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 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 to a Kennedy. Sarge was a Shriver, scion of a distinguished old Baltimore family, but once he married Eunice Kennedy, he was a Kennedy but a lesser Kennedy. He wanted to run for governor of Illinois in 1960, but his brother-in-law Senator Jack Kennedy was running for president, and the Kennedys always came first. When Sarge ran for president in 1976, his brother-in-law Senator Edward Kennedy was less than helpful. The presidency was for a "real" Kennedy not a mock one.
Sarge was an elegant man. His liberalism was passionate and sincere but he lacked the common touch. He was profoundly and authentically religious. Unlike many politicians, he did not use religion. Religion used him. He had serious religious studies on his bed stand and he went to mass every morning. I asked him once why he did so and he said it was because he needed God's help so much to get through the day. That was not a Sarge most people saw.
Sarge was ninety-five and lived an incredibly rich and productive life, and much of my sadness today is about his greatest creation, the Peace Corps. In 2003, Sarge gave a speech at Yale University in which he said, "We didn't go far enough! Our dreams were large, but our actions were small. We never really gave the goal of 'World Wide Peace' an overwhelming commitment or established a clear, inspiring vision for attaining it. If we had, the world wouldn't be in the mess we are in, and what could have been should have been."
The truth is that the organization he founded is in every way diminished. Two years ago I volunteered with a program of the National Peace Corps Association of returned volunteers to try to get Congress to raise the Peace Corps budget dramatically pushing toward President Obama's announced goal of doubling the corps by the fiftieth anniversary this year. As I got into it, I saw that it wasn't just the numbers that needed to be increased. The organization needed to be reformed, torn apart and built anew the way Sarge would have done it.
After 9/11 the Peace Corps had lost its way, concerned more with security than change, pulling out of a number of crucial countries, building high walls behind which the directors lived in almost as exalted a fashion as the ambassadors. The attrition rate was horrible, many of the programs deeply flawed. And the bureaucrats in Washington went home early and did not listen to the volunteers.
People like Senator Chris Dodd, himself a returned volunteer, and Senator Patrick Leahy, knew that there were serious problems but they did nothing. Dodd backed off a bill that would have begun the reforms. NPCA took money from the Peace Corps to publish the volunteer magazine and was hopelessly compromised. I coined the slogan "Bold New Peace Corps" to suggest that it was not just money that was needed but change. I called all kinds of national media trying to get them to do a story on what was wrong. Nobody would do anything. A political editor at NPR was at least honest. He said, "Nobody cares." I kept pushing at NPCA. I upset too many people and nobody at the organization cared about reform. I was pushed out of having any further involvement with the campaign.
Last Friday, in the biggest story the Peace Corps has had in years, ABC's 20/20 did a devastating report on the 1,078 female volunteers who have been sexually assaulted or raped during the past decade. If I extrapolate correctly from these figures, that means that a woman has roughly a one in twenty five chance of being attacked. These are the Peace Corps figures and one would assume that many women remain quiet. The ABC story reported by Brian Ross and produced by Anna Schecter had six brave women on camera talking about how their abuse did not end once their attacker or attackers left them. In several cases, the Peace Corps shuttled them out of the country and forget them.
ABC also interviewed Chuck Ludlam and Paula Hirschoff, vociferous critics of the Peace Corps who have done prodigious work documenting all kinds of problems. That was clearly not as intriguing a subject to 20/20's viewers, and their segment was cut. But that story is out there waiting to be done, and 20/20 was only a beginning.
I know that some of my fellow returned volunteers are reading this and thinking, "Why does he write this now on the very day Sarge died." I write it now because on this evening I remember Sarge as he was and I remember his dream and I know how far away from that we have come.
John Bridgeland: Sarge Changed Our World and Us
My issue with Mr. Leamer’s complaints, while well intentioned, is that they give credence to a pervasive hopelessness that is carried on by many “old timers” like him as a kind of mythological badge of honor. There is this constant reminiscing about how pure the ideals of the Peace Corps were and how off track it all seems now. Bogus.
The world has changed; it has been changing for the last 50 years since its inception and yes, it needs reform. I wish the old timers could also remember what they did more than 50 years ago when the political atmosphere was just as badly stacked against the idea that there could even be a "peace" corps.
So to even consider the notion that perhaps we should give up on the Peace Corps because there may be better/more nimble groups is infuriating! No, there are not. This is it folks. This what we have to work with. Stop crying about long lost days days and do something about it.
Nevertheless in a smaller circles Peace Corps is an excellent resume or application buzz word that needs to be spun as a means to an end. Countless people have leveraged entire careers on spinning this experience, many of these are the out spoken "old timers" but also there is a younger generation eager to follow in those footsteps and settle into academic or bureaucratic complacency. Who can argue, the job market sucks....these jobs are far more exotic than finance, health care, or defense...But who counts those that are destitute as a result of a poor experience?
The recent deeply troubling 20/20 and your article have started to expose this latent snobbery. There is a complete lack of transparency from the headquarters. Thanks for pushing for reform. I noticed Peace Corps Wiki linked your article on the top of the front page! Way to go!
The Peace Corps idea was first adopted by Hubert Humphrey, then by JFK. As an undergraduate at BC, I participated in many efforts to make sure the Peace Corps idea did not die, and helped BC put together a proposal for training volunteers, which unfortunately was not successful.
I agree the Peace Corps, NPCA and other returned Peace Corps volunteer organizations have been less than useful in getting a revitalized and effective Peace Corps. Several RPCVs in Congress have been able to keep the flame alive, but barely.
Sarge deserved a better memorial to his life than the curent Peace Corps.
All institutions grow more bureaucratic and sclerotic as they age and it shouldn’t surprise us that the Peace Corps, for which we had such high hopes, has suffered the same fate.
An example of Washington’s cynical manipulation was a suggestion that military personnel be allowed to complete their terms of duty in the Peace Corps. How absurd! Such a scheme would place in danger both the public overseas image of the Peace Corps and volunteers as well.
Mr. Leamer’s believes that the Peace Corps should be expanded. I’m not sure, because the world is different now; there are more nimble organizations doing what the Peace Corps did.
Some countries were overloaded with too many volunteers. It’s encouraging that most volunteers found something useful and helpful to do, in spite of slipshod placement.
The Peace Corps offered naïve Americans the opportunity to experience a different world. The benefits we received as volunteers surpassed those we left behind. This alone is probably reason enough to expand the Peace Corps, but for the sake of volunteers and host countries, placement must be more selective than what I observed. This requires that the Peace Corps bureaucracy match the host country’s needs with the skills prospective volunteers offer. This process was haphazard in my day; is it better now? I hope so.
This reminds me of my deepest anger against the conservative/ultra-conservative movement that began with the Nixon election. All ugly hatred versus hope.
We lost the so called "news" all of them to the conservative hatred generated for one purpose to re-establish an oligarchy and keep the poor, and enforce servitude.
I am not surprised you could find no news organizations to present Peace Corps ideas and reform.
Conservatives own the voice of the nation and hatred, division and poverty is their goal for "the people."