Archive - April 22, 2010

I had a email recently from a dear young friend complaining that my blog is about ‘all you old farts at Peace Corps Headquarters”‘ and I wrote back, okay, I’d do more items on golf and Tiger Woods. She quickly replied, “Well, then maybe you should stay with the early days of the agency. Anything is better then golf!” There is a lot one can write about those early days of the agency when the Peace Corps attracted the best and the brightest, or so they claimed. An early document of the agency said that the staff in D.C. and around the world was composed of “skiers, mountain climbers, big-game hunters, prizefighters, football players, polo players and enough Ph.D.’s [30] to staff a liberal arts college.” There were 18 attorneys, of whom only four continue to work strictly as attorneys in the General Counsel’s office and the rest [including Sargent Shriver] did other jobs. Also, . . .