Peace Corps At Day One: #14 Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo Peace Corps!

At the time of Shriver’s February 22, 1961 memorandum to President Kennedy–stating that the Peace Corps should be established as a semi-autonomous agency–there was a lot of professional resistance to the whole idea of sending young Americans overseas to do good. Career diplomat like Elliot O. Briggs described the Peace Corps’ team cry as “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo. Let’s go out and wreak some good on the natives,” as Wofford reports in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings.

Throughout the State Department diplomats were indifferent to hostile to the whole idea of a Peace Corps. But not Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s new Secretary of State.   He told Shriver that he thought the Peace Corps idea was “first-class.” (Rusk’s sister, during my time in Ethiopia, would serve as an APCD in the Empire.)

Henry Labouisse, was appointed in 1961 head of ICA (International Cooperation Administration, Eisenhower’s foreign aid agency that had a policy of massive capital investment accompanied by a few expert advisers, and that proven to be unsuccessful) and he feared that sending inexperienced “youngsters” into strange cultures would be inviting disaster and embarrassment. Labouisse wanted the Peace Corps placed under firm control of Kennedy’s new AID program where its progress could be strictly monitored. The ICA then became AID. Labouisse lasted one year as head of AID, then went off to Greece as ambassador from ’62-’64, later he was head of Unicef. Labouisee died in 1987.

In late March of ’61 Shriver realized there was a problem with his vision of a “semi-autonomous” Peace Corps when he saw a draft of Kennedy’s speech on foreign aid and realized the President had sandwiched the agency inside of AID. He then attended a meeting at the White House and spotted a large chart of the new AID super-agency: the Peace Corps was off in a far corner, listed as a  “resource.”

All of Kennedy’s aides: Goodwin, Ralph Dungan, and Ted Sorensen said it only made ‘sense’ to put the Peace Corps under the umbrella of the new AID. Kennedy, however, was still undecided and Shriver got to him and JFK’s speech on foreign aid given on March 22, 1961 was vague about the Peace Corps, saying only that the new agency would have “distinctive identity and appeal.”

Shriver thought he had ‘won’ this battle with the White House and the Peace Corps would emerge as a semi-autonomous agency in the new administration and be independent of AID, but Shriver was wrong.

In these first frantic days of creating the Peace Corps timing was everything. What mattered most was ‘who was in the White House Oval Office when a decision was being made. The problem for the Peace Corps was that Shriver was not only not in the room, in fact, he wasn’t even in the country.

According to Gerard Rice in his book, The Bold Experiment,  Kennedy had instructed Shriver to visit Third World leaders, to tell them about the Peace Corps ‘viability’ in order to generate requests for PCVs. So Shriver went off around the world and was in India when Henry Labouisse (who was against Shriver’s grand plans for the Peace Corps) was setting up a meeting for Kennedy to decide how all foreign aid programs would be incorporated into AID, including the Peace Corps.

The meeting was scheduled for April 26, 1961. On April 17, 1961, a force of 15,000 Cuban exiles landed at Cochinos Bay in southern Cuba. Now JFK had bigger problems than where the Peace Corps would find a happy home in his new administration.