Archive - January 2012

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RPCV Jerry Rust Writes Murder Mystery
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RPCV Joe Kennedy (Dominican Republic 2004-06) Running for Congress
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RPCV at Busted Halo remembers Shriver
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Politics and Prose Connects to the Next Generation
5
Early Peace Corps Bibliography: March 1961 to March 1965
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Why the Peace Corps? Part Six
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Why the Peace Corps? Part Five
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Why the Peace Corps? Part Four
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Why the Peace Corps? Part Three
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Why the Peace Corps? Part Two
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Why The Peace Corps? Part One

RPCV Jerry Rust Writes Murder Mystery

This is a article from Sunday’s local Eugene, OR newspaper on the self-published book, published only as an ebook, and written Jerry Rust, who served in India. Not sure of his years in-country. If you lived in Eugene, it is your kind of book, and you might know Jerry. • A Murder Mystery of Lane County Former politician’s first novel is steeped in local history by Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard, Eugene, OR (Sunday, Jan 8, 2012 ) He started out as a Peace Corps volunteer, became a tree planter and then won election as a Lane County commissioner. After five terms in office, from 1977 to 1997, Jerry Rust worked as a carpenter before getting the yen to go off to China to teach English as a second language and, at the same time, improving his own grasp of Chinese. Now 68, Rust has added another line to his résumé – . . .

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RPCV Joe Kennedy (Dominican Republic 2004-06) Running for Congress

The Boston Globe is reporting that Joe Kennedy III,  a 31-year-old prosecutor and son of former Rep. Joe Kennedy, might run for the Democratic nomination of the redrawn Barney Frank district seat. Kennedy, a Harvard Law School graduate, was in the DR as a PCV. If he were to win, he would be the fifth RPCV in Congress. He is also the first in the fourth generation of Kennedys to thrust himself into electoral politics. He is the second Kennedy to join the Peace Corps. A cousin Maeve Kennedy McKean was an English teacher in Mozambique. She currently works at the Department of Health and Human Services.    

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RPCV at Busted Halo remembers Shriver

Busted Halo is a blog that I check weekly because I find it interesting, and also it relates to my job as a communication director at a small Catholic college. The blog is a media and ministry outreach to Catholics in their twenties and thirties created by the Paulist Fathers. The discussions are based on the belief that all God’s children are “saints in the making,” and that everyone is called to aspire toward the holiness and selflessness of a Mother Teresa or Saint Francis. At the end of 2011, Busted Halo looked back and remembered important figures who had died during the year. Included was a piece about Sargent Shriver that I read — because it was about Sarge. It was written by Joe Williams, an RPCV from South Africa, who is the head art, graphics and video producer for Busted Halo. After graduating from Texas Christian University with a degree . . .

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Politics and Prose Connects to the Next Generation

In a newsletter from the new owner of the wonderful Washington, D.C. book store, Politics & Prose, there is word that the store is going “electronic.” Here’s what the owners had to say a few days ago. No doubt some of you received gifts of electronic readers for Christmas or Hanukkah this holiday season, and you’re probably thinking about which titles to download. Did you know that you can buy eBooks through Politics & Prose? Or that the price of most eBooks through P&P is the same as at other online retailers? We are continuously surprised to learn that many of our customers aren’t aware that P&P offers both online ordering of physical books and downloading of eBooks.  You can place your orders online any time of day or night, seven days a week through our website:  www.politics-prose.com. You can also come by the store or call us at 202-364-1919 if you . . .

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Early Peace Corps Bibliography: March 1961 to March 1965

Early Peace Corps Bibliography March 1961-March 1965 Books & Pamphlets An International Peace Corps: The Promise and Problems, by Samuel P. Hayes (Public Affairs Institute, 1961) $1.00. Breaking the Bonds: A Novel About the Peace Corps, by Sharon Spencer (Tempo Books, Grosset & Dunlap, 1963) $.50. Also available in hardcover. Complete Peace Corps Guide, by Ray Hoopes, with an introduction by R. Sargent Shriver (Dial Press, 1961) $3.50. Hidden Force, by Francis W. Godwin, Richard N. Goodwin and William F. Haddad, with a foreword by R. Sargent Shriver (Harper & Row, 1963) $3.95. Letters From the Peace Corps, Editor Iris Luce (David McKay Co. 1964) $2.95. New Frontiers for American Youth: Perspective on the Peace Corps, by Maurice L. Albertson, Andrew E. Rice and Pauline E. Birky (Public Affairs Press, 1961) $4.50. Peace Corps, by Glenn D. Kittler, with an introduction by R. Sargent Shriver (Paperback Library, 1963) $.50. Peace . . .

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Why the Peace Corps? Part Six

Congressman Reuss was not the only U.S. legislator intrigued by the idea of youth service for America. Another Midwesterner, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, had observed the volunteer work being done by the American Friends Service Committee. He, too, like Congressman Reuss, had given talks on college campuses in the late 1950s and received the same sort of strong, enthusiastic responses that Reuss experienced at Cornell University. Humphrey would say later that no one in ‘official government Washington’ would take him seriously, but he went ahead anyway and assigned a young member of his staff–a Stanford University foreign relations graduate named Peter Grothe–to research the idea for him, and what Grothe uncovered convinced Humphrey that the idea had merit. Grothe spent six weeks interviewing private agency workers and digging through available material. In his final report, Grothe conservatively estimated that 10,000 volunteers could be sent into the field within four . . .

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Why the Peace Corps? Part Five

Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, representing the Milwaukee area, went to the Far East in the fall of 1957 on a foreign aid inspection tour. The U.S. government had recently paid thirty million dollar to build a highway through the Cambodian jungle that Reuss realized when he arrived in Cambodia was a road to nowhere. One day he drove for miles along the new highway without spotting a single motorist. He spotted a solitary farmer trudging down the edge of the deserted road, his water buffalo in tow. The road, and the $30 million spent on it, was all a waste of money. But then, and by happenstance, in the same jungles of Cambodia, he came upon a village, and a new elementary school being built in the clearing by four young American school teachers. They told Reuss they had built the school with primitive tools and manual labor. . . .

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Why the Peace Corps? Part Four

Some Peace Corps historians, including early Peace Corps staff, trace the idea for such an organization as ‘the Peace Corps’ back to the nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James, and his “moral equivalent of war” statement. Bill Moyers, who was around the agency at the very beginning, was still saying in 2011 in an interview in Vanity Fair that he considered the Peace Corps his greatest professional achievement, adding, “We were making a statement to the world about America that is still valid half a century later. Remember, there is a moral alternative to war.” William James wanted a “conscription of our youthful population” to form “an army against Nature.” Once conscripted, the young people would be assigned “to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing , etc.” James’ idea wasn’t entirely altruistic. He felt that assigning young people into disciplined service would . . .

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Why the Peace Corps? Part Three

The Peace Corps wasn’t Kennedy’s idea. It wasn’t a Democrat’s idea. It wasn’t even Shriver’s idea. Writing In Foreign Affairs magazine about the creation of the Peace Corps, Shriver would quote Oscar Wilde comment that America really was discovered by a dozen people before Columbus, “but it was always successfully hushed up.” Shriver added, “I am tempted to feel that way about the Peace Corps; the idea of a national effort of this type had been proposed many times in past years.” Beginning in 1809, churches in the United States started to send missionaries abroad. Besides preaching the gospel, missionaries also built hospitals and educated doctors and nurses. They helped farmers and they developed health and social welfare programs. They did much of what Peace Corps Volunteers would also do later in the history of America. The missionaries weren’t the only ones going overseas to help others. In 1850, British . . .

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Why the Peace Corps? Part Two

As Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968)  points out in his book Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and The Speech That Changed America, and Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) alludes to in his recent book on Kennedy, Elusive Hero, most of JFK’s great speeches evolved over time with ideas and paragraphs of prose being sharpened and changed and improved from one speech to the next during the campaign of 1960.  The idea for the Cow Palace speech on the Peace Corps has such a gestation period. To begin with, Kennedy was well aware of a ‘youth crop’ talk in the halls of Congress. In 1958 the novel The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick was published. As a Senator Kennedy had sent a copy to every member of Congress. The bitter message of this novel was that Americans diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective. The implication . . .

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Why The Peace Corps? Part One

In these first few days of the New Year, I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about the creation of the Peace Corps. These ‘impulses’ we might say are close to being lost in the fog of history. There were, however, several generally accepted desires that coalesced in the last days of the Fifties, framed by a number of people in speeches and in prose, and with the election of John F. Kennedy, became a reality as a federal agency. Most of the early history of the Peace Corps, as we know, lives only as oral history. Still there are a few key books that spell out in some detail the foundations of the agency. Two important books are The Story of the Peace Corps by George Sullivan, and that has an introduction by Sargent Shriver. It was published by Fleet Publishing in 1964. . . .

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