Laurence Leamer’s (Nepal 1965-67) next book will be The Price of Justice,  a nonfiction legal thriller telling the story of a coal giant CEO who sets out to destroy a small mine owner in West Virginia.

Being First: An Informal History of the Early Peace Corps
by Robert Klein (Ghana 1961–63)
Wheatmark, Inc
$19.95
182 pages
2010

Reviewed by Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963–65)

GHANA I — Peace Corps groups were Roman-numeraled in the early years  — began with 58 trainees at the University of California at Berkeley. It was July 1961, four months after President John F. Kennedy asked R. Sargent Shriver to establish the Peace Corps. The 58 guinea pigs and their trainers were all too aware that the experiment could rise or fall on the basis of their performance.

“That challenge,” Robert Klein writes in Being First, “created a sense of uniqueness which has lasted through the years.” Fifty years, of course, and counting.

Klein was a 32-year-old teacher in Harlem when he volunteered. Kennedy’s summons “added a moral dimension” to Klein’s “restless romanticized adventurism.” The group supposedly had been sifted through a fine mesh of selection criteria. Klein et al had their doubts. “Although we were constantly told how select a group of trainees we were, the haste with which we had been gathered led us to believe that, in fact, we were probably the first 58 people who had applied to the Peace Corps.”

This tongue-in-cheek wit infuses Klein’s breezy and well-written account of Ghana I, its exemplary service and its enduring cohesion. Over the years, Klein has interviewed Ghana I veterans, former trainers and staff to reconstruct what he calls an “informal history” of the Peace Corps’ formative period.

Klein and his Ghana I comrades make no claim to being anything other than the first PCVs on foreign soil. What is remarkable, in Klein’s telling, is how closely their frustrations and fragile achievements foretold what was to come for the 200,000-plus Volunteers who have followed. He captures the tension which arose, almost immediately, between early Peace Corps staff who emphasized “doing a job” and those who believed that making friends across cultural barriers was the litmus test for Volunteers’ effectiveness.

When he visited his pioneers in Ghana, Shriver — according to one Volunteer’s recollection — was explicit: The job was paramount. But Franklin Williams and Richard Goodwin, headquarters heavies who accompanied Shriver, flogged a very different message: The primary objective was to counter the image of foreign aid workers’ cultural insensitivity, searingly portrayed in the The Ugly American, a novel published just three years earlier.

Shriver was well aware of the jousting he was encouraging between pragmatic, program-oriented staff such as Warren Wiggins and John Alexander, who had come over from the forerunner of USAID; and, in Klein’s words, “more idealistic global thinkers,” such as Harris Wofford and Bill Moyers.

George Carter, the first country director in Ghana, referred to these contending camps as the “hard heads” and the “soft heads.” Wiggins, a hard head who had helped to crystallize the Peace Corps’ mission in “The Towering Task,” believed that Volunteers should focus on achieving concrete development objectives. The soft heads were more enamored by the prospect of Volunteers working shoulder-to-shoulder with the people and demonstrating Americans’ supposedly innate egalitarianism.

Both groups, Klein writes, “were ultimately hostage to the reality that it was people like me, less ideological and more activist, who would actually decide what a Peace Corps Volunteer was by being one.”

Carter, whom Klein interviewed a few years before his death in 2001, confessed that he thought Kennedy’s proposed Peace Corps was a “piece of nonsense.” An experienced Africa hand, Carter was hoping for an ambassadorship in West Africa and believed that sending naïve, mostly white “kids” to Africa was asking for trouble. Shriver, of course, convinced him otherwise. So did Ghana I.

The group, who met with President Kennedy in the White House rose garden shortly before departing, were hardly representative of the American demographic. Just two were African-American. A white Virginian was the only Southerner. Nor did they meet the qualifications set by Ghana’s skeptical Ministry of Education. Ghana wanted only teachers with master’s degrees, preferably in math and science. The ministry expressly asked that Volunteers be graduates from leading Ivy League universities. Late in the day, two academics involved in the training had to presume upon their friendship with Ghana’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, to persuade him to accept the motlier crew assembled by the Peace Corps.

Shriver, Nkrumah and the members of Ghana I in fact shared a common vision of the Peace Corps’ raison d’etre: To do jobs that needed doing and for which there were no qualified Ghanaians. The Ghana government underscored this by insisting that it pay the Volunteers’ salaries.

Klein, who later directed the Peace Corps program in Ghana and innovated in-country training, abstains from editorializing about the Peace Corps in its longer-term or contemporary contexts. He is content to recall how the Peace Corps came to be, his experience as a Volunteer in remote western Ghana and the memories of several of his compatriots. He dedicates Being First to the Ghanaians “who had the grace and charm to put up with us. . . .”

Sarge would have loved that.

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Kevin G. Lowther taught secondary school history as a member of Sierra Leone IV (1963–65). He subsequently served in several headquarters positions, principally in the Africa regional office. In 1970, he assisted C. Payne Lucas in establishing Africare and later managed its Southern Africa programs for 29 years before retiring in 2007. In 1978, he and Lucas published Keeping Kennedy’s Promise, a critical analysis of the Peace Corps during its first decade. More recently, Lowther has written a biography of a Sierra Leonean who survived slavery in America and returned to his homeland to fight the slave trade. The African American Odyssey of John Kizell, to be released May 15 by the University of South Carolina Press, is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

To order Being First: An Informal History of the Early Peace Corps from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that helps support our awards.

I’m a big fan of Roger Rosenblatt. I love his essays on PBS News Hour. I love his soft voice, quiet demeanor, the gentleness of this gentleman. When I grow up, I want to be just like him.

I love the way he writes, the smooth elegance of his prose. He is like that polished English butler of English movies who has everything under control and quietly, unobtrusively, brings the dinner party to the dining room table and serves them roast duck under candle light.

Besides everything else that Roger Rosenblatt does, he writes books. Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing, just published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, is his latest. He is also professor of English and writing at SUNY Stony Brook. He teaches students how to write. Though, as he says in his essay, “Can I teach them to become professional writers? No. Can I teach them to write better than they do? Yes.’

Tonight, waiting for the ice storm that is about to encase the east coast, I read an excerpted from his now book. It is entitled, “And Then What Happened?” and is in the current issue of The Chronicle Review.

In this essay, Rosenblatt talks about the wide range of backgrounds of his current students. He talks about teaching writing, and talks about why people write. All of this is fascinating. I wish I could take his course, but Stony Brook is out at the end of Long Island, and I have a job, and this blog, which amazingly takes an amazingly lot of work, and also I am writing a novel, and that, too, is labor, if not of love.

Anyway.

What does Roger have to say?

He said so much in this short essay that I am going to order the book from Amazon right after I tell you a few things, then maybe you, too, will buy his book.

His writing course at Stony Brook is focused on short stories, essays, and poetry, and he starts with the short story. He tells his students, “stories are central to life.” Next is the essays, because an essay is the story of an idea or of a true event. And the poem is the story of a feeling.

What he tries to achieve in his classroom is a place where “students feel safe with one another and will trust the group with personal information they use in their writing.”

They will in his class read one another’s work and comment on it. He tells them, “You will never have a situation like this again. Here, in these classes, you have colleagues, people who share everything with you and wish you well. Writing anywhere else is a lonely enterprise.”

Students who feel safe with one another, and who trust each other, will learn from each other. They will, if only for a brief moment of time, become closer than  family.

Roger Rosenblatt then tells a story of how this happens.

In one class, a women read a section of her novel aloud, another woman asked, “May I be your friend?” The first woman answered, “You already are.”

Over the weekend I read this interesting article in The New York Review of Books by Jason Epstein. He was reviewing a book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson.

Epstein is a famous figure in U.S. publishing. In 1952 he launched the trade paperback format. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books.

In his review he was talking about the whole industry. As he writes, “Far more than any other mediu, books contain civilizations, the ongoing conversation betwen present and past. Without this conversation we are lost. But books are also a business….”

So, the article really is about books and the digital revolution, and he makes this point, however, (in a footnote) that is interesting:

“Self-publishing has an illustrious history. Milton published Areopagitica himself and Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. When he could not find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Street, Stephen Crane published it himself. James Joyce in similar circumstances published Ulysses with the help of Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop. The Joy of Cooking was first published by its author and so were such recent best sellers as Richard Evan’s Christmas Box and Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence.

So, when in doubt: Self Publish!

George Wallace (Korea 1975–77), writer-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, will present a program of readings and conversation entitled “Whitman And Beyond, Fanfares for the Common Man” at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos NM, on Friday Feb 4, 2011 at 7 pm. In his presentation, Wallace will trace the thread of 19th century Romantic/Transcendental ideas about ‘the common man’ through early and mid-20th century American writing, and into the contemporary era.

According to Laurel Johnson, Review Editor of New Works Review, “Wallace’s poetry is neither conventional nor even ‘conventionally’ atypical… Anyone who ever loved or needed love should read these poems.”

Some of Wallace’s recent work:

Poppin Johnny
Three Rooms Press
2009

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Who’s Handling Your Aubergines
Green Panda Press
2008

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Sunnyside Up: The Dream Cloud Egg
Good Japan 2008

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Summer of Love Summer of Love
Shivastan Woodstock NY 2008

KEN AULETTA HAS WRITTEN the “Annals of Communications” columns for The New Yorker since 1992, and is the author of eleven books, including five national bestsellers. His latest, Googled: The End of The World As We Know It, chronicles the ubiquitous company’s rise to prominence. Among Ken’s other books are: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed And Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman; and Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire. In ranking him as America’s premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.” He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and one of the 20th Century’s top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers.

Auletta grew up on Coney Island, attended public schools, earned a B.S. from the State University College at Oswego, N.Y., and an M.A. in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Starting in 1974, Ken was the chief political correspondent for the New York Post, then staff writer and columnist for the Village Voice and Contributing Editor of New York Magazine. He has hosted numerous public television programs, served as a political commentator for both WNBC-TV and WCBS-TV, appeared regularly on Nightline, the News Hour with Jim Lerher, and the Charlie Rose Show. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, a Trustee of PEN, is a member of the New York Public Library’s Emergency Committee for the Research Libraries, and the Library’s Committee to Protect Journalists. The State University of New York awarded him a Doctor of Letters in 1990.

Early in his career, Auletta taught and trained Peace Corps Volunteers. Last week, Ken was speaking at the University of North Florida, and made time to talk with novelist Tony D’Souza via email about his writing career, his path to success, his work ethic, his marriage to literary agent Amanda Urban, fatherhood, and, of course, his relationship with the Peace Corps.

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Talking with . . .

. . . Ken Auletta

An interview by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02, Madagascar 2002–03)

Ken, let’s get this out of the way before we start: I admire your achievements immensely, envy your access and outlets, the stories you’ve covered. You’ve had a long and distinguished career, as has your wife, Amanda Urban. Are you living the life you dreamed of as a kid in Coney Island?

Growing up on Coney Island I hoped to become a professional pitcher or an FBI agent. Neither made any sense, but my imagination was limited. I got into the only college that would take me, the State University of New York at Oswego, and could not have done this without a boost from the baseball coach. In graduate school, while studying for a doctorate in political science (I received an MA), I imagined working as a diplomat or in government. I did work in government and politics for awhile. I’ve been a journalist most of my adult life. Go figure.

Your connection to the Peace Corps — you weren’t a Volunteer, you were a trainer. When and in what capacity? You also worked on the Bobby Kennedy Presidential Campaign. Were you more of an idealist in those days? How did the experiences of your early adulthood shape who you are?

In my second year of graduate studies at the Maxwell School at Syracuse U, I had a fellowship at the East African Studies Center. Syracuse U was a major academic center for Peace Corps trainees. My duty was to teach trainees about political science. I derived a tremendous sense of public service from this, as I did when I quit my job and went to work in Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. As I do, not incidentally, from journalism and writing books.

Was journalism/writing something you always pursued, or was it something you fell into?

I was a weekly columnist for the Oswegonian and the editor of the college underground newspaper, which with tongue in cheek was called, Pravda. I wrote a weekly column for the Syracuse U school newspaper and also founded and served as editor of the of campus magazine. My first job out of graduate school was as a speech writer (and coat holder). After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I became the editor of a weekly newspaper, before heading back to government and politics. I wanted to go back to journalism but I felt a commitment to a reform candidate, Howard J. Samuels, who wanted to be Governor of New York. With my help as campaign manager, he lost twice. I then escaped back to journalism.

How did you land at the Post and then the NYer?

After Samuels lost the 1974 race for Governor, I was hired as the chief political correspondent for the New York Post. Two weeks later, I had a run-in with the then publisher, Dorothy Schiff, and I left. I would become a political columnist for the Village Voice and an investigative reporter for New York Magazine. When Rupert Murdoch engineered a hostile takeover of these two publications, to try and block this myself and about 40 other staffers went on strike, threatening to resign if Murdoch won. He did, and most of us quit. Soon after, I received a call from William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, asking to see me. I started writing for The New Yorker in 1977.

How did you get your first book deal — was the idea of the book yours, or a suggestion? Did you write it first or sell the pitch? Three Blind Mice became a bestseller. Was that a life changing event for you career-wise?

The first book deal grew out of my coverage of New York City and state’s financial crisis while I was at the Voice, New York, and The New Yorker. Jason Epstein, the editor-in-chief of Random House, was rabidly interested in the subject and suggested a book explaining what happened and why. That book, The Streets Were Paved With Gold: The Decline of New York — An American Tragedy, was my first. My first bestseller came in 1985 with the publication of Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman. My next bestseller was Three Blind Mice in 1991.

If I had to pinpoint a life changing event, I would probably go back to my first mentor, Abraham Lass, who was my high school principal at Abraham Lincoln H.S. I was in my junior year and “borrowed” a book of passes to leave the school on free period to hang out at the sweet shop across the street. The Dean nabbed me and threw me out of school. My horrified working class parents appealed to Mr. Lass, who met with me and asked, “Ken-nit, what do you like about attending Abraham Lincoln high school?”

“Football and baseball,” I said.

“Ken-nit, how do you suppose you can play football and baseball for Abraham Lincoln if you don’t attend Abraham Lincoln?”

He had my attention, and proposed that I could return if I gave up my free period and used them to read books he would assign and then discuss them. Abe Lass sparked curiosity and helped open my mind. Without his prod, I might have followed the tough guys in Coney Island who shunned college.

You won a National Magazine Award for your profile of Ted Turner, have gained access in other stories in ways other journalists couldn’t, such as in your latest book Googled. Can you give us some tips on conducting good interviews and gaining access?

Getting access to people often requires time and personality. Time, because prominent people require a period of courtship before they consent. It took me three years to get Rupert Murdock to consent to a 1995 New Yorker profile (which he didn’t appreciate). Personality, because no one will agree to open themselves up to someone who acts like a dentist eager to drill their teeth. If, on the other hand, you have an agreeable manner and convince them that you really seek to understand them and what they do — and you have the time and space that is granted by The New Yorker and books — you’ve got a better shot.

Most people, even those we think of as egregious, think they are doing God’s work, and want the world to know about it. Convince them that you really want to understand them, which I genuinely do, and more often than not they will open up. In the end, however, they are not the audience you are writing for. Your audience is the reader, which means that you step back from your sources and tell the truth as best you can approximate it. When I am trying to persuade someone to cooperate I always say, “If I do my job, I assure you that I will write things you don’t like.” I’ve found that this candid comment helps convince them that you are not some slick salesman.

You’re married to the literary agent Amanda Urban. Is she one of your readers and/or do you collaborate with her? How did/does being a father factor into your career? How did you make time?

My wife reads everything I write before I turn it in. She is ruthless, but a great editor unafraid to leave bruises. Liking to be near my refrigerator, I work at home when I’m not traveling. One of the bonuses from a home office was being there when our daughter got home from school. Say hi and ignore her for half an hour, and then she would make her way into my office and we’d discuss her day and her friends and feuds and homework. Now that she’s a grownup, I miss it.

Is your home a revolving door of literary figures and conversations?

My wife and I share many interests and friends. Many of our friends are in kindred fields.

I’d like to know about your work ethic, discipline, and process. Is that something you can describe in brief? How has it changed over the years?

My wife calls me “anal.” I’m reasonably well organized, and systematically arrange my research and interviews. I compile these notes and documents and my notebooks and digital recordings into what I call an Index, which I then type into a Word document. I separate everything by categories — bio, chronology, etc. — and categorize each entry that starts with the name of the person or document, a headline of what they said, followed by the notebook and page # it can be found in (B, p.56), the book (IV, p36), or the document (202, p.46). A New Yorker profile might consist of 40 single-spaced Index pages. My Google book consisted of nearly 300. This indexing is laborious and boring, but is among the most important steps because it grounds me in the subjects, allows me to see holes I need plug, and then to move sections around like a deck of cards to structure the narrative I want to follow.

You’ve had five bestsellers. Any reasons you can see why some of your books have made the list and other haven’t?

No, and if authors and publishers knew the formula they’d only publish bestsellers.

You’re a New York Public Library Literary Lion, work with PEN, do many altruistic things. Your work has a “watchdog” quality to it. Did this come from your upbringing? Experiences? Education? Or is it just “who you are”?

Journalists spend a lot of time observing. Which is another way of saying, watching.

What do you think of the Peace Corps today?

I admire the Peace Corps mission and the people who devote part of their lives to serving others.

Tips for younger writers?

A good journalist or writer needs a number of qualities — write well, think well, know how to craft the who, what, and why of a story. But the most important quality they need is humility. For without humility one does not listen. One does not ask questions. One assumes they already know the answers. Those who follow this route are destined to become poor journalists — or bloviators on cable television.

What are you working on now?

New Yorker pieces. Here’s another tip: dance around the question when anyone asks what you’re working on.

Seminal moment(s) in your career? Life?

Too many to recount, but they start with Abe Lass and high school and parents who wanted more for their son.

Thanks, Ken!

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Tony D’Souza is the author of the novels Whiteman and The Konkans. His new novel, Mule, will be released in September by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I put this video up last month but my friend Tom Hebert (Nigeria 1962-64) missed it–mostly because he doesn’t read the site–and he recently wrote me to say that he had just read the article in The New Yorker and that it was the finest piece about the Peace Corps he had ever read. He wanted me to post something about it, and I said I did, and he said that most people were like him and never got around to reading or watching the video and that I should post it again.

Tom wrote: “John, given my propensity for procrastinating on things I am supposed to read, I hadn’t really finished the New Yorker piece until last night. One word: Wow! That article, to my mind, is the single most important article ever written about the Peace Corps.”

Now, Tom is the type to nag me until I put up something, so to ‘cut him off at the pass’ (he lives out west and rides a horse, and that’s how he talks) I’m posting the link to The New Yorker webpage so that all you “procrastinators” out there can read about Peter and Rajeev.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/12/peter-hessler-peace-corps-video.html

Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Back Streets of a City Transformed had an op-ed in the New York Times on January 1, 2011. Mike is just back from China, living in New York, and he dropped me an email to say, “Just back from China this morning and had a great skate in the sun of Bryant Park. ” Ah, the writer’s life. China one day; the Big Apple the next.

Here’s Mike’s piece on China’s Big Zhang.

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January 1, 2011

China’s Big Zhang

Harbin, China

On the high-speed train from Beijing northeast to Harbin, passengers around me munch sweet popcorn and read books titled “Currency Wars,” “The Collapse of the Eurosystem,” and “The Upside of Irrationality.” Despite the raft of anti-inflationary measues introduced by the Chinese government in November, the lead article in the morning New Capital News announces that the price of gasoline is at a record high of $4.91 a gallon. Another article says that a popular Chinese online forum voted “zhang” — rapid price increase — 2010’s “character of the year.” It outpolled the runner-up, “resentment,” nearly six to one.

As the train glides silently past snow-covered cornfields, I ask my seatmates, people of varied ages and professions, about zhang. They swap stories of soaring apartment prices, not to mention zhang of cooking oil, zhang of toilet paper, zhang of airplane tickets, zhang of school fees. Voices rise as the passengers blame “speculators and hoarders” and declare that zhang makes them “angry to death” - it’s always personal in China - and suddenly everything is in the grips of zhang, including my formerly tranquil train ride.

So it’s not surprising that the annual “Blue Book of China’s Society,” compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reported that prices topped the list of the public’s concerns. China’s consumer price index, a gauge of inflation, rose 5.1 percent in November. That was driven by food prices, which, on average, rose 11.7 percent, with vegetable prices doubling in some places.

The nation’s best-selling brand of instant noodles increased its price 10 percent (to 33 cents, from 30 cents) to cover, it said, a rise in ingredient prices - leading the French grocer Carrefour to pull the product from its 169 stores in China. Say it with Parisian élan: zhang! And real estate prices continue to surge: a 2,000-square-foot apartment in the southern coastal city of Shenzhen can cost the equivalent of a four-bedroom in prime New York.

Even the dead are affected by zhang. At the privately run Eternal Garden Cemetery in Shenzhen, I recently watched a saleswoman explain to a customer that 50,000 yuan ($7,547) would secure her parent’s ashes a one-square-meter hillside plot for 20 years, with an option to renew for 50 after that, provided the cemetery had not been pushed out for development.

“If you want the grave to face the pond and valley, which has the best feng shui,” the saleswoman said, “it will cost 70,000 yuan ($10,566). Those are selling quickly; I suggest you buy today. The price will not go down.” The customer quickly chose the tomb with a view.

Edited by Bill Buford The Best American Travel Writing 2010 published by Mariner came out in early September and I wanted to mention it now in the first day of 2011. Of the twenty-one essays, from three to sixty pages, we have three by RPCV writers.

Peter Hessler (China 1996-98), “Strange Stones” is from The New Yorker and as always beautifully-written and detailed. His new book about China, Country Driving  is reflected in this work. Our second writer in the collection is George Packer (Togo 1982-83). His story from The New Yorker is entitled, “The Ponzi State,” and is about the Florida housing boom and bust.

The third travel piece is Tom Bissell’s (Uzbekistan 1996-97), “Looking for Judas” that was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and is about his off-the-beaten path in Jerusalem looking for THE spot where Judas killed himself, but mostly focuses on his impressions of well-armed Israelis and their heightened security awareness everywhere.

Also come out in September (and I wrote about this RPCV before) is Mohezin Tejani (Thailand 1978-80) piece called “Fruits of Childhood” that appeared in the collection: The Best Travel Writing 2010: True Stories from Around the World edited by James O’Reilly.

Not bad for one year of writings by RPCVs.