When the World Calls Read online

  Also by Stanley Meisler

  United Nations: The First Fifty Years

  Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War

  When the World Calls

  The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years

  Stanley Meisler

  Beacon Press, Boston

  To Sam, Mike, Michèle, Joshua, Gabriel, and Jenaro

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One. The Challenge from JFK

  Chapter Two. Sarge’s Peace Corps

  Chapter Three. The Pioneer Volunteers and the Postcard

  Chapter Four. The Battle of Britain

  Chapter Five. Friday, November 22, 1963

  Chapter Six. U.S. Troops Invade the Dominican Republic

  Chapter Seven. Johnny Hood

  Chapter Eight. The Specter of Vietnam

  Chapter Nine. The Wrath of Richard Nixon

  Chapter Ten. The Fall of the Lion of Judah

  Chapter Eleven. The Militant Sam Brown

  Chapter Twelve. Mayhem and Illness

  Chapter Thirteen. The Rich Lady in Her First Job for Pay

  Chapter Fourteen. 200,000 Stories

  Chapter Fifteen. A New Name and a New World

  Chapter Sixteen. The Expansive Mood of the Clinton Years

  Chapter Seventeen. The Quiet Bush Years

  Chapter Eighteen. Diplomatic Troubles

  Chapter Nineteen. Obama and the Future

  Afterword. Does the Peace Corps Do Any Good?

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  Introduction

  The Peace Corps was only an afterthought during John F. Kennedy’s election campaign in 1960. But it was an afterthought that excited the imagination of thousands of college students. The enthusiasm swelled with the admonition of President Kennedy’s inaugural address, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The outpouring of letters from college students was so great that Kennedy feared he could not set up the Peace Corps in time to accommodate the first wave of graduates. The Peace Corps, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, is surely Kennedy’s most enduring legacy.

  I was not there at the madcap, exciting, glorious beginning. I started my work at Peace Corps headquarters just after the election of Lyndon B. Johnson to a full term as president, a year after the assassination of President Kennedy. Accepting a job offer from the Peace Corps was not an easy decision to make. I was in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press then, and I looked on the federal government as our antagonist. The federal government hid information from the American people, and it was the job of the Washington correspondent to ferret it out. Joining the federal government was sort of like joining the enemy.

  But the Peace Corps was different. It was an oasis of idealism and goodness in the vast Washington bureaucracy. Everyone, even Washington correspondents, loved the Peace Corps. The Volunteers were heroic figures. And since I had spent a year studying and traveling in Africa as a Ford Foundation fellow, I had the kind of background that might help them out. After a couple of weeks of reflection, I pushed aside my misgivings and accepted the offer to work in the evaluation division.

  I soon found out how different the Peace Corps was. On my first day of work, I walked out of my office at the scheduled closing hour and noticed that no one else was leaving. So I slipped into the office of one of my colleagues, Richard Richter, the future ABC television news producer, and asked him what was going on. He laughed and explained that everyone liked to show their commitment by working well past closing time and coming in on Saturdays. Since he had already finished his work for the day, he agreed with me that it seemed pointless to hang around, and we headed to the bank of elevators. As we did so, our boss, Charles Peters, spotted us from afar. “What do you two guys think this is?” he bellowed. “The Department of Agriculture?”

  I took lengthy trips, usually a month or longer, for the Peace Corps. I went to Ethiopia twice, to Cameroon twice, and once each to Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, India, and Iran, interviewing Volunteers about their experience and hearing their comments and complaints. In Washington, especially after Peters named me his deputy, I followed the machinations of the staff, for even an agency as unbureaucratic as the Peace Corps had its share of bureaucratic infighting.

  After I left the Peace Corps and joined the Los Angeles Times, I still watched the Peace Corps, most closely when I was based in Africa. I called on Peace Corps staff and Volunteers whenever I could. Sometimes old friends on the staff treated me as if I still worked for the Peace Corps. These contacts proved vital in Ethiopia when the authoritarian regime of Emperor Haile Selassie was unraveling because of student fury—a phenomenon that was ignored by almost all Americans on the scene except for the Peace Corps Volunteers and staff. I have devoted a chapter in this book to the little-known but remarkable story of the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.

  Any history of the Peace Corps must follow two threads—the work of the Volunteers overseas and the tensions of the policymaking in Washington. I have tried to move from one to another as smoothly as possible. They are, of course, interconnected. The incessant campaign to increase the size of the Peace Corps in the early days, for example, sometimes led to fraternity-like clusters of Volunteers in the main cities.

  I have also tried to be selective. Any attempt at an exhaustive history would bog down and become meaningless. By September 30, 2009, the end of the 2009 fiscal year, a total of 198,809 Volunteers had served in 139 countries. The varieties of the interplay of lives and experiences are enormous.

  The ups and downs in Washington have also been too numerous to understand easily. During the first fifty years of the Peace Corps, there have been nine U.S. presidents and eighteen Peace Corps directors. The Washington part of my narrative deals mainly with those who left important imprints on the Peace Corps and on those involved in controversies that tell us a great deal about the meaning of the Peace Corps.

  The Peace Corps has sometimes bent its programs to meet the whims of the White House. In the 1980s, Honduras received the largest Peace Corps program in the world as a reward for letting the United States use the country as a base for the contras attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. When the Cold War ended, the Peace Corps foolishly rushed volunteers to Eastern Europe as agents of capitalism. During both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars, many volunteers wondered if they were serving overseas as the smile on the face of the imperial American tiger.

  A good deal of my narrative explores this tension between the independence of the Peace Corps and the demands of U.S. foreign policy. This tension reflects a great danger, for the Peace Corps would lose its credibility and its acceptance if it lost its independence.

  The Peace Corps has one great inner resource. The strength of the Peace Corps has always depended on the energy and commitment of the Volunteers. No matter how asinine the director in Washington, no matter how much the U.S. president despises the agency, no matter how faulty and lackluster the program in their countries, most volunteers have persevered, determined to do the best they can. That quality has persuaded many countries to ask for more Volunteers, year after year.

  One aspect of the story astounded me as I studied the Peace Corps after so many years away: the impressive array of talent among former Volunteers. The alumni roster includes two U.S. senators, nine members of the House of Representatives, two governors, three mayors, twenty ambassador
s, a host of university presidents, the board chairs of Levi Strauss and the Chicago Bears, and the founders of the Nature Company and Netflix. Novelist Paul Theroux, television news anchor Chris Matthews, and New Yorker writer George Packer are also former Volunteers. It is obvious that the United States itself has benefitted a great deal from the Peace Corps.

  I have tried throughout this history to set down a narrative. I have not shied away from adding analysis to illuminate the story, but it is the story that interests me most. It has been an exciting, even astonishing, and yet sometimes combative fifty years, and I have tried to capture the narrative that fueled that mood.

  Chapter One. The Challenge from JFK

  Senator John F. Kennedy, now revered as a president, was not a figure of great stature when he was nominated by the Democratic Party in 1960. He was young, only forty-three, handsome, kind of dashing, brimming with energy, full of smiles, but also short of experience—perhaps, many thought, even shallow. The Democrats had made the mistake of scheduling a special session of Congress after their nominating convention. The session accomplished little, and even worse, it made obvious the fact that the Senate was dominated by the party’s vice-presidential candidate, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, not the party’s presidential candidate. Kennedy looked like no more than a hanger-on.

  While they intended to vote for him, many party liberals found Kennedy troubling. His Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, was a contemptible figure in their eyes, riding to the House and Senate—and even the vice presidency—on shameless campaigns that slimed his opponents as soft on communism. Nixon had to be defeated for sure, but liberals were uncertain about the man they hoped would smash Nixon down.

  Kennedy’s record on Senator Joseph P. McCarthy of Wisconsin was ambiguous at best. With his wild exaggerations of the numbers of communists lurking in U.S. government offices and his willful slandering of the reputations of innocent men and women, McCarthy, the self-appointed scourge of reds and pinkos, had bequeathed the vile word McCarthyism to the English language. But Kennedy had never denounced him.

  It would have been difficult for Kennedy to do so. After all, his father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, was McCarthy’s friend and financial supporter. Furthermore, his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, worked for the investigations subcommittee that McCarthy used for his witch hunts. McCarthy had even dated two of his sisters, Eunice and Patricia. Kennedy had angered McCarthy by voting against some of his proposed legislation, but when the Senate finally censured McCarthy in 1954 and rendered him powerless, Kennedy did not vote at all. He was in the hospital recovering from back surgery. Kennedy said later that he would have voted for censure had he been able to go to the Senate. But no such statement came from the hospital at the time. His closest aide, Ted Sorensen, concluded in his memoirs published more than a half-century later, “JFK showed no courage on that vote.”

  Some liberals were troubled as well by his Catholicism, although they preferred not to think so; priding themselves on being tolerant, they did not want to be identified as bigots. But the hierarchy of the Catholic Church had now become an obvious conservative force in the United States, with bishops, priests, and Catholic organizations trying to censor American cultural life. Liberals began to object, in the words of Kennedy biographer James MacGregor Burns, to “the imposition on Catholics and non-Catholics alike of Catholic standards, through legislation and economic and political pressure, on education, censorship, marriage, and divorce, on medical practices of contraception, legal abortion, and in other matters.” Church leaders even tried to prevent theaters from showing Vittorio De Sica’s great movie The Bicycle Thief because, as one priest said, it “glorifies a thief.” No one thought Kennedy harbored a view so foolish and ignorant, but the influence of the hierarchy on his thinking was still a nagging question.

  The election campaign erased (or at least set aside) these doubts for a majority of American voters. Kennedy took the Catholic issue head on in a remarkable speech to an assembly of Protestant ministers in Houston on September 12. “I believe in an America,” he said, “where the separation of Church and State is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

  As the campaign intensified, voters began to realize that Kennedy was special, not an ordinary politician. He mastered the issues, memorized an array of data, and delivered his ideas with economy, clarity, and wonderful rhythm. He was self-confident, poised, energetic, and bold. He did not share all the views of Democratic leftists, but he won their admiration anyway, for he was intellectual and pragmatic, prepared to tackle problems with intelligence, not cant. His youth ceased to rankle and began instead to reinforce his promise of a dynamic presidency. Young voters in particular felt swept up in a tide of excitement for him.

  The television debates, the first in U.S. history, made his particular appeal clear. Kennedy and Nixon took part in four weekly debates that ended eighteen days before the election. Much has been written about how Nixon, who regarded himself as a formidable debater, misunderstood the intensity of the television camera and came across as haggard, unshaven, and dark during the first debate. But even more important, Kennedy, who was at ease with himself and with television, established himself as a politician of wit, style, and agility, and Nixon could not match him in any of these qualities.

  The differences between the two were etched during the third debate, when Kennedy was asked about a Republican demand that he apologize for a speech by former president Harry S. Truman in which Truman had warned voters, “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” While noting that his own way of speaking differed from that of Truman, Kennedy replied with a smile, “But I really don’t think there’s anything that I could say to President Truman that’s going to cause him, at the age of seventy-six, to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.”

  Nixon felt compelled then to deliver some lengthy humbug. He insisted that “whoever is president is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to.” He noted that Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had “restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.” If elected president, Nixon concluded, he hoped that “whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House and, whatever he may think of his policies, he will say, ‘Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.’” This oration came from a man who would be exposed by tape recordings years later as one of the most foul-mouthed presidents in the history of the republic.

  The third debate felt surreal, for the two candidates did not argue face to face. Instead, Kennedy spoke from a studio in New York, Nixon from a studio in Los Angeles. As Kennedy hurried from the studio to fly to Michigan, he was clearly still annoyed by a remark that his distant opponent had made. “I would remind Senator Kennedy of the past fifty years,” Nixon said. “I would ask him to name one Republican president who led this nation into war. There were three Democratic presidents who led us into war.” The accusation that President Woodrow Wilson “led us” into World War I, President Franklin D. Roosevelt “led us” into World War II, and President Truman “led us” into the Korean War struck Kennedy and his aides as an unseemly low blow, even for Nixon.

  It is not clear why, but in the next few hours, Kennedy would surprise his staff and publicly embrace a new idea—the most novel idea of his entire campaign for the presidency. His plane arrived at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti shortly be
fore two o’clock in the morning of Friday, October 14. A motorcade then took him fifteen miles to the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Kennedy had not planned to speak there. The schedule called for him to grab a few hours of sleep in a room at the Michigan Union building before boarding a train for a daylong whistle-stop tour through the state. There were limited votes at a college campus in any case in those days, for the U.S. Constitution had not yet been amended to lower the voting age to eighteen.

  A large crowd of students, perhaps as many as ten thousand, had been waiting several hours for a chance to glimpse the handsome and dynamic candidate. Deborah Bacon, the dean of women, had lifted the 11:00 p.m. curfew for women so they could take part. Freshman Eleanor Segal and her sister Sara, who was in high school, managed to make their way to a second-story window of the Union building so they could sit on the ledge, their feet dangling, and watch the candidate below. Joel Sherman, another freshman, and some classmates climbed an old tree alongside the building and perched on a massive branch. The morning was unusually warm and dry for Michigan in October, making the long wait tolerable, even pleasant.

  Kennedy could not ignore the crowd or the microphone set up in front of the doors of the Michigan Union. Sorensen told his fellow speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, “He won’t just let them stand there. He’s going to speak. Maybe that’ll give us a chance to get something to eat. I’m starved.” The two aides slipped into the student cafeteria, knowing that Kennedy would not need them while talking to the students. In just a few moments, according to Goodwin, a campaign worker rushed into the cafeteria and announced, “You know what he just did? He proposed a peace corps.” That was an exaggeration.

  In his talk, Kennedy had won immediate cheers of approval by introducing himself as “a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University.” He said that he would take the opportunity “to say one or two words about this campaign that is coming into the last three weeks.” Due to the problems pressing on the United States, he called this campaign the most important since the election of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Then, without any warning, Kennedy issued a challenge.