Cold War Peace Corps

Parker Borg’s fascinating trajectory from Peace Corps Volunteer in 1961 to U.S. Ambassador in 1981 ran through service in the Civil Operations for Rural Development Support program (CORDS) in Vietnam.

Amid some of the war’s heaviest fighting in 1968, Borg worked with a Vietnamese military counterpart on community development projects to bring infrastructure and education into rural areas.

In Mali, Borg would witness how both forms of assistance, Peace Corps’ grassroots approach and USAID’s big budget operations, could work together to keep U.S. interests on track.

When Ronald Reagan tapped Parker Borg to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Mali in July 1981, the nomination fulfilled the highest ideal JFK had set for the agency. Cold War rhetoric influenced the 1960 campaign, and Kennedy ran in part on establishing a “peace corps” to train a different kind of soldier to fight it. The fronts were everywhere, from southeast Asia to West Africa.

JFK outlined his vision while stumping at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in November 1960:

The key arm of our Foreign Service abroad are the ambassadors and members of our missions. Too many have been chosen – who are ill equipped and ill briefed.… Men who lack compassion for the needy here in the United States were sent abroad to represent us in countries marked by disease and poverty… How can they compete with Communist emissaries long trained and dedicated and committed to the cause of extending Communism in those countries? *

In her call informing Borg of Reagan’s ambassadorial nomination, Peace Corps Director Loret Ruppe told the nominee he was the first RPCV to achieve that honor. The agency was celebrating its 20^th anniversary; Borg had completed sixteen years with the Foreign Service.

He recalled his time in the Philippines, how the Peace Corps had encouraged him and other volunteers to build piggeries or convince harried teachers to organize community projects. These efforts in addition to teaching.

Skeptical about such development work, Borg focused on his students. The country had its trained cadres for development work, he reasoned; latrine-building Americans would only reinforce a mindset that foreigners alone could accomplish things that the villagers themselves could not.

Then came his second diplomatic assignment, development work on a grand scale: road, bridge, and school construction across scores of Vietnamese hamlets. To Borg, CORDS proved that rural development could work, with outside resources harnessing village initiative to bring real change. But the funds necessary were staggering.

Now, in Mali, he would have an opportunity to bridge these contrasting approaches—grand objectives on large budgets with personal engagement at the grass roots level. One collaboration in particular would highlight the effectiveness.

Villagers in a desert community had tripled their wheat cultivation over traditional irrigation methods thanks to USAID-supplied motorized pumps. In later years, however, the project floundered because the villagers couldn’t maintain the pumps.

Officials at headquarters in Washington thought it was time to end the program.

Rather than quit altogether, USAID funded eighteen volunteers from neighboring countries to travel during the planting season. They went from village to village to get the pumps running. The interim solution gave motorized irrigation a chance to take off.

More importantly, to Borg’s mind, they’d avoided dropping the project when it hit a setback, which risked making the villagers resistant the next time outsiders came in with development ideas.

Read more about Borg’s experience in Mali, the Peace Corps’ first volunteer cohort to the Philippines, CORDS, and how Borg leveraged one RPCV’s relationship with Master Sargent Sammy Doe to help the State Department engage with the violent Liberian coup-maker later this year.

Profiles in Service – Peace Corps Roots and Distinguished Careers in American Diplomacy is scheduled for publication later this year.

Borg moved from development skeptic to a supporter of strategic implementation. Did you have an experience that swayed you in one direction or another for or against development work? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Watch Kennedy’s remarks at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, November 1961.

Read his full remarks.

*Partial Kennedy Remarks

We are going to have to have the best Americans we can get to speak for our country abroad…Out of Moscow and Peiping and Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany are hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, studying in those institutes, prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism. A friend of mine visiting the Soviet Union last summer met a young Russian couple studying Swahili and African customs at the Moscow Institute of Languages. They were not language teachers. He was a sanitation engineer and she was a nurse, and they were being prepared to live their lives in Africa as missionaries for world communism.

This can only be countered by skill and dedication of Americans who are willing to spend their lives serving the cause of freedom. [Applause.] The key arm of our Foreign Service abroad are the Ambassadors and members of our missions. Too many have been chosen – too many ambassadors have been chosen who are ill equipped and ill briefed. Campaign contributions have been regarded as a substitute for experience. [Applause.] Men who lack compassion for the needy here in the United States were sent abroad to represent us in countries which were marked by disease and poverty and illiteracy and ignorance, and they did not identify us with those causes and the fight against them. They did not demonstrate compassion there….How can they compete with Communist emissaries long trained and dedicated and committed to the cause of extending communism in those countries?

I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for 3 years as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service [applause], well qualified through rigorous standards, well trained in the languages, skills, and customs they will need to know, and directed and paid by the ICA point 4 agencies.