BY ALAN GUSKIN PH.D.
Published October 13, 2010
The Peace Corps began in the midst of a light drizzle at 2 a.m. on Oct. 14, 1960, near the end of a tumultuous presidential campaign. John F. Kennedy won the election a few weeks later, the hopes of a new generation began to unfold and the Peace Corps became a reality on Mar. 1, 1961.
Illustration by Rose Jaffe
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The idea that would lead to the creation of the Peace Corps came from an impromptu speech that challenged 10,000 University students to aid developing countries. The birth of the Peace Corps owes much to the context of the times: the spirit of social justice embodied in the Civil Rights Movement, students' stirrings for change on campuses throughout the nation, the emergence of young leaders in newly independent nations of Asia and Africa and the incredible optimism of a new decade sparked by the presidential campaign of John Kennedy.
I was present on that rainy night 50 years ago. Along with a few others, I helped to form a group that showed that students would respond to Kennedy's challenge, which asked if we were prepared to serve in developing nations. It’s said by Peace Corps chroniclers that Kennedy was moved by the University student response. A short time after his speech on the steps of the Michigan Union, on Nov. 2 — just six days before the election —he gave a major campaign address committing himself to the creation of the Peace Corps and mentioned the reaction of the students at the University of Michigan. He met privately with a small group of University students — including me — on the following day.
Robert Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, wrote in his memoirs: “It might still be just an idea but for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty… Possibly Kennedy would have tried it once more on some other occasion, but without a strong popular response he would have concluded the idea was impractical or premature. That probably would have ended it then and there. Instead, it was almost a case of spontaneous combustion.”
Eleven months after the meeting with Kennedy, I entered the Peace Corps, spent three months in training at the University and then served two and a half years in the first group to Thailand.
The Peace Corps reflected the spirit of Kennedy. In fact, in many countries, volunteers were called Kennedy's children. Kennedy was not radical, nor revolutionary. Neither was, or is, the Peace Corps. Kennedy represented a new spirit and style domestically and internationally; so did the Peace Corps.
The experience of the Peace Corps volunteer
The real success of the Peace Corps, I believe, was and is the people-to-people, non-political nature of its programs and its specific assignments. For the volunteers, the Peace Corps was a noble and humble undertaking. Returned volunteers will tell everyone who will listen that we gained much more than we gave. Peace Corps volunteers didn’t create broad-scale changes; they impacted individual people's lives.
The Peace Corps today is doing what it always did well — creating programs in which host country individuals and organizations are served well and Peace Corps volunteers are deeply affected by their service. The results reflect the best of what early leaders like Sargent Shriver, Bill Moyers and Harris Wofford — and some of us who were younger, but just as idealistic — hoped would happen to the volunteers and those they served.
I have had the good fortune of knowing many volunteers over the last five decades, some of whom weren’t born when I served as a volunteer from 1961 to 1964. But somehow, the experience in one of the last five decades in vastly different countries created a bond that unites those of us who served and differentiates us from those who haven’t. It’s as if the experience overseas seared itself deeply into the volunteers' consciousness and became a formative part of their identity.
For most of us who have served, the Peace Corps represents the single most significant risk of our lives. At a young age, we left the comforts of school and society to enter a world of uncertainty in which our coping and survival skills were brought into question, underwent change and then re-stabilized. The cues that enable us to understand other people and how we should act had to be altered. Concerns for physical safety and illness became significant for people of an age group that often considers itself invulnerable. These are profound adjustments, and the more successful the volunteer was overseas, the more likely it was that these psychological changes were significant.
The impact of re-entering the United States on the volunteers was enormous and unexpected. The assumption throughout the Peace Corps was that a successful volunteer was defined by the strength of personality and character.
