The Peace Corps

BOB GALE Bob Gale was six foot two, blue eyed, and owned a big personality.  He was an academic coming to the Peace Corps from being the vice president for development at Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a Humphrey supporter. Gale had decided he wanted to go to Washington with the New Frontier and work for the Peace Corps and got in touch with Hubert Humphrey, who he knew, and a meeting was arranged with Bill Haddad (another early Mad Man) who was already working at the agency. William F. Haddad was the Associate Director for the Office of Planning and Evaluation. (At the age of 14 in post-Pearl Harbor, he had enlisted in the Army Air Corps pilot training program and advanced to cadet squadron commander before his true age was discovered.) Haddad (who went on to become a Congressman from New York State) had come to the Peace Corps from being . . .

Taylor  Dibbert (Guatemala 2006-08)  is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of the Peace Corps memoir Fiesta of Sunset. Invictus, his debut poetry collection, is due out in January 2024, and he’s expected to have three other full-length collections published later that year. Taylor is a Program Director at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Before joining the ICFJ team, he worked at the US Counsel on Sri Lanka, a DC-based advocacy organization. Prior to that, he worked for human rights NGOs in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Taylor began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala. Over the years, his writing and journalism has appeared in a variety of outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, World Politics Review and HuffPost. Taylor holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Georgia. Fiesta of Sunset: The Peace Corps, Guatemala and . . .

I mentioned that in those early days of 1960s the agency was full of Mad Men (and a few Mad Women) who were living in a world-of-work atmosphere very much like the provocative AMC TV drama Mad Men. They were wonderful characters, some charming, many nice, and a few not very . . .  vOne terrific guy was Meridan Hunt “Med” Bennett. He was sort of a  ‘Peace Corps Jimmy Stewart.’ I met him in Ethiopia in, I think, 1965. He was totally unlike the smooth types that crowded Shriver’s big conference table back in D.C., but he was smarter than most, a writer, and a farmer who had grown up in the Canadian Rockies. It was so remote a farm, he said, that he had to ride three miles on a horse to attend a one-room schoolhouse. vHe farmed when haying was done with horses and a beaver slide stacker. He rode . . .

By 1970 most of the country desk officers had been Volunteers and APCDs in the field.  We were a noisy, can-do bunch, within the NANESA Region roughly half females. I was on the Nepal desk my second 30-month tour from mid-1970 through early ‘73. Don Hess was the Peace Corps Director, leading the formerly independent agency that was then part of ACTION. On my last day Hess called me to his office and asked me to contract to lead a team to revise the entire Peace Corps Manual. [It was not lost on me that the last gasp of a dying bureaucracy was to redo their rule book.] I did agree, provided I could hire an editor and an experienced typist. I also asked for someone from A&F to serve with me.  Hess agreed. Don Romine joined our little team. My first act was to visit the Peace Corps print . . .

Peace Corps Chronology 1961-2010 by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) iUniverse May 2011 120 pages $9,99 (Kindle); $12.60 (Paperback); $22.95 (Hardcover)   Peace Corps Bibliography by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) Create Space Publishing May 2018 76 pages $5.00 (Kindle); $9.99 (Paperback)     Here are two books by Lawrence Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) full of valuable historical information about the early years of the agency. Lawrence’s travels and work has taken him from southwestern Alaska to Argentine Pampas. His studies have included master’s in urban planning at la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, art and ccreative writing at Skyline College in San Bruno, California and education at. California State University Fresno. Now retired, he earned his living as an urban planner for many years, working in Honduras, Mexico, Alaska, Arizona and California. He is author of some twenty books.  

Early Peace Corps Women Staff Who Worked for the Mad Men  Helene Farrall The first face that a visitor saw at the Peace Corps Headquarters usually was receptionist Helene. Mrs. Farrall, who studied at the University of Maryland and recently had worked for the American Friends of the Middle East, was born and raised in Faulkner, Md., and she still lived there. Her dedication to the Peace Corps was shown by the fact that she undertook a daily commune of 45 miles in each direction.   Sally Bowles Sally Bowles, daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles, was an honor graduate in history from Smith College where she was named editor of the college newspaper and was elected president of the student body. She had already traveled and lived in Southeast Asia, India, Mexico, Morocco, France and Spain. She was a legislative assistant to Congressman John Brademas (Dem-Ind) and as administrative assistant . . .

It was not all ‘work’ and no ‘play’ at the Peace Corps for the Mad Men and Women. Here’s a 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 You Are: The Peace Corps Story. Coates, as I mentioned, was a writer for the Peace Corps in the early days, later press person 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’s 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 . . .

John writes —   If you ever had watched the TV show Mad Men you know all about the office atmosphere and the thick layer of smoke that filled the offices. It was no better in the Peace Corps during those early years of the 1960s. Flipping through pages of old Peace Corps publications, I see half a dozen people who I knew, all with cigarettes in their hands. Al Meisel in the Training Division; Charlie Peters, head of Evaluation; Jim Gibson, head of Agricultural Affairs. He liked cigars and smoked them in the building! The wonderful Jules Pagano. Other heavy smokers: Howard Greenberg in Management; Jack Vaughn, the second director; Frank Mankiewicz; evaluator Dick Elwell, (as I recall, everyone in evaluation smoked and drank and wrote great prose). Doug Kiker and his crew in Public Affairs knew how to light up. And so did Betty Harris. When the Mad . . .

Documentary Now Available on DVD & for Streaming Finally, A Towering Task is available on DVD and to stream! And just in time for the holidays or to celebrate a birthday or milestone. You can purchase DVDs: DVDs can be purchased through Amazon. CLICK HERE Through First Run Features, you can purchase a DVD or view (while supporting a small film distributor). CLICK HERE View online by renting or purchasing: Rent or purchase online viewing through Amazon, and be sure to leave us a review! CLICK HERE  If you would like to, instead, view through your local library – or if you are a student or teacher – you can do that through Kanopy. CLICK HERE Take a look, and do share these options with friends, family, colleagues, and schools! Video montage from the upcoming new website. Stay tuned! PBS Broadcast Update: In the past few months, A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps has been broadcast across the . . .