Loret Miller Ruppe; Directed Peace Corps

Loret Miller Ruppe, the longest-tenured director of the Peace Corps, has died at the age of 60.

She died Tuesday at her home in Bethesda, Md., of ovarian cancer.

After Ruppe’s appointment as Peace Corps director by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she set about strengthening the international service organization and its focus on promoting development to achieve world peace.

A major problem for the maturing organization, she found, was its low visibility at home.

“When I became director,” she told The Times in 1986, “people were saying, ‘Oh, yes, the Peace Corps. I love it. Is it still around?’ ”

Current Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan said Ruppe strove to keep the 35-year-old organization a nonpartisan force for peace, even though the appointment of a director was traditionally a political one.

In her eight years as director, Ruppe was responsible for volunteer programs in 63 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. She visited volunteers in most of those countries.

Under her leadership, the Peace Corps was invited to begin or resume programs in seven countries: Sri Lanka, Haiti, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands.

In a speech commemorating the service organization’s 35th anniversary in March, Ruppe said: “The Peace Corps is needed more now than ever. It is our nation’s greatest peace-building machine, which serves overseas and then brings it all back home.”

After rapid growth, decline and then revival, the corps had about 7,000 volunteers last year, a 20-year high but less than half the peak of 1966, when there were 15,000.

“The Peace Corps of today, as well as the thousands of individual volunteers who served during [Ruppe’s] tenure, owe her an immense debt of gratitude for her vision, dedication and leadership,” Gearan said.

Ruppe also was responsible for developing the Leadership Through Peace program focusing on environmental and women’s issues at colleges and universities.

She had never held any paying job, but was a civic leader and volunteer organizer in her hometown of Houghton, Mich. She received 25 honorary degrees in recognition of her accomplishments.

Ruppe helped her husband, former Rep. Philip Ruppe (R-Mich), win election to Congress in 1966. He retired in 1979.

She was George Bush’s campaign manager in the 1980 Michigan presidential primary and later served as co-chair of Michigan’s Reagan-Bush State Committee in the 1980 campaign.

In 1989, she was appointed ambassador to Norway by President Bush. She served until 1993.

Ruppe is survived by her husband and five daughters.