Miscellany

In 1962 the Peace Corps received 20,000 applications, compared with 13,000 in 1961. Nevertheless, Recruitment couldn’t keep up with the staggering period of growth. For example, in 1961 the Peace Corps was in 9 countries. A year later they were in another 32 countries. Then, in the early months of 1963, there was a dramatic decline in applications, and the Peace Corps suffered its first shortfalls. This happened just as more and more countries were asking for Volunteers. The head of Recruitment–called then ‘Chief of the Division of Colleges and Universities–was the former Dean of Men at Vanderbilt University, Samuel F.  Babbitt, Sam Babbitt was a low-key kind of guy. His idea for recruitment was to set up a single Peace Corps faculty contact on campuses all across the country with instructions to conduct a continuous but unaggressive information program. Babbitt wanted to win the Peace Corps a  reputation for honesty and thoroughness which, he told everyone, “would produce . . .

I’ve saved this “character” for last in my collection of  Peace Corps Mad Men.  A television producer might think of  featuring this person as a main character for a new series. He wouldn’t be a bad ‘concept’ as they say in Hollywood for a new show.    In those early days of the agency he invented a new way of doing things in the government  that didn’t last, but did propel the Peace Corps from being a minor bureaucracy into a major player in D.C. Warren Wiggins credits Bill Moyers as the key figure in the Peace Corps during those first years, citing Moyers role in creating full bipartisan support in Congress, and how he got Young and Rubicam to develop those award winning ads some of us today are old enough to recall. All true. Warren is right about Moyers. However, recently I read a draft of an essay “Reflections on the Peace Corps” that Robert Textor, a former professor of Anthropology . . .

I recently came across the “Woyingi” blog.” http://woyingi.wordpress.com/ The blogger, a woman, lives in Canada. Her mother is French-Canadian and American German. Her father is Nigerian Ijaw. Her father was deported back to Nigeria when she was a child so she was raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents. She had no contact with her father until she found him in her mid-twenties and have since developed a relationship with him via e-mails. She has yet to meet him in person. She writes on African issues, African writers, and women. She wrote recently about Neshani Andreas who is from Namibia. Now, what is the connection to the Peace Corps here? Neshani trained as a teacher at Ongwediva Training College and taught English, history, and business economics from 1988 to 1992 in a school in rural northern Namibia, where her first novel The Purple Violet of Oshaantu is set. Neshani completed this novel soon after . . .

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek, CA) and (Ethiopia 1965-67) who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, today voted for two amendments that would end the war in Afghanistan and set a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. John voted for an amendment authored by Obey and McGovern that requires the President to present Congress with a new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan by January 31, 2011 and a plan by April 4, 2011 on the safe, orderly and expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, including a timeframe for the completion of the redeployment. By a vote of 162-260, it did not secure a majority vote. Garamendi also voted for an amendment by Rep. Barbara Lee that would restrict funding in Afghanistan to only what is necessary to have a safe and orderly withdrawal, protect soldiers and contractors on the ground, and carry out diplomatic . . .

In the fall of 1962, the Peace Corps Volunteers arriving in Ethiopia were reading, or had packed into our carry-on luggage, Catch 22 by Joe Heller; The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone; Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger; Exodus by Leon Uris. And, of course, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. There were, I’m sure, a few other books being read on that long overnight flight on TWA out of the old Idlewild  Airport in New York to Rome and Athens, and then in the fleet of Ethiopian DC-6Bs into Africa. There were nearly 300 of us crossing Egypt and Sudan to arrive in Addis Ababa at dawn at the end of the “big rains” when the Ethiopian highlands are blanketed with bright yellow Maskel flowers. We stepped from the plane and smelled for the first time the burning of a hundred thousand eucalyptus fires — the smell of Africa . . .

Dick Irish, that old codger, has goosed me into recalling on paper a few more of the grand gals and guys who started the Peace Corps in the winter of  ’61. One woman who I remember fondly, and who was one of the class acts at the agency, was the very young and very charming, Sally Bowles, who was, everyone will agree, the first Peace Corps employee. She went to work for no pay at the Maiatico Building on March 1, 1961. Sally was the daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles, an honors graduate in history from Smith College where she was named editor of the college newspaper and was elected president of the student body. By the time she arrived at the Peace Corps, she had traveled and lived in Southeast Asia, India, Mexico, Morocco, France and Spain. She had worked for Congressman John Brademas of  Indiana and as an administrative assistant to . . .

In the July 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, in The Talk of the Town section, there is a comment made by George Packer (Togo 1982-83) on the firing of General Stanley McChrystal,  Obama, and the nine years of fighting in Afghanistan. First a little history. Packer, as some of you will recall, supported Bush and the Iraq invasion. He was right up there with ‘mister personality,’ Christopher Hitchens himself. I had a falling out with George over his support of Bush and “Mission Accomplished,” not that he seem to notice. No, he just went ahead and wrote his award winning The Assassins’ Gate, and got a full time gig at the New Yorker. But he also came around to his senses when he saw what really was happening in Iraq, and now he is getting as pissed off about what is happening at Afghanistan as I am. Packer knows what he is talking . . .

[Laurence Leamer (Nepal 1965-67) is considered a leading authority on the Kennedy family for his trilogy The Kennedy Women, The Kennedy Men, and Sons of Camelot.  He also has written best-selling biographies of Johnny Carson, the Reagan family, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. His latest work is Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach. Here is a piece he published  Tuesday on newsmax.com and written from Belgrade.] America Looks Like a Fortress By: Laurence Leamer I am spending time this summer in Belgrade, Serbia with my wife, Vesna, who was born in the Eastern European country. Last week we decided to visit Kosovo, a region that the Orthodox Serbs see as their Jerusalem. There are only a few protected enclaves of Serbs left in Kosovo. The Muslim majority claim that if the land that was once part of the former Yugoslavia becomes fully independent, the Serbian . . .

We all know L. P. Hartley’s famous line from his novel, The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Yes, they did, and there is a comment by “Joey” on the site today which reminds me that I should pay more attention to just ‘what they did’ back then, in that other country. I admit I have collected stories from those early years of the agency that paint an interesting time and want, for reasons of my own nostalgic self, to remember the best of times. Joey, however, lived through the worst of times, and she rightly remembers them, as she writes in her comment: “I love reading about the early romantic days of the Peace Corps. That is the Peace Corps I wanted so much to join. The Peace Corps I served in was very different. I try to be as accurate as I can about what I did, what I . . .

In their first public statement about celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps, the current leadership under the direction of RPCV Aaron Williams, is doing little to nothing to celebrate the history and importance of  the agency. Today the Office of Communications, run by political appointee and non-RPCV Allison Price, announces with excitement in a single-page pdf that much is happening — but none of it is being staged, organized or supported by the agency itself. Director Williams is terrified, I’m sure, that Congress will be all over his ass for spending dollars on any sort of celebration of RPCVs and the Third Goal. Of course, such an event, as happened at the 25th Reunion on the Mall, generated front page newspaper stories across the country that showed America that the agency was alive and well. A reunion of thousand of RPCVs would show the U.S. that yes, there is still a Peace Corps! It . . .

A profile of Hobart and William Smith Colleges President Mark Gearan was  featured on the front page of the Rochester Business Journal on June 14. The article covered Gearan’s career in politics beginning with the Dukakis campaign, followed by the Clinton administration and his tenure as Director of the Peace Corps. The article states that Gearan has brought large-scale initiatives to the colleges, (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and leading them in strategic planning at five-year intervals and in the largest capital campaign of their history. Gearan’s 11-year tenure at HWS has been influenced, the article says, by his experience as head of the Peace Corps. He has helped the college adopt the ‘Peace Corps’ mission of “bringing the world home,” sharpening the school’s focus on studying abroad and encouraging 60 percent of students to do so. Once a recruiter, always a recruiter!

When the 25th Reunion of RPCVs took place in Washington, D.C. in 1986, I wanted a book store to  sell the books written by RPCVs. I contacted Carla Cohen at her relatively new bookstore, Politics and Prose, up on Connecticut Avenue, and asked Carla if she would set up a table and sell books under the tent on the Mall at our reunion. I was a nobody, our reunion was not important, but Carla loved the Peace Corps and she set up a table of books that I had recommended and featured Peace Corps writers for the very first time. Since then, Carla has always had a open door for Peace Corps writers. I have read in her famous book store, as as Norm Rush, Peter Hessler, Paul Theroux, Maureen Orth, Tony D’Souza and many, many others. Twice over the years I arranged Peace Corps readings at the store by Peace Corps writers. It always only . . .

In a comment on the site the other day, my good friend Dick Irish wrote about the goals of the Peace Corps, saying, rightly, ” In 1961, the Cold War war was a freakin’ obsession in America. To push PC legislation through Congress, it was necessary to integrate intensive training of new recruits in the Theory and Practice, dare I write it[?], of Marxism-Leninism. In my PC training group we absorbed three hours per week on the subject. Thus could Shriver and Moyers go to the Hill and intimate that Volunteers – once in place overseas – would be personal bulwarks against the Red Menace.” Not being an scholar, but hanging around them, I thought it might be best to go back to what academics are fond of calling, ‘original sources’ so I dug up JFK’s Cow Palace Speech. This was a speech given a week before the election in the . . .

“Why did you join the Peace Corps?” People are still asking that question as we approach the half century of the agency. Back in May of 1966, Joseph Colman, who was then the Acting Associate Director of the Peace Corps for Planning, Evaluation, and Research, published a paper in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and recently Marian Beil asked if I knew about this paper. I tracked down a copy of Colman’s paper that reports on several studies of motivation for joining the agency. One was a 1962 study of 2,612 applications’ replies to a motivational question on the application form; another a 1963 interview study of why people who apply later decline a specific invitation to enter training; and the third was a 1964 interview study of college seniors and their interest in the Peace Corps. Colman’s paper concludes [not surprisingly] that Volunteers . . .

Quiz any RPCV or PCV and they’ll tell you the three goals of the Peace Corps. While the wording varies from one publication to the next, these are the goals: (1) Contribute to the development of critical countries and regions; (2) Promote international cooperation and goodwill toward the country; (3) Contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.  Now, those are the stated goals, and I know that they have been tweaked with by staff and PCVs over the last 49 + years. For example, “living at the level of the HCNs” is often stated as Goal # 2. But the question is, who came up with these goals and why only three? Or why not just one? Well, at the famous Mayflower Hotel when the task force began to draft the proposal to give JFK that would define what “Peace Corps” was, a . . .