Miscellany

Harris Wofford also dropped by our Training program at Georgetown University. Sometimes early in the day, before seven a.m., he would arrive with his oldest son, who was then about 10, and they would do the morning exercises with the ‘guys’ up on the playing field behind the college dorms. In the years since our Training days, that field became the site of the new Georgetown Hospital. Wofford  would also come to Georgetown when we were having someone famous speaking to us. Chester Bowles, then the Secretary of State, addressed us, as did the former governor of Michigan, Soapy Williams, who was Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.  I remember Wofford best from small sessions we had with him late in the evening and sitting around a college conference table. For the life of me, I can’t recall how or why those sessions came about, nor why I was in them. Perhaps Harris was having many other small . . .

NEW ROCHELLE – When Peace Corps volunteers return from teaching English, fighting disease or designing irrigation systems, they have one more job to do: tell the story. Volunteers are expected to share what they learned about the people and cultures they came to know during their two years abroad. Pelham resident John Coyne, an author, blogger and former volunteer in Ethiopia, has made it his mission to help them do so. Coyne edits a busy website called Peace Corps Worldwide, where volunteers share their experiences through a network of blogs. The site grew out of a newsletter Coyne created with Marian Haley Beil in 1987 and a smaller website that launched in 1999. Peace Corps Worldwide launched four years ago, with Coyne as editor and Haley Beil as publisher. There are more than 200,000 former Peace Corps volunteers, and they’ve produced a kind of subgenre of the travelogue. By living . . .

[This article appeared today, 10-10-2010, in the Chicago Tribune. It was written by John Keilman, a Tribune reporter. As of today I am not seeing signs that the agency understands that the 50th is a great recruitment opportunity. The Peace Corps, of course, is allowed to spend money to recruit, but my guess is that they are afraid of the IG’s office, and the Peace Corps lawyers — a bunch of hanger-ons from the Bush years — who will slap their hands for using the lives and experiences of RPCVs to ‘sell’ the idea that the Peace Corps was worthy once, and is still worthy today. Of course these lawyers, and others key people in the Peace Corps administration, never were PCVs, and they do not have a feel for the organization. They just want jobs! I’m sure they are also afraid to volunteer and live the life of a PCV.) Articles such as this one will . . .

At the Ann Arbor City Council meeting on October  4, 2010, the council agreed to close – State Street, from South University to East William – in connection with the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Peace Corps. There will be two events on October 14, 2010, one of them in the early morning, to mark the exact anniversary of the 2 a.m. speech by John F. Kennedy from the steps of the Michigan Union. The later event, at 11 a.m. will include as guest speakers  Sen. Harris Wofford, Jack Hood Vaughn, Aaron Williams, Julia Darlow, Mary Sue Coleman and Jennifer Granholm. The council voted unanimously to approve the street closing.

That summer in Washington changed my life. It changed all our lives in one way or the other, but in most respects it was a peaceful few months. We were back on a college campus; we were living a simple routine of early morning exercises, breakfast, classes, lectures, and beers in a bar late at night. We had some money in our pockets, and we had little responsibility. It was a lovely time, and those of us who might worry, worried about being de-selected, not that we knew much about that process. We all thought we were going to Africa once this silly Training thing was over. For the most part it was vacation time. Only after two years in Addis Ababa, coming back and working for the agency, and going to Training sessions for new Volunteers to Ethiopia, did I find Training useful. Now, I knew, something about the Empire, and how to put into . . .

The NBC video featuring the 37 new PCVs in Sierra Leone was finally telecast on the NIGHTLY NEWS last evening. It was extremely well done and included references to the first group that arrived back in the early ’60s and had interviews with a few of the volunteers who were shown in their assigned locations. Below is the web link sent by Jim Sheahan (Sierra Leone 1961-63) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39151931/ns/nightly_news-making_a_difference/

On those hot and humid evenings in Georgetown during Training when there wasn’t an evening lecture at the Hall of Nation, we would walk down the hill to the college bars on K Street and sit around telling lies about our lives back home, or we would walk along the shady cobblestone streets of the old section of Washington, with its clapboard small houses, and stone mansions built close to the sidewalk and find a party going on. There were always parties going on, kids working for the government, young bureaucrats. We weren’t like them. We were living on the edge, or so we fantasized that about ourselves; we weren’t finding safe jobs at home  nor settling down with careers. And on those hot summer evenings guys and gals would be standing outside their group houses with bottles of beer in hand, smoking cigarettes, catching a bit of breeze. Walking by, we’d paused and say hello, or step through an open gate, . . .

WOFFORD HAD COME TO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION as JFK’s Special Advisor on Civil Rights, but there were rumors he was pushing so hard on African-American issues that Kennedy wanted him out of the White House. There were also rumors Harris could have any ambassadorship he wanted in Africa, but Wofford wasn’t interested in a diplomatic role. My guess was that Harris was looking for an assignment that was a  zinger. At that moment in Peace Corps History, Ethiopia was the zinger. This Empire post with the largest project of the agency. So in 1962 Wofford became the first CD to Ethiopia, and was named by Shriver to be the Peace Corps Representative to Africa. In 1962 Harris and his wife Clare had three young children. It was not an easy move in the early Sixties to move a family, especially to a new continent. Thinking back, fifty years ago, we as a nation knew very little about Africa. . . .

Looking forward to this year’s 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, the University of Michigan is planning many events, including a national symposium on the future of international service and a commemoration of Senator John F. Kennedy’s speech on the steps of the Union. All of these events were organized by the University and not the Peace Corps or the National Peace Corps Association. The events that have been planned to date include: October 1-November 30 U-M and the Peace Corps: It All Started Here Hatcher Graduate Library, Library Gallery (Room 100) This dynamic exhibit showcases the unique role of University of Michigan students and faculty in the creation and popularizing of the Peace Corps. As Sargent Shriver said, “It might still be just an idea but for…those Michigan students and faculty.” The exhibit highlights the development of student activism as well as important historical events. Sponsored by the University of Michigan Library and . . .

One of the Peace Corps’ Mad Men who did not have a ‘real’ job at 806 Connecticut Avenue was Harris Wofford. Wofford, who was at the birth of the agency in the two-room suite in the Mayflower Hotel, was in 1961 32 or 34, and was one of the Best and the Brightest who had come to Washington with the Kennedy Administration. Wofford had been a white-shoe firm lawyer in D.C., an early civil rights advocate, and had become friends with Sarge Shriver early in Kennedy’s run for the White House when Shriver sought out Harris at Notre Dame, where Wofford was teaching law. Their first meeting was at a Notre Dame football game, where they talked civil right and politics while watching ND play. During the presidential campaign it was Wofford’s idea to suggest to Kennedy that he make the famous phone call to Martin Luther King’s wife after . . .

[A friend who I served with in Ethiopia (1962-64) sent me this article from the January 3, 1963, The Machinists, a newspaper published by the International Association of Machinists. It is the way that the Peace Corps did recruitment in those early days. Here was an announcement looking for Diesel Mechanics. The  contact person at the Peace Corps was Jules Pagano. A few months ago I wrote about Jules as one of the original Mad Men at the agency. Here’s the newspaper ad:] Peace Corps Needs Diesel Mechanics The Peace Corps is looking for 30 gasoline or diesel engine mechanics to volunteer for a special repairing and maintenance project in Tunisia. JULES PAGANO of the Peace Corps public affairs office announced recently that volunteers will be assigned to repair shops to maintain trucks, buses, and auto engines and to help train Tunisian mechanics. The operation is part of a Tunisian Peace Corps . . .

This coming November Rutgers University will honor the PCVs who trained at Rutgers and went to  Colombia with the first group of Volunteers. The Rutgers College Avenue Campus will host a program of guest speakers on November 4, beginning at 7:00 p.m. The next day, a commemorative plaque will be unveiled  at 11:00 a.m. at Hegeman Hall in New Brunswick. Thirty-five of the 62 (men only) Colombia One RPCV are planning to attend the cerebration. Recently the Rutgers Magazine, interviewed Harry Kranz, a 1945 graduate of the College, who was instrumental in getting the Peace Corps Training Program to Rutgers, about his involvement and those early Volunteers. Kranz was with Shriver on June 25, 1961, when Shriver came to Rutgers to see what “real PCV Trainees” looked like. Kranz, who had been an assistant to Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, had contacted Harris Wofford about going to work . . .

The relentless Rajeev Goyal (Nepal 2001-03) and his Push for Peace Corps Campaign has produced a short, informative 2-minute animation video entitled “Build a Better World.” It is something that you’ll never see on the Peace Corps.gov site. The purpose of it is to build awareness that House Appropriators recently passed a $46.15 million increase in Peace Corps funding for the 50th anniversary (which would support 1,000 new positions), but the Senate, shortly before recess, voted to reduce this increase by $26 million! The video asks all RPCVs to call their Senators and urge them to vote for the full $446.15 million Peace Corps budget. Check out the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUruDQAmAYA

Poet Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1963-65) was kind enough to send me a March 8, 1998 column by Mary McGrory from the Outlook Section of The Washington Post. It was a column about the Peace Corps on the 37th birthday of the agency, the CIA, and Moynihan. McGrory writes about Moynihan, saying, “he was a fan of the Peace Corps but not the CIA,” and then told a story of how when Moynihan was the ambassador to India villagers were resisting the help of the Peace Corps. The reason was that peasants had been evicted from their mud huts on either side of the volunteers’ mud hut to make room for the local police, who had moved in with their listening devices to monitor what they were sure were U.S. espionage activities. McGrory wrote in that column, “The CIA is into disruption, uprooting, sabotage and subversion. The Peace Corps is about plowing, planting, irrigating, . . .

The John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, with be having a “conversation with Peace Corp Directors” on October 12, 2010. They have asked the current Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams, (Dominican Republic 1967-70), of course, to come but then they stiffed all of the other notable RPCV Peace Corps Directors and asked (mostly) Republican hacks to present the agency at the Kennedy School. Why is that? Take Elaine Chao (she has been invited) who was director from (1991-92). Chao was famous for breaking into tears whenever she talked about all the work PCVs were doing overseas. Volunteers laughed at her, and to her face. She was also famous for scheduling several hours a day (regardless of the country) where she could have her hair done while overseas. And she told me once, in her office in the Peace Corps, that she didn’t become a PCV because she was an immigrant daughter and . . .