Archive - December 14, 2023

It was not all ‘work’ and no ‘play’ at the Peace Corps for the Mad Men and Women. Here’s a 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 You Are: The Peace Corps Story. Coates, as I mentioned, was a writer for the Peace Corps in the early days, later press person 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 . . .

John writes —   If you ever had watched the TV show Mad Men you know all about the office atmosphere and the thick layer of smoke that filled the offices. It was no better in the Peace Corps during those early years of the 1960s. Flipping through pages of old Peace Corps publications, I see half a dozen people who I knew, all with cigarettes in their hands. Al Meisel in the Training Division; Charlie Peters, head of Evaluation; Jim Gibson, head of Agricultural Affairs. He liked cigars and smoked them in the building! The wonderful Jules Pagano. Other heavy smokers: Howard Greenberg in Management; Jack Vaughn, the second director; Frank Mankiewicz; evaluator Dick Elwell, (as I recall, everyone in evaluation smoked and drank and wrote great prose). Doug Kiker and his crew in Public Affairs knew how to light up. And so did Betty Harris. When the Mad . . .