"It's just like a wedding, isn't it?" giggled a pretty girl. And so it was: a long line of young men and women stood among the rosebushes in the White House garden, eventually meandered through the French doors leading to President Kennedy's office. The girls were bright in their flowered summer dresses, the men were turned out in their Sunday best, and everyone was smiling and chatting amiably —sometimes in Swahili and Twi. Inside, the President and his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, looked for all the world like fathers of the bride as they greeted each of the young guests. The occasion was a farewell party for 80 young volunteers (average age: 25) bound for teaching and road-building jobs in Ghana and Tanganyika. They had just completed two months of intensive training (TIME, Aug. 11), and they were the first members of the Peace Corps to go out into the world.
Underlying the gaiety was a note of anxiety. Kennedy and Shriver were painfully aware of the criticism, both at home and abroad, that already surrounded the youthful missionaries of democracy. Communist propagandists had been hard at work for months, denigrating the Peace Corps. Some home-grown critics were just as harsh. "The thing is so disproportionate as to be nonsensical," editorialized the Wall Street Journal. "What person, except perhaps the very young themselves, can really believe that an Africa aflame with violence will have its fires quenched because some Harvard boy or Vassar girl lives in a mud hut and speaks Swahili?"
In such a climate, the first Peace Corpsmen are very much on trial. "You will make or break the Peace Corps," Sarge Shriver told the pioneers in a final briefing. "The payoff will come out there where you're working. You'll be watched like no Americans abroad have ever been watched before in history. In some places Peace Corpsmen will be the first Americans who have arrived without guns on their shoulders. The President is counting on you. It's up to you to prove that the concepts and ideals of the American Revolution are still alive." Then, in a peroration more notable for its locker-room emotion than for its accurate understand ing of world opinion, he concluded: "Foreigners think we're fat, dumb and happy over here. They don't think we've got the stuff to make personal sacrifices for our way of life. You must show them. And if you don't, if any one of you does not measure up, you'll be yanked out of the ball game."
The next day the vanguard headed out to their new assignments. Fifty (including 21 young women) went directly to Ghana, to teach in secondary schools. The other 30 (all men) flew to Puerto Rico for 26 days of field training before proceeding to Tanganyika, where they will build roads for the next two years. Available soon to each corpsman is a special guidebook, "Working Effectively Overseas." Crammed with information on the problems and pitfalls—trivial as well as serious—of working in primitive countries, the booklet was drawn from the painful experience of other Americans in the field. Items: