Author - John Coyne

Here are President Kennedy’s comments about founding of the Peace Corps given in his three State of the Union Addresses. From 1961 State of the Union Address: “An even more valuable national asset is our reservoir of dedicated men and women — not only on our college campuses but in every age group — who have indicated their desire to contribute their skills, their efforts, and a part of their lives to the fight for world order. We can mobilize this talent through the formation of a National Peace Corps, enlisting the services of all those with the desire and capacity to help foreign lands meet their urgent needs for trained personnel.” From 1962 State of the Union Address: “A newly conceived Peace Corps is winning friends and helping people in fourteen countries–supplying trained and dedicated young men and women, to give these new nations a hand in building a . . .

A police escort with sirens blaring led our dozen Peace Corps buses in one long continuous caravan through every downtown light in Washington, D.C. It was high noon in the District the summer  of 1962, less than a year after the famous postcard dropped by a PCV had been found on the Ibadan campus that almost doomed the Peace Corps and we–the 300 Ethiopia-bound Peace Corps Trainees at Georgetown University–were on our way to meet John F. Kennedy at the White House.      There were other Peace Corps Trainees as well meeting the President that afternoon. Peace Corps Trainees at Howard, American, Catholic, George Washington universities, and the University of Maryland, over 600 in all, gathered in the August heat and humidity on the great lawn below the Truman Balcony.      Arriving at the White House, I walked with the others up the slope with the Washington Monument behind me and the White . . .

What continues to surprise me is how few people–since that morning in the Mayflower Hotel–have read “A Towering Task.” It was the first draft of defining the Peace Corps; it was the bible of the Peace Corps. When I asked Warren Wiggins about this, he commented wryly, “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 permeated the whole organization and PCVs overseas expressed the same sort . . .

The third recommendation that Shriver made to Kennedy in his memorandum was the appointment of a Peace Corps Director. That is, someone besides himself. Shriver listed people he thought should be the Director. Included in this list where Eugene Rostow of Yale, Carroll Wilson of MIT, Gilbert White of the University of Chicago, and Clark Kerr of UCLA. All of these men had had experience with small overseas service programs involving the training or replacement of American students in the Third World. Kennedy rejected all of them. According to Gerard T. Rice in his book The Bold Experiment, Kennedy wanted “the Peace Corps to be an adventurous foreign policy initiative and he did not feel that a bookish type of leader would be consonant with that ethos.”      The Peace Corps in these heavy days was being covered closely by the press, especially by David Halberstam and Peter Braestrup of . . .

The question now was would anyone apply to the Peace Corps? Could the United States produce enough Americans of high quality and character to make the Peace Corps successful?      Between March 1 and June 1, 1961, after the Peace Corps preliminary policies were set, approximately 10,000 Americans filled out and mailed in Peace Corps applications. From June to December 31, 1961, Americans volunteered at the rate of 1,000 per month.      In those early months, the Peace Corps made little effort to attract Volunteers, preferring to wait until it had a clear mandate from the Congress both in terms of authorization and appropriation. That mandate came on September 22, 1961. With bipartisan national endorsement, the Peace Corps took the initiative in explaining its program and the opportunities for Peace Corps service. October and November 1961 were taken up in preparing an adequate public information and public affairs program for . . .

One of the seminal books on the Peace Corps was published in 1966 and entitled Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps. It is a collection of fifteen essays by social scientists who visit Peace Corps projects to observe and write about Peace Corps activities. It was edited by Robert B. Textor, who was then an anthropologist at Stanford and a consultant to the Peace Corps. Textor is important in Peace Corps history and mythology if only for drafting the original memorandum that detailed the “In, Up & Out” personnel policy of the new agency. I’ll discuss that in a later blog, but now I just want to reprint a quote from the Foreword  written by Margaret Mead who at the time was in Aghios Nikolaos, Crete. This was July 1965, very early in the life of the Peace Corps. Mead writes in summing up her views of the Peace Corps: “…the Peace Corps . . .

Shriver created the Peace Corps in twenty-one days (from February 7, 1961–the day after he got The Towering Task– to March 1, 1961, when the Executive Order was signed by President Kennedy.) According to Wiggins, “That’s a record for a government agency. Something like a year or two is usually the case. But he got it together that fast; he created its laws, its principles, and he staffed it up.”      “Staffing up” meant appropriating three rooms on the sixth floor of 806 Connecticut Avenue, the Maiatico Building, [the first Peace Corps Office, now replaced by a slick building housing law firms, I’m sure] where Wiggins and Josephson already worked at ICA. Both of them soon would be working full time for the Peace Corps, Wiggins doing planning, and Josephson figuring out how to make the agency become a government agency. Josephson found the way in a little used President’s . . .

Among the large cast of characters who created the Peace Corps Administration in the very early days of the agency was Bill Josephson who came to the agency as the Deputy General Counsel when he was 26 or 27. Josephson is most important in these early days as he worked with Warren Wiggins in the drafting of The Towering Task. Here’s a little of Josephson’s background.      In September, 1958, he went to England to write a doctoral dissertation in history at St. Antony’s College, one of the two graduate colleges at Oxford University. He dissertation was on what the other Americans, other than President Wilson and Colonel House, were doing at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The thesis never got written as Josephson met and married a young lawyer from London.      Josephson was from South Orange, New Jersey, and with the help of a scholarship, went through the . . .

This is not an April Fool’s Joke. We are looking for a few good bloggers, RPCVs who have a special background, experience and knowledge that they want to share with the Peace Corps Community. We want to add to our collection of bloggers who now are sharing their experience with PCVs, the families of PCVs, and RPCVs.      We began this site: www.peacecorpsworldwide.org, a project of the non-profit Peace Corps Fund, to provide a community of resources for RPCVs, PCVs and their family, and others as they make their home in the world.  We are writing to see if you want to join our group of experts.      In the coming weeks we will add three more bloggers, one is an RPCV who will write a travel column for women traveling alone overseas; a former Peace Corps Recruiter who will give advice on how new applicants can handle the recruitment . . .

What strikes anyone reading about the creating of the Peace Corps was 1) how creatively it was organized; and 2) how fast it was put into operation. The reason was that the ‘founding fathers’ (and they were only fathers) took chances. Wofford remarks in Of Kennedys & Kings how a management consultant said to him one evening, “You guys had a good day today. You broke fourteen laws.” Then the consultant promised to straighten out the paper work and urged then all on, saying, “Keep it up, we’re making progress.”      Wiggins in his interview with me listed 7 reasons why the Peace Corps was so successful in those early days of the Kennedy administration.      1)  Bill Josephson and Warren Wiggins kept the idea of a “Peace Corps” simple. At first, the PCVs were only to teach English. As Wiggins told me, “Our cardinal rule in crafting ‘A Towering . . .