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Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace and teaches courses on nonviolence at four Washington area universities and two high schools. He is a long time friend of the Peace Corps, and, of course, Sargent Shriver. • Sargent Shriver: A life of grace by Colman McCarthy Wednesday, January 19, 2011 IT TOOK ONLY A WALK with Sargent Shriver to learn how deeply loved and loving he was. Former Peace Corps volunteers, from the early days of the program that he began in 1961, or ones just back from stints in Third World outposts, would stop Sarge to thank him, embrace him and tell him stories about their life-changing service. Countless others approached him on airport concourses, city sidewalks and elsewhere: people whose lives were changed because of the anti-poverty programs that Shriver started in the Johnson administration – Legal Services, Head Start, Job Corps, . . .

 [This blog was posted this morning by RPCV writer Larry Leamer on Huffington Post website. Larry’s most recent book is  Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach.] Sarge’s Dream When I joined the Peace Corps in 1964, Sargent Shriver was my hero. I was stationed two days from a road in the mountains of the Himalayan kingdom and I never met the director of the Peace Corps. But he inspired me. He was “Sarge” to all of us, and we often talked about him. He visited Nepal once, this exuberant, inspiring presence who believed that the only thing higher than Mt. Everest was the human spirit. He thought people were capable of anything, even me. We just had to do it. When I started my trilogy on the Kennedy family in the late eighties, I got to know Sarge, and I realized it was not easy being married . . .

People are still asking that question as we approach the half century of the agency. Back in May of 1966, Joseph Colman, who was then the Acting Associate Director of the Peace Corps for Planning, Evaluation, and Research, published a paper in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. I tracked down a copy of Colman’s paper that reports on several studies of motivation for joining the agency. One was done in 1962 of 2,612 applications’ replies to a motivational question on the application form; another in a 1963 interview study of why people who apply later decline a specific invitation to enter training; and the third was a 1964 interview study of college seniors and their interest in the Peace Corps. Colman’s paper concludes [not surprisingly] that Volunteers can be successful in the Peace Corps with a variety of motivations for joining.   In 1960, before . . .

IN EARLY 1960, Maurice (Maury) L. Albertson, director of the Colorado State University Research Foundation, received a Point-4 (precursor to USAID) contract to prepare a Congressional Feasibility Study of the Point-4 Youth Corps called for in the Reuss-Neuberger Bill, an amendment to the Mutual Security Act. The Youth Corps was “to be made up of young Americans willing to serve their country in public and private technical assistance missions in far-off countries, and at a soldier’s pay.” Then in late 1961, Public Affairs Press in Washington, D.C. published, New Frontiers for American Youth: Perspective on the Peace Corps written by Maury Albertson, and co-authored with Andrew E. Rice and Pauline E. Birky. The book was based on their Point-4 study. According to the authors, “The roots of the Peace Corps idea . . . stretch wide and deep, . . . .” They were referring to a number of volunteer programs that were early instances . . .

The recent reports how the FBI had subpoenaed information on the social media website Twitter about Julian Assange and several other prominent people connected to WikiLeaks, includind an Icelandic lawmaker brought to mind when the FBI was investigating RPCVs. This was all during the Vietnam era. The Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV)–the first national organization of RPCVs organized in 1965 actively opposed the Vietnam war. Their copious writings–newsletters, information kits, analytical papers–portrayed the goals of U.S. foreign policy as exploitative. The true function of the Peace Corps, they believed, was to mask this imperialism by putting a warm and friendly face on America’s presence overseas. CRV members were among the marches showered with tear gas at the 1968 Democratic convention, and in 1970 they occupied the Peace Corps building in Washington for 36 hours to protests the student killings by National Guardsmen at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, as well as . . .

The Peace Corps actually ‘started’ the day after Kennedy inauguration. Kennedy telephoned Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps could be organized and then to organize it.” Shriver telephoned Harris Wofford and they rented two rooms for offices in the Mayflower Hotel, downtown in Washington, D.C. They were the “Task Force.” They began to call people they thought might know something about international development and living in the developing world. One name led to another. Shriver says that he had no long-term, premeditated vision of what the Peace Corps might be. “My style was to get bright, informative, creative people and then pick their brains.” The first official meeting  of the Task Force was scheduled for February 6. Kennedy had requested a report from Shriver by the end of February. Shriver would later say, “I needed help badly.” On Sunday night, . . .

Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. I picked this story up from his blog. • This is a true “Hollywood” story of how my writing partner and I got Tom Hanks to star in our 1985 movie, Volunteers. We wrote the first draft five years earlier (so far this is a typical Hollywood story). The movie centers around a preppy Yalie who ducks a gambling debt and winds up in the Peace Corps. Hilarity ensues (at least on the page). Sargent Shriver, then the head of the Peace Corps, read it and said it was like spitting on the flag. I knew we were onto something. The producer asked whom we thought might be good to star and we suggested this guy who at the time was in Bosom Buddies on ABC – Tom Hanks. The producer scoffed. Tom Hanks couldn’t get a movie made. We were . . .

In the first year the Peace Corps was in Ethiopia, way back in 1962, PCVs were invited to sing Christmas carols at Jubilee Palace, the residence of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, and Conquering Lion of Judah. (I might have forgotten a few of his other titles.) Jubilee Palace was the real thing, built in Addis Ababa in 1955 in commemoration of the first twenty-five years of the Emperor’s reign. We had been to the Palace once before, in September of ’62 shortly after arriving in country, when we had been welcomed to the Empire by His Majesty. We toured the palace’s park-like grounds of trees, gardens and pools, and viewed his private collection of animals. Besides the Imperial lions, antelopes and monkeys, his cheetahs were a special interest to all of us because we could step inside the cage and pet them. . . .

Fritz Fischer is a professor of history and history education at the University of Northern Colorado. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, taught for five years in middle/secondary schools, and then earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 1994. His research specialties are 20th century American cultural and diplomatic history. He wrote Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s published by Smithsonian Institution Press. It is, as Dr. Fischer points out, his PhD. dissertation at Northwestern University. The title, as he writes in his Acknowledgments, “might appear to some as an indictment of the Peace Corps and its volunteers. Quite the contrary . . . the experiences of volunteers promoted a new spirit of dialogue and understanding between Americans and the rest of the world. This book does not argue that the volunteers tried at all times to make them like us. Rather, the volunteers . . .