Author - John Coyne

On November 4-5, 2010, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Colombia I Volunteers, the first Peace Corps group to assemble, and Rutgers University, the first Peace Corps training site, will celebrate the moment when the idea of a Peace Corps became a reality. Keeping the Peace Corps spirit alive, these Colombia I RPCVs, and the University,  will hold a Peace Corps forum on  November 4.  The next morning, Rutgers University’s President, Richard L. McCormick, will preside at a commemorative ceremony, culminating in the unveiling of a plaque on the spot where Colombia I began training for the Peace Corps on June 25,1961. Colombia I RPCVs will host a cumbia-laden celebratory banquet on the evening of November 5, where “elaborations and exaggerations of the truth,” particularly with respect to Peace Corps exploits, will not only be allowed, but  admired and encouraged.

A lot gets lost over time and 50 years of history is a long time for an agency. Reading this past weekend the long, and deadly prose written report: The Peace Corps A Comprehensive Agency Assessment, published by the agency in June 2010, I realized how much of the original spirit of the Peace Corps has evaporated in five decades of service. This report claims six people wrote it, with lots of advisory committees, but I’m told the key writers were Jean Lujan, an attorney, who recently retired from the Department of Justice. She was a PCV in Chile back in 1965-67, and a graduate of the U of Michigan. The other writer (to use the term loosely) was Carlos Torres. He is the founder and former president of I Corporation, a company specializing in international consulting. In other words, a Beltway Bandit. They, and their cohorts, attempts to evaluate the agency, and make recommendations . . .

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 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. In the academic year 1963-64, his recruiting techniques . . .

FINE ART DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER Damian Wampler (Kyrgyzstan 1999-2001) recently had two prints from his series Darfur in Brooklyn acquired by the Brooklyn Museum. One of the prints, Untitled 1 (Kitchen), will be on display in the American Identities galleries on the 5th floor from August-December 2010. Darfur in Brooklyn is a documentary photography project that shadows a day in the life of a Sudanese taxi driver named Omar. Damian met Omar at a protest in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, DC. He soon learned that Omar lived in the neighborhood adjacent to his in Brooklyn that had a large Sudanese population. Damian began shooting portraits of many of the 300 Darfuri refugees that live in Kensington, a Brooklyn neighborhood just south of Prospect Park, but soon realized that Omar’s face reflected the struggle of the Darfuris as a whole. “The Darfuris accepted me and opened their houses to me. . . .

Trouble, however, was brewing for the Wisconsin Plan. Evaluator Dave Gelman was warning that unless the Peace Corps gave priority for quality over quantity, the Peace Corps would not only acquire too many “high-risk” applicants but also “drink dry the well of potential recruits.” (Remember those Trainees? High Risk/Low Gain?) Gelman felt Gale’s method was wrong and warned about the “evils of excess” and the grave danger of becoming over-eager to ‘sign-up’ people of  two years of service. “The Marines had long since landed.” Gelman wrote. One young applicant expressed his disappointment at the Wisconsin Plan style this way: ‘I thought we were something special. Then I saw that they were just pulling people off the street and testing them later.” Gelman was an early Evaluator and a tough son-of-a-bitch. I did not know him, but I watched him in the hallways of the building. He always appeared to be in a . . .

Bob Gale was apprehensive being called into Moyers’s office. It wasn’t Moyers’s way to have a tete-a-tete. Moyers was edgy standing behind his desk, and while only about 27 at the time, he appeared “fatherly,” thought Bob. There had been talk, Bill told Gale. Talk of ‘after-hour’ antics on the California advance trip. Moyers told Gale that as the head of Recruitment it was his responsibility to behave himself, and to see that others did at well. They (the recruiters) had no right to ‘party on a business trip at government expense.’ He told Gale that his ‘antics’ could bring shame to the Peace Corps. “He was being very‘Baptist’ with me,” Gale recalled. Moyers had also been “thoroughly informed” as to all of their doings in California and had exaggerated them in his mind, or his informer had exaggerated them to the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps. Moyers told Gale that it was . . .

The most famous recruitment trip of them all was in early October 1963. It was the one that gave rise to the term, blitz recruiting. Gale put together five advance teams and five follow-up teams. Each team spent a week in southern California and then a week in northern California, visiting every major campus in both areas. Coates Redmon sums up the ‘teams’ in her book. “One advance team consisting of Nan McEvoy, then deputy director of the Africa Regional Office, and Frank Erwin, then deputy director of Selection, were assigned first to Los Angeles Sate University (where there was only modest interest in the Peace Corps) and next to San Francisco State University (where there was considerable interests). Bob Gale, Linda Lyle (his secretary) and Dough Kiker took on the University of Southern California in the south and then the University of California at Berkeley in the north. Gale had friends . . .

Jay Rockefeller had no interest in going out on a blind date with Lennie Radley when he arrived at the University of Michigan. As he emphatically told Gale. “Bob, I’m not seeing her. I have traveled fifty thousand miles in the past five weeks. And now I am going to bed.” You can’t, Gale insisted, begging Rockefeller, grabbing the young man by the shoulders. Gale had promised the young woman. She had lost her brother in the Peace Corps.  It was as if the whole future of the Peace Corps depended on getting Rockefeller to go on this blind date. “Okay, Bob,” Jay answered. “I’ll do it. But only if you take out her roommate and go with me.” “I can’t! I’m a married man!” “I don’t care.” “Besides, she might not have a roommate.” “She’s got a girlfriend. If I’m going; you’re going.” The two recruiters double dated for the sake of the future of . . .

“What do you mean, Sarge?” Bob Gale asked, alone in the conference room with Shriver. “The school year is over. It’s the end of April. The students spend May studying for finals. It’s a tense time on campus. I don’t think we should impose ourselves. We hit Wisconsin at a perfect time. But there won’t be another perfect time until next fall.” Shriver wasn’t having any of that. “What’s the nearest equivalent of a school like Wisconsin?” Shriver wanted to know, disregarding Gale’s protests. “We need a big, liberal-learning place where you have contacts?” Shriver was on one side of the long conference table, leaning back in his chair, asking questions. Gale was on the other side, keeping his distance, pacing back and forth. A moving target was harder to hit, he kept thinking. “Michigan,” Gale finally answered, sighing. He had to say something. There was no turning back. Haddad had abandoned . . .

Returning to D.C. after their Madison trip Gale and Kiker walked into a senior staff meeting and were greeted by cheers and applause, a standing ovation for what they had achieved in Wisconsin. Howard Greenberg was the first to speak up at the senior staff meeting that morning after the round of applause and words of congratulations from the Mad Men & Mad Women. This old tough government bureaucrat was the Associate Director for the Office of Management. He controlled the funds appropriated by Congress, and was a long time government employee. He had seen it all. He wasn’t easily impressed by a couple of guys wet behind the ears when it came to “Washington ways.” He began the meeting by saying: “Gale and Kiker here, went out to Wisconsin two weeks ago and they broke more rules and regulations than anyone in the United States government, as far as I know. Thought I won’t go so far as to say they’ve broken . . .

Following Sarge’s ‘T’riffic!’ and approval for the new recruitment campaign, Gale went up to his rabbit warren of rooms and started to call everyone he knew at the University of Wisconsin. “They were all old pals of mine, and they were going ape over the phone about my plans for the Peace Corps at the university. But it wasn’t an easy job of recruitment. In 1963, the campus covered nine hundred acres on the shores of Lake Mendota. There were over 17,000 undergraduates, another 7,000 grad students. Gale realized early on that he (and the Peace Corps) had to see the recruitment trip as a presidential campaign. There were two of them, Doug Kiker and Bob Gale, assigned by Sarge to do the first campaign–neither of them knew each other at HQ, both were new to the Peace Corps. They couldn’t do it all, so Gale decided on a second team to arrive in . . .