Author - John Coyne

Betty Harris was what we used to call a ‘a piece of work.’ She was thirty-nine-years old in 1961 and had been a political organizer and a public relations executive in Dallas, Texas, before arriving in D.C. She had also been a pioneering journalist in New York City before women had such jobs, working with among others, Newsweek and NBC. When she arrived at the Peace Corps in 1961 she had just gone through a bitter divorce with Leon Harris, the son of man whose department store in Dallas that became the model of Neiman-Marcus. Betty always, in fact, looked as if she had just stepped out of the pages of a Neiman-Marcus catalog. ‘Chic’ is the term that Coates Redmon uses to describe Betty in Come As You Are. Betty Harris knew Shriver longer than anyone else at the Peace Corps, having first met the man in the 1940s when they both . . .

Lee St. Lawrence might very well been the prototype of who Shriver had in mind when it came to picking his Peace Corps staff. First, Lee had a great name. Second, he had a great personal story. And, third, there were his dashing and dark and slightly romantic looks. I didn’t know Lee St. Lawrence in those first days of the agency, when he was one of the Mad Men of the Peace Corps, but I knew all about him. Going into  WW II as a teenager,  St. Lawrence of Brockton, Mass, was sent into combat duty in Europe. He stayed overseas for 17 years after the fighting stopped.  St. Lawrence (even with that name!) wasn’t one of Shriver’s ‘rich kids.” He had worked his way through high school as a gandy dancer on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. He studied Greek and Latin at a Catholic Redemptorist Fathers junior college in Pennsylvania, then . . .

When I was managing the Peace Corps Office in New York back in the mid-90s, I use to tell applicants that the Peace Corps was the #2, employer of college graduates, right after Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Well, things are getting tougher; the Peace Corps has fallen to #3, following Enterprise (still # 1!) and VerizonWireless, #2. Of the top 100 Employers for the Class of 2010 (according to Phil Gardner, Director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State), the Peace Corps ‘hired’ 5230 people in 2010 with Bachelor’s Degrees, and another 743 with Masters, for a total of 5973; the agency recruited on 600 campuses. Enterprise, however, went to 800 campuses; they had zero grads with masters. (I was told when I was with the Peace Corps  that Enterprise only wanted employees with C grade averages. I guess a “C” is all it takes to fill out those forms!) The Peace Corps, by the way, has more master’s level Volunteers than Verizon; they hired just 500 . . .

Pat was driving to D.C. when he heard on the car radio that JFK had signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps. It was March 1, 1961. He stepped on the gas and reached Washington that night. He started to work at the Peace Corps the next day. There was no specific job, however. There were no jobs. There were 12 or so people working for the new agency: Sarge, Maryann Orlando, Sally Bowles, Nancy Gore, Mitzi Mallina. Warren Wiggins, Charlie Nelson, Gordon Boyce, Al Sims, Al Meisel, Ed Bayley, and Harris Wofford. “Wofford was dividing his time between the Peace Corps and the White House,” Kennedy recalls. “He interviewed me and he kept yawning in my face. I knew he was important; I’d heard about him on the campaign. He was close to Shriver. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve had it. I’m boring him to death.’ Pat wasn’t boring Wofford, it . . .

Pat Kennedy wasn’t a relative to the ‘other’ Kennedys, but he was never anxious to tell others that. It was nice in those balmy days of 1961 to ride the smooth carpet of the most famous name in America. Thought, in all honesty, Pat never ‘lived off’ the name. He made his own way to Washington, D.C. and the Peace Corps, he was a good guy who treated everyone fairly, and unlike many others, didn’t use his ‘connections’ to make his way in the agency. Like most of those early staffers he had ‘family money’ and he was young, twenty-eight, married to Ellen Conroy a wonderful (and in my opinion, much smarter wife. Ellen who, by the way, was the sister of Frank Conroy, who wrote the wonderful Stop-Time, and was for years director of the Iowa Writer’s Program, but back to Pat.) Pat was a teaching fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (history) when he heard about . . .

The Peace Corps On Day One blog series that I recently posted attempted, in pretty much short-hand fashion (suitable for blogging), to tell the history of the first days of the agency, and the initial thinking behind the Peace Corps itself. I mentioned that in those early days of 1960s the agency was full of Mad Men (and a few Mad Women) who were living in a world-of-work atmosphere very much like the provocative AMC drama Mad Men, the program that follows a handful of ruthlessly competitive men and women in New York City who work in advertising on Madison Avenue. They are living (in case you haven’t seen the series) in an ego-driven world where “selling” is all that matters. The series is set around 1962-63 and has everything we grew up with: cigarette smoking, drinking, sexism, adultery, racism, etc. (I might have left out a few ‘isms’.) Well, some (if . . .

A New York Non-Profit–BEST–is partnering with RPCVs to create a historical exhibit in downtown Manhattan. The theme is “Then & Now: 50 Years of Service” and the exhibition will tell personal stories of the Peace Corps’ long-term impact on the countries where we lived and worked.  The exhibit will be displayed in the lobby of the Federal Building at 201 Varick Street where the Regional Peace Corps Recruitment Offices are located. The group is seeking stories from RPCVs (along with accompanying photos and artifacts, when available) that illustrate the impact of their Peace Corps projects and relationships that began during their service. The Peace Corps experience is rich in its history and full of stories and connections that have lasted longer than just two years. What do you remember? Who among your many HCNs still write letters, send emails, keep in touch? Tell the stories of your trip back to your country of service. Tell it in . . .

This is a terrific piece by Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) that is on the website of  The New Yorker as of today,  March 15, 2010. Peter takes on NYTIMES writer Nicholas Kristof and his piece the other day that stirred a lot of  interest among RPCVs who have been there, done that, and know how to say more than “doorknob” in their host country language. Read it, and if you haven’t read Warren Wiggins’  comments about what the founders of the Peace Corps were trying to do 50 years ago, read his comments, too.  And also, if you are taking a class from John Brown at Georgetown University, give him an F. He’s like a lot of those foreign service officers we know overseas. You know, the ones we called, “dumb f****! in our host country language. Here’s Peter’s piece: “Here’s a one-word language test to measure whether someone really knows a foreign country and culture: . . .

What continues to surprise me is how few people–since that morning in the Mayflower Hotel–have read “A Towering Task” which was the first draft of defining the Peace Corps; it was the bible for the future Peace Corps. When I asked Warren Wiggins about this, he commented, saying, “It’s marvelous that nobody has read it because, you see, in most ways I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. In some ways I was dead on, but I did recommend that we ship air-conditioned trailers to the Philippines to house the Volunteers. It’s a far cry from the theology of the Peace Corps that evolved, but then, those were the early days.” What is clear now from the safety of time and distance is that being anti-establishment, amateurish, anti-professional was the reason for the success of the Peace Corps. This attitude by the staff permeated the whole organization . . .

“The list is long and it is hard to name a few when so many contributors would be left out, so let me just mention one person,” Warren Wiggins said in the winter of ’97 when I asked him who had made the most significant contribution (besides Shriver) to the creation of the Peace Corps. Wiggins went on: Bill Moyers deserves his special place in Peace Corps history. His work with Shriver to create full bipartisan support in the Congress that first year was critical. His role in the creation of the public service advertising campaign for the Peace Corps created a nationwide citizen constituency. These achievements were of unparalleled important. Moyers got Young and Rubicam to create ads. Moyers interpreted the Peace Corps to them. And those ads meant that all Americans read or heard on the radio or saw on television three or four good sentences about the Peace Corps. The . . .