Sam Brown and the Peace Corps: All Talk, No ACTION
Nocera, Joseph
Sam Brown and the Peace Corps: All Talk, No ACTION by Joseph Nocera By the end of last year morale had hit bottom at ACTION; it was as low, they say, as in the Nixon-Ford years, when the...
...Here were people in the government, in his government, openly condemning his war policies...
...She had seen the symbols...
...But in the field offices around the country, it is not the same story...
...In large part, that is accurate...
...He had not yet found time to hire a Peace Corps director, but he knew where it was going to go...
...When he quit that position to become one of Jimmy Carter’s first appointments, the ACTION bureaucracy felt it had been given a clear signal: Jimmy Carter cared about voluntarism, he cared what happened to the Peace Corps and to VISTA...
...From the White House, the word is...
...The generalists were the ones who were most adaptable to a new culture, were usually better able to learn the language, but they had to have useful work todo...
...That length of time was arrived at by trialand error-and if anything it was on the short side...
...it was as low, they say, as in the Nixon-Ford years, when the place had been turned into a home for out-of-work Republicans, and when the struggle had been for simple survival...
...Under Sam Brown, they have yet to be built up...
...At the heart of the matter, though, was the feeling that Brown had come to ACTION with no particular agenda in mind, and that now, after all this time, he still didn’t have one...
...Some had taught sports...
...They had been in the Peace Corps in some cases slightly longer than Sam Brown, and in some cases not quite as long...
...they stayed in urban centers or “the white man’s compound” instead of getting out into the rural villages or urban ghettos where the Peace Corps wassupposed to be doing its work...
...In addition, its recruiting and programming and budgeting divisions were centralized under ACTION...
...skills...
...From the beginning Brown spoke in the language of the left-he would “put ACTlON on the cutting edge of social and economic change,” he would “find the places where you havesomelatitude and try to create some models”-and from the beginning most of Washington bought it...
...Oh, there has beensomescorn from other radicals (Daniel Berrigan, for one), but by and large he has retained his old antiwar constituency and broadened it considerably...
...But community organizing (which is what he wants VISTA to do) and urban experiments are not new ideas to Sam Brownand his constituency...
...Sam Brown doesn’t see this because he isn’t looking...
...It required an ability to step outside his established view of the world and face situations that didn’t necessarily conform to it...
...We would havestoodonour headsifthat’swhat he wanted,” says one ACTION bureaucrat, recalling Brown’sfirst few months...
...Even at ACTION he has had some limited success.in changing the focus of VISTA, the domestic volunteer agency...
...What a time to make an emotional plea for the Peace Corps, in the name of Humphrey, who had worked so hard to get it going...
...Its budget was cut every year so that volunteers dropped from a high of 15,000 in 1966tothecurrent6,000orso...
...In no case did the returned volunteers see any discernable shift under Brown...
...Sadly, in most cases, that is still how programming is done...
...They knew they had a good idea, and they wanted desperately to make it work...
...While there wasn’t much he could do about college demonstrations, Peace Corps dissent was a different story...
...But there is a rub here that Sam Brown hasn’t faced...
...First, with it came the bureaucrats...
...Under Nixon, all three areas were decimated...
...But nearly a year later, all that had changed...
...Finally, a group of employees took their gripes t o columnist Jack Anderson...
...But Brownsays this is one area he is “non-negotiable” on...
...Sam Brownisn’t oblivious to this, but he says that his hands are tied...
...It is difficult to sit and listen to him for more than a few m i n u t e s w i t h o u t becoming convinced that yes, he is right, that here is a man who knows what he’s talking about...
...Heis the story, not ACTION, not the Peace Corps, but Sam Brown, the radical in government and all that...
...Most of the rest of the Washington press corps have found hooks galore: Sam Brown as Symbol, as Outsider Come Inside, as Target of the Right Wing...
...Among the t e c h n i c a l p e o p l e especially, there was real resentment toward the Peace Corps, for they felt they had simply been free bureaucrats for other countries...
...A good interview, as they say in the trade...
...He will never again have such a potentially sympathetic congressional audience...
...The biggest headache of all is probably training...
...Leading the troops for Nixon was Alan May, ACTION’S head of personnel...
...When Jimmy Carter called Brown in Colorado to ask him to join the administration, his first question was, “Are you wearing bluejeans...
...When the Peace Corps got a$20-million budget increase this year, Brown vowed that most ofthe money would go toward extending the training time...
...From the White House, the word is, off the record, that much more had been expected of Sam Brown than he has produced...
...Brown could have pointed to the Republicans and said give me the money to undo the damage rhq did...
...Who can be against helping poor people...
...And that is, how do you turn the philosophy of human needs into decent programs...
...This, although he runs one of the smallest agencies in town( 1,700employeesanda total budget of $200 million...
...If he infuriated the right with his statements-and he did, especially in Congress-that was a feather in his cap...
...In interviews with Peace Corps people here and abroad, the impression that emerges is of an agency that is floundering, unsure of itself and its role, searching for some kind of direction...
...How do you make the theory a reality...
...In the old Peace Corps, some of the things they tried to do-things that sounded right in theory-had turned out to be absolute disasters...
...The head of programming said no, their hands were tied until the volunteers were recruited...
...And yet, if you listen to Sam Brown talk about the Peace Corps, it all sounds so good...
...An attitude of unquestioning acceptance of the status quo, of willingness to serve the colonialists-that was the real lesson those schools taught...
...Several had been university teachers...
...Nurturing An Image “I’m sick and tired of all these stories about me being a symbol of something or other,”says Sam Brown...
...The Peace Corps was born 16 years ago, in the days of Camelot...
...Although when Brown had a chance to interest Fidel Castro in the Peace Corps, via Bill Moyers, who was going to Cuba to interview Castro for a television special, he passed it up...
...They tended to be older and less adaptable to other cultures and climates...
...This place was euphoric, absolutely overjoyed, about the appointment...
...they often did not have the drive and the willingness to learn the language and culture that the younger generalists usually had...
...The same Peace Corps that once thrived on beingthe most unbureaucratic agency in Washington had been paralyzed by its bureaucracy well before Brown came to town...
...Finally, she wrote, the Vietnam war is behind us...
...Ralph Nader...
...The Ear, The Washington Star’s gossip column, began running bitchy little items about Brown-including one that caused him to cancel a consulting contract because it gave “the appearance”of a conflict of interest...
...The Peace Corps, then, went about defining with the host country, quite precisely, specific useful tasks that generalists could learn in a relatively short time...
...From within, he could have altered the structure of the Peace Corps by administrative order...
...In fact, Sam Brown hasn’t done that-“It has never been much more than a nice-sounding bunch of words,” says one former ACTION aide...
...But had he passionately cared about the Peace Corps, he would have at least tried...
...A Peace Corps staff member pointed to onecase in point: recently, shesaid,she hadtried to get some new programs approved that would have allowed a modest increase in generalists...
...The press turned in a series of rave reviews...
...A Lack of Knowledge This lack of knowledge-and, perhaps more important, of a hunger for knowledge-has hurt the Peace Corps in other ways as well...
...And Sam Brown was at the helm...
...He has kept his ideology intact and his constituency happy...
...It was clear at thestart that Sam Brown had no idea of what needed to be done there...
...It was, however, a story without secret documents or startling revelations, and it never found its way into Anderson’s column...
...Gone would be the patronizing cultural imperialism of the past...
...The ACTION merger brought with it agencies that already had a rigid Civil Service s t r u c t u r e , and the Peace Corps immediately became swallowed up in that...
...His is a Peace Corps built according to the language of the left: he wants to stress Basic Human Needs and avoid the Cultural Imperialism of the past...
...He was the politician-symbol of all of us who had worn blue jeans on college campuses in the 1960s...
...The Peace Corps still has to go through ACTION’S directors of programming and recruiting and budgeting to get anything done...
...The group at Anderson’s that night also expressed some bitterness over the great press Brown had beengettingsincecomingto Washington from the likes of liberal columnist (and head Brown cheerleader) Mary McGrory, when he had not done anything to deserve that kind of favorable publicity...
...It’s painfully clear to anyone who has taken more than a cursory look at the Peace Corps that something drastic needed to be done if the place was ever to awaken from the doldrums of the 1970s...
...Imagine the President’s reaction...
...These were the people who were going to decide the future of the Peace Corps...
...that’s not unusual for any new agency head...
...And when thetopstaffmet, its sessions took on an eerie, unreal atmosphere that was never grounded in the realities of the Peace Corps...
...The Republicans were not at all subtle about their purpose-the Peace Corps quickly became smaller and less visible...
...But what was worse is that he made no real attempt to find out...
...His experience during the war years, when he was a bona-fide leader, and in Colorado, where he accomplished a great deal, show that he can get things d o n e , t h a t he can be bold and innovative...
...Nixon’s Peace Corps director, Joseph Blatchford, got the message-the Peace Corps was not going to harbor “radicals” as long as Richard Nixon had something to say about it...
...About ten of them met one night with an Anderson reporter to air complaints ranging from Brown’s cronyism in his hiring and contracting practices, to his lack of administrative ability, to his supposed unwillingness to listen to anyone but his closest aides...
...There had been no director of the Peace Corps for months, for example-something that should have been an immediate priority...
...There also was an infusion of Nixon appointees at the top...
...It was time to “shift priorities” and “change d i rec t i o n, ” B la t c h f o rd announced, with the biggest change being in the kind of person the Peace Corps recruited...
...Indeed, if ever a man and ajob had seemed the perfect match, it was Sam Joseph Nocera is an editor ojThe Washington Monthly . Brown and the top spot at ACTION...
...It is as much a story of volunteers finding no work to do, or spending two years on the beach, or working for the government...
...The questions were not about what had actually worked and what had failed in the past, but how they couldensurethat the Peace Corps was in line with the g r e a t goals of anti-imperialism, workplace democracy, and so on...
...In Jimmy Carter’s government, budget is a common complaint, and the Peace Corps now works with $50 million less a year than it did in its heyday...
...His is a Peace Corps built according to the language of the left: he wants to stress Basic HumanNeedsand avoid the Cultural Imperialism of the past...
...The real story of the Peace Corps, said one of the former volunteers, is not the one that has warmed the hearts of Americans everywhere...
...When Brown was sworn in in the Oval Office alongside Max Cleland, the man who lost three limbs in the Vietnam war and now heads the Veterans Administration, Mary McGroryapplauded loudly...
...Protests were mounting, campuses were erupting, and in the Peace Corps, young, college-educated volunteers were getting in their antiwar licks, much to Nixon’s consternation...
...Tom Hayden came by...
...Under the Republicans, most countries became accustomed to making requests for expert agronomists and the Peace Corps got in the habit of findinga volunteer to match the request (hence the feeling by volunteers that they are part of the labor forces...
...The Peace Corps, on the other hand, is something foreign to his experiehce, and as such it has glaringly shown his weaknesses...
...It didn’t always work out that way-some programs were flops, and some volunteers couldn’t cut it-but it often did...
...This would have meant, for instance, keeping or reviving teaching programs that worked, a move that would have antagonized large portions of his constituency, who would not have understood...
...At the Peace Corps, this means programming, recruiting, and training volunteers...
...It got to the point where we were nothing but a placement service for other countries’ technical needs,” says one Peace Corps official...
...He would create small-scale models, with agriculture and nutrition projects at their core...
...His arrival also meant a great deal to the liberal community generally and in particular to the Peace Corps community-a loose collection of people bound together by having been part of the Peace Corps in the old days...
...But there were also Peace Corps teachers who learned the languages of the people-Ibo or Twi or Luo-and who involved themselves and their students in the life of the people and thus struck a blow against the colonialists and against imperialism...
...Remember, this was when the antiwar movement was reaching its peak (and Sam Brown was in the thick of things...
...The very term ACTION is a misnomer, for Nixon’s purpose in putting under one roof all thevolunteer programs begun by Kennedy and Johnson was precisely the opposite: to deactivate what the Democrats had built up, particularly the Peace Corps and VISTA...
...A Nice Sounding Bunch of Words In interviews, Brown can mesmerize you with that kind of talk...
...If this was not being “on the cutting edge of social and economic change,” to quote Sam Brown, it is hard to imagine what would have been...
...At i t s most successful, the Peace Corps gave volunteers three solid months of language and technical training...
...Because Peace Corps staff were not allowed to stay for morethanfiveyears, there was a constant infusion of new talent and new ideas...
...But in the intervening 21 months, the great appointment has become the great disappointment, and it is not just the ACTION bureaucracy that is unhappy...
...And where else to put Brown but at ACTION, itself a symbol of the devastation of government wrought by Nixon...
...There would be linkage between Peace Corps projects overseas and VISTA work at home...
...What they said about their Peace Corps experiences, whether it was glowing or sour, brings home the point that the Brown theoretical canon doesn’t have much to do with the reality of the Peace Corps...
...But he wrote a story anyway, focusing on the disenchantment with Brown within ACTION, and on the fact that it was coming not so much from Nixon holdovers who felt t h r e a t e n e d (although there was some of that), but from the young idealists, many of them former volunteers, who make up the bulk of the ACTION bureaucracy...
...Ironically, his current Peace Corps director, Carolyn Payton, understands this all too well...
...By conceding defeat to the bureaucratic system he inherited from the Republicanswhich he calls “working within the system”-he has limited the people he is willing to fight to the hard-core right, which would object to anything he did...
...The absence of a Civil Service personnel system had given the Peace Corps a freedom and mobility unheard of in Washington...
...most volunteers could not handle that kind of work, so it wasscrapped...
...It was not a pleasant place to work...
...He is 34 now, an engaging person, full of charm and dry wit, and a great talker...
...It meant that anyone who didn’t already have a ready-made skill went abroad not knowing enough to be an effective volunteer...
...But the problem was not that thevolunteers were cultural imperialists...
...One fellow in Brazil had worked on a government computer...
...She had been acountry director in the mid-1960s and had seen first-hand the importance of teaching...
...After sitting in a few meetings with them in the early months, an ACTION staff member recalls thinking how they seemed to look on the Peace Corps as a new toy...
...The new ad campaign is going to waste...
...The new Nixon Peace Corps wanted people who had specific “technical skills,” and it promised to build programs that would utilizethose But in the intervening 2 1 months, the great appointment has become the great disappointment, and it is not just the ACTION bureaucracy that is unhappy...
...that much more had been expected...
...sitting in his Washington office, t a l k i n g to Washington reporters, he has never had to...
...It was as if he had to prove to these people that he could be a part of the federal government and not sell out...
...And yet, if you listen to Sam Brown talk aboutthe PeaceCorps,itallsounds so good...
...Thechoice of Brown, most of them agreed, was a master stroke by Carter, a great appointment...
...In August of last year Brown and his staff unveiled their answers...
...Does Brown know t h a t ? Obviously not-he continues to have total faith in community efforts, and no faith at all in teaching...
...What the progressive Third World leaders understood was that the schooling set up by the British and French colonialists was designed to use rote learning to produce clerks for their civil service...
...I guess it just wasn’t black and white enough...
...Fearful and frustrated, Peace Corps and VISTA staff formed a union to fight the excesses of the Republicans...
...From Congress, one who should have been a natural ally, liberal Rep...
...Certainly there were elitist teaching programs in the old Peace Corps...
...In theory, it sounds like a vibrant Peace Corps renewed with Brown’s new vision...
...Instead, he has been content to handle small crises as they cropped up-running, for instance, to Capitol Hill to get extra money to cover foreign inflation (mistakenly left out of the Ford budget...
...More importantly, a new kind of teaching could be a revolutionary process in much of what had been a colonized world...
...It was a rapid fall from dizzying heights of optimism...
...It is something we all have to live with...
...Thus began the purge, although it was never descri bed in terms so crude...
...Challenging the Status Quo What the Peace Corps teacherscould do, and did almost instinctively, was break through the old colonial subservience and challenge the status quo by simply asking“Why...
...They learned the right feed formulas and how to improvise with ingredients available in India...
...Michael H arringt on, chairman of a Peace Corps subcommittee, calls Brown’s work “pedestrian...
...Brown, DeVries, and the others, they had their answers already-the answers of the left, the answers that had worked for them for the last ten years-and the only question that remained was how the Peace Corps would fit into those answers...
...He wants his staff to work in an atmosphere of Workplace Democracy...
...David H a r r i s . Phillip Berrigan...
...Sniping at Sam Brown became the order of the day...
...Although it took time and money to train the generalists to do something, the early Peace Corps had found that it was worth the effort, for these were the people who became the truly good, caring volunteers...
...In two ways, the merger immeasurably hurt the Peace Corps...
...Some of them had worked in countries that don’t have overwhelming poverty, like Western Samoa...
...But there are people who had hoped he would be much more than that, had hoped he was the leader who could make the Peace Corps once again a vital and vibrant agency, a place that people cared about and that cared about people...
...liberal Rep...
...They had wanted, for example, to do some community organizing with Peace Corps volunteers, which made great sense on the Washington drawing board but was a bust in practice...
...Meetings with the on-line Peace Corps staff, the people doing the nitty-gritty work, were few and far between...
...Within the first few months, many of the heavies of the left came to ACTION to visit Brown...
...They learned to vaccinate, debeak, and kill diseased chickens...
...Sam Brown has been unwilling or unable to change that...
...The basic ways the Peace Corps does business-the manner in which it recruits and trains volunteers and develops programs abroad-have been so abused in the past eight years that they needed to be thoroughly turned around...
...Surely that was the best reason of all to be excited about ACTION...
...The steps Brown has taken have been incremental and tentative...
...The “bad guys”-Nixon and Alan May and Joseph Blatchford-were no longer in office...
...The idea of doing something worthwhile by joining the Peace Corps quickly caught on, and college graduates, mostly in their mid20s, signed on in droves...
...it was that they shared the get-an-attache-caseanda-Mercedes values of the native teachers and students who had been brainwashed by their colonial masters to value summer vacations in Paris or London a b o v e helping-or even talking to-the average man of their own country...
...Brown has gotten more press than just about anyone in the administration outside of Joseph Califano...
...From inside the agency, an even nastier gossip sheet materialized, called The Rear...
...From Congress...
...Sam Brown and the Peace Corps: All Talk, No ACTION by Joseph Nocera By the end of last year morale had hit bottom at ACTION...
...Those were the kind ofprograms that worked best, but Brown hasn’t revived them...
...The employees’ union, once necessary to slow the destruction being caused by the Republicans, is now an unnecessary impediment to change, filing grievances, creating roadblocks every step of the way...
...The missionary zeal that gave us the Peace Corps is not so far from the zeal that gave us the Vietnam war,” Brown was fond of saying...
...One of the keys to the success of early Peace Corps was that it had been a bureau without bureaucracy...
...One golden opportunity that he missed came when Hubert Humphrey, one of the founding fathers ofthe Peace Corps, was in the last months of his life...
...known to be dying of cancer...
...Shriver and the people around him cared passionately about the agency...
...But they knew one thing reasonably well: how to house, raise, cull and keep healthy a small flock of chickens in India...
...People who had believed in Brown in the beginning were quietly quitting in disgust...
...After three months of sharply focused training, these volunteers were as ignorant as they had ever been about general farming and animal husbandry...
...His Peacecorps would beoneto take pride in...
...That was Tom DeVries(recent1ydeparted to take a newspaper job), who had worked for the Peace Corps in Washington in the mid-1960s-but he had been the house radical, and his knowledge of programs in the field was exceedingly dim...
...When a half dozen agencies were fighting for a chunk of Carter’s urban program, Sam Brown scored a coup, getting $50 million for his urban projects...
...The Great Disappointment This is the story of Sam Brown and the Peace Corps, one year and nine months later...
...In recruiting volunteers, the Peace Corps has put together a new ad campaign, the first it has had in years, and it is a good one...
...In talking to Peace Corps staff and Brown aides about their inability so far to turn the PeaceCorpsaround, youget a two-fold answer: budget and bureaucracy...
...No longer would the liberal arts graduate-the so-called BA-generalist-be the heart of the Peace Corps...
...At the Peace Corps, this means programming, recruiting, and training volunteers...
...The people around him, the half-dozen aides with whom he consults daily and with whom he devises policy, had also known nothing about the Peace Corps when they signed on with Brown...
...It is almost impossible to overstate how demoralizing all this was to the Peace Corps staff...
...The new direction, he proclaimed with considerable fanfare, would be towards basic human needs, toward reversing the technician trend of the Nixon years, toward attracting more generalists and placing them in rural villages to work alongside the poorest of the poor...
...I t also would have required enough passion to confront the difficult obstacles in his path: the tangled bureaucracy, the union, the forces in Congress...
...Otherwise, for alltheirgood intentions, the generalists would have been of no good to anyone...
...When he leaves ACTION, his reputation and credentials will be intact, another notchon his belt...
...How, after all, does one go about arguing against basic human needs...
...And it was hard to knock the enthusiasm, the energy, and the commitment that went into buildingthe Peace Corps...
...He wants his staff to work in an atmosphere of Workplace Democracy...
...To them, Sam Brown, for all his promise, has turned out to be the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time...
...their a p p r o v a l would mean t h a t his credentials were still intact...
...The key to good programming, when there was such a thing in the Peace Corps, was to find the generalist recruits jobs that were quite specific...
...It was at ACTION that May honed his now-famous techniques for subverting the federal personnel system (for which he was later indicted...
...We all thought he was going to be our savior...
...He could have made a point of bringing into the organization returned volunteers, who might work for the Peace Corps in Washington for a few years, donating their energy and their firsthand knowledge of what’s working overseas and what isn’t, people with no interest in staying on as entrenched careerists...
...But in order to understand the Peace Corps today it helps to know how it got the way it is...
...But Brown’s belief that teaching is imperialistic and his lack of direct knowledge of what the best teaching can do havecombined to blind him completely to its tremendous potential value...
...They were full of the right stuff, by Brown’s standards-some were Colorado political activists or civil rights activists or community organizers-but only one of them had ever come into contact with the Peace Corps before...
...Onthe other hand, the teaching programs that Brown so mistrusts in many cases succeeded wonderfully...
...Guerrilla warfare” is the way staffmanagement relations were described...
...But likeit or not (and it’s hard to believe the not), a symbol is what Brown is and why he was hired...
...The Peace Corps volunteer was going to represent the “best that is in us,” a person who worked side by side with people of other cultures...
...Those division heads, in turn, must get clearance from Brown’s staff...
...One reason is that Brown courts the press eagerly and well...
...It is a neat trick if you can do it, and there haven’t been many politicians on the left who have done it as well as Brown...
...The Peace Corps of the Kennedy/ Johnson years came in for special criticism by Brown-it had stressed teaching skills among Peace Corps volunteers, and to Brown’s way of thinking that meant teaching the welltodo who went to school rather than the poor who really needed the help of a volunteer.When he talked about the cultural imperialism of the old Peace Corps, Brown always made specific mention of the teaching programs...
...Her arguments with Brown over the direction the Peace Corps should take are legend at ACTION...
...It was heady stuff, and many of those who served remember it as an experience that changed their lives (including the editor of The Washington Monthlii, Charles Peters, who ran the Peace Corps’ evaluation division from I96 I - 1968...
...To a large degree, he was successful...
...But even before ACTION came into being there were rumblings that the Peace Corps was in trouble under Nixon...
...So it wasn’t just the bureaucrats at ACTION who were excited when Sam Brown came to Washington...
...But those education systems did not change overnight as countries became independent, and in fact they still exist to a large degree...
...They saw Brown as someone who talked a great “social change” game but who didn’t know the first thing about implementing policy...
...With the Democrats in, there would be renewed commitment and energy, fresh ideas and vision, and a budget, a real budget, intended to build ACTION and the Peace Corps up, not phase them out...
...This is the real failure of Sam Brown’s leadership...
...When Richard Nixon became president the Peace Corps went through a series of changes that culminated in the creation of ACTION in 1971...
...To the American left, the Peace Corps has always beensomewhat suspect, an easy target for those accusations of the cultural imperialism of the West, the proudest creationofthe generation people like Brown were dedicated to unseating from power and influence...
...The subsequent investigation by the Anderson reporterturned up nothing in the way of a “hard news” angle-the cronyism charge, for example, didn’t stand up upon inspection...
...To change the thrust of an operation you have to get at its nuts and bolts, at the functions that make it tick...
...But what of the Peace Corps...
...Not Much To Do With Reality In the course of researching this article, I talked to a number of recently returned volunteers...
...The pitch is to the generalist, the idealist-“the toughest job you’ll ever love...
...In fact, Brown’s performance is guaranteed to satisfy just about everyone-he has been a perfectly respectable government official...
...In almost every case, the returned volunteers had been either teachers or technicians...
...Former Peace Corps deputy director Brent Ashabranner has described the process in one program: “The [generalist volunteers] spent their time on just onething: learningthe rudiments of starting and taking careof small poultry units in India...
...I understand why you folks want towrite about Sam,”says oneof his aides...
...they learned the deep litter, close confinement system of r a i s i n g chickens...
...The merger of the Peace Corps with VISTA and a host of other volunteer agencies into ACTION only made matters worse...
...They learned about the right kind of mud chicken houses by actually building them...
...The bureaucracy is still the landmine the Republicans intended it to be...
...he must be doing something right to get those folks mad at him...
...But much more important is that Brown is the real success story, the big winner, of all the people who made names for themselves in the antiwar movementhe entered politics and won elected office without being accused of selling out...
...Throughout the agency, but particularly in the Peace Corps, there were all sorts of meetings and task forces and studies, but where were the r e s u l t s ? Why wasn’t anything happening...
...The personnel system is here to stay...
...In January a new administration had come to town, and for the people at ACTION-theagency created by Nixon in 1971 to house the government ’s v ol u n t eer programs , including the Peace Corps-that meant the struggle had been worth it...
...Among t h e teachers, there was a feeling that they had done some good, that they had had an impact, and that not cultural imperialism but a real cultural exchange had taken place that enriched the lives of both students and teachers...
...For people in the old Peace Corps, the real meaning was obvious, for what they had found-as much by trial and error as any other way-was that in general, technicians did not make good volunteers...
...Under Sam Brown, they have yet to be built up...
...The Safer Course Sam’Brown is a talented man...
...Recruiters sit in their offices, sorting names with jobs, matching previously acquired skills with those technical programs Brown says have togo, rather than scouring the campuses for smart, idealistic people...
...When the training time was slashed to seven or eight weeks, it meant that Peace Corps volunteers were being sent abroad without the language and technical skills they had to have to be useful...
...He could have taken it out of the bureaucratic structure of ACTION and given it a new life...
...It was toocomplicated...
...But in practice it is far from that...
...But his plan would add only two weeks of training-not nearly enough, especially if he is serious about attracting more generalists, the people most in need of technical training...
...Recruiters work for ACTION, not just the Peace Corps, which means they are recruiting for ten volunteer agencies, not just one...
...For us, there was no real hook,”says the reporter now...
...Most recently, as treasurer of Colorado, Brown had served impressively and intelligently by all accounts, redistributing much of the state’s money, for example, from the large Denver banks to small-town banks...
...President Kennedy created it, and Sargent Shriver breathed life into it in an atmosphere of idealism that one doesn’t see very often in America today...
...The worst volunteers spoke only the language of the elite, whether it was English, French, or Spanish, and never strayed from the school compound, built by the colonialists to separate themselves from the vulgar mob...
...Under Nixon, all three areas were decimated...
...The former antiwar activist, organizer of the “children’s crusade” for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and later the Vietnam moratorium marches, Brown had built a reputation as a leader, smart but practical, a man more interested in results than talk...
...Sam Brown, instead, chose the safer course...
...For Sam Brown it was a challenge different from any he had faced before, requiringsolutions he had never had to consider...
...Michael Harrington, chairman of a Peace Corps subcommittee, calls Brown’s work “pedestrian...
...Maybe we were unfair,”says a Brown aide who left ACTION recently, “but expectations had been built up so high, that when he didn’t produce right away, there was a huge letdown...
...Many of them felt that the countries in which they worked had considered them merely a free adjunct to the labor force...
...The head of recruitment said, sorry, we can’t do anything until theprogramsare approved...
...To change the thrust of an operation you have to get at its nuts and bolts, at the functions that make it tick...
...Training was cut almost in half, from an average of 13 weeks to seven weeks...
...The new countries Brown most wanted to enter were T a n z a n i a , J a m a i c a , a n d C u b a , countries with progressive leaders who had captured the imagination of American radicals...
...In that time, Jack Anderson may have been the only reporter in town to have passed up a chance to write about Brown...
Vol. 10 • September 1978 • No. 6
