Celebrating Peace Corps

It feels a little flighty, perhaps disconnected, to tootle on about Peace here at the start of a war.

But why should the quixotic timing of one regime’s efforts to take down another regime spoil a party that’s been brewing for more than six decades?

Sixty-five years ago today, March 1, 1961, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, creating a Peace Corps within the Department of State—a logical home given one of JFK’s stated purposes for establishing the agency:

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, 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. … How can they compete with communist emissaries long trained and dedicated and committed to the cause of extending communism in those countries?

The comment came as JFK stumped in November, 1960, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

The rest is history, with the first groups of volunteers being sent out by the end of summer in 1961.

Interested readers can learn more about the fullness of the Peace Corps-State Department relationship in my article for this month’s Foreign Service Journal.

For a deeper dive into how the Peace Corps served as a proving ground for future U.S. ambassadors and other senior American diplomats, consider my nonfiction book PROFILES IN SERVICE. Amazon is offering it now at a discount.

Thank you, and Happy Birthday Peace Corps and congratulations to all who celebrate Peace.

##