(6 of 10)
One in Ten. Shriver and his high-spirited young headquarters staff (Shriver, then 45, was the oldest Peace Corps official when it began) sent out questionnaires to 20,000 people who had fired in eager inquiries about the corps after Kennedy first mentioned it. By the end of 1961, a trickle of 700 volunteers were in 13 countries—and thousands more were on the way. Ever since, there has been a steady stream of young and old Americans (up to 3,000 a month) volunteering for service. The corps accepts only about 10% of the applicants, then washes out another 22% during training classes at one of 56 U.S. colleges geared to give language, customs or technical instruction to volunteers. In pep talks to potential volunteers, Shriver tries to discourage delusions of glamour: "This won't be a moonlight cruise on the Amazon. The military life may not only be more glamorous, but it could be safer."
Shriver's corps has grown like no other peacetime agency before it. Now he is arguing for a Peace Corps budget of $108 million. Because his requests are buried in the foreign aid budget, he will likely get a bit less than he wants. But his appropriations almost certainly will treble that original $30 million grant of 1961.
Indeed, the very fact of its bigness is becoming a problem with the Peace Corps. Much of the corps' success depends on its activities being unhampered by tangles of bureaucratic red tape. As of now, there are 802 salaried, professional staffers—620 of them in Washington, the rest sprinkled about the corps' foreign headquarters. This breaks down, roughly, to one bureaucrat to every six amateurs overseas. And the individualistic volunteers—who lean toward autonomy and away from administration—are deathly afraid the corps is becoming too big, overorganized, and getting bogged down beneath the burden of red tape.
The Peace Corps still has its outside critics, among them Pundit Eric Sevareid, who has pontificated: "While the corps has something to do with spot benefits in a few isolated places, whether in sanitizing drinking water or building culverts, its work has, and can have, very little to do with the fundamental investments, reorganization and reforms upon which the true and long-term economic development of backward countries depends." To such criticism, Sarge Shriver snorts: "Hell, I've said many times we could send 500 volunteers into Borneo and do a good job and the gross national product might still go down." In his report to Congress this year, Shriver flatly said: "Some of our projects have been distinguished more by good intentions than by good works."
"Nicer Than the Kennedys." Such candor comes naturally to Shriver. He springs from proud colonial American ancestry and a no-nonsense family. His mother, Mrs. R. S. Shriver, now of New York, makes it clear where her family stands in U.S. life—and from whom her son inherited his frankness. Says she: "We're nicer than the Kennedys. We've been here since the 1600s. We're rooted in the land in Maryland."