The Heart of a Volunteer : Some Pungent Advice From L.B.J, During the Planning Days of the Peace Corps

Celebration of the Peace Corps’ 25th anniversary begins Sept. 18 and culminates Sept. 22. Bill Moyers is a commentator for CBS News.

The very idea of the Peace Corps scared the traditional managers of the foreign-assistance sector of government. But they couldn’t oppose the Peace Corps outright because it had such high visibility with the new President. So they did the next best thing: They sought to absorb it. The result, we knew, would be anonymity for an organization that needed to be publicly conspicuous to attract and excite volunteers, and stifling regulation of an idea whose great virtue was that it was by the government but not for the government. . . .

By “we,” I mean Sargent Shriver, myself and our colleagues. I was then working with them in establishing the Peace Corps, having left the service of my mentor and friend, Lyndon B. Johnson. . . . Shriver and I called upon him. His argument went like this:

“Boys, this town is full of folks who believe the only way to do something is their way. That’s especially true in diplomacy and things like that, because they work with foreign governments and protocol is oh-so-mighty-important to them, with guidebooks and rulebooks and do’s-and-don’ts to keep you from offending someone. You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service and they’ll put striped pants on your people when all you want them to have is a knapsack and a tool kit and a lot of imagination. And they’ll give you 101 reasons why it won’t work every time you want to do something different or they’ll try to pair it with some program that’s already working and you’ll get associated with operations that already have provoked a suspicious reputation, and the people you want to work with abroad will raise their eyebrows and wonder if you’re trying to spy on them or convert them. Besides, you don’t have money to give out . . . so you’ll get treated like the orphan in a big family where your prestige depends upon your budget. And to top it off, they’ll take your volunteers and make them GS 1s and 2s and you’ll send little government employees marching off into the villages over there when you want those countries to accept you as American citizens. . . . If you want to recruit the kind of people I think you want, you’re going to have to ask them to do something for their country and not for AID (Agency for International Development) or State. . . .

“Earl Rudder (then president of Texas A & M) commanded the Rangers at Normandy. . . . He took a mess of gangly country boys and turned ‘em into the damnedest crowd Eisenhower let loose that day. Now, there had been a big argument in training over whether they were part of the regular forces or not, but ol’ Earl told ‘em they were an army unto themselves and they believed it. And I’ll tell you this--when they went up those cliffs and through those hedgerows like Indians after my Grandpa Baines’ scalp, it wasn’t for Eisenhower and it wasn’t for Marshall and it wasn’t for the Joint Chiefs of Staff--it was for Earl Rudder and glory.

“And if you want the Peace Corps to work, friends, you’ll keep it away from the folks downtown who want it to be just another box in an organizational chart, reportin’ to a third assistant director of personnel for the State Department. Who’s your boss in this town is important, and as much as I like Dean Rusk, do you think he’s going to have time to give to Shriver here when he has a problem? . . . Hell, he has to worry about the Russians and the Chinese and Charles de Gaulle. You’ll wind up seeing his deputy’s deputy. And who the hell is going to volunteer to go to Nigeria for the second deputy secretary of state? Who the hell is the second deputy secretary of state, anyway?”

Well, L.B.J. loved hyperbole, but his point was not lost on us. And he felt so keenly about it that he later personally called J.F.K. and implored him to keep the Peace Corps separate and apart. . . .

I do not mean to disparage our foreign-assistance program or our diplomatic force. At its best, foreign aid has also expressed the magnanimity of the American people. But the Peace Corps is to the American government what the Franciscans in their prime were to the Roman Catholic Church--a remarkable manifestation of a spirit too particular and personal to be contained by an ecclesiastic (read: bureaucratic) organization. It is not like anything else.

Excerpted from “Making a Difference: The Peace Corps at Twenty-Five,” edited by Milton Viorst, to be published this month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York. 1986 Bill Moyers.