Author - John Coyne

Gary L. Garrison (Tunisia 1966-69) the Assistant Director, Asia, of the Institute of International Education dropped me a note to let me know of “opportunities for international teaching and research available in the Fulbright Scholar Program during the 2011-12 academic year.  Open to writers, college and university faculty and independent professionals, the program seeks qualified candidates to teach in higher education institutions in countries worldwide. We value the experience and expertise of former Peace Corps Volunteers who wish to participate in another great international program, the Fulbright Program.  Writers have held teaching or research awards in recent years in places such as India, Korea, Philippines, Lesotho, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Colombia and many others.  I hope your Peace Corps writers (and teachers) will consider joining them as Fulbright Scholars.” You can check by countries at http://catalog.cies.org/index.aspx. The Fulbright Scholar Program and Fulbright Humphrey Fellowship Program are administered by . . .

According to a front page article in The New York Times this morning there is a new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency being written for the History channel, and while there is no cast or footage yet, those who know anything about JFK want the script stopped.  The reason being, they say, the “Kennedys” screenplays contain many factual errors, some benign, some outrageous.” For example, one mistake that hits close to home to all of us is that the script has President Kennedy introducing the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact JFK signed an executive order creating the agency one month earlier. The mini-series, called “The Kennedys,” is being produced by  Joel Surnow, a political conservative. Kennedy scholars say the script offers a portrait of the president and his  family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job. Mr. Kronish, the script writer, says that some factual details, like . . .

Within the RPCV crowd from those early days there is a lot of joshing about who was first in Training, first in-country, first on the job. Mostly the discussion (argument?) goes on with RPCV from Ghana, Tanganyika, Colombia, and the Philippines. (The rest of us couldn’t care less.) But for the record: Colombia I started Training on 6/25/61 (48 Trainees) Tanganyika on 6/25/61 (35 Trainees) Ghana on 7/2/61 (51 Trainees) Nigeria I on 7/24/61 (39 Trainees) Nigeria II on 9/18/61 (24 Trainees) Nigeria III on 9/20/61 (45 Trainees) Sierra Leone on 11/7/61 (32 Trainees) Philippines I on 7/13/61 (272 Trainees in 4 Training Projects) Philippines II on 8/25/61 Philippines III on 12/7/61 Philippines IV on 3/29/62 Thailand on 10/9/61 (45 Trainees) Chile on 7/20/61 (45 Trainees) St. Lucia on 8/1/61 (15 Trainees) India on 10/1/61 (26 Trainees) Pakistan-West 9/15/61 (28 Trainees) Pakisten-East 8/30/61 (29 Trainees) Malaya I 10/16/61 (67 Trainees) We also know that . . .

Shriver, it turns out, (at least according to Warren Wiggins) was not an easy man to work for. “I’m not the first to say that and I found that in the early days it was close to impossible working for Sarge,” Warren told me in our 1997 interview. “I failed to build a good relationship with him in that first period. It was so bad that I went to Jack Bell, who worked for C. Douglas Dillon (the number two man in the State Department), and asked Bell to get me out of the Peace Corps. I couldn’t take it. Bell won’t let me quit. He told me the Peace Corps was too important. Then I went to lunch with Franklin Williams. I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him. I told him the story, how Shriver won’t see me. He won’t pay any attention to me. And Franklin . . .

The People In The Pews Shriver in those first days was fond of talking about how his staff got to the Peace Corps. “Tom Mathews was on a skiing trip in Alta, Utah, when I called him. He arrived in Washington still wearing his ski boots. Gordon Boyce got a telegram and arrived the very next afternoon. At the time our payroll arrangement were slow and inadequate and most of these people worked for as long as three months without pay.” The Peace Corps was a disorganized mess. When Lee St. Lawrence, Director of the Far East Regional Office, arrived he took one long look at the confusion and commented to no one in particular, “this place is all fouled up.” Then he wanted to know which desk was his. Others came on ‘day one’ and stayed where Charlie Nelson, Willie Warner, Sally Bowles, Charlie Peters, John Corcoran, Nan McEvoy, John Alexander. There . . .

[There is a plaque on the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union at Ann Arbor that reads: Here at 2:00 A.M. on October 14, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy first defined the Peace corps. He stood at the place marked by the medallion and was cheered by a large and enthusiastic student audience for the hope and promise his idea gave the world. In her book, Come As You Are: The Peace Corps Story, Coates Redmon tells what happened next: Kennedy was making an unannounced stop at the University of Michigan in the last month of his campaign for the presidency to rest up after his third debate with Richard Nixon. The Ann Arbor crowd had been gathering, by means of word of mouth, since the middle of the evening. Deborah Bacon, the dean of women at Michigan, knew of the visit and was ‘inspired’ to lift the ban . . .