Still more on the Peace Corps Book Locker!

Questions on the famous Peace Corps Locker came back to me recently and once again I went searching through files looking for lost documents and I came across a letter written to me by Jack Hood Vaughn on December 3, 1999.

For those RPCVs who never received a Peace Corps Book Locker, they were given out to all of us in the early days.  The Book Locker was sent overseas  with the first Volunteers so we might start a small library in our schools, as well as having something to read. These paperback books were to be left behind when we left our towns and villages. Now, of course, PCVs have cell phone and laptops, iPods and iPhones….who needs a book!

Well, we certainly did.

What I had been trying to track down, back in the ’90s, was how did the Book  Locker come to be?

I have heard that it was Eunice Shriver who first had the idea, and she suggested it to Sarge. I also heard from Padraic Kennedy who was then the Chief of what was called the Division of Volunteer Field Support that Tim Zagat, before he went to Yale Law School in 1966, and before he started in 1979 the Zagat Guide to Restaurants, was instrumental in creating the book locker. Tim actually has on his resume that he was the “Director of Reading Material Programs for the Peace Corps.”

When I spoke to Tim Zagat last year about the book locker, his fondest memories of those days when he was still an undergraduate was hiding from Bill Josephson, the Deputy General Counsel. When he was a student-intern working in the Peace Corps Building at 806 Connecticut, he hadn’t been cleared to work and Josephson  knew that, knew him, so whenever Bill came down to his florr Tim took off.

Tim  Zagat did work on that first book locker, but the person most responsible for it, and who had been given the task by Shriver to pick the books forthe Peace Corps Book Locker, was Nathaniel Davis.

Jack Hood Vaughn back then was the Director of the Latin America Regional Office and in his letter to me in December 1999 read:  “Sarge delegated that task to Nathaniel Davis, one of the foreign service officers assigned to a tour of duty in the Peace Corps, both in Washington and overseas.”

Who was Nat Davis, I wondered. I tracked him down in 2000 at Harvey Mudd College in California where he was a professor of humanities and wrote and called him. He never replied to my phone calls or letters.

Researching his history, however, I found that he had joined the Foreign Service in 1947, after receiving a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. (He would also get  a PhD from Fletcher in 1960.)

After serving in the Foreign Service in Prague, Florence, Rome, and Moscow, he became a Soviet desk officer for the State Department, and when Khrushchev came to the US in 1959, he was an escort officer.

Davis went to the Peace Corps in early ’62 as a special assistant to Shriver, and later, I think, he was briefly the deputy director. Interestingly, in the Maiatico Building, a building full of Super Egos, he left no footprints. Neither Coates Redmon or Gerard Rice mention him in their histories of the Peace Corps agency. He is not cited at all in the early pamphlet, “Who’s Who in the Peace Corps Washington” that has bios and photos of the charter members. 

Davis was at the Peace Corps until 1965, then returned to the State Department. His first assignment was Bulgaria, before we even had an embassy in the country. From then on his life as a foreign service officer began dangerous and memorable.

In 1968 he was on the senior staff of the National Security Council when in August terrorists killed John Gordon Mein, our ambassador to Guatemala. Davis took over from Mein before going onto Chile as our ambassador.

He arrived in Chile in 1971, a year after Allende became Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Davis’ term there ended amid suspicions of American involvement in the 1973 military coup that resulted in Allende’s violent death. Later classified documents and Congressional hearings would show that Nixon and the CIA had operated spies in Chile, in a plan called ‘Track Two.” The agents were to cultivate military officers in Chile who opposed the governing socialists. Davis knew nothing about it until it came out in Senate hearings in  1975.

Also in 1975 he was named assistant secretary of State for African affairs to Henry Kissinger, but resigned after only four months because of differences with Kissinger and President Ford over covert military operations in Angola.

His last foreign posting was as ambassador to Switzerland from 1975 to 1977.

In his book, The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende, Davis would refute allegations of American collusion in its downfall. However, many believe he was the model for the ambassador in the 1982 Constantin Costa-Gavras film Missing, which was based on a book by the same name by Thomas Hauser.

In 1983, Davis, and two other American officials who served with him in Chile, sued Hauser, Costa-Gavras and Universal Pictures for libel, alleging that false accusation were made of their complicity in the disappearance and death of American journalist Charles Horman during the coup. They sought $60 million in damages for the “public disgrace, scorn and ridicule” they had suffered. The libel suit was ultimately thrown out of court.

Davis would leave the government and spend the next 19 years, until his retirement in 2002, teaching political science at Claremont Harvey Mudd College. He also got involved in the civil rights movement, and with the local Democratic Party. He became a mountain climber. And in 1995 he wrote a history of the Russian Orthodox Church called A Long Walk to Church.”

In May of  last year, 2011, at the age of 86, he died of cancer in Claremont, California. On his death, Kissinger would describe him as a “brilliant career officer.”

What I find most fascinating about the life and death of Nathaniel Davis is that for a very brief time, for only two years, he was at the Peace Corps, yet when he died the headline in the Los Angeles Times on May 21, 2011 read: The longtime diplomat and Peace Corps official also taught political science at Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College for 19 years until his retirement in 2002.

The Peace Corps was just a footnote in this man’s long, successful life where whatever contributions he made to the agency were not even noted by Peace Corps  historians, but nevertheless, in the world at large, in a major U.S. newspaper, the Peace Corps is as important as his diplomatic career, and his tenure as a professor of humanities at Harvey Mudd College.

Think about that when you wonder whether your two years in the Peace Corps was worth your time and effort. In the eyes of the world it surely seems to be.