The story of the Peace Corps stamp (see the blog entry on March 10, 2011) sent me off into the attic to find my own ‘First Day Issue’ copy of the stamp. As I recall it was given to me by Don Hess, the Peace Corps Director in the summer of 1972 while I was in Washington during a pre-staging trip. Holding it in my hand brought back many fond memories of a time when first class postage was 8 cents! It also brought to mind a problem I have of long standing.
I don’t think there is any doubt that Peace Corps was not on Nixon’s favorites list, but I have always been puzzled by the frequent comments from folks who weren’t there that he tried to kill the agency, and that it had fallen on hard times during his tenure. On the ‘hard times’ bit I would refer you to a comment made by David Riesman, an academic with a long-standing advisory relationship with Peace Corps during the 1960s, who said in 1972 “The decline and fall of the Peace Corps is in the eye of the beholder . . . . The Peace Corps has really not changed that much and it certainly has not changed for the worst. . . . It’s less erratic too, and many of the problems that were concealed under the life of spontaneity, glamour, and enthusiasm of the Shriver days, have been wrestled with more seriously since.”
At about the same time (late 1972) a bi-partisan delegation from the House of Representatives visited several East Asian Peace Corps programs and concluded in its report, issued in 1973, that Blatchford’s New Directions were making a significant and positive contribution to the work of the Peace Corps in the countries that were examined.
The real danger for the Peace Corps during the early 1970s came from several Democratic congressmen and Senators. Chief among them was Congressman Otto Passman who tried mightily to cut drastically the Peace Corps budget mid-way through a fiscal year, which, if successful, would have led to the end of many country programs. Ironically, it was Nixon who signed off on a compromise with Passman to reallocate other foreign aid money to the Peace Corps, thereby permitting the agency to abandon its already formulated plan to close countries and bring volunteers home. It was during this time, and before the compromise, that a famous Bill Mauldin political cartoon was published showing a near dead dove in a hospital bed (labeled Peace Corps) with a bloated eagle (labeled military budget) hovering over him and lamenting “poor little guy . . . . How could anyone starve in this land of plenty?”
Another thorn in the side was Democratic Senator William Fulbright, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who scheduled hearings to consider the abolishment of the Peace Corps because “it was an idea whose time is past.” In this instance it was Republican senators Charles Percy and, of all people, Barry Goldwater who championed the Peace Corps and saw to it that Peace Corps budgets increased in the years immediately ahead.
(I’m not here to praise republicans or to damn democratics; I’m just presenting facts that are often overlooked when it comes to assessing the Peace Corps in the seventies.)
It has always troubled me that the ‘keepers of the flame’ insist upon maintaining the fallacy that Peace Corps was ‘damaged goods’ during the Nixon/Ford years, and that in doing so they (probably inadvertently) disparage the service of volunteers from that period. The thousands of volunteers who served during those years have every right to be as proud of their service as do those from every other era. I also maintain that the Peace Corps staff members from those years were every bit as much filled with the ideal of ‘making the world a better place’ as were their predecessors and successors. As I stated in the introduction to The Peace Corps Experience “The strategic decisions made [during the late-60s/early-70s] shaped the Peace Corps that followed. Yet [these changes] were so badly misinterpreted that what was actually key to the agency’s survival was labeled a threat to its well-being.” The story of this non-existent threat goes on unabated much to the detriment of Peace Corps history.
I fear that I will lose the struggle to rehabilitate the image folks have of the Nixon/Ford years in the Peace Corps, but on behalf of all of us who were there, it is worth the effort.
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Dear David,
I am a Peace Corps Volunteer from the Nixon era (Peru 1970 - 73) and I have nothing but praise and respect for Joe Blatchford who I met when he visited our training group at Brockport, NY in 1970 and who I profiled in Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Blatchford
The New Directions program was definitely a step in the right direction and something that needed to be done.
One interesting personal anecdote that I can share from that era is that a few weeks before I started training I had read Alan Weiss’s account of Peace Corps training, “High Risk, High Gain,” about his training from for Nigeria circa 1964 and I went into training expecting the worst as far as a high pressure deselection process went.
I was pleasantly surprised the training ordeal described by Weiss in his book never materialized.
John has a good review of Weiss’s book, a Peace Corps classic published in 1968 that I wish would be re-issued, at:
http://peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2005/0511/511booklocker.html
At the macro level, the Peace Corps certainly suffered from Nixon’s hostility which really seems to have begun in earnest after the occupation of PC Headquarters by the CRV, but at least in the program I was part of, that hostility never filtered down to the volunteer level.
I think a lot of the retrospective carping about the Nixon era comes from staff members at Headquarters from the Shriver/Vaughn era, who were taken aback when Blatchford decided to apply the five year rule, and bring in his own people. The staff in DC during the 60’s were the trailblazers and brought an enthusiasm to the Peace Corps that was unsurpassed but Blatchford needed to bring in fresh blood to revitalize the organization. I once talked to a staff member who worked at HQ in the 1960’s and asked him if he ever would have left on his own. His answer - hell no - the Peace Corps was such a great job that most would have stayed until they retired - which would be about right now - and nobody else would have had their chance to come in, up, and out.
Best Regards,
Hugh Pickens
Dear David:
There is no doubt that, while keeping Joe Blatchford out of the picture, Nixon and his aides were intent on destroying the Peace Corps. Pat Buchanan and Clark Mollenhoff were assigned to investigate the Peace Corps with, as Buchanan put it in a memo, “an eye, as we understand, to doing away with the thing.” The problem was its popularity which forced the White House to work on all kinds of strategies to try to hurt the Peace Corps without letting the public know what was going on. Haldeman wrote in his diary that Nixon “wanted to cut Peace Corps and Vista budget down far enough to decimate them.” A feeling arose, as well, that Blatchford was a little soft for the job. They weren’t impressed when he defended the PCV lawyers who had helped Micronesian petition the UN against US policies. All the memos exposing Nixon’s campaign are in the National Archives. I believe Elizabeth Cobb Hoffman was the first to come upon them. Even after reading about them in her book, it was q
(2) was quite a shock to actually hold them in my hand and read all their venom toward the Peace Corps. Joe says he had no idea this was going on and that Nixon always complimented him. I’m sure Joe’s account is accurate. That was Nixon’s underhanded way.
I have not read Meisler’s book, so my recollections may not be absolutely historical accurate, but I think I can comment generally. I have read some of the administrative memos from the 70s and early 80s in the Archives.
When Carter came to the White House, he appointed Sam Brown head of ACTION. Brown was intent on imposing his agenda on the Peace Corps and wanted Volunteers to be dealing in meeting basic needs. So Blanchord’s New Directors was out of favor. I believe Brown canceled TSEL programs. When Regan came in, he activated the Peace Corps Advisory Council and filled it with his conservative politcal appointees, such as Holly Coors. They attempted to control the Peace Corps as if they were a Board of Directors. They wanted Peace Corps purged of all the “long haired” radicals associated with the Sam Brown brand and wanted only “patriotic” Americas to serve.
One of Loret Ruppe’s first battles was to successfully defeat this attempted coup de tat of the Council.
All of this only reinforces the notion that Peace Corps is exceedingly a political prize, ” anybodies.” When the ship of state sails into
port, Peace Corps is waiting on the dock. In the decades described above, even the Country staff were political appointees. Now, it is only the top 30 decision making positions that are the political plums.
Again, I would refer everyone to Robert B. Textor’s “Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps.” In his first chapter, he outlines the various subcultures within the Peace Corps and the tensions between them.
Searles describes his experience with this in his Peace Corps book.
Textor also outlined the policy which would place qualified RPCVs in most if not all the decision making positions within the agency. I think that would have made a real difference.
Both the book and the memo are available on line at: http://www.stanford.edu/~rbtextor/
Click on publications.
I hope I have not misspelled Ruppe’s name. She was a treasure.Loret Ruppe
CORRECTION and my apologies. The name of the first women Director of the Peace Corps and one of the finest was Loret Miller Ruppe.
Joey–the first woman director was Carolyn R. Payton, appointed by: President Carter, and she was director from 1977 to 1978. She was the first female Director of the Peace Corps, and the first African American. Loret didn’t come along for several more years and she was appointed by a Republican.
John, Thank you very much for the information and correction.
I knew that Carolyn R.Payton was the first women Director of the Peace Corps. But, I allowed myself to think of ACTION as being so impotant as to diminish the importance of Peace Corps and its Director.
I am delighted to have caused a stir. Here are some responses:
To Stan. I agree that Nixon hated Peace Corps, but then he also hated rich kids, Jews, some Italians, Ivy Leaguers, peaceniks, ‘commies’ and any number of other groups. Peace Corps was in good company. But, my point is that he really didn’t hurt the agency, other than to send Mike Balzano over to head ACTION, a fellow most of us at PC/W at the time ignored much to his undying frustration. Small, relatively unimportant agencies like Peace Corps have great freedom to do as they wish, and Blatchford and his successors took advantage of that fact.
To Joey. I wasn’t there during the Carter’s time so I can’t provide any on-the-ground insight for those years. But I will suggest that you tend to place Peace Corps higher on the political totem pole than it actually is in practice. I remember hearing about many foreign affairs ‘names’ saying not only ‘no’ but ‘absolutely no’ to an offer to be Peace Corps Director in the years since the mid-1970s or so. If Peace Corps political appointments are a prize, I suspect it is like the old joke that ends with ‘two weeks in Philadelphia!” These days it is most rare to hear someone without a Peace Corps connection even mention the agency. Perhaps one of the problems at PC/W at present is related to the fact that the 30 ‘plums’ are given to folks who don’t have standing to go anywhere else in the administration.
To Hugh. Thanks for being here!
Now, what else can I do to stir the pot?
Well, for openers, I was born in Philadelphia and would love to spend two weeks or more there, again!
It is not that Peace Corps political appointments are so sought after within the universe of “important” positions. Rather, in the very small plant Peace Corps, those political appointees have great influence over what happens to the direction of the agency. It is that political influence that changes from administration to administration.
Again, I would think that you would want to read Textor’s original “In, Up, and Out” memo, and comment on his analysis.
Oops, did I say Philadelphia? I meant Des Moines. (Surely no one out there is from Des Moines!)
I don’t equate ‘political appointee’ with ‘bad guy.’ The Executive Branch (except for the President and the Vice President) is run by political appointees; always has been, always will be. What the Peace Corps needs, and hasn’t had in years, is someone important enough to have clout with the powers that be both in the administration and in the congress. That is one reason why I think that the insistence that the Director must be a RPCV is misguided. What is needed is someone with clout and stature, although it would be nice if that person was also a RPCV.
I also wonder just how much influence those 30 ‘plums’ have on the mission? In my experience Country Directors have far more influence in making the Peace Corps what it is (and has been and will be) than Washington-based staff. And, Country Directors only really have the authority given them by PCV’s, as difficult as that is for some CDs to understand. So in a sense PCVs have a great deal of influence in determining how the Peace Corps changes over time.
These days we often hear (much to my personal dismay) “elections have consequences.” And the selection of political appointees is one of them.
I am interested in knowing what trouble (bad decisions, wrong strategies, etc.) you think having ‘political appointees’ at the Peace Corps has caused over the years? What major shifts or events that can be blamed on political appointees would you have preferred never happened?
Well, let me defend the Nixon Administration for a moment. (okay, everyone can get off the floor from laughing too much!) When Nixon came into office, according to Karen Schwarz who interviewed me for her book and she came to me for names and phone numbers. This was before the Internet.. In fact, I was her first interview as her editor was a friend of mine. Karen became my friend and later told me that there were a lot of people who wanted the job of Peace Corps director in that Nixon administration, but Blanchord got the job because of his experience overseas.Joe had been around since 1961 remember, and actually was interviewed by Shriver in the Mayflower Hotel. So all of thos Republicans wanted to run the agency.
Later, in the Clinton administration, I was told by a Schedule C friend that ‘everyone’ in the campaign wanted the Peace Corps job, or at least Associate Director or Director because, as we know, the Peace Corps is ‘mom’s apple pie’ and it is a gateway to a better job and a career. It’s a gold star on a political career. Plus it is a lot of fun and lots of free travel, as Directors have shown. So, more than one political type has used the agency to advance their careers.
Somewhat later in the Peace Corps story it seemed that the position of Peace Corps Director, or even association with the agency, was becoming less of a worthwhile credential. I remember Tony Lake, a big deal in foreign policy under President Clinton, bristling at the memory of having once been thought as an appropriate guy to head the Peace Corps. He said, looking back, “it was awful” to be considered as Carter’s nominee for the job. He had no interest in being “this squishy, softy” in the Peace Corps. Similarly, that paragon of international affairs, Richard Holbrook, spent weeks, months, and years in the headlines and never once admitted to having been a Peace Corps Country Director in Tunisia.
Oh, for the days when Peace Corps was important, not an after-thought!
Joey, I have read Textor’s account of the origination of the ‘five-year-rule.’ I am in full agreement with his recommendation — generally observed for most of the Peace Corps’ history – to limit Peace Corps staff employment to five years (with a possible sixth year under some circumstances). I observed it when I left in 1976; I formally endorsed it in my book (1997); later published a fuller account of my reasoning on Hugh Pickens’ site (2002); and more recently in a number of other venues. I have always been surprised at the amount of opposition there is to this management philosophy, but strong objections there sure are.
I don’t think most folks realize just what a revolutionary management idea it was in the early 1960s when Peace Corps adopted it. At that time corporations, universities, the church, the military, many government departments, everybody proudly proclaimed the fact that their leadership had been on board for decades. The idea that ‘new blood’ should be regularly added was unheard of.
I am less enthusiastic about his notion that in time all staff should be former volunteers. I could go with ‘largely’ but not ‘exclusively.’ During my time we had opportunities to hire former Catholic missionaries who served for years one in Korea, the other in the Philippines as desk officers for those two countries. It made good sense to hire them. While in the Philippines we had an opportunity to start a new program with volunteers serving in rural public health clinics. To make sure we did it right we hired a Filipino doctor to plan and run it. There are and will continue to be program areas where very specialized skills are needed, and the Peace Corps must be free to go get them wherever they exist. Staff responsibilities go beyond the care and support of volunteers, and sometimes fulfilling them means going outside ‘the family.’
As for PC/W there is always a need for administrative skills that have to do with how government functions (budgets, congressional relations, advertising, personnel, etc.) so I would expect there to be posts there that would be filled by non-volunteers. And, as I said recently, the Director needs to have some genuine clout and stature if Peace Corps is ever going to get the favorable notice and support it needs. I would prefer someone with clout and stature over someone who has volunteer experience if a choice has to be made.
Perhaps the biggest reason of all for objecting to ‘exclusively’ is that doing so runs the risk of creating an inbred climate that is immune to new ideas. We all have encountered situations where the folks in charge say “that’s not how we do it here.” I fear that a staff consisting of 100% former volunteers would lead to an environment in which ‘way-out’ ideas – like New Directions – are automatically rejected because “that’s not the way we did when I was in the field.”
There needs to be a balance and it looks as if, based on the numbers in Textor’s report, it has been achieved quite nicely by today’s Peace Corps.
Dear David,
The article you wrote for us about revitalizing the five-year is at:
http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/2629/3216273.html
[Excerpt]
“On balance, the advantages of the five-year rule outweigh the disadvantages. This is especially true now that many staff positions are held by former volunteers. They bring with them two or three years of Peace Corps experience, which significantly shortens the learning curve. Add to this the possibility under existing legislation of a sixth year of service in special circumstances - and the presence of some retreads - and the agency’s need for stability is being met. But without regular staff turnover both abroad and in Washington, one can almost predict a gradual hardening of the bureaucratic arteries that will eventually make the Peace Corps another of those government entities that do not listen, are not responsive, and seemingly do not care. Prevent that outcome; revitalize the five-year rule.”
Ron Tschetter also had some interesting observations about the five-year rule that he discussed during the interview I did with him in 2009 at:
http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/2629/3212158.html
[Excerpt]
“I would like to have us take a look at the five year rule in regards to our country directors. Around the world, there are 76 countries we are in, and we typically have three Americans on staff. You have a country director, oftentimes you have an administrative officer, and usually one of the APCDs. So you will have three Americans and the rest are all host country nationals, and by law the country director has to be an American. Now let’s say there is an Administrative Officer who has been at post for four years and has really been doing an outstanding job and shown tremendous growth and the potential to be a country director. You make this person a country director and now they don’t have very much time left. So one of the tweaks I would propose we make to the five year rule is that at that point in time when an internal staffer is elevated to country director, the meter starts over again, and they have at least the two tours that they can perform as country director. So that is a tweak that I would really like us to dig into. We haven’t done that yet. We’ve had quite a bit of dialog about it. It has to be legislatively changed quite rapidly when the time is right. ”
David, your original article about the Peace Corps of the 70’s has really elicited some interesting discussion.
Best Regards,
Hugh Pickens
David,
There are two aspects to the staffing strategy at Peace Corps and they are not the same. One is the Five Year Rule, the other is maintaining thirty decision making postions as political appointments. These should be considered separately.
In preparing a response to your earlier challenge, I reviewed Textor’s “Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps.” I was struck, again, at the emphasis on placing trained personnel in structured positions during the first few years of Peace Corps. Registered nurses were in abundance during those early years. Trained engineers, surveyors, and mechanics were the norm. Almost all the case studies in the book dealt with structured positions. “New Directions” was not new. The emphasis on the “BA generalist” came as Peace Corps exploded in size and the trained people were not available in sufficient numbers.
There is also a political component to the development of “community development” as a program focus.
Finally, it has been a joy during these beginning weeks of celebrating the Fifty to meet RPCVs as well as vacationing serving PCVs from all over, time and place. There were certain commonalities among us.
For example, the serving Volunteer on home vacation, said she called PC/W and no one there knew who she was or even how to direct her question…there was loud groans in agreement from the audience! The problem of dirty needles echoes tragically through all the health programs from defeating small pox to fighting HIV/AIDs.
Anyone who thinks that staffing Peace Corps with successful RPCVs would result in some kind of stagnant bureacracy, has not spent much time with RPCVs from all over. But, as the very least, when a serving Volunteer called PC/W someone would respond appropriately.
One consequence of the inordinate amount of political appointees in the Peace Corps agency is that the change in the partisan political administrations at the executive level can result in long term vacancies within the agency or a period of transition in which the newly appointed may not be able to fully execute their responsibilities. (I note that in the Agency Assessment one recommendation was that these political appointees be given, within the first three months, an orientation as to the goals and mission of Peace Corps.) There are four tragedies that may illustrate this problem. The events may be or may not reflect a pattern nor can I prove cause and effect. I don’t have the information to make a judgment.
In 1976, Deborah Gardner was murdered by a fellow Volunteer, Dennis Priven, in Tonga. (See: Phillip Weiss’s American Taboo for a full account.) Priven was tried and convicted in Tonga. Peace Corps negotiated with the Tonganese government to allow Priven to return to the United States and promised that he would be incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane. Privan was returned during the transition time from the Ford to Carter administration. There was inadequate follow up by Peace Corps and Privan walked away from the PC/DC and had no further criminal penalty. Weiss was highly critical of PC/DC.
During the same transition period, Colombian PCV Richard Starr was kidnapped by FARC. He was held captive for three years before ransom was privately paid. In the transition period from Clinton to Bush, Bolivian PCV Walter Poirier went missing and has never been found. Finally, in the transition period from Bush to Obama, when the post of Director was still vacant as well as other political appointments, Katy Puzey was murdered.
Attention should be paid to the vulnerability of serving Volunteers when there is such a wholesale turnover in staff.
In Textor’s analysis of why he thought that tenure should be limited within Peace Corps staff, he emphasized the need for constantly making available qualified personnel with field experience in the cultures, countries and programs where Peace Corps worked. I support that value. I believe that a constant supply of successful qualified RPCVs would provide the agency with the unique combination of experience and innovation.
Joey, the facts don’t support your analysis.
Let’s take the Tonga murder as an example. The murder took place on October 14, 1976, about three weeks before the election. The volunteer who turned himself in to the police as the one who did it had a long-standing, and difficult, relationship with the woman killed. There was an immediate and extensive investigation in Tonga and the murderer was found to be ‘mentally ill’ and returned to the US for treatment, presumably in some sort of official confinement. The key Peace Corps staff people involved – the Peace Corps Director, the Regional Director, the Country Director, the Deputy Country Director, and others, remained in their positions for many months after the event, despite the election results. There is simply no way one can say that a more attentive Peace Corps staff, or one less distracted by a pending presidential election, could have prevented the killing. The election and likely eventual staff turnover played absolutely no role what-so-ever in the whole tragedy.
Phil Weiss’s whole point was that the Peace Corps’ bureaucratic apparatus was more interested in keeping the scandal quiet – a charge made regularly throughout the past 50 years — than in seeing that the killer received the detention Tongan officials expected. Weiss never says that Peace Corps’ response (or the nature of it) indicates a lack of concern for volunteer safety and security, or that political appointees were more interested in finding new jobs than in completing their Peace Corps work in a credible fashion.
I suspect a careful review of your other examples would prove equally damaging to your thesis.
Perhaps the problem is you really don’t know how agencies handle transitions like the ones that occur when administrations change. Typically the incoming folks go to great efforts to make the transitions go smoothly, and the outgoing ones want to leave with dignity knowing that they have fulfilled their missions to the very end. You may not like to hear this but sometimes political appointees really are ‘the best and the brightest!’
My citation of the Tonga incident was not about the murder, it was about the fact that the convicted murder was returned to the states, after promises to the government of Tonga that he would be incarcerated. Then, when he returned to the states, he was “allowed” to simply walk away from the Peace Corps office. I do not know what impact this had on the Volunteers or the program in Tonga.
In presenting my examples, I did not present a thesis. I very carefully said that I was not identifying a pattern nor charging cause and effect.
I was making observations. Observations which I think confirm that Volunteers are especially vulnerable when the administrations change and there are vacancies in political appointments. Are you disputing that families of each of this victims have been highly critical about the Peace Corps response.
As for the “beautifully orchestrated transition period,” please cite specific examples from the times noted and the Peace Corps agency. In the case of Ford to Carter, Sam Brown was the newly appointed Director or Action. He was heading the weekly Monday morning staff meetings when Starr was kidnapped. He diriected the response. He had no overseas experience at all.
In the case of Bush to Obama, all the poiitical appointees resigned and left on the day of the Obama inaugeration. Those positions remained vacant for months. The position of Director was not filled until August and Deputy Director until almost 18 months later.
I am looking for two volunteers who served in ‘Eua in 1972. It was a husband and wife and they were probably in the medical sector. I’m asking because they help a woman give birth (difficult delivery), both mother and son survived, altho the mother passed a short time after that. The son is now looking approaching 40 y/o and is looking for the couple. If you possibly know or know of a couple in ‘Eua in that period, I would like to get in touch with them and pass along the message of who is trying to contact them. Thank you.
David
(i’m currently serving as a business volunteer in Nuku’alofa.)
Having served under Sarge Shriver on the early staff, I would note that the Peace Corps has enjoyed many fine directors since then, and I would specifically mention Paul Coverdell as another of the Republicans among them. Overall, had there not been some pretty good bi-partisan leadership, given the number of years Republicans have been in The White House, we might be talking about the agency in the past tense.
Wow! This debate sure sounds like “Who’s more macho?” It reminds me of Veterans of Foreign Wars arguing about which was a real war. They and we all served, regardless of the who, what, when and where.