Miscellany

Meanwhile, back in Ann Arbor On the Michigan campus, after hearing Kennedy, two graduate students – Alan and Judy Guskin – wrote a letter to the editor of The Michigan Daily, the university newspaper, asking readers to join in working for a Peace Corps. (The editor of the Daily, by the way, was Tom Hayden. The paper later won a journalism award for its coverage and support of the Peace Corps movement.) Students began to circulate a petition urging the founding of a ‘Peace Corps,’ though it was not named as such. Then a Democratic National Committeewoman and UAW official, Mildred Jeffrey, learned about the students’ response from her daughter Sharon, who was studying at the university. She put the students in touch with the Kennedy camp. They couldn’t reach anyone until they got Ted Sorensen, who liked the idea of a major speech on the subject, and promised to tell . . .

The Ugly American One of the most important books of the late 1950s was The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was Homer Atkins, a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, and building bridges. He was called the “ugly American” only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lived and worked with the local people and, by the end of the novel, was beloved and admired by them. The bitter message of the novel, however, was that American diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective; and the implication was that the more the United States relied on them, the more its influence would wane. The book was published in July 1958. It was Book-of-the-Month Club selection in October; by November it had gone through twenty printings. It was so influential that in later . . .

Then came Ann Arbor, Michigan. On October 14, Kennedy flew into Michigan from New York, where he had just completed his third debate with Nixon. He had agreed to say a few words to the students at the university. Ten thousand students waited for him until 2 am, and they chanted his name as he climbed the steps of the student union building. Kennedy launched into an extemporaneous address. He challenged them, asking how many would be prepared to give years of their lives working in Asia, Africa and Latin America? The audience went wild. (I know, because at the time I was a new graduate student over in Kalamazoo. I was also working part time as a news reporter for WKLZ and had gone to cover the event.) According to Sargent Shriver, “No one is sure why Kennedy raised the question in the middle of the night at the . . .

Kennedy’s Involvement JFK’s first direct association with the idea of what would become “the Peace Corps” came on February 21, 1960. He was on a college television show called “College News Conference” and someone asked about the “Point Four Youth Corps.” Kennedy said he didn’t know what the legislative proposal was. Afterwards, he told aide Richard Goodwin to research the idea. Goodwin, who was the Kennedy link with the “brain trust” at Harvard, wrote to Archibald Cox at the university’s law school about the idea. Then in April and May of 1960, when Kennedy was running against Humphrey for the nomination, the idea was discussed further. Humphrey introduced his bill for a “Peace Corps” in the Senate in June, but after Kennedy won the nomination in July, Humphrey transferred all his research files to Kennedy’s office. The Cow Palace speech made by Kennedy right before the election, which revealed his growing commitment . . .

A New Frontier There was also, as there has always been, a search for a new frontier. That feeling was loose in America. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner has written about how America has continued to grow because of this search for another frontier. The Peace Corps gave young people a New Frontier. A new generation The Baby Boom had struck. 50 percent of the population in 1960 was under 25. For the first time a college education was within the grasp of the majority of young people. Unprecedented material wealth freed this new generation to heed their consciences and pursue their ideals. This spirit of generosity and participation had been sorely missed under Eisenhower. As one Peace Corps administrator puts it in Gerry Rice’s book: “The 1950s made ancient mariners of us all – becalmed, waiting and a little parched in the throat. Then we picked up momentum on the winds . . .

Senator Chris Dodd (Dominican Republic 1966-68) of Connecticut puts it this way: “The Peace Corps took a nice kid from suburban Connecticut, whose father was a United States senator, and sent him to a remove part of the Dominican Republic to ‘do something good.’ I may have done some good, but mostly I learned. I learned about the complexity of a culture that is close to us geographically, but far, far away from our understanding. I learned to speak Spanish, the language of our neighbors. I learned to teach others some of the skills most of us take for granted. I learned to organize people to help themselves. Most important, I learned that one person can make a telling difference in the lives of those around him.” Dodd, who is 65, sounds like almost any other RPCV, but isn’t. As a Senator and Congressmen of Connecticut since 1974, he is . . .

The day after his inauguration in January 1961, John F. Kennedy telephoned Sargent Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps should be organized and then to organize it.” When he heard from Kennedy, Shriver immediately called Harris Wofford who had worked with Shriver during Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The two men rented a suite of rooms in the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. Here, they began with a new phrase–the Peace Corps–a few lines from Kennedy’s speeches, and a laundry list of names of people involved in international affairs. They  began to craft what would become, according to a 1962 article in TIME Magazine, “the greatest single success the Kennedy administration had produced.”  Over the next few blogs, I’ll tell the story of those 30 days in Washington, D.C. when the Peace Corps became a reality, . . .

Karen Chaput, Video Production Manager in the Office of Communications for the Peace Corps, caught up with me when I was in D.C. recently and asked if I would sit down and be interviewed for her digital project. She recently sent me the unedited transcript of my 40 minutes with her talking about the history of the agency and the work we have been doing with Peace Corps writers. Here is a brief except from those 40 minutes. (With some additional editing by the author.) Q. John, you’ve devoted a lot of your personal time to Peace Corps writers over the years.  You obviously have a passion for helping people recreate their Volunteer stories.  Can you explain a little bit about that? John:  Well, oddly enough, I’ve only written one story myself about the Peace Corps, and I have published 25 novels and books of non-fiction. Two of my collections, one fiction and . . .

The new Peace Corps Director, Aaron Williams, has just announced the launching of the Peace Corps’ Digital Library, a searchable collection of electronic Peace Corps materials from 1961 to today. He wants RPCVs and PCVs to send in narratives and photographs to the library. The Digital Library, Aaron says, ” will be a a living collection that represents the agency’s legacy of public service.” He is asking that RPCVs and PCVs contribute up to five photos and one story to the Digital Library via online submission forms. The way that it is set up is that visitors can either browse the individual collections or search by keyword, the host country name, or a specific period of time. At the moment the Digital Library is very much a work in progress, and will not be as comprehensive  as the collections at the National Archives and the Kennedy Library. If you want to find out more about . . .

One afternoon back in 1963 novelist Mark Harris received a telephone call from Sargent Shriver inquiring whether he’d be interested in writing a special report about the Peace Corps. Mark gladly accepted, then waited five months while his loyalty and sanity were investigated (been there, done that), and then went overseas  to West Africa where he wandered around for ten days in a country he called ‘Kongohno’  and then wrote his one-and-only Evaluation Report for Charlie Peters. Mark Harris retells all this in a book entitled, Twentyone Twice published in 1966. The book has two sections. One is about getting through security, the second is about Africa. The fictional name that he used of the West African country he visited is Kongohno…I’m not sure of the actual country, but I believe it is Sierre Leone. Old timers in the Peace Corps might know the real name of the country Mark Harris  visited as a Peace Corps Evaluator in 1964. But who was Mark Harris and why did . . .

Colombia I (1961-63) group was the first to go to Peace Corps Training and these PCVs had the first of the many famous CDs who served in the agency. In some ways their director was the most famous of all. His name was Christopher Sheldon and he is the sort of person legends are made of, and books written about. In fact, a book and a movie were written about Christopher Sheldon. If it had been his book, it would have been a love story about himself and his wife, and how they met on Capt. Irving Johnson’s last voyage around the globe, and how his new bride perished at sea. It was typical of Shriver to select someone like Chris Sheldon to be a CD, but it was Mary Bunting who suggested Chris Sheldon to Shriver. Bunting was on the Peace Corps Advisor Board. She was also the President of Radcliffe College, and the woman responsible for fully . . .

This is the very first photograph of Sarge Shriver meeting the very first Peace Corps Trainees. It happened on Sunday, June 25, 1961, at Rutgers University.  The photograph, and details surrounding it, were sent to me recently by Dennis Grubb who was one of those legendary first Colombia I Volunteers, 1961-63. The word from Dennis: I received a telegram and was told to call the White House switchboard. They passed me onto the Peace Corps HQ in the Maiatico Building and I was invited to Training in New Jersey. I drove down to Rutgers from Connecticut, and since my home was only a couple hours away, I think I might be the very first person to arrive for training for the Peace Corps.” Shriver came up from D.C. to New Jersey on Sunday, Jun2 25, 1961, to meet the potential PCV. “I think,” says Dennis, “Sarge just wanted to see us, to see what the Peace Corps was catching as potential Volunteers. There were 80 Trainees at . . .

Our site supports PCVs and RPCVs and anyone who works for the agency. We don’t go looking for causes, but Katie Flanagan is the sister-in-law to a woman who I worked with, an RPCV, and when my friend asked me to help her new sister, I couldn’t refuse. It’s a good project and this is a Peace Corps country, and PCVs in the field are involved. So if you are looking for a good cause for Christmas, think of Tanzania.] The Kupona Foundation was created in March 2009 to support Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania (CCBRT). CCBRT, itself founded in 1994, is composed of a surgical disability hospital, community rehabilitation, and training programs.  Its headquarters in Dar es Salaam, clinic in Kilimanjaro, and mobile services throughout the country, directly benefit more than 120,000 patients and caregivers. The next five years promise to be a period of tremendous growth for . . .

The other day I went down to D.C. to interview Aaron Williams, the new Peace Corps Director, a former Volunteer in the DR in 1967-70. Aaron told me that when he flew off to Training it was the first time this southside Chicago kid had ever been on a plane. He had never been out of Chicago before joining the Peace Corps, earning his college degree locally, in Education and Geography from Chicago State University, not Harvard or Yale. After his tour, he worked for the Peace Corps in Chicago as a Recruiter, and all these years later, that gang of RPCV Recruiters who worked together in the early Seventies are still close friends. For another year, and this was 1970-71, he worked in Peace Corps Washington as the Coordinator of Minority Recruitment, and then he returned to school and earned an MBA in Marketing and International Business. He worked in Minneapolis with General Mills for awhile before beginning a long USAID . . .

Kinky Friedman (Borneo 1967-69) will not run again for governor of Texas. Instead Kinky will seek, as a Democratic,  the position of agriculture commissioner. In his last governor’s race, he finished fourth, running as an independent. Kinky has met with both Democratic gubernatorial candidates and has been stating his positions as the agriculture commissioner. For example, he will be for promoting more food from local producers in school cafeterias and putting animals rescue facilities in countries across Texas.    .