August 10, 2010 – Peace Corps Worldwide

A Writer Writes: Finding Sanjally Bojang

Aug 10 2010

Joan Richter, wife of Dick Richter, an early Peace Corps Evaluator (1963–65), is herself an award-winning short story writer whose works have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and in themed anthologies. Also a freelance journalist and editor, she was a stringer for The New York Times‘ metropolitan section, and a contributing editor to Westchester Magazine. Joan also worked for American Express, publishers of Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine as director of public affairs. A specialist in tourism, she was the company’s representative to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In her career, she has traveled to more than sixty counties in Africa, Europe and Asia. She was consulted by Peace Corps/Washington on the role of staff wives overseas, stemming from her two years in Kenya where her husband, Dick, was the deputy director (1965–67). Along with their two small sons, they traveled throughout East Africa to visit . . .

We Can Do It Better!

Aug 10 2010

Reading some passages in The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps by Gerard T. Rice, I was struck by a quote from David Halberstam’s book, The Best and the Brightest. Rice notes that Shriver’s effusive brand of idealism went against the grain of John Kennedy who was, according to Halberstam, “at least as skeptical as he was idealistic, curiously ill-at-ease with other people’s overt idealism, preferring in private the tart and darker view of the world and of mankind.” Harris Wofford is also quoted in an Oral History Interview at the JFK Library that Kennedy was “put off by too-far-reaching ideas…Certainly, idealism or liberalism in any conventional sense was uncongenial to him.” Kennedy’s existential sense of irony was the polar opposite of Shriver’s unbounded idealism and optimism. Within the Kennedy clan, Shriver was called the “family Communist” for his very liberal views. We are hearing much the same about Obama, about how . . .

Archive - August 10, 2010