Archive - September 25, 2010

Poet Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1963-65) was kind enough to send me a March 8, 1998 column by Mary McGrory from the Outlook Section of The Washington Post. It was a column about the Peace Corps on the 37th birthday of the agency, the CIA, and Moynihan. McGrory writes about Moynihan, saying, “he was a fan of the Peace Corps but not the CIA,” and then told a story of how when Moynihan was the ambassador to India villagers were resisting the help of the Peace Corps. The reason was that peasants had been evicted from their mud huts on either side of the volunteers’ mud hut to make room for the local police, who had moved in with their listening devices to monitor what they were sure were U.S. espionage activities. McGrory wrote in that column, “The CIA is into disruption, uprooting, sabotage and subversion. The Peace Corps is about plowing, planting, irrigating, . . .