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From the front porches of the U.S., the view of the Peace Corps is beautiful. The image is that of a battalion of cheery, crew-cut kids who two years ago hopped off their drugstore stools, and hurried out around the world to wage peace. Through the application of Good Old American Know-How and That Old College Spirit, they have all but won the cold war. It somehow seems too good to be true.
It is. As so often happens, the image is glossier than the reality. The Peace Corps kids are not all paragons of virtue. They are not necessarily even kids: the average age of Peace Corps men is 25, of women 28, and there are plenty who are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s. Most volunteers feel they have had few glimpses of glory. Many have been racked with illness and bedded down in squalor. They have slogged through colorless tasks, from building chicken houses to digging sewers. They have wrestled with tongue-twisting languages. They have gagged on incredible foods containing everything from cat meat to sheep intestines to fish heads. They have cursed the mistakes of their superiors and muttered in fury at the ignorance and inertia among the natives they are trying to help. Six volunteers have died; 248 quit or were fired.
It has been a rough two years. But partly because it has been rough, the reality is more meaningful than that unflawed popular image. By any reasonable standard, the U.S. Peace Corps has been a fine overall success.
An Easy Man to Fire. Inevitably distorted by that same image of halos and high school heroes is Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 47, director of the Peace Corps and brother-in-law of President Kennedy. He was once introduced on television as "the man known as Mr. Clean." He is so closely identified with the public's good-will-and-good-works vision of the Peace Corps that many people think he created the idea, sold it to the President, then dashed out in a blaze of idealism to make it work.
Not so. Shriver, if nothing else, is a realist. He shuddered when he heard himself described as "Mr. Clean." He did not dream up the Peace Corps. Indeed, when the time came in the winter of 1961 for John Kennedy to make good on a 1960 campaign promise to create the corps, he tapped his brother-in-law—and Shriver dodged. "But he told me," says Shriver, "that everyone in Washington seemed to think that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history, and it would be much easier to fire a relative than a friend."
Brother-in-Law Shriver took the job, but was by no means swept up in the idealism of it all. Says he: "There's a great difference between a noble idea, no matter how well conceived, and the execution of that idea in practical, realistic, down-to-earth terms. I had misgivings. I lay awake at night."