Peace Corps Worldwide

The legendary first Chief of the Division of Evaluation of the Peace Corps, Charlie Peters, has just published Lyndon B. Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 36th President, 1963-1969. It is part of the American President Series, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Sean Wilentz. If not for Vietnam, Peter writes, Johnson would be considered by many to have been one of the greatest presidents, and Charlie points out that LBJ’s domestic legislative achievement is second only to FDR’s. However, many felt that while LBJ’s domestic goals were laudable, the laws he bullied through to meet them were deeply flawed and sowed the seeds of entitlement politics. Charlie asserts that Johnson, raised in the nasty world of Texas politics, remained ruthlessly dedicated to his own advancement and became a great, if flawed, statesman. Charlie was something of a ‘statesman’ himself in West Virginia where he was in the House of Delegates before . . .

I remember back in ’95 e-mailing Susan Snelson, who was finishing up her tour as a PCV in Poland and asking her how she had become involved in the Peace Corps. In the late ’80s, she told me, she had gone to visit her son who was a PCV in Niger and she decided ‘she could do this!’ and came home to Midland, Texas, where she owned a travel business, turned the business over to others, joined the Peace Corps, and went off to Poland to help them develop their tourist business. Because she had been in the travel industry, she was assigned to the Ministry of Tourist. It all made a lot of sense to the CD and the Polish government, but they, the Tourist Bureau, had no idea what to do with Susan. They gave her a desk to sit at, and for awhile she sat at it, but the Ministry had no idea who . . .

As Chris Hedrick (Senegal 1988-90), a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he studied political history, and who is today the CD in Senegal, mentioned in his ‘comment’ on this site that it is the PCVs who make the difference, not the HQ staff in D.C. Chris wrote on July 29: As always, the real work of the Peace Corps is being done every day by Volunteers in the field. For example, my Volunteers have led the way in Senegal with innovative approaches to preventing malaria and distributing bed nets. They have provided an example that has now been adopted by the government of Senegal and USAID and is saving hundreds of lives here. See: http://pcsenegal.org/malaria/index.html No particular help from Washington, and none needed but outstanding work by dedicated Volunteers which my Senegalese staff and I do our best to support, as has ever been the case. There are a few other examples of what PCVs in . . .

Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) is the Associate Director of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. The Black Mountain Institute  is an international literary center “dedicated to promoting discourse on today’s most pressing issues” and Wiley is author of the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction and reissued in 2007 by Hawthorne Books), Fools’ Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, and Ahmed’s Revenge. His most recent novel, Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, was published by the new Michener Series at the University of Texas Press in 2007. Wiley has been teaching creative writing at  UNLV since 1989, and brought the Peace Corps Masters International Program in creative writing to the university in the mid-nineties. Well, now he has arranged a wonderful evening of Peace Corps Writers in Las Vegas to celebrate the creation of the Peace Corps. This is another event to celebrate the . . .

It should be noted that when Shriver and the others were developing the “Peace Corps” in the Mayflower Hotel it was Sarge who held the position that Peace–not Development–that was the overriding purpose, and the process of promoting it was necessarily complex. So the Peace Corps should learn to live with complexity that could not be summed up in a single proposition. Finally, the Task Force agreed on three. Goal One:  It can contribute to the development of critical countries and regions. Goal Two: It can promote international cooperation and goodwill toward this country. Goal Three: It can also contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world. On the morning of Friday, February 24, 1961, Shriver delivered the report-the Peace Corps Magna Carta-to Kennedy and told him: “If you decide to go ahead, we can be in business Monday morning.” It had taken Shriver, Wofford, Wiggins, Josephson and . . .

On November 4-5, 2010, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Colombia I Volunteers, the first Peace Corps group to assemble, and Rutgers University, the first Peace Corps training site, will celebrate the moment when the idea of a Peace Corps became a reality. Keeping the Peace Corps spirit alive, these Colombia I RPCVs, and the University,  will hold a Peace Corps forum on  November 4.  The next morning, Rutgers University’s President, Richard L. McCormick, will preside at a commemorative ceremony, culminating in the unveiling of a plaque on the spot where Colombia I began training for the Peace Corps on June 25,1961. Colombia I RPCVs will host a cumbia-laden celebratory banquet on the evening of November 5, where “elaborations and exaggerations of the truth,” particularly with respect to Peace Corps exploits, will not only be allowed, but  admired and encouraged.

A lot gets lost over time and 50 years of history is a long time for an agency. Reading this past weekend the long, and deadly prose written report: The Peace Corps A Comprehensive Agency Assessment, published by the agency in June 2010, I realized how much of the original spirit of the Peace Corps has evaporated in five decades of service. This report claims six people wrote it, with lots of advisory committees, but I’m told the key writers were Jean Lujan, an attorney, who recently retired from the Department of Justice. She was a PCV in Chile back in 1965-67, and a graduate of the U of Michigan. The other writer (to use the term loosely) was Carlos Torres. He is the founder and former president of I Corporation, a company specializing in international consulting. In other words, a Beltway Bandit. They, and their cohorts, attempts to evaluate the agency, and make recommendations . . .