Peace Corps At Day One, # 4
In the very early days of 1961, the experts had concluded that a Peace Corps of 300 to 500 Volunteers would be a realistic and worthwhile pilot program. The estimate was revised when Shriver and a Peace Corps “team” (then Presidential Assistant Harris Wofford and Peace Corps Assistant Franklin H. Williams and Edwin Bayley, among others) returned from a trip to Africa and Asia in May of 1961. Requests from world leaders for Peace Corps Volunteers, plus demonstrated interest at home, led to a revised estimate of 500 to 1,000 Volunteers by December 31, 1961, and 2,400 by June 30, 1962, the end of the Peace Corps’s first fiscal year. The governments of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanganyika, India, Pakistan, Malaya, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, St. Lucia and the Philippines were the first to request Volunteers. These requests covered much of what, in the first years, had come to be considered the Peace Corps . . .
Read More
Rowland Scherman
John: Are you vetting stories about Peace Corps at Day One for some purpose? Fascinating to me, of course. My…