Author - John Coyne

Arriving for work on or before March 1, 1961, the day President Kennedy signed the executive order establishing the Peace Corps, were a few women who were early “volunteer staffers” and who would become famous in those first years of the agency. The majority of these women were well connected by family or friends to Shriver and eager to work at the Peace Corps, the shining star of Kennedy’s administration. The Peace Corps was the ‘hot’ agency and everyone, of course, wanted to be connected to Kennedy–if they couldn’t be in the White House–they wanted to be with Shriver and the Peace Corps. The women at the time were mostly ‘second class’ citizens in the world-of-work. They were not, for example, sitting at the ‘big conference table” at Senior Staff meetings. Looking at old black-and-photos of Peace Corps HQ meetings, you might see that Elizabeth (Betty) Forsling Harris had wedged herself into . . .

  Regardless of what else might be said about the “Gale Method” it established two important elements for the Peace Corps. HQ staff now understood how recruitment was done, and they had acquired the skills that would make them effective recruiters. More importantly was that within the first years, the Peace Corps was established as part of campus life. Peace Corps Recruiters would be invited back every year, and would be welcomed, often with the same deference and cooperation shown in 1963. By now, and this was early in 1965, the Peace Corps was starting the “In, Up & Out” policy that Robert Textor had crafted in a memo for the agency, and Bob Gale was thinking of leaving. He didn’t want to be Director of Recruiting for Life, as Shriver had declared at the senior staff meeting in March 1963. Gale wanted to leave when the going was good. . . .

Lawrence Grobel (Ghana 1968-71) is the author of 32 books and hundreds of magazine articles. Among his honors are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction; Special Achievement Awards from PEN for his Conversations with Capote, and Playboy for his interviews with Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro; and the Prix Litteraire from The Syndicat Francais de la Critique de Cinema for his Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel. He has been a Contributing Editor for Playboy, Movieline, World (New Zealand), and Trendy (Poland) and has been called “A legend among journalists” by Writer’s Digest, and “The Mozart of Interviewers” by Joyce Carol Oates. He served in the Peace Corps, teaching at the Ghana Institute of Journalism; created the M.F.A. in Professional Writing for Antioch University; and taught in the English and Honors Departments at UCLA. He has served as a jury member at . . .

In the third year of the Peace Corps–1963–a booklet was published by the agency entitled “Who’s Who in the Peace Corps Washington.” Here is one photo of the early Staff Meetings with Shriver at the head of the table.       A list of the top 40 employees are profiled in this booklet. Only three profiles, however, were of women: Alice Gilbert (Director of the Division of United Nations and International Agency Programs); Ruth Olson (Special Assistant to the Chief of the Division of Volunteer Field Support); Dorothy Mead Jacobsen (Chief of the Division of Personnel). There was also a list of “Charter Members” of the agency. They have a photo and a paragraph. A total of 21 employees were profiled. Of them 7 were women: Jean Hundley, a secretary; Nan Tucker McEvoy, Deputy Director of Africa Programs; Sally Bowles, daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles; Helen Farrall, receptionist; Gloria Gaston, African Region; Nancy Gore, . . .