Nation-Building the Peaceful Way

Kennedy greets Peace Corps volunteers on the South Lawn of the White House, August 9, 1962.

(John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA)

On March 1, 1961—45 years ago today—President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing a government program that remains inspiring and influential to this day—the Peace Corps.

Its goal was ambitious: to place educated young Americans in foreign countries where with their expertise and energy they could assist in national development. A study had suggested that as many as 5,000 volunteers could be useful in countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The new program was so successful, however, that it quickly exceeded that enlistment goal. Within five years, more than 15,000 American youths were stationed abroad.

Kennedy and his advisers had considered making a pledge to create an international service organization along the lines of the Peace Corps during the 1960 presidential campaign, and on October 14 of that year, in an extemporaneous speech at the University of Michigan, he had asked the massed students, “How many of you are willing to spend 10 years in Africa or Latin America or Asia working for the U.S. and working for freedom?” The crowd’s response was overwhelmingly positive. The reaction from his opponent’s camp was not so enthusiastic; Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, derided the idea as a “haven for draft dodgers.” President Eisenhower dismissed it as “a juvenile experiment.” In November, however, it was Kennedy the voters sent to the White House.

The idea was not without historical precedent. During the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt’s government had sponsored the Civilian Conservation Corps, which paid unemployed young men to work on federal land, in parks and forests. Ultimately, several million people had taken advantage of the opportunity, both to lift themselves out of destitution and to serve their country. And the British Voluntary Service Organization employed several hundred young people in the developing world. A program of the Peace Corps’s scale and ambition was unprecedented in the United States, but its proponents could point to a variety of successful forerunners.

Kennedy put his own brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, in charge of the program, and without Shriver’s sure leadership it might never have lived up to its promise. His coworkers praised him as a “visionary” with the “competitive, bottom-line instincts of a corporate CEO.” He was famous for seven-day weeks and for pushing his staff to the limits of their endurance in order to get the job done. Former Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, a onetime Shriver aide, has described him as “not a tidy administrator, but . . . a great executive.” He was also not above making compromises in the interests of practicality. Going against his own political instincts, he agreed to administer a loyalty oath to prospective Peace Corps employees in order to win full and permanent funding from a reluctant Congress.

The Peace Corps was not just a way of helping the developing world and increasing America’s prestige abroad; it also promoted national unity at home. Shriver was fond of touting its ability to bring together Americans of disparate backgrounds. Alongside working- and middle-class volunteers worked men with names like Saltonstall, Rockefeller, and Taft, some of whom would go on to positions of national prominence. Here, Shriver proclaimed, was a program that could transcend economic boundaries. But not, at first, racial boundaries; of the initial 185 trainees, only 4 were black. The Corps did train public servants who would one day lead the U.S. government, though. Future Senator Christopher Dodd served in the Dominican Republic; future Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala worked in Iran; and Congressmen Mike Honda and J. T. Walsh labored in El Salvador and Nepal, respectively.

In the years just after Kennedy, the public remained highly supportive of the program. Lyndon Johnson used it as a model for his domestic-service agency Volunteers in Service to America, a leading part of his war on poverty. Even after Kennedy’s Democratic party gave up the White House, less instinctively supportive administrations were reluctant to meddle with the Peace Corps. Nixon’s aide Patrick Buchanan advised the thirty-seventh President that it would be a mistake to tamper with such a popular initiative, and the man who had formerly been among the Peace Corps’s most prominent critics came to support its continued existence.

Enlistment lapsed during the Vietnam War, however, as many likely volunteers found themselves drafted into military service instead. The number of volunteers dropped from 15,000 to 5,000. Later, during the 1990s, when the economy was flourishing and lucrative jobs were in plenty, enlistment dwindled again. Then after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Corps saw its application totals spike by 23 percent.

With corporate jobs in shorter supply, a growing sense of national unity, and a strong endorsement of national service in President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, Americans began to take an interest once more in serving their country abroad. Because of this, and because of the growth of Peace Corps-inspired programs like Teach for America, President Kennedy’s legacy of national service has endured and remains strong to this day.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.