Author - John Coyne

The other day I got a call from a friend planning the 50th reunion of the Peace Corps and that got me thinking about the 25th Anniversary Conference in September of 1986. It was held under a huge tent on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and organized mostly by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of  D.C.. At the time, Peace Corps Director Loret Ruppe attempted to stop the reunion fearing the RPCVs would march on the White House and against President Reagan, but she and her Republican lackeys had to back off when Harris Wofford secured for Roger Landrum, Dough Siglin and the other D.C. RPCVs, a grant of $25,000 from the  MacArthur Foundation to stage the conference. Seeing that it would happen–with or without her–Ruppe rushed to take control and elbowed her way onto the stage. Nevertheless, the reunion really was a Volunteer event, as the Peace Corps really is about PCVs, not Washingon HQ staff, and the purpose of the agency was brought into focus when Shriver . . .

Doug Kiker was from Griffin, Georgia and had early success as a short story writer while still a student at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, majoring in English. There’s a story about how he wanted to get published and he picked up Martha Foley’s short stories collection, went to the rear of the book and found the list of short-story publishers, closed his eyes and punched in the dark. He hit the Yale Review, to which he promptly submitted a short story. And they accepted his story. While still in college he worked as a reporter, covering the Senate race between Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnston. After college he joined the navy and was commissioned an Ensign, serving in Korean War. Discharged, he returned to Atlanta and worked at the Atlanta Journal and covered the first sit-ins at lunch counters in North Carolina. Out of that experience came his . . .

I had a email recently from a friend complaining that my blog is “all about JFK !” and I wrote back, okay, I’d do more items on golf. She quickly replied, “Well, then maybe you should stay with the early days of the Peace Corps.” There is a lot one can write about when it comes to the days  when the Peace Corps was attracting the best and the brightest. 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, all of these employees were parents of some 272 children. In terms of . . .

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’ 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 to see the two guys, who had been roommates at Princeton. . . .

Arriving for work on or before March 1, 1961, the day President Kennedy signed the executive order establishing the Peace Corps, were a number of women who would become famous during these early years at the agency. The majority of these women were well connected by family and friends to Shriver and the new administration and eagerly went to work at the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps was the ‘hot’ agency and everyone wanted to be connected to Kennedy–if they couldn’t be in the White House–they wanted to be with Shriver at the Peace Corps. Some of these noted women were: Maryann Orlando, Sally Bowles, Nancy Gore, Nan McEvoy, Diana MacArthur, Patricia Sullivan, Alice Gilbert, Betty Harris, Ruth Olson, Dorothy Mead Jacobsen. It is a long list, but nevertheless the agency was dominated by men. Looking at old black-and-white photos one is struck by two things: 1) the women are sitting behind the men . . .

By 1960 two bills were introduced in Congress that were the direct forerunners of the Peace Corps. Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin proposed that the Government study the idea, and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota asked for the establishment of a Peace Corps itself.  These bills were not likely to pass Congress at the time, but they caught the attention of then-Senator Kennedy for several important reasons.       According to several books on the beginnings of the agency, Kennedy foresaw a “New Frontier” inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal. In foreign affairs, Kennedy viewed the Presidency as “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.”      Concerned by what was then perceived to be the global threat of communism, Kennedy was looking for economic aid to counter negative images of the “Ugly American” and Yankee imperialism. Between his election and inauguration, he asked Sarge to do a . . .

As many of you might know I play golf and I write novels about golf, and I’m a big Ben Hogan fan [What? You haven’t read The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan?] But more importantly, forty plus years ago this weekend Ben Hogan turned back the clock at the Masters in Georgia when he shot a back-nine 30 in the third round at Augusta National GC. It was one of the great rounds of golf ever played at Augusta. Hogan had won the Masters in ’51 and ’53 but in 1967 at the age of 54 he was back at the Masters for a final time. He still suffered from the 1949 car accident that nearly killed him. He had bad legs and a left shoulder plagued with bursitis, scar tissue and calcium deposits. Every morning he needed a cortisone shot just to be able to swing a club. In the . . .

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 . . .