Archive - March 26, 2009

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 . . .