Peace Corps documentary narrated by Annette Bening

By Donald H. Harrison

 

SAN DIEGO — Actress Annette Bening, who got her start in drama as a student at Patrick Henry High School in San Diego before going on to Broadway and to the movies, is the narrator of a new documentary A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps, which covers six decades of America helping developing nations, from the inception of the idea in 1958 to the present. It will be shown in theaters later this month.

In the documentary, we learn that while still a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, President John F. Kennedy was so impressed with The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that he purchased a copy for every member of the Senate, urging them to read why America was losing the war for influence in the Third World.  The novel pictured American diplomats living in their own colonies, far from the people, while Soviet diplomats placed themselves among the indigenous population to win friends.  A few days before he was elected as President, Kennedy proposed a peace corps be established to serve as an alternative or a supplement to peace time selective service.  The idea was so popular that 25,000 letters from would-be volunteers inundated the President-elect.

Kennedy quickly designated his brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver to conceptualize and build up the Peace Corps from a two-room office in the Mayflower Hotel of Washington D.C.  Harris Wofford, who later in his career would become a Democratic U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, became Shriver’s chief of staff.   Initially, eight countries were chosen for pilot projects, but by 1964, the Peace Corps had become so popular that 10,000 volunteers were serving in 50 countries.  Of these 50 percent were teachers, 30 percent were assigned to community development, and 20 percent to health care.

From that point, the documentary takes us through the ups and downs of the Peace Corps.  It was embarrassed when a volunteer in Nigeria wrote a postcard home decrying the primitive state of that country.  Years later, it was devastated when volunteer Kate Puzey was murdered in Benin, by a Peace Corps teacher who had a record of sexually harassing his students.  Her murder occurred shortly after she blew the whistle on him

After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson decided to make Shriver in charge of the domestic War on Poverty.  Though he continued as director of the Peace Corps, Shriver’s divided attention hurt the Peace Corps.

Stanley Meisler,a former international correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was frequently interviewed during the documentary, thanks to his authorship of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps.  Fearing a communist takeover of the Dominican Republic, Johnson sent  the U.S. Marines to that country, even while Peace Corps volunteers continued to live in villages.  Amazingly, forces opposing the United States put out word to their fighters not to bother the Peace Corps volunteers, who were seen as neutral parties.  The volunteers were credited with arranging food shipments to starving villages.

However, as the United States subsequently became embroiled in Vietnam, with President Richard Nixon later expanding the war against communism to Cambodia, the neutrality of the Peace Corps became a source of suspicion, with even the volunteers questioning whether their humanitarian efforts were serving imperialism. Nixon decided to combine the Peace Corps and Vista, a domestic peace corps, in a new agency called Action, further diminishing the Peace Corps’ prestige.

The agency got a public relations boost, however, following the election of Jimmy Carter as president, whose own mother Lillian Carter had previously served as a volunteer in India.

One of the interviewees on the documentary was Anita Siegel, who had served as a community health director in Honduras.  A brunette, she related that up till her arrival in the village, the people there thought all Americans were blonde haired and blue eyed.

The nearly two-hour long documentary paid particular attention to Loret Miller Ruppe, who was appointed as Peace Corps director by President Ronald Reagan and successfully advocated for the Peace Corps to once again be an independent agency.  In a clip showing Reagan’s characteristic humor, the documentary  noted that retirees and older adults were flocking to the Peace Corps to offer their expertise in a variety of areas.  Mused Reagan on camera: “Maybe I should get my own resume ready.”

Even with the United States fighting a proxy war in neighboring Nicaragua, the Peace Corps flourished in Honduras and around the world under Ruppe’s administration.

In 1989,  at the beginning of George H.W. Bush’s administration, the Berlin Wall came down, and not long after that much of Eastern Europe declared itself independent of control by the Soviet Union.  There was a great demand for English teachers. Hungary for example requested 10,000 English teachers at a time when all the U.S. could offer was 60 teachers.  Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, even Russia, and China also eventually requested and received Peace Corps volunteers.

When Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, became a volunteer in South Africa, it was a milestone: it was the first time in the agency’s history that a great-grandson of a Peace Corps volunteer also became a volunteer.

Under Bill Clinton, Mark Schneider became the Peace Corps director.  It was a time that HIV and AIDs were exploding in Africa, with Peace Corps volunteers offering community health expertise to affected countries.  There were hopes that the Peace Corps might expand to more Muslim countries, but then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the United States, creating an atmosphere of tension between the United States and the Islamic world.  President George W. Bush sought to increase the number of  Peace Corps volunteers around the globe, but he was unsuccessful.  The number settled to around 8,000.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com