Archive - May 3, 2011

Thanks to Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963-65) who later went onto work in Washington, D.C. and with C. Payne Lucas wrote Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps, Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, (a book that beat-up, in some ways, the agency) for giving me a heads-up on an essay produced for the Center For Global Development (I know, I never heard of them either) that was penned by Charles Kenny and entitled: “The Peace Corps in a Smaller World: A New Model for the Next 50 Years.” Don’t you just love essays about the Peace Corps written by people who never were PCVs? Anyway…. Charles is a is a senior fellow at the Center. His current work covers the demand side of development, the role of technology in quality of life improvements, and governance and anticorruption in aid. He is also a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. Charles . . .

Here’s a famous Peace Corps story from the early years that has been told and retold a couple thousand times, and is retold in the late Coates Redmon’s book Come As Your Are: The Peace Corps Story.[Coates was a a writer for the Peace Corps in the early days, later a speech writer for Rosalynn Carter, and later still, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.] It is a story [as all good Washington, D.C. do] that begins in Georgetown. It was a Sunday evening in the fall of 1961 and Dick Nelson, who was Bill Moyers’s assistant, and Blair Butterworth, whose father was ambassador to Canada, and who worked as a file clerk at PC/W, were living together at Two Pomander Walk in Georgetown. That Sunday, Moyers’ wife and kids were in Texas and he came over to see the two guys, who had been roommates at Princeton. . . .