While Ted Kennedy is known more for his fights for health care and being the “lion in the senate” he has also pushed to increase the budget for national service. We RPCVs wonder, however, when anyone will get around to the Peace Corps and increase our numbers, our budget.

MorePeaceCorps, which NPCA President Kevin Quigley reminded me recently was his idea, his campaign, have been collecting signatures from every congressman and congresswoman on Capital Hill. Daily I get reminders from the NPCA of how great they are doing on the Hill with their signature petition.

Nevertheless, when I spoke to the lovely Obama official camped out at Peace Corps HQ yesterday, she had yet to meet Kevin Quigley, and only had a vague idea of who he was!  What gives, Kevin? I know for a fact that Kevin is tight with Utah Republican, and former Peace Corps Deputy Director (now interim director) Jody Olsen, who has been kept behind at the agency to sign leave slips and hall passes, but Kevin, as the President and CEO of the NPCA, should be pounding on doors and shouting out the windows of the Peace Corps building. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”

Well, maybe Kevin never saw the movie.

Less than a month ago Ellen Tausher, who has represented California 10^th congressional district since 1997, announced that she had accepted the position in the Obama Administration of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. In the mean time, PeaceCorpsWorldwise has learned that John Garamendi (Ethiopia 1965–67), the Lieutenant Governor of California, will not run for the governorship of the state but instead seek  Tausher’s seat. A special election will take place this coming August. The 10^thdistrict includes parts of the San Francisco Bay area, as well as areas near Sacramento. John is tentative scheduled to make his announcement tomorrow, Wednesday, at a job center in Concord, California.  If elected, Garamendi would be the second PCV from Ethiopia to be in Congress. Paul  Tsongas (Ethiopia 1962–64) was elected to the House of Representatives in 1974 and served two terms in the House. In 1978 he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Garamendi is no stranger to Washington, D.C. In the Clinton administration, he was the U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior. During the same period,  his wife, Patricia Garamendi (Ethiopia 1965–67), was the Peace Corps Associate Director for Recruitment & Selection.

John became the 46th Lieutenant Governor of California in ‘07. He had previously been the California State Insurance Commissioner from 2003 - 2007.

An interesting note — Garamendi is of Basque descent, and  garamendi literally means height of the mountain in the Basque language. We are not sure if John will be the tallest member of Congress, but he will be close to setting that mark.

Good luck, John!

The other day I got a call from a friend planning the 50th reunion of the Peace Corps and that got me thinking about the 25th Anniversary Conference in September of 1986. It was held under a huge tent on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and organized mostly by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of  D.C.. At the time, Peace Corps Director Loret Ruppe attempted to stop the reunion fearing the RPCVs would march on the White House and against President Reagan, but she and her Republican lackeys had to back off when Harris Wofford secured for Roger Landrum, Dough Siglin and the other D.C. RPCVs, a grant of $25,000 from the  MacArthur Foundation to stage the conference. Seeing that it would happen–with or without her–Ruppe rushed to take control and elbowed her way onto the stage.

Nevertheless, the reunion really was a Volunteer event, as the Peace Corps really is about PCVs, not Washingon HQ staff, and the purpose of the agency was brought into focus when Shriver rose at the end of the day on Saturday to greet the crowd and address the RPCVs assembled under the vaulted tent. It was a vintage Shriver performance.

Sarge was 70 at the time. As he stood to give the final speech of the day, we all stood to greet him with sustained applause. Years after his time as the first director, even to the recent RPCVs who had never met him, Shriver was the legend of the Peace Corps.

He began by talking about how the Peace Corps was put together in the first days of the Kennedy Administration, and even in the far corners of the tent, the crowd was silent and attentive as he spoke of how this unique government idea of service became a reality. He restated his admiration for what we had done overseas in the developing world, in persons and by deed, and what we symbolized to the people of the world. “The miracle is,” he said, “that decades of war, Presidential prevarication and disgrace, budget cutting, and the cynicism of power politics still have not killed the dream nor staunched the flow of those willing to volunteer and serve. All of you made the Peace Corps a success.”

He went onto say, “PCVs know what they are doing with their hands as well as with their hearts. Their courage, their generosity, their spirit tells the world what American democracy, rather than American power, is all about.”

And then he summed up with his familiar and famous call to service. “Be servants of peace,” said Sarge. “Work at home as you have worked abroad, humbly, persistently, intelligently. Weep with those who are sorrowful. Rejoice with those who are sick. Join others who serve. Serve, serve, serve. That’s the challenge. For in the end it will be the servants who save us all.”