What strikes anyone reading about the creating of the Peace Corps was 1) how creatively it was organized; and 2) how fast it was put into operation. The reason was that the ‘founding fathers’ (and they were only fathers) took chances. Wofford remarks in Of Kennedys & Kings how a management consultant said to him one evening, “You guys had a good day today. You broke fourteen laws.” Then the consultant promised to straighten out the paper work and urged then all on, saying, “Keep it up, we’re making progress.”
     Wiggins in his interview with me listed 7 reasons why the Peace Corps was so successful in those early days of the Kennedy administration.
     1)  Bill Josephson and Warren Wiggins kept the idea of a “Peace Corps” simple. At first, the PCVs were only to teach English. As Wiggins told me, “Our cardinal rule in crafting ‘A Towering Task’ was to make the agency simple, workable, understandable, and within the competence of young Americans.” When it got started the Peace Corps Volunteers did a lot more, but in the beginning that was an explicit, verbalized statement of what the Peace Corps would be.
     2) The staff was anti-professional and anti-bureaucratic. “I don’t know from whence some of that came,” Warren recalled, “other than that I always prided myself on being a maverick, outspoken, audacious, irreverent.”
     3)  They were all amateurs. “We were,” said Wiggins, “a whole group of people who were amateurs in the business of being a government agency that ran volunteers.” The staff also was made up a wide assortment of people who, with a few exceptions, had no professional skills in volunteering and no international experience.
     4) The Peace Corps staff paid no attention to the hierarchies of professionalism. Wiggins recalled how the staff approached the teaching of English as a second language. “We called in the national association of teaching English as a secondary language,” he said, “and asked for help in developing a training program. They were all excited by this and said we needed to train for two years. I told them we didn’t have two years. They cut the training back to 18 months and said they couldn’t be responsible unless the Volunteers had 18 months of training. So, we said four months is the max, and we’re going to teach a lot besides teaching English as a second language. They left and we never paid attention to them again.”
     What the Peace Corps did was write their own books; teach their own courses. “We were ahead of the game, and we did not rely on the professionals,” Wiggins summed up. “For example, we had two former heads of the American Psychological Association heading up selection, but the selection process was anti-establishment. It didn’t run like normal selection processes.”
     5) The Peace Corps from the first considered the Department of State the enemy, and plotted to see that State never got its grips on the agency. The anti-establishment staff didn’t want the Peace Corps as an establishment. “I was so proud,” Wiggins recalled, “that for a couple of years we never had policy directives. We only had interim policy directives. And that was lovely.”
     6) The staff also didn’t want a personnel office in the agency and were able to get away with it for a few years. “Then we finally appointed someone,” Wiggins said, “but she had no power.”
     7) The Peace Corps staff took the long-term view about their work. Warren recalls an early public service ad. It was two photos of Chimbote, Peru. In the same ad there is a photo of Chimbote before the Peace Corps, and a photo of Chimbote after the Peace Corps. Both photos are the same. “You can’t tell the difference,” Wiggins says. “What a marvelous ad!”
     Looking back, one sees that being anti-establishment, amateurish, anti-professional was what made the Peace Corps work
     Shriver knew he had to start big to make the Peace Corps work and here was Wiggins, the Deputy Director of the Far Eastern Division of the International Cooperation Administration–and expert!– telling him that bigger was better and that the Peace Corps need not be a small experimental project. Wiggins and Josephson had given Shriver with their memo “A Towering Task” a song Shriver wanted to sing. And Shriver, and all those anti-establishment amateurs he had brought into the Peace Corps, started to sing, and they have been singing the same chorus ever since.

A footnote on yesterday’s long blog about, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser. In his book, Kaiser points out that 283 former Clinton administration officials have become lobbyists, along with 310 Bush appointees. They do it, of course, for the money and to stay in D.C. For example, a member of Congress can go from making $162,500, and a staff person’s $95,000, to a salary of $300,000 or more on K Street almost overnight. As Dylon said long ago, “money doesn’t talk, it brags.”
     President Obama on is first full day in office issued an executive order saying they can’t participate for two years in any matter they worked on in prior employment in the government. They can’t lobby Congress for two years upon leaving the administration, and they can’t lobby the Obama administration ever.
     One reason that Obama is having such a difficult time filling positions on his staff is because the Obama transition team has the toughest questionnaire for job applicants ever promulgated. It has sixty-three questions and is called by Norman Ornstein “the equivalent of full body cavity searches.”
     This is only the first step in cleaning up the mess, of course, but those old fat liberals like Cassidy have seen the writing on the wall. Cassidy  is quoted in So Damn Much Money, “a day of reckoning is coming” against him and his kind and the way business is done in Washington. Cassidy goes onto say that when the crises are so severe and the system so inadequate to the task of addressing them “people will really come to understand that they are stakeholders.”
     Exposing people like Cassidy is the first step, and Robert Kaiser has done a masterful job with his book, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government.

The signs that the special role for the Peace Corps in foreign aid was in trouble were all over Washington. Wofford ran into Ralph Dungan in the White House mess (Wofford was then a Special Assistant to the President on Civil Rights) and Dungan told him the Peace Corps would be a subdivision of the new AID. “Not if Sarge has anything to say about it,” Wofford tossed off, half joking, but also firmly believing Shriver walked on water.
The truth was that all these “new guys” Shriver brought in to work for the Peace Corps believed Sarge could get anything he wanted from the White House. But Shriver was scheduled to leave D.C. and the U.S. Who would carry the fight that was developing in D.C.?
Before leaving for his ’round the world trip to secure placements for PCVs, Shriver lobbied Sorensen, Dungan, and Labouisse, trying to persuade them of the absolute necessity of having an “independent” Peace Corps. Shriver also wrote Vice-President Johnson and sent a memo to JFK saying that it would be a “political mistake” for the Peace Corps to be “one of the categories of assistance in the new foreign aid bill.”
Kennedy was also “out of the loop” and did not chair the April 26th meeting. (At the time he was dealing with the repercussions of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Ralph Dungan step in to chair the AID meeting and Dungan, Labouisse, and David  Bell, director of then Bureau of the Budget, all recommended that the Peace Corps should be a subdivision of AID.
Representing the Peace Corps at this White House meeting were Wiggins and Josephson. They argued against this “bureaucratic tidiness” favored by Kennedy’s aides. Josephson took extensive notes, and immediately afterward, Wiggins cabled Shriver who by then had reached India. Wiggins’ message read: “Peace Corps not, repeat not, to have autonomy. Dungan describes  himself as acting on behalf of the President.”
Like Labouisse, Dungan believed that the Peace Corps should be part of AID and that the President need not be troubled by the “arguments of amateurs,” as Rice puts it in his book.
According to Rice in The Bold Experiment Wiggins and Josephson suspected that Dungan had not been objective. “There was some evidence that he had intercepted Shriver’s memorandum to the President and had prevented it from reaching him.”
But Dungandidn’t know who he was dealing with in Shriver and these ‘new guys’ in town. Wofford was right. Shriverwasn’t giving up in this fight with the presidential assistants over ‘turf.’
From India, Shriver cabled Wiggins and told him to ask Vice-President Johnson if he would intercedon behalf of the Peace Corps. He told Wiggins to get in touch with Bill Moyers, then Johnson’s aide. “Moyers took on the crucial role here,” writes Rice. At the time, Bill Moyers was only twenty-four, but Johnson’s key aide, and Moyers loved the Peace Corps, in fact, he would soon leave Johnson’s VP Office to work at the Peace Corps, taking a low-ranking job as Associate Director.
Johnson called Kennedy and asked for a private meeting. This was on May 1, 1961. As Bill Josephson later described it, and as reported by Gerard Rice, “Johnson, on his way to the Oval Office, picked up Henry Labouise and Dave Bell by their respective ears and began telling them what the foreign aid program really should do.”
No formal record was kept of the conversation between Kennedy and Johnson. Warren Wiggins told me in my 1997 interview, “by force of personality (not logic) Johnson cajoled the President into overturning a unanimous decision of his newly appointed staff, including the heads of the Bureau of Budget, the Department of State, the Foreign Aid Administration and the Civil Service Commission.”
Thanks to Johnson, Kennedy reversed this decision and gave the Peace Corps independence. Shriver would declared Lyndon Johnson “a founding father of the Peace Corps.”
Later Moyers ran into Dungan in the White House. Dungangreeted him with a wry smile and said, “Well, you sons of bitches won.” Dungan did not like the front-page headline in the New York Times: “Peace Corps Wins Fight for Autonomy.”
Somehow, the whole story of the Peace Corps’ battle for independence had been leaked to the press, much to the embarrassment of Labouisse, Dungan, and other Kennedy aides. This story, written by Peter Braestrup, summed up, “For Peace Corps officials, it was an important victory.” Wofford called it the “the biggest early decision” in Peace Corps history. According to Wiggins, “It is very doubtful if anything like the Peace Corps as we know it would have emerged if it wasn’t for Kennedy’s decision.”
Scott Stossel in his book Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriverwrites how Dungan was furious at the “hotshots in the Peace Corps” who had outfoxed him.
Bill Josephson later recalled, “Ralph Dungan called me and said we were on our own [as an agency]. I said, ‘Would you like to come over and talk about this? We’re going to be working together for a long time.’ And Ralph said, ‘Absolutely not. You are on your own. Don’t ever come here asking for help.’
If the Peace Corps wasn’t going to play by the rules established by the White House staff or by AID, then it shouldn’t expect to get any assistance or sympathy from Ralph Dungan or anyone else at AID. The Peace Corps had its independence; it would have to sink or swim on its own.
Well, the Peace Corps has been swimming very nicely ever since, thank you.

Warren Wiggins would tell me in an interview I did with him in January 1997 (published in RPCV Writers & Readers) that the greatest weakness of the original idea of the Peace Corps was that it didn’t have a constituency beyond “the youth of America.” The Peace Corps, Warren said, “was not an outgrowth of development experience. It didn’t have a constituency in the Congress, the press, or other leadership institutions in the U.S. nor did it have a constituency abroad.”
     This proved to be an immediate and immense problem. Kennedy had created a Peace Corps and no one wanted it! There were 25,000 potential PCVs waiting to go do something for America, but no Third World country asked for them.
     Getting requests for PCVs was a major problem. “Shriver almost terminated me in those early months,” Warren recalled in his interview. “He would never admit that, and I am not sure if it was conscious. Hell, getting overseas requests was my function and I couldn’t get any.”
     Wiggins sent out the word via normal diplomatic channels, but no one replied. Shriver was getting antsy. Kennedy was getting antsy. Then Kennedy decided to send Shriver overseas and seek placements for Volunteers. “My ass was saved by that foreign trip,” said Wiggins, “and I wasn’t even on it!”
     On April 22, Shriver began a twenty-six-day venture in personal diplomacy that took him to Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. With him were Ed Bayley, Bill Kelly, Franklin Williams, and Harris Wofford.
     Who were these guys anyway?
     Edwin Bayley was the first director of public information for the Peace Corps, coming from Wisconsin where he had been the executive assistant to Gaylord Nelson, the governor. (Wofford writes in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings, that  Bayley always complained Shriver was running the Peace Corps as if it was the last stages of a presidential campaign.) Bayley left the Peace Corps early on to become information director for AID.
     Bill Kelly was in charge of contracts. He came to the Peace Corps on May 15, 1961, to organize its contracts office from scratch.
     Franklin Williams was the chief of the division of private organizations, (developing programs through the United Nations) and had great influence within the agency and beyond his title. He had been (since 1958) the assistant attorney general of California, a close friend of Frank Mankiewiez, and had run Kennedy’s black voter registration drive.
     Harris Wofford was the first person Shriver called when they put together the Mayflower Hotel Gang to start the Peace Corps. He had worked on the Kennedy campaign with Shriver, would become Kennedy’s civil rights special assistant, and later director of the Ethiopia project and the Peace Corps Representative in Africa.
     Traveling around the world, the group arrived in India and met Prime Minister Nehru. In Ghana they met Kwame Nkrumah. In Tanganyika it was Prime Minister Julius Nyerere. Shriver got permission to send PCVs to India, Ghana, and Tanganyika. They got permission, everyone on the trip agreed, because Sarge charmed the leaders of these three countries. Wiggins would say, “If Shriver had not made that trip, we would not have had a Peace Corps.”
     Wofford would write in a memorandum to Kennedy on Mary 25, 1961, after their trip, “Shriver is a born diplomat. I have never been witness to so successful an international operation. His meetings with government officials, newsmen and private citizens all produced good results for the Peace Corps and U.S. relations. Our ambassador and other overseas officers in every country expressed to me and others their admiration and appreciation of Shriver, their amazement at how much was accomplished in such a short time, and their increased hopes for the Peace Corps in their respective countries.”
     With three commitments from developing countries the Peace Corps was in the words of Warren Wiggins, “in business.”

 

Over the weekend I read a great review of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser [Knopf 2009]. (Kaiser is The Washington Post associate editor and senior correspondent.) The review was written by Michael Tomasky, the editor-at-large for The Guardian, and appears in the April 9, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books. You should take a look at it for no other reason than to see why it is so important that Obama is able to clean out the lobbyists on K Street in Washington, D.C.

Michael Tomasky writes in his review: “A central aspect of Obama’s entire approach to governance has focused on the reducing the power and influence of these lobbies.”

What is key is what Obama said at the end of February in a radio-video address about his plans for his new administration: “I know these steps won’t sit well the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I.”

Who are these lobbyists? In his book, Robert Kaiser traces the rise of this “corroded culture” by “following the money,” so to speak. He tells the story of Gerald Cassidy and his firm. It is the tale of a Brooklyn boy liberal who today has a personal fortune exceeding $100 million, all earned through lobbying. As he tells the story, Tomasky writes in his engaging review, Kaiser shows how the lobbying business in Washington grew, along with other developments like the dramatic increase in the cost of election campaigns, leading to the present-day mess.

And it didn’t begin with Republicans: Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, and Jack Abramoff. No, our present day problem started with a Sixties idealistic liberal, Gerald Cassidy, who when he left Brooklyn worked in a legal aid program for itinerant farm workers in Florida, then for George McGovern, back when McGovern mattered, and when McGovern replaced Cassidy with that squirmy Bob Shrum, Cassidy and another young idealist, Ken Schlossberg, set up shop in the basement of Schlossberg’s Capitol Hill townhouse. Both of them had 1) liberal backgrounds, and 2) knowledge of nutrition issues from having been staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.

Michael Tomasky in his long review asks the question: how does one parlay a background in poverty and food stamps into lobbying riches? We might also ask: what was the first step that Sixties Liberals took to get on a fast track to corrupting America?
It was easy. Tomasky details the baby steps of these two Toddlers on the Shady Walks of Capital Hill.

A California businessman whose company provided ingredients for school lunches had complained that he had not been paid by the Department of Agriculture. The son of this man had met Ken Schlossberg and called him up. Gerald Cassidy knew a person who could help at the Department of Agriculture. The business man got his money. Cassidy/Schlossberg received their first lobbying check in the mail. It was as simple as that. In Washington it all comes down to is who one knows whom on Capital Hill, and do you have their cell #?

Next came the Kellogg Company to the basement office of these young lobbyists. They wanted help getting their breakfast cereals included in the school lunch program. Then the National Frozen Food Association needed a report on congressional attitudes towards supermarkets. Pillsbury, Nabisco, and General Mills came knocking at the door with money to spread around town. All of this is ‘normal’ enough for lobbyists. Business as usual in D.C.

Then the terrain changed. A Frenchman named Jean Mayer had just been appointed the president of Tufts University. Tomasky writes: “Mayer, sensitive to Tufts’s low status compared to Harvard, wanted to start a world-class nutrition center at the university. Could Cassidy and Schlossberg help some how?”

Cassidy went looking for an angle, i.e., a loophole, somewhere in the statutes and regulations he wanted a hole where he might wedge in Tufts’s request for a nutrition center. It turned out that a Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota had gotten federal money appropriated for a project in North Dakota. The wording suggested that this authorization was the way to fund with federal money the facility Mayer wanted for his university. Money that would be appropriated for 1) a specific institution (Tufts) to use for 2) a specific purpose (nutrition center). We call that loophole today “an earmark.” Kaiser writes that it was one of the first of its kind. He also writes that it didn’t hurt Cassidy/Schlossberg that Tip 0′Neill was the local congressman in Boston, and as we know about O’Neill: all politics is local.

Soon under universities took notice and Georgetown University (those Jesuits know how to follow the money) were looking for a piece of the action. Other followed these two universities. Soon Cassidy/Schlossberg were rich in lobbying fees and in Congress “earmarks” became routine on the Hill.

While Cassidy’s firm might have invented the earmark device it, was the Republicans who perfected it. Kaiser quotes retired Republican senator Chuck Hagel about the famous Tom DeLay K Street Project…..”They wanted to build a triad: the White House, K Street and business, and Congress, and just luck up the issues.”

That “project” came to an end when the lobbyist Jack Abramoff swindled Native American gaming interests out of millions and ended up in jail where he is currently serving time.

Cassidy, meanwhile, is still walking the halls of Congress, pressing the flesh, but he has lost some of his power in his old age. Also he split with his buddy Ken Schlossberg years ago. That is a great story to end this blog.

It seems the break up of the Cassidy/Schlossberg basement firm came at the 1984 Democratic convention. There was a dispute between the partners over whether Schlossberg and his wife could use a limousine the firm had hired to drive about an hour north of San Francisco to look at some Brittany spaniel puppies the Schlossbergs wanted to buy. The Cassidy/Schlossberg firm was going to the dogs!

Well, enough is enough, even for low life like lobbyists.

You have mostlikely heard about, or read about, Dambisa Moyo and her new book: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa that was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia. She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters from Harvard University. She worked at the World Bank in D.C., then at Goldman Sachs for 8 years in the debt capital markets, hedge fund coverage and in global macroeconomics teams.

Her new book says that foreign aid is preventing Africa from becoming self-reliant. She proposes that within the decade, all foreign aid to Africa be cut off. To make her point about ‘dead aid’ she has gone after Bono and other celebrities who flock to Africa to get babies and give aid. She has earned herself the title, Anti-Bono.
Her argument is that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has not helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. She points out that  poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined-and millions continue to suffer.

She sees the way to salvation through trade, and cites China as one super power who might be the answer for Africa, though she has some serious reservations about China, too.

She loves micro credits. She thinks that remittances from the African Diaspora as a key factor. That, and good local government. “The African issue should be championed by the African leaders charged with delivering long-term growth for their people. Anyone else offering opinions is pretty much moot” is how she sums it all up

But what about the Peace Corps? Where, if anywhere, are the PCVs? Are they, as we said in the ’60s, part of the problem, or part of the solution?

One way, I think, we make our difference is at the micro level. Nowhere in Africa can you find anyone more micro than a PCV! We are living examples of ‘micro’ as we walk at the grass roots levels through all those villages and towns. Think about our small role in the African landscape the next time Bono flies over the Sahel.

The Mayflower Hotel Gang outlined “seven steps” to form the Peace Corps in a February 22, 1961 memorandum to Kennedy. This memo is interesting for several reasons. The first point Shriver made was that the Peace Corps should be established by an Executive Order within the Mutual Security Program. William Josephson, then the only lawyer in the ‘new’ Peace Corps was the principal author of the President’s Executive Order. [This is not entirely true for Shriver was a lawyers, as was Wofford, among others, but Josephson had come in with Wiggins with their Towering Task Memo, and was a government employee, as was Warren Wiggins who was made Director ad interim. And, therefore, the FIRST DIRECTOR of the agency.] Shriver was appointed by Kennedy on March 4, but subject to Senate confirmation. It was May 21 before Shriver made his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his appointment was confirmed. In fact, he became the director only one day before the first Volunteers received letters from President Kennedy himself–on May 22, 1961–asking them to join the new Peace Corps.
     By January 1, 1962, a year after Kennedy had become president, the Peace Corps had trained and placed 580 Volunteers in 10 countries. By the end of 1963, 7,000 Volunteers were in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and what they then called Oceania.

 

What Shriver also said in his original memo to Kennedy was that other countries should establish programs like the Peace Corps. He wanted Kennedy to send a letter to all heads of state at the United Nation “to avoid as best we can the possibility of misunderstanding in the rest of the world about the Peace Corps’ function and purpose and irritation with an appearance of arrogance in assuming that young Americans automatically can teach everybody…” Shriver suggested that Kennedy “invite other countries to form their own Peace Corps units and propose that this become a truly international project through UN coordination.”
     Other nations did create programs like the Peace Corps. In fact, Great Britain had their version of a ‘peace corps’ in operation before the U.S. and soon France, Germany, etc., and Japan, were sending volunteers into the Third World.
     Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s published in ‘98 is a terrific book that goes into this ’spirit of volunteering’ that swept the world. While the U.S. didn’t invent such volunteer movements, or were they first to ‘go abroad,’ the Peace Corps was the first government sponsored agency, and that made all the difference in terms of size, influence and importance.
     In launching the new idea, Shriver also suggested that the President cable [no emails then] U.S. Ambassadors, U.S.I.S and ICA representatives, and other overseas officials to expect to be “flooded with questions.” Shriver said they should be “able to give accurate and helpful answers. Also they should be asked to give careful consideration to possible Peace Corps projects.”
     Shriver also wanted JFK to make a public announcement at a live TV-press conference about the establishment of the Peace Corps. “The emphasis should be on the establishment and description of the Peace Corps rather than on the person chosen to direct it.”
     The one question was the actual ‘nature’ of the Peace Corps. While the agency was being created by Executive Order, and would be (as Shriver suggested) “established within the State Department,” Shriver wanted the Peace Corps to be semi-autonomous, and that idea of being “semi-autonomous’ became a huge stumbling block in the establishment of the agency. It would take LBJ to solve Shriver’s problem and the future of the agency.

At the time of Shriver’s February 22, 1961 memorandum to President Kennedy–stating that the Peace Corps should be established as a semi-autonomous agency–there was a lot of professional resistance to the whole idea of sending young Americans overseas to do good. Career diplomat like Elliot O. Briggs described the Peace Corps’ team cry as “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo. Let’s go out and wreak some good on the natives,” as Wofford reports in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings.
     Throughout the State Department diplomats were indifferent to hostile to the whole idea of a Peace Corps. But not Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s new Secretary of State.  Rusk told Shriver that he thought the Peace Corps idea was “first-class.” (Rusk’s sister, during my time as an APCD in Ethiopia, would also work as an APCD in the Empire.)
     Henry Labouisse, who was appointed in 1961 as head of International Cooperation Administration (ICA), Eisenhower’s foreign aid agency, had a policy of massive capital investment accompanied by a few expert advisers. This program proven to be unsuccessful, nevertheless, he feared that sending inexperienced “youngsters” into strange cultures would be inviting disaster and embarrassment. Labouisse wanted the Peace Corps placed under firm control of Kennedy’s new AID program where its progress could be strictly monitored. When ICA became AID. Labouisse lasted one year as its head, then went off to Greece as ambassador from 1962-’64; he later was head of Unicef. 
     In late March of ‘61 Shriver realized there was a problem with his vision of a “semi-autonomous” Peace Corps when he saw a draft of Kennedy’s speech on foreign aid. Shriver saw that the President had sandwiched the agency inside of AID. He was attending a meeting at the White House and spotted a large chart of the new AID super-agency: the Peace Corps was off in a far corner, listed as a  “resource.”
     All of Kennedy’s aides: Goodwin, Ralph Dungan, and Sorensen said it only made ’sense’ to put the Peace Corps under the umbrella of the new AID. Kennedy, however, was still undecided and Shriver got to him and the speech on foreign aid given on March 22 was vague about the Peace Corps, saying only that the new agency would have “distinctive identity and appeal.”
     Shriver thought he had ‘won’ this battle with the White House and the Peace Corps would emerge as a semi-autonomous agency in the new administration, independent of AID, but Shriver was wrong.
     In these first frantic days of creating the Peace Corps timing was everything. What mattered most was who was in the White House Oval Office when a decision was being made. The problem for the Peace Corps was that Shriver was not only not in the room, he wasn’t even in the country.
     According to Gerard Rice in his book, Kennedy had told Shriver to visit Third World leaders and tell them about the Peace Corps ‘viability’ in order to generate requests for PCVs. So Shriver went off around the world and was in India when Henry Labouisse (who was always against Shriver’s grand plans for the Peace Corps) was setting up a meeting for Kennedy to decide how all foreign aid programs, including the Peace Corps, would be incorporated into AID.
     The meeting was scheduled for April 26, 1961. On April 17, 1961, a force of 15,000 Cuban exiles landed at Cochinos Bay in southern Cuba. Now JFK had bigger problems than where the Peace Corps would find a happy home in his new administration.

In Shriver’s memo to Kennedy, Sarge had written, “We have submitted to your Special Counsel legal memoranda showing how the Peace Corps can be created as a program agency in the State Department within the existing Mutual Security framework….Congress can consider the program fully when it deals with the requests for specific legislation and funds for FY 1962.”
     Shriver and the others who had drafted this memo and come up with the “idea of a Peace Corps” saw the new agency as being within the State Department so that it “can work closely with State and ICA, drawing on their personnel, services and facilities, particularly pending reorganization of the whole foreign aid program. But the Peace Corps should be a semi-autonomous entity with its own public face. This new wine should not be poured into the old ICA bottle.”
     While the Band of Boys in the Mayflower Hotel thought this was a great way to create a new agency, it wasn’t seen that way at the White House.   Gerard Rice in his book The Bold Experiment:JFK’s Peace Corps reported that Ted Sorensen, then Kennedy’s special counsel, told Shriver the Report was very different from what he had envisaged. The people around Kennedy were thinking of a small, low-cost addendum to the overall foreign assistance program, and here Shriver had produced this “Towering Task” concept, pushed by Wiggins and Josephson and also supported by Shriver, Wofford, and others where the Peace Corps would be established fast and big. Wiggins and Josephson were thinking of sending thirty-,fifty-, and even a hundred thousand PCVs overseas. [What were those guys smoking in the Mayflower Hotel? And this was years before Eliot Spitzer discovered the hotel!]
     Rice writes, “Wiggins also felt strongly that if Kennedy did not set up the Peace Corps at the beginning of his administration by swift executive action, then there was a possibility the program might never see the light of day.”
     [Harris Wofford tells the story that Kennedy had asked Max Millikan of MIT, a long-standing economic adviser, to work up a 'Peace Corps idea' for him. Kennedy reportedly was worried that "naive young Americans" might become embroiled in some debacle overseas and that blame would be changed to Kennedy's inexperience in foreign affairs. (Remember the Bay of Pigs?) Millikan came up with a lengthy memorandum entitled, "An International Youth Service" that favored a corps that would be limited and tentative, a program of only "several hundred young people in the first year or two." Volunteers, for example, would go to Nigeria, live in college dormitories, and go out during the day to work in the nearby community. Wofford said Shriver gave this memorandum to prospective Peace Corps candidates and if they agreed with Millikan's limited approach to the creation of the Peace Corps, they weren't hired.]
     While the Peace Corps Executive action idea hit a wall inside the White House, it got help from Larry O’Brien, special assistant to Kennedy for congressional relations. He liked the idea and thought using it to create the Peace Corps would be the “effective tactic.”
     Shriver on one-on-one with Kennedy convinced him to use the Executive Order approach and the Peace Corps became the only program of the Kennedy administration allowed the distinctive status of an “emergency agency.”
     But Kennedy was taking a political risk, as Rice points out, in that he was making a political and personal pledge to the new agency, to what the Mayflower Gang had dreamed up. He was focusing public attention to it: newspapers were writing daily stories about its creation, watching its development.
     Also, coming into focus and national attention were the major figures of the early administration. Besides Shriver, the new faces of the new agency were Wofford, Wiggins, and Josephson. These were not household names, and more new names to Washington were being added quickly to this list. It seemed that everyone who wanted to work for the Kennedy Administration wanted to work at the Peace Corps.
     But there were more problems for the Peace Corps. One was the placement of Volunteers. No country had requested those 25,000 people who had already written Kennedy wanting to do something for their country. The other problem was the more touchy: how independent would the Peace Corps be in Foggy Bottom. As Bill Moyers put it, “The old-line employees of State and AID coveted the Peace Corps greedily. It was natural instinct; established bureaucracies do not like competition from new people.
     Shriver, Wofford, Wiggins, and Josephson were in many ways new people. The only different was that they were smarter then the ‘old-line employees’ when it came to playing bureaucratic games and they were about to show Foggy Bottom how touch football was played in the new Kennedy administration.