Archive - February 10, 2010

Shriver, it turns out, (at least according to Warren Wiggins) was not an easy man to work for. “I’m not the first to say that and I found that in the early days it was close to impossible working for Sarge,” Warren told me in our 1997 interview. “I failed to build a good relationship with him in that first period. It was so bad that I went to Jack Bell, who worked for C. Douglas Dillon (the number two man in the State Department), and asked Bell to get me out of the Peace Corps. I couldn’t take it. Bell won’t let me quit. He told me the Peace Corps was too important. Then I went to lunch with Franklin Williams. I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him. I told him the story, how Shriver won’t see me. He won’t pay any attention to me. And Franklin . . .

The People In The Pews Shriver in those first days was fond of talking about how his staff got to the Peace Corps. “Tom Mathews was on a skiing trip in Alta, Utah, when I called him. He arrived in Washington still wearing his ski boots. Gordon Boyce got a telegram and arrived the very next afternoon. At the time our payroll arrangement were slow and inadequate and most of these people worked for as long as three months without pay.” The Peace Corps was a disorganized mess. When Lee St. Lawrence, Director of the Far East Regional Office, arrived he took one long look at the confusion and commented to no one in particular, “this place is all fouled up.” Then he wanted to know which desk was his. Others came on ‘day one’ and stayed where Charlie Nelson, Willie Warner, Sally Bowles, Charlie Peters, John Corcoran, Nan McEvoy, John Alexander. There . . .