Miscellany

Aaron Williams is Vice President for International Business Development and responsible for representing RTI’s international consulting practice in the Washington DC office. He leads the representational efforts, working with RTI’s senior management team and other staff in expanding RTI’s involvement in the international development community’s dialogue regarding policy and programs concerning the USG and other multilateral donor assistance programs. Related to these efforts, he provides leadership in the development of strategic partnerships with other international organizations and global corporations involved in international development activities. Mr. Williams has over 25 years of experience in policy formulation, strategic planning, and the design and implementation of development assistance programs. Mr. Williams has directed a broad range of development assistance programs in the areas of economic policy development and economic growth, trade and investment promotion, banking and finance, democracy and governance, education, housing and urban development, and public health. In his role as a . . .

Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) was on Morning Joe this morning talking about the Peace Corps and the school she started as a PCV in Colombia. Years ago we were talking about these inexpensive laptops, as a new version of the famous booklockers that were given to PCVs to leave behind in their villages, and/or to be the first books in the first library of their schools. A number of RPCVs said giving PCVs laptops was a terrible idea. Well, Maureen has made it work in her  bilingual public school, using the technology from the program “One Laptop per Child.”  Check out:www.K12wired.com. Maureen also made a pitch for more Peace Corps, saying we need to increase the budget and the number of Volunteers serving overseas. Nicely done, Orth!

The 25th Anniversary Conference mostly took place on the Washington D.C. Mall where 5,000 + gathered under the largest tent ever raised at the foot of the Capitol Dome and adjacent to the Air and Space Museum. The Mall was the brainchild of Bill Carey (India 1968-69) the executive director of the conference. The late talented writer David Schickele (Nigeria 1961-63) wrote, “The tent was like the Peace Corps I was part of. Its muggy windless flaps said something about heat and hard work and improvisation, its massive nonchalance the perfect protection for the ideas being hatched beneath it.” Over 70% of those at the conference had served in the first 10 years of the Peace Corps. Almost 45% had served in just 10 of the 82 countries represented at the conference. Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Liberia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Thailand and Turkey. People had come from all 50 states and 12 other countries. Doug . . .

Alan Guskin, as most people know, was one of the key influences in the creation of the Peace Corps and went from the University of Michigan to Thailand with the first group of PCVs. He has had a long career in education and is currently the President Emeritus of Antioch University, where he was President and then Chancellor from 1985-97. This is a short except from his essay, A Way of Being in the World: Reflections on the Peace Corps 30 Years Later. It was published in the The Antiochian in the Fall of 1991. It is republished here with Alan’s permission. . . . The Peace Corps began in a light drizzle at 2 a.m. in the morning on Oct. 14, 1960, near the end of a tumultuous presidential campaign.  John Kennedy won the election a few weeks later, the hopes of a new generation of the 1960s began . . .

In 1958 came The Ugly Americanby William Lederer and Eugene J. Burdick. This book went through fifty-five printings in two years and was a direct motivation in creating the Peace Corps, as Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman points out in her history of the Peace Corps, All You Need Is Love.      In a “Factual Epilogue” to the novel, Lederer and Burdick lay out the basic philosophy and modus operandi of what would later be the Peace Corps. Writing about how America should “help” developing countries, the authors declare: We do not need the horde of 1,500,000 Americans – mostly amateurs – who are now working for the United States overseas. What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working, and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and – in some cases – their health. They must go equipped to apply a positive policy promulgated by . . .

Insiders in D.C. are telling me that Tony Patrick Hall, the former Democrat Congressman and PCV from Ohio, is on the short list to be the next Peace Corps Director. Tony recently served as the ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and chief of the U.S. mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome. Hall, I’m told, has expressed ‘interest’ in the position. Also lobbying for the job is the former Regional Manager of the Peace Corps Recruitment Office in Boston. Not a PCV, it is unlikely that he will get the appointment.

Now that there is talk and even some planning by the outgoing administration for a 50th reunion, I have notes from the 25th  Anniversary Conference that was executed by the RPCVs of Washington, D.C. and a coalition of other groups, all chaired by Roger Landrum, (Nigeria 1961-63) and a guy name Doug Siglin (Zaire 1979-81) who was one smart organizer and might have been at one time the Director of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, (as the NPCA was then ungainly called) if the Board of Directors had had any sense. As Roger told the crowd of RPCVs gathered under the huge tent on the Washington Mall, “We wanted to have this national anniversary conference in Washington to bring as many alumni together as possible. We told the Peace Corps that we were going to have some fun but we were not going to burn down the . . .

Credit must be given to those Volunteers who joined the Peace Corps in the early Sixties. They were all kids who had come of age in the final years of the Fifties, schooled in novels like Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, published in 1955, and the non-fiction The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s philosophy as articulated in her novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Every man, philosophized Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. None of us knew in the winter of 1961 if joining the Peace Corps would mark us for life, like being a member of the Communist Party, or worse, a member of the Republican Party (just kidding!). The real heroes were the “Originals,” those PCVS . . .

My lament about the lack of attention by the White House to the MorePeaceCorps campaign, and the lack of juice by the NPCA, created an outcry (well, at least from one recent employee of the Peace Corps), who came out of the woodwork in defense of Jody Olsen. And I wasn’t even attacking Jody! You can read his comment to me.  Roger, who is a good guy, was upset at my tone, I guess, and that I had called Jody a Utah “Republican.” He has a point. Calling anyone a ‘Republican” today is a slap in the face,  Sorry, Jody! You can read what Roger says in his comment: “Your public vitriol about Jody Olsen is misplaced, inappropriate, inaccurate, and unattractive. Jody may be Republican – who knows? – but that is totally irrelevant to her performance, dedication, and thoroughly decent personage….” First, all I said about Jody  (besides being a Republican) was that she was “passing . . .

Yesterday, the President signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. At the White House signing, Obama drew attention to what the Kennedy Family has done in the name of service. While Ted Kennedy is known more for his fights for health care and being the “lion in the senate” he has also pushed to increase the budget for national service. We RPCVs wonder, however, when anyone will get around to the Peace Corps and increase our numbers, our budget. MorePeaceCorps, which NPCA President Kevin Quigley reminded me recently was his idea, his campaign, have been collecting signatures from every congressman and congresswoman on Capital Hill. Daily I get reminders from the NPCA of how great they are doing on the Hill with their signature petition. Nevertheless, when I spoke to the lovely Obama official camped out at Peace Corps HQ yesterday, she had yet to meet Kevin Quigley, and only had a vague idea of . . .

Less than a month ago Ellen Tausher, who has represented California 10th congressional district since 1997, announced that she had accepted the position in the Obama Administration of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. In the mean time, PeaceCorpsWorldwise has learned that John Garamendi (Ethiopia 1965–67), the Lieutenant Governor of California, will not run for the governorship of the state but instead seek  Tausher’s seat. A special election will take place this coming August. The 10thdistrict includes parts of the San Francisco Bay area, as well as areas near Sacramento. John is tentative scheduled to make his announcement tomorrow, Wednesday, at a job center in Concord, California.  If elected, Garamendi would be the second PCV from Ethiopia to be in Congress. Paul  Tsongas (Ethiopia 1962–64) was elected to the House of Representatives in 1974 and served two terms in the House. In 1978 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Garamendi is no . . .

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. . . .