Author - John Coyne

One of the important ways that Bill Moyers helped establish the Peace Corps was in his ability to get Shriver to work the halls of Congress. Shriver wasn’t a Washington type. When he began to sell the Peace Corps idea to Congress he had only been in D.C. for four months. But it was up to him to sell the new agency. Kennedy had told his sister, Shriver’s wife, “Well, Sarge and Lyndon Johnson wanted to have a separate Peace Corps, separate from AID, and so I think they ought to take charge of getting it through Congress. I’ve got plenty of other legislation I’m struggling with.” “When he said that,” Shriver recalled, “I just said, ‘I’m putting this piece of legislation through!’” Shriver’s ace-in-the-hole was Bill Moyers. Peter Grothe, who had come to the Peace Corps from the Hill, having been a speech writer for Senator Hubert Humphrey in 1960, said . . .

James Rowe, an influential Washington lawyer, who was also an intimate of Lyndon Johnson’s and a former aide to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called Shriver and said, “Sarge, I think I have good news for you. I don’t really understand how this has come about, but did you ever hear of a fellow named Bill Moyers? Shriver tells Rowe he has never heard of Moyers. This was all reported in Coates Redmon’s book, Come As You Are. Rowe tells Sarge that this twenty-five-year old kid wants to work at the Peace Corps, and that he is the smartest person that Lyndon Johnson has ever had work for him, and is “one of the most gifted young legislative persons I’ve ever seen. I have no idea why in the world he wants to work in the Peace Corps. Frankly, I think it’s sort of crazy for him to want to do . . .

I had a email recently from a dear young friend complaining that my blog is about ‘all you old farts at Peace Corps Headquarters”‘ and I wrote back, okay, I’d do more items on golf and Tiger Woods. She quickly replied, “Well, then maybe you should stay with the early days of the agency. Anything is better then golf!” There is a lot one can write about those early days of the agency when the Peace Corps attracted the best and the brightest, or so they claimed. An early document of the agency said that the staff in D.C. and around the world was composed of “skiers, mountain climbers, big-game hunters, prizefighters, football players, polo players and enough Ph.D.’s [30] to staff a liberal arts college.” There were 18 attorneys, of whom only four continue to work strictly as attorneys in the General Counsel’s office and the rest [including Sargent Shriver] did other jobs. Also, . . .

It was not all ‘work’ and no ‘play’ at the Peace Corps. 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 . . .

Washington, D.C. March 1, 1961 I have today signed an Executive order establishing a Peace Corps on a temporary pilot basis . . . I recommend to the Congress the establishment of a Permanent Peace Corps – a pool of trained Americans men and women sent overseas by the United States Government or through private organizations and institutions to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower . . . . Let us hope that other nations will mobilize the spirit and energies and skill of their people in some form of Peace Corps – making our own effort only one step in a major international effort to increase the welfare of all men and improve understanding among nations. John F. Kennedy President of the United States [check: http://www.sbpca.org/EO10924.htm]

Those of  us who follow the history of the Peace Corps agency know the term “peace corps” came to public attention during the 1960 presidential election. In one of JFK’s last major speeches before the November election in the Cow Palace in San Francisco  he called for the creation of a “Peace Corps” to send volunteers to work at the grass roots level in the developing world. However, the question remains: who said (or wrote) “peace corps” for the very first time? Was it Kennedy? Was it his famous speech writer Ted Sorensen? Or Sarge himself? But – as in most situations – the famous term came about because of some young kid, usually a writer, working quietly away in some back office that dreams up the language. In this case the kid was a graduate student between degrees who was working for the late senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Today, forty-nine . . .

Lately there has been endless talk among RPCVs about who was the first PCV. Perhaps I’m partially to blame with my blogging about the early days of the Peace Corps. Or is it because we are reaching the milestone of the 50? Some RPCVs are drawing on faulty memories, old plane tickets, anecdotal incidents, typewritten letters from Shriver, and yellow copies of telegrams folded and unfolded over the last fifty years, to make their historical (if not hysterical) claim. “Yes, it was I! I was the first PCV!” Well, let me take another tact. Let me suggest to you who really was the first Volunteer. We can end the guessing game, solve the mystery, and all go on and argue about something else. As we said back in the Sixties: Here’s the skinny. The Peace Corps began in a light drizzle at 2 a.m. in the early morning of October . . .

Arriving in D.C. and hired as a consultant to the General Counsel’s office, Charlie Peters first job for the Peace Corps was to negotiate with the government of Puerto Rico for the establishment of Camp Crozier at Rio Abajo. The only problem was that  he had no idea how to do it. But as he said in Coates Redmon’s book, “In those days my zeal was going well past what I know I was doing.” Kenny O’Donnell, however, had advised Peters to get to know Bill Haddad at the Peace Corps because O’Donnell basically knew Charlie was going to need help in Washington.   Haddard happened to have been in Shriver’s office when the White House called to recommend Peters to the agency. Haddard realized that if Bobby Kennedy was prepared to endorse Peters, Peters must be first rate. Haddad also guessed that Peters must have some secret connection to the White House that none of them . . .