Peace Corps Worldwide

Shriver, it turns out, (at least according to Warren Wiggins) was not an easy man to work for. “I’m not the first to say that and I found that in the early days it was close to impossible working for Sarge,” Warren told me in our 1997 interview. “I failed to build a good relationship with him in that first period. It was so bad that I went to Jack Bell, who worked for C. Douglas Dillon (the number two man in the State Department), and asked Bell to get me out of the Peace Corps. I couldn’t take it. Bell won’t let me quit. He told me the Peace Corps was too important. Then I went to lunch with Franklin Williams. I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him. I told him the story, how Shriver won’t see me. He won’t pay any attention to me. And Franklin . . .

The People In The Pews Shriver in those first days was fond of talking about how his staff got to the Peace Corps. “Tom Mathews was on a skiing trip in Alta, Utah, when I called him. He arrived in Washington still wearing his ski boots. Gordon Boyce got a telegram and arrived the very next afternoon. At the time our payroll arrangement were slow and inadequate and most of these people worked for as long as three months without pay.” The Peace Corps was a disorganized mess. When Lee St. Lawrence, Director of the Far East Regional Office, arrived he took one long look at the confusion and commented to no one in particular, “this place is all fouled up.” Then he wanted to know which desk was his. Others came on ‘day one’ and stayed where Charlie Nelson, Willie Warner, Sally Bowles, Charlie Peters, John Corcoran, Nan McEvoy, John Alexander. There . . .

[There is a plaque on the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union at Ann Arbor that reads: Here at 2:00 A.M. on October 14, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy first defined the Peace corps. He stood at the place marked by the medallion and was cheered by a large and enthusiastic student audience for the hope and promise his idea gave the world. In her book, Come As You Are: The Peace Corps Story, Coates Redmon tells what happened next: Kennedy was making an unannounced stop at the University of Michigan in the last month of his campaign for the presidency to rest up after his third debate with Richard Nixon. The Ann Arbor crowd had been gathering, by means of word of mouth, since the middle of the evening. Deborah Bacon, the dean of women at Michigan, knew of the visit and was ‘inspired’ to lift the ban . . .

The only RPCV book that focuses exclusively on Peace Corps Training–that I know about– is Alan Weiss’ (Nigeria 1963-64) High Risk/High Gain published in 1968 by St. Martin’s Press. It is Alan’s account of  training at Columbia University in the summer of 1963. It is a funny, outrageous, and a sad book.  In his book, Alan focuses on the elaborate system  ‘someone’ at the Peace Corps had created, a series of rating from High Risk/Low Gain to Low Risk/High Gain. All of the PCVs in those early years was so graded in our Peace Corps Training report card. A year after my tour in Ethiopia I returned to Addis Ababa as an APCD. In the office files, in the old Point Four building, I discovered in a bottom file cabinet drawer a copy of how the psychologists back in Georgetown Training had evaluated all of us, the first PCVs to Ethiopia. I went down the long list of some 275 PCVs and found my name and my rating. . . .

Early training for the Peace Corps–this was in 1961–was on college campuses like the University of Michigan, but for some Trainees it also meant “field training” in Puerto Rico, the Rocky Mountains, and other locations. The first Puerto Rico site ws located in the mountains south of Arecibo. This training came about, or so it seems, because Shriver in February and March of ’61 reviewed the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VOS) program. These schools exposed their student to unexpected challenges and the students were judged by how well they reacted to new situations. This method, I understand, was developed during World War II and was later adopted by the British industry as a technique for training potential leaders. Shriver got in touch with the Outward Bound Trust, governing body of the schools, and got the help of two of their members, Sir Spencer Summers, chairman of the Trust, and Captain Frederick Fuller, Headmaster of the oldest Outward Bound . . .

Training I Ordinary Americans had rarely been trained systematically for service overseas. As assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland pointed out in his study, “The Overseas American,” attempts at orienting Americans to overseas service had usually been casual and totally inadequatee. As a result many Americans living abroad, whether privately or as officials, had not had a real understanding of the society in which they found themselves. Fewer still had learned the local language. These were the errors the Peace Corps resolved to avoid when they began Peace Corps Training in the summer of 1961. When the Peace Corps was established on March 1, there were few guidelines on how to train PCV effectively for service in the Third World. Faced with this dearth of precedents, Associate Director Larry Dennis sponsored a series of Peace Corps Institutes which brought people together from Government agencies, universities, foundations, business, labor and professional and . . .

SELECTION II The test battery was only one phase of the selection process. Selection began when an applicant filled out the questionnaire and returned it to the Peace Corps. This process of volunteering represented a kind of “self-selection” and it was in no small part responsible, or so Peace Corps/Washington thought, “for the generally high calibre of Peace Corps applicants in those early days.” Further “self-selection” occurred when and applicant was offered an invitation to train for a specific project and was free to accept or decline the invitation. Potential Volunteers listed various references on the questionnaire and they were contacted. What was learned (and this surprised the Peace Corps selection staff) was that the attention paid to the recommendations by referents provided a “valuable tool for selection.” [In later years, when doing studies on how ‘successful’ PCVs were overseas, the Peace Corps found that the evaluations by PCV’s mothers proved to be the most accurate of all on . . .

Selection [PCVs today fill out applications for the Peace Corps, mostly on-line, and have a quick one hour interview, in person or by phone. with a recruiter; they supply a list of 4 references, and take a physical examination and that is how they get into the Peace Corps. Today’s PCVs have no idea of the elaborate selection process that took place in the early days of the agency. Here is a brief summary (over the next few days) of what happened in D.C. (and across the country) to select and train the first generation of Peace Corps Volunteers.] In March 1961, in developing a way to find the right Volunteers for the right job, there was no margin for error, or so they thought at Peace Corps HQ in the old Maiatico Building. The Peace Corps, at the time, was a  highly visible, well reported operation of the government. A considerable body of public opinion was already . . .