The Public Policy/The Peace Corps Revival
Stempf, Tory
For nearly twenty years, the Peace Corps was a vivid symbol of American (one can also read Democratic) virtue at work in the world. Yet by 1981 it was moribund. From its heyday in the...
...And the volunteers themselves changed: youthful idealism suddenly turned petulant...
...A self-conscious diaspora of over 120,000 former Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) has resettled, often uneasily, into American life...
...Later Nixon got even...
...and "a widespread feeling of unresolved personal and PC-related experiences and problems...
...Ruppe talks (and she t£dks a lot, and well) about the importance of "people-to-people" contacts and an interlocking "global village" of nations great and small, her muscular lacocca-like style is really about the exercise of power, the sort of power that makes all this magnanimity possible...
...It would have to be brought into the Republican eighties, given a Brooks Brothers suit and a Wall Street sensibility...
...Then, under Jimmy Carter, the liberals got in their lick...
...Peace Corps got up off the deck...
...What's more, PC has done all this with the blessing of an administration by nature hostile to government-sponsored altruism...
...lobby against U.S...
...Offsetting this taint, however, were her infighting savvy, connections, and political moxie...
...Ruppe's boss for the greater good of the corps...
...Whether because of emotional predisposition or the tour of duty itself (or both), few PCVs returned to the States with what could be called a prideful attitude toward American culture and politics...
...He wrote that the PC experience was "the making of an un-American...
...And to keep the diaspora's collective spirit up, a new magazine for exPCVs is in the works—r/i//ri World— thanks to market research contributed by the Ford Foundation...
...ACTION'S Sam Brown accused PC's most successful education program of "cultural imperialism" and proceeded to gut it, so that by the time 1981 rolled around the corps was on the ropes— and with a new Republican administration coming in that everyone knew was itching to knock it out...
...A few skittish countries with "nonaligned" reputations to uphold asked it to leave...
...That was in May 1970...
...Life here seemed superficial, and for the struggling peoples they had left behind and come to identify with, dangerously complacent and ignorant...
...Rumors of a CIA connection wouldn't go away...
...Republican Ruppe and the legions of ex-vols she caters to are at cross purposes...
...a sense of being caught between two worlds...
...A Peace Corps Institute, seeded by the World Bank, was founded by PC's director under Carter, Richard Celeste (now governor of Ohio...
...Mrs...
...For as much as Mrs...
...RPCVs gravitate toward, and tend to dominate, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and relief agencies like Catholic Relief Services, CARE, and Oxfam...
...That was when the miracle happened...
...Ruppe didn't raise the dead all by herself...
...Lorett Miller Ruppe, 47, a MiUer Beer baroness and the wife of a six-term Michigan congressman, came on board a political pariah to the "California crowd" for being a George Bush devotee...
...After this, outflanking her conservative critics was easy...
...This training (termed "absolutely, totally bullshit" by Carter's deputy director, Richard Sykes) was discontinued in the seventies...
...Indeed, twenty years later the Chicago RPCV group finds these attitudes still "universal" among exvolunteers: "a continuing sense of connection with one^s host country...
...For her part, Mrs...
...What happened...
...It is not necessary to support dictators and racist regimes in South Africa, Central America, and Asia," is the way a New York group articulates its political worldview...
...Employees started being tested for their political purity...
...And that's what she did, selling it as effective, professional (specialists being preferred over liberal arts "generalists"), and a good buy to boot—just $20,000 supports a PCV overseas for a year, compared to $100,000 for a USAID employee...
...In one particular fit of pique at President Nixon's Vietnam policy, employees conunandeered the national headquarters in Lafayette Park...
...Tbday's Peace Corps, with its stump-thumping patriotism and glitter, embodies what every RPCV I've ever talked to despises...
...Ruppe and Mr...
...Former volunteer and author Paul Cowan didn't beat around the bush...
...Peace Corps would stand up there with the Sixth Fleet in the Gulf of Sidra as an "image of America" (her words) that would replace "Dynasty" and "Miami Vice" (her examples) in the eyes of the world...
...Reagan and their vision of America are gone...
...Ruppe reinstituted a slicker "audio-visual" version of the old lecture course, satisfying enough cold warriors that naive trainees were once more being duly awakened to the Soviet threat...
...Ruppe simply harked back to what had been the chief rationale behind the corps in the first place: what Hubert Humphrey called its role "to combat the virus of Communist totalitarianism" in the developing nations...
...And they have organized...
...Recruitment slumped...
...feelings of empowerment . . . beyond what we could have expected in our own culture . . . "; the "mutual ignorance between the Third World and the USA...
...What sort of special insights into world affairs do RPCVs discover and then share with the American public...
...It was a moral perspective redolent of liberation theology and bowdlerized Marxism...
...Maybe it's because they know they have the last say...
...the American indifference to the PC experience...
...It's an awkward pas de deux indeed...
...According to the National Council of RPCVs, more than fifty private groups around the country today actively pursue what has always been the most problematic of PC's goals: "to educate Americans about the Third World...
...As the thirty Silver Anniversary symposiums taking place around the country this year make clear, the corps has refound its purpose (if not its youth), reclaimed its agency independence, and upped its budget from $83.6 million in 1981 to $120 million, enabling it to field 6,(X)0 volunteers (soon to go to 10,000) in sixty-three underdeveloped countries ("friends of America," the director calls them...
...support the sanctuary movement...
...Tbward this goal, the Carnegie Corporation and AID gave the council $80,000 to design a high-school course on the problems of Third World development...
...senators, 500 work for AID and 250 as congressional aides...
...Reagan himself extolled...
...Peace Corps as laid-backworse, guilty—liberalism, Ruppe knew, would never wash with this image-conscious President...
...Five are now congressmen, two are U.S...
...So we arrive in this 25th year at a delicious irony...
...And it taps an altogether different American feeling, namely the one that believes it's high time the rest of the world started learning from us...
...In the early days PC training had included, by congressional mandate, a mini-course on the theory and practice of Communism in the' Third World...
...But above all she hawked it as the personification of the reassertive—yes, interventionist—^America Mr...
...But Mrs...
...Ruppe seems oblivious to these ideological tensions...
...policy in Central America and send "peace planes" to Nicaragua...
...He relegated PC to the bureaucratic catacombs of the agency ACTION...
...The old isprit de corps returned, and so did the recruits...
...Bitten by the Third World bug and habituated early in life to the taste for power, they've gravitated in disproportionately large numbers to jobs like teaching and international consulting, and to politics...
...By the New Left's reckoning, the corps was too entwined with the "established power structure" to have any real educative value—PCVs didn't "go native" enough—but most observers saw otherwise: what a twoyear stint amidst grinding poverty did to young, middle-class, impressionable souls...
...PCVs acquired, in their own words, "a sense of the dispossessed" that often as not found the United States "on the wrong side of social change" in the world...
...After all, 6,000—10,0(X)!— PCVs today means 6,(XX) more transformers of American culture tomorrow, long after Mrs...
...RPCVs privately express their qualms, but publicly (so far) swallow their aversion to Mrs...
...No wonder, then, that many RPCV groups today "work for peace and disarmament" with organizations like Ploughshares and Peace Offensive...
...Western freedom and democratic values in particular began looking abstract, even chimerical, in the spotlight of worldwide human want— of little use to people without the economic strength to use them...
...At the same time she got President Reagan to abolish political testing for selection of overseas staff...
...Start with the director...
...From its heyday in the mid-sixties, when some 15,000 volunteers traipsed around the globe doing good, things had soured in PC...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
