[This blog was posted this morning by RPCV writer Larry Leamer on Huffington Post website. Larry's most recent book is Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach.]
When I joined the Peace Corps in 1964, Sargent Shriver was my hero. I was stationed two days from a road in the mountains of the Himalayan kingdom and I never met the director of the Peace Corps. But he inspired me. He was “Sarge” to all of us, and we often talked about him. He visited Nepal once, this exuberant, inspiring presence who believed that the only thing higher than Mt. Everest was the human spirit. He thought people were capable of anything, even me. We just had to do it.
When I started my trilogy on the Kennedy family in the late eighties, I got to know Sarge, and I realized it was not easy being married to a Kennedy. Sarge was a Shriver, scion of a distinguished old Baltimore family, but once he married Eunice Kennedy, he was a Kennedy. He wanted to run for governor of Illinois in 1960, but his brother-in-law was running for president, and the Kennedys always came first. When Sarge ran for president in 1976, his brother-in-law Senator Edward Kennedy was less than helpful. The presidency was for a “real” Kennedy not a mock one.
Sarge was an elegant man. His liberalism was passionate and sincere but he lacked the common touch. He was profoundly and authentically religious. Unlike many politicians, he did not use religion. Religion used him. He had serious religious studies on his bed stand and he went to mass every morning. I asked him once why he did so and he said it was because he needed God’s help so much to get through the day. That was not a Sarge most people saw.
Sarge was ninety-five and lived an incredibly rich and productive life, and much of my sadness today is about his greatest creation, the Peace Corps. In 2003, Sarge gave a speech at Yale University in which he said, “We didn’t go far enough! Our dreams were large, but our actions were small. We never really gave the goal of ‘World Wide Peace’ an overwhelming commitment or established a clear, inspiring vision for attaining it. If we had, the world wouldn’t be in the mess we are in, and what could have been should have been.”
The truth is that the organization he founded is in every way diminished. Two years ago I volunteered with a program of the National Peace Corps Association of returned volunteers to try to get Congress to raise the Peace Corps budget dramatically pushing toward President Obama’s announced goal of doubling the corps by the fiftieth anniversary this year. As I got into it, I saw that it wasn’t just the numbers that needed to be increased. The organization needed to be reformed, torn apart and built anew the way Sarge would have done it.
After 9/11 the Peace Corps had lost its way, concerned more with security than change, pulling out of a number of crucial countries, building high walls behind which the directors lived in almost as exalted a fashion as the ambassadors. The attrition rate was horrible, many of the programs deeply flawed. And the bureaucrats in Washington went home early and did not listen to the volunteers.
People like Senator Chris Dodd, himself a returned volunteer, and Senator Patrick Leahy, knew that there were serious problems but they did nothing. Dodd backed off a bill that would have begun the reforms. NPCA took money from the Peace Corps to publish the volunteer magazine and was hopelessly compromised. I coined the slogan “Bold New Peace Corps” to suggest that it was not just money that was needed but change. I called all kinds of national media trying to get them to do a story on what was wrong. Nobody would do anything. A political editor at NPR was at least honest. He said, “Nobody cares.” I kept pushing at NPCA. I upset too many people and nobody at the organization cared about reform. I was pushed out of having any further involvement with the campaign.
Last Friday, in the biggest story the Peace Corps has had in years, ABC’s 20/20 did a devastating report on the 1,078 female volunteers who have been sexually assaulted or raped during the past decade. If I extrapolate correctly from these figures, that means that a woman has roughly a one in twenty five chance of being attacked. These are the Peace Corps figures and one would assume that many women remain quiet. The ABC story reported by Brian Ross and produced by Anna Schecter had six brave women on camera talking about how their abuse did not end once their attacker or attackers left them. In several cases, the Peace Corps shuttled them out of the country and forget them.
ABC also interviewed Chuck Ludlum, a vociferous critic of the Peace Corps who has done prodigious work documenting all kinds of problems. That was clearly not as intriguing a subject to 20/20’s viewers, and his segment was cut. But that story is out there waiting to be done, and 20/20 was only a beginning.
I know that some of my fellow returned volunteers are reading this and thinking, “Why does he write this now on the very day Sarge died.” I write it now because on this evening I remember Sarge as he was and I remember his dream and I know how far away from that we have come.
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Thank you John for this very touching and transparent viewpoint. There is still much work to be done, and we all wish it were done more quickly and effectively, but the inspiration and motivation Shriver passed down, to you and to so many, does not die with a life, and in that truth there is still so very much hope.
While researching government reports for my tiny reference book (Peace Corps Chronology; 1961-2010), I noticed that the oft-cited 15,000 volunteers was only true for one year out of fifty. For this reason, I calculated the yearly average by decade and included a graph in the appendice. During the 1960’s, the average number of volunteers in the field was just over 11,000 per year. Interestingly enough once the number of volunteers surpassed 10,000, the Peace Corps began to recieve complaints about volunteers not adapting and getting into trouble. The root of the problem was a lack of work. It might not be such a bad idea to cap the number of volunteers at 9,500 until the agency retools for more.
When I met Aaron Williams at a Santa Barbara shindig, we just talked about Chicago. Then I asked him where he would like me to mail his complimentary copy of my new book about the agency. He referred me to his assistant, out in the hall. So, away from the suits and necklaces, his assistant and I had the opportuniy of speaking more openly. I mentioned the rape problem.
“Oh. The numbers have improved. It’s no longer a problem,” he said and I realized that what we have is institutional denial. This is and has been a reported problem since 1992!