The Peace Corps: It Is Almost As Good As Its Intentions

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From the front porches of the U.S., the view of the Peace Corps is beautiful. The image is that of a battalion of cheery, crew-cut kids who two years ago hopped off their drugstore stools, and hurried out around the world to wage peace. Through the application of Good Old American Know-How and That Old College Spirit, they have all but won the cold war. It somehow seems too good to be true.

It is. As so often happens, the image is glossier than the reality. The Peace Corps kids are not all paragons of virtue. They are not necessarily even kids: the average age of Peace Corps men is 25, of women 28, and there are plenty who are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s. Most volunteers feel they have had few glimpses of glory. Many have been racked with illness and bedded down in squalor. They have slogged through colorless tasks, from building chicken houses to digging sewers. They have wrestled with tongue-twisting languages. They have gagged on incredible foods containing everything from cat meat to sheep intestines to fish heads. They have cursed the mistakes of their superiors and muttered in fury at the ignorance and inertia among the natives they are trying to help. Six volunteers have died; 248 quit or were fired.

It has been a rough two years. But partly because it has been rough, the reality is more meaningful than that unflawed popular image. By any reasonable standard, the U.S. Peace Corps has been a fine overall success.

An Easy Man to Fire. Inevitably distorted by that same image of halos and high school heroes is Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 47, director of the Peace Corps and brother-in-law of President Kennedy. He was once introduced on television as “the man known as Mr. Clean.” He is so closely identified with the public’s good-will-and-good-works vision of the Peace Corps that many people think he created the idea, sold it to the President, then dashed out in a blaze of idealism to make it work.

Not so. Shriver, if nothing else, is a realist. He shuddered when he heard himself described as “Mr. Clean.” He did not dream up the Peace Corps. Indeed, when the time came in the winter of 1961 for John Kennedy to make good on a 1960 campaign promise to create the corps, he tapped his brother-in-law—and Shriver dodged. “But he told me,” says Shriver, “that everyone in Washington seemed to think that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history, and it would be much easier to fire a relative than a friend.”

Brother-in-Law Shriver took the job, but was by no means swept up in the idealism of it all. Says he: “There’s a great difference between a noble idea, no matter how well conceived, and the execution of that idea in practical, realistic, down-to-earth terms. I had misgivings. I lay awake at night.”

Shriver had cause for insomnia—as one event swiftly proved. Hardly had the Peace Corps put its feet on foreign ground than there was a major flap: a corps girl named Margery Michelmore, stationed in Nigeria, dropped a home-addressed postcard that seemed critical of life in that shoeless African nation; it was picked up, put in anti-American channels, and screechingly publicized.*Shriver is convinced that the subsequent success of the Peace Corps has been such that there will be no repetition of that incident. “It won’t happen again —not like that,” he says. “We’ve got some money in the bank now.”

The Tiny Triumphs. He is probably right. For the Peace Corps is no longer just an experiment. Last week the first contingent of Peace Corps veterans began to return home after completing their two-year stints. They had not changed the face of the world’s political map; their numbers are too few for that. But there are 4,826 volunteers overseas now, and a buildup begins this month to increase the corps to 9,000 by next January. They will be scattered in 47 countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In scores of small ways, through their own zeal and ingenuity, the Peace Corpsmen have made a disproportionate number of friends for the U.S. Items:

>In Ethiopia, two California schoolteachers—Beulah Bartlett, 65, and Blythe Monroe, 66—moved in on an abandoned schoolhouse, whitewashed it themselves, turned it into an excellent training school for native teachers. The spinster pair earned a special audience from His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, and Beulah said after the meeting, “Oh, we think he’s just the sweetest little man in the world.” Beyond Beulah and Blythe, the Peace Corps’ 276 schoolteachers in Ethiopia have caused a remarkable change. Peace Corps teachers constitute half the faculty of every high school outside Addis Ababa. Since they bolstered Ethiopia’s teaching force, in mid-1962, high school enrollment has nearly doubled—the greatest increase since the Ethiopian school system was started in 1908. “This,” says Harris Wofford, corps representative for Ethiopia, “is what the Peace Corps was born for—to enable a country that really wants to move to move faster than it otherwise could.”

> In Cumaná, Venezuela, Philip Lusardi, 27, of San Diego asked fishermen how they were doing at catching squid, which is profitable because Latin Americans consider it a delicacy, happily pay high prices for it whenever it is available. The fishermen replied that their squid catch was awful. Why? Well, squid were just too smart to be caught in wholesale numbers. Lusardi squatted in the sand, and the fishermen gathered round while he sketched diagrams of a net-and-jar technique that European fishermen use to outsmart squid. It worked in Venezuela—and Phil Lusardi is king of the beach.

> In North Borneo, June Jensby, 19, a Webber, Kans., 4-H girl, found that every long house in her bailiwick had a rusty Singer sewing machine, purchased years ago as a status symbol. But nobody knew how to work them. She scored a considerable local success by oiling the machines and giving sewing lessons. Since then, she has enlarged her curriculum to include lessons in playing volleyball, building latrines and making jam from bananas and brewing soup from cucumbers and eggs.

> In Punjab, India, Peace Corpsmen arrived to find that the U.S. foreign aid program had purchased an electric wheat-grinding machine months ago for the natives’ use. Unfortunately, it had sat idle ever since. Reason: the electric cord had a flat-pronged American-style plug instead of the round-pronged plug needed in India. The Peace Corpsman merely chopped off the American plug, grafted on an Indian plug, and put the machine to work to the great gratification of the whole community.

> In Montalvania, Brazil, David Knoll, 20, of Chatham Center, N.Y., lives in a hovel about the size of a U.S. bath room. Yet he has changed the whole economy of the village by persuading the peasants to pool their oxen in a farm cooperative. To Knoll, the experience has been inspiring. “After I leave the corps, I want to do more with direct contact between people and the U.S. We’ve got to get down into the soil with these people. White shirts and cocktail parties aren’t going to swerve them away from Communism.”

— In St. Lucia, a dreamy little Caribbean isle where only 14 volunteers are stationed, the local paper paid the Peace Corps its highest compliment. Said the Voice of St. Lucia: “When the Peace Corps first landed in St. Lucia, there was skepticism behind the welcoming speeches. ‘Here they come,’ said one socially prominent St. Lucian woman, ‘straight from school to people who manage very nicely earning nothing—to teach them about refrigeration and The Star-Spangled Banner.’ But today, America’s Peace Corpsmen in St. Lucia have assimilated themselves into the St. Lucian society with an enthusiasm that would have made the first missionaries quake in horror. They are on first-name terms with thousands.”

Corpsmen have piled up hundreds of these tiny triumphs—ranging from teaching the twist in Nyasaland to growing lettuce in Brazil to building badminton courts in Borneo. They have been treed by African buffaloes, serenaded by Filipino gigolos, adopted as sons by Southeast Asian aborigines, frightened by playful natives tossing pythons in their laps.

The Foul-Ups. They have also been the victims of inexcusable administrative foulups. A batch of young nurses was sent to a medical aid station in Bolivia only to find that the place was to be closed down shortly after they arrived. Mrs. Frances Cunha, 74, a California walnut-farm owner, was sent to the dust bowl near the Sáo Francisco river valley in Brazil to help nurture the cashew and Brazil-nut trees. She quickly discovered that nut trees had never been grown there. Again, a group of volunteers was posted to a scruffy village in Nepal, found that no one knew they were coming, who they were or what they were supposed to do. They spent the night huddled grimly beneath flimsy blankets in a bare, cold house, finally broke up in laughter when a voice piped up, “Any more bright ideas, Mr. Kennedy?”

The corps’ largest program is in the Philippine Islands, where there are 600 “teachers’ aides.” It has also been one of the least satisfying—at least to the volunteers. Most of them are young liberal-arts college graduates without teaching experience. They were sent in to help out Filipino teachers in village classrooms, and no one knew exactly what they were supposed to do when they got there. Some took over classes almost entirely; others stood around to help out with an English translation now and then. Generally, the Philippines volunteers can see no real progress. Says one corpsman: “We read about a volunteer in South America who has made 3,000,000 bricks or built a bridge, and we feel discouraged. We ask: ‘What have we done?’ ”

“Dumb, Not Deliberate.” In Colombia, Peace Corps Representative Christopher Sheldon insists that the program there is the “most successful in Latin America.” There are 210 volunteers in Colombia, and most of them have been working with a government-sponsored program called “Action Comunal” (community action) to help peasants shape up their towns. Sheldon makes an impressive count of what they have created: 88 health centers, 442 schools, 82 bridges, 102 aqueducts, and 425 kilometers of roads.

But not all of the corpsmen agree with that assessment of progress. Many of them charged into Colombia 21 months ago, full of enthusiasm, and ran full tilt into a stone wall of local government inertia. Michael Wilson, 26, of Hinsdale, 111., says he waited two months for the Colombian Public Works Ministry to lend him a bulldozer for one day to grade a road. But the day it arrived was a national holiday, and the whole town was drunk. “It wasn’t deliberate. Just dumb, man,” says Wilson. And Bruce Lane, 25, of Austin, Texas, was totally soured by his experiences: “I came here two years ago with the attitude of a social worker who was going to help the country’s peasants. Now I feel to hell with ’em.”

Inevitably, the Peace Corps has also had its internal problems. One young woman was fired from the corps after carrying on an open affair with a Filipino in her barrio (village). A 21-year-old volunteer was sent home on “sick leave” after marrying a native grandmother in Colombia. A man was transferred from his station in North Borneo after he got so carried away that he answered a call from his village’s home guard last December during a border revolt, carried arms with the natives for a time. A few girls have been sent home pregnant; some men have contracted venereal disease. And in one quaint native hamlet, a corps leader was strolling down a street, chanced to see a Peace Corps Jeep parked in front of the town’s biggest bawdyhouse. Seeing his duty, the official stomped into the house, collared the Peace Corps culprit and thundered: “Look, if you’re going to a cathouse, O.K.—but for God’s sake, don’t go in Government transportation!”

By the Shirttail. The Peace Corps, then, is a loosely ruled, badly dressed, often complaining, yet highly motivated melting pot of individualists scattered through jungle, slum and mountain peak in some of the most backward countries of the world. At the same time, it is possibly the greatest single success the Kennedy Administration has produced.

Contrary to New Frontier legend, the Peace Corps was something John Kennedy barely caught by the shirttail. He never mentioned it during the presidential primaries in the spring of 1960, gave only two quick references and one real speech to the idea toward the end of his campaign that fall. In fact, five months before he was elected, Congress had already approved a bill, introduced by Wisconsin’s Democratic Representative Henry Reuss, setting up a $10,000 study on the feasibility of a Peace Corps. Once in office, Kennedy saw the value of the idea and bought it in full.

He created the corps with an executive order in March 1961, put it under the wing of the State Department, and sent Shriver off on a monthlong, eight-nation tour to see if anyone was interested in inviting in some rosy American idealists. Shriver came back with a hatful of requests: India especially wanted agricultural types; Ghana needed plumbers, teachers, electricians; the Philippines wanted English teachers.

With such foreign requests to display, Shriver went up to Capitol Hill and found little real resistance to the idea of his program, although there was a good deal of doubt about how much money to spend on it. Shriver finally got $30 million to start in 1961, grinned happily when President Kennedy labeled him “the most effective lobbyist in Washington.”

One in Ten. Shriver and his high-spirited young headquarters staff (Shriver, then 45, was the oldest Peace Corps official when it began) sent out questionnaires to 20,000 people who had fired in eager inquiries about the corps after Kennedy first mentioned it. By the end of 1961, a trickle of 700 volunteers were in 13 countries—and thousands more were on the way. Ever since, there has been a steady stream of young and old Americans (up to 3,000 a month) volunteering for service. The corps accepts only about 10% of the applicants, then washes out another 22% during training classes at one of 56 U.S. colleges geared to give language, customs or technical instruction to volunteers. In pep talks to potential volunteers, Shriver tries to discourage delusions of glamour: “This won’t be a moonlight cruise on the Amazon. The military life may not only be more glamorous, but it could be safer.”

Shriver’s corps has grown like no other peacetime agency before it. Now he is arguing for a Peace Corps budget of $108 million. Because his requests are buried in the foreign aid budget, he will likely get a bit less than he wants. But his appropriations almost certainly will treble that original $30 million grant of 1961.

Indeed, the very fact of its bigness is becoming a problem with the Peace Corps. Much of the corps’ success depends on its activities being unhampered by tangles of bureaucratic red tape. As of now, there are 802 salaried, professional staffers—620 of them in Washington, the rest sprinkled about the corps’ foreign headquarters. This breaks down, roughly, to one bureaucrat to every six amateurs overseas. And the individualistic volunteers—who lean toward autonomy and away from administration—are deathly afraid the corps is becoming too big, overorganized, and getting bogged down beneath the burden of red tape.

The Peace Corps still has its outside critics, among them Pundit Eric Sevareid, who has pontificated: “While the corps has something to do with spot benefits in a few isolated places, whether in sanitizing drinking water or building culverts, its work has, and can have, very little to do with the fundamental investments, reorganization and reforms upon which the true and long-term economic development of backward countries depends.” To such criticism, Sarge Shriver snorts: “Hell, I’ve said many times we could send 500 volunteers into Borneo and do a good job and the gross national product might still go down.” In his report to Congress this year, Shriver flatly said: “Some of our projects have been distinguished more by good intentions than by good works.”

“Nicer Than the Kennedys.” Such candor comes naturally to Shriver. He springs from proud colonial American ancestry and a no-nonsense family. His mother, Mrs. R. S. Shriver, now of New York, makes it clear where her family stands in U.S. life—and from whom her son inherited his frankness. Says she: “We’re nicer than the Kennedys. We’ve been here since the 1600s. We’re rooted in the land in Maryland.”

Shrivers fought in the French and Indian War and the Revolution; Sargent’s grandfather rode as a teen-ager with Jeb Stuart in the Confederate cavalry. Shriver was reared in Maryland, a devout Catholic and hard-core Democrat. There was a fair amount of money from the family grain mill, built in Union Mills, Md., in 1797, and from a canning business. The son of a Baltimore bank vice president, Sargent prepped at Canterbury School, New Milford, Conn., went on to Yale, graduating cum laude in 1938, got his law degree three years later. While he was still in school, his father went broke during the Depression, and Shriver recalls: “I’ve always sent money home. I’ve had to earn my own way.”

During his Yale years, Shriver distinguished himself by becoming editor of the Yale Daily News and defining himself as “Christian, Aristotelian, optimist and American.” He lived in Germany during a couple of summers while he was a Yalie, and came home with a deep fear of war: “I remember in Germany and France going to church on Sunday and noticing that there were no men in church between the ages of 30 and 50. They were all dead—killed in other wars.” Shaken, he returned to his senior year in law school, helped start Yale’s America First chapter (“I thought it would be beneficial to our people”). But when isolationism became a dead issue, he was an early volunteer for the Navy’s V-7 program.

Athletics & Art. Shriver fought the war on a submarine (he still wears the submarine service dolphin in his coat lapel). His first postwar job was writing for Newsweek. Then, at a cocktail party in 1946, he met tawny-haired Eunice Kennedy, and they had a couple of dates. Nothing serious—but Shriver did meet Old Joe Kennedy. When Joe learned of Shriver’s journalistic interest, he asked him to look at some diaries written in Spain during the Civil War by the late Joseph Kennedy Jr. to see if they were publishable. Shriver read them, said frankly that they weren’t. But Joe Kennedy was impressed with handsome, trim (6 ft., 174 Ibs.) Sarge Shriver, and offered him a job as his fulltime personal representative at the Chicago Merchandise Mart.

Eventually, Shriver was made assistant general manager—a kind of all-round vice president involved in sales, promotion, advertising. He married the boss’s daughter in 1953 after six years of off-again-on-again courtship. Says Shriver: “She’s a hard person to sell—tough as her father.” They settled down in a 14-room duplex in Chicago, produced three bright-eyed kids (Robert Sargent III, 9; Maria, 7; and Timothy, 3). Shriver got deeply involved in civic affairs—as a good Kennedy in-law would—including five years on the Chicago board of education. He resigned from the Merchandise Mart, got a generous separation settlement from his father-in-law, took his Peace Corps position for a dollar a year.

The Shrivers now rent a 14-room farm home on 30 acres in Rockville, Md. They entertain visiting firemen and corpsmen with vigorous hours of softball, touch football and swimming. Shriver is a good tennis player, easily beats Bobby, who is the Kennedy clan’s best. He is also an art connoisseur, has a diversified personal collection including Salvador Dali, Kenzo Okada, Miró.

Although he was active in the 1960 presidential campaign, Shriver will not participate overtly in the Kennedy clan’s campaign plans for re-election next year. At least not while he remains director of the Peace Corps: “I think that as long as I’m head of a national bipartisan agency, I should stay out of it. The commandant of the Marine Corps doesn’t go out campaigning for a candidate, and neither should the Peace Corps director.”

As for the future, Shriver has long coveted the Governor’s spot in Illinois. For a while, he seemed a good bet to run there in 1964. But Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, Democratic boss for the state, let it be known he would probably support the inept but subservient Democratic incumbent, Otto Kerner, for reelection. At about that point, Shriver began prolonging his Peace Corps plans.

In Greenish Awe. He doesn’t seem unhappy about it, insists with rah-rah resonance in his voice, “I have the best damned job in Government.” In that job, he has logged 350,000 miles in visits to corps outposts in 35 countries. He has had three cases of dysentery, has learned to sleep sitting up in a Jeep, become adept at a variety of native dances, gobbled countless stomach-churning helpings of local dishes while his staff looks on in greenish awe.

Since the whole Peace Corps philosophy is by definition antagonistic toward showy special treatment for Americans abroad, Shriver travels tourist class on planes, refuses to carry a dinner jacket on his tours, usually arrives at embassy receptions driving a Jeep. The Peace Corps is frugal: its volunteers collect from $53 to $220 as a monthly living allowance, depending on where they are and what job they are doing. Shriver, despite his considerable personal means, is frugal too. He once dispatched an aide to buy him a new shirt in Guatemala City, was appalled to find that the man had paid $8.95. Shriver ordered the shirt returned to the store, wore a dirty version until he got something cheaper. Another time, he spent 20 minutes scrambling under a shack in the Philippines, looking for some coins that had accidentally fallen through cracks in the floor.

A New Cry. He is immensely popular with volunteers (by a rough headquarters count, there are some 100 Peace Corps dogs around the world named “Sarge”). The volunteers write him personal letters, and he tries to answer every one. One girl in the Philippines made him a beneficiary in her Government life insurance policy.

Shriver is proud of his organization. He makes dozens of speeches to college kids, usually includes this thumbnail history of the Peace Corps: “Two years ago, the skeptics and the cynics were convinced that modern Americans were too flabby in body, too flaccid in spirit, to meet the rigorous challenges of life in the underdeveloped world. Today, we know from experience that the skeptics and cynics and doubters were wrong. They have changed the world’s slogan from ‘Yankee goHome’ into a new cry: ‘Send us more Peace Corps volunteers.’ ”

There is still much to do. For one thing, there is that home-town image of the Peace Corps marching off to save the world. It bothers the volunteers. Said Shriver in his congressional message: “As the Peace Corps enters its third year, volunteers and staff alike have the feeling that the Peace Corps stories most often repeated are too glamorous, too glowing, too pat. Few of these stories talk of the day-to-day problems, the frustrations, the harsh disappointments, and the serious occupational hazards—as one volunteer put it—of ‘dysentery and boredom.’ In a sense, the most unsettling challenge the volunteer faces is his publicity. A generous world press has drawn an unvarying image of volunteers effortlessly spouting Pushtu, Swahili, or Tagalog, of volunteers winning legions of friends while transforming economies … To sum up: while the Peace Corps may not be as good as its reputation, it is almost as good as its intentions.”

That sounds just about right to the U.S. and to many other countries. Hearing about the work of the Peace Corpsmen, one country after another has asked to be included in the program. Where Peace Corpsmen have already been sent, requests have come in for more. Even Nkrumah’s Ghana, where government-run, Communist-lining newspapers still rail at the Peace Corpsmen as “agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,” the government itself has urgently requested that the 113-man Peace Corps contingent be doubled. In Nigeria, where poor Margery Michelmore caused all that commotion, the present group of 297 teachers is being increased, at Nigerian request, to more than 600. Says a top official of the Nigerian Ministry of Education: “There is not one of the various foreign aid schemes working in this country that can beat the Peace Corps.”

The 13 Imitators. Such has been the history of the Peace Corps that it has inspired, in the two short years of its existence, no fewer than twelve other nations to try to follow suit. They are: Argentina, Belgium, El Salvador, France, Great Britain, Honduras, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, The Netherlands and West Germany. Last January, an International Peace Corps Secretariat, geared to building more Peace Corps from more countries, was set up in Washington. Just last week President Kennedy (who was accompanied on his European trip by his sister, Sargent Shriver’s wife Eunice, standing in for the expectant Mrs. Kennedy as the feminine presence) spoke at the inauguration of West Germany’s aborning Peace Corps. He predicted: “Germans will find their reward not here, pursuing their private pursuits, but in some far-off country.”

Perhaps the truest measure of the U.S. Peace Corps—of its creed, its ideals, its constructive naivete and its basic worth—was put by a Peace Corpsman who died in the line of duty. Just before he was killed in a plane crash in Colombia while returning to his Peace Corps mission from a short holiday, David Crozier, 23, of West Plains, Mo., wrote to his parents: “Should it come to it, I had rather give my life trying to help someone than to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”

Looking down the gun barrel is sometimes necessary. But Sarge Shriver and his Peace Corpsmen have at least started to make helping people a practical, and perhaps historic, alternative.

-Margery voluntarily left Nigeria after the incident, worked for a time at the corps’ Washington headquarters, is now the wife of a Manhattan attorney.