When President Kennedy brought the Peace Corps into existence with his executive order on March 1, he made clear that its funding—which came for the time being from his executive branch discretionary funds—was temporary. Only Congress could appropriate money for it on an ongoing basis. This meant that Shriver’s next task was to persuade Congress, and in particular the skeptical Southern conservatives, to pass Peace Corps legislation. Despite the program’s general popularity, this would not be easy. Congress was notoriously hostile to foreign assistance programs in general (in early March, for instance, the very week Kennedy signed the Peace Corps executive order, the House Appropriations Committee refused to authorize a single dollar of the $150 million in foreign policy emergency funds the president had asked for) and was feeling particularly ornery about the Peace Corps. Members of Congress felt that the president had usurped their prerogatives by launching the program via executive order. The White House received letters from aggrieved senators and representatives.
Shriver initially assumed that he would have significant assistance from the White House in selling the Peace Corps on Capitol Hill. After all, the president had reaped considerable political benefit from his support of the program, and it was closely identified with the New Frontier. Moreover, a majority of Americans seemed to be in favor of the Peace Corps. Time magazine had recently reported that “the Peace Corps had captured the public imagination as had no other single act of the Kennedy Administration.” It seemed Kennedy would have little to lose by deploying White House aides to help in crafting political strategy.
But Kennedy’s aides had other ideas. When Ralph Dungan had told Bill Josephson that the Peace Corps was on its own now, he had meant it: If Shriver and company weren’t going to play along with AID, then they could damn well craft their own legislative strategy. According to Josephson, Dungan and Larry O’Brien derided the Peace Corps people as “empire builders.” As Wofford recalled, “When we returned home [from the trip to Africa and Asia] at the end of May, we found there was a price to pay for the Peace Corps’ newfound freedom. It took Shriver a few weeks to realize what was happening: O’Brien and the White House congressional staff were doing nothing whatsoever to promote the Peace Corps Act.”
When the White House staff’s recalcitrance became apparent to Shriver, he initially assumed that the president himself was unaware of it. Flying to Cape Cod one weekend, he mentioned this to Eunice. That weekend in Hyannis Port, she mentioned the situation to her brother. “If Sarge hadn’t demanded that it be separate,” Jack replied (as Eunice later reported it to her husband), “I would have only had to ask for a congressman’s support once and we could have got AID and the Peace Corps together. But now I left it out there by itself at their request—they wanted it that way, they didn’t want me to have it in AID where I wanted it—so let them go ahead and put the son of a bitch through.” Getting the AID bill through was going to be “goddamn difficult,” Jack told his sister, and he didn’t want to then have to turn around and worry about getting the Peace Corps through, too.
Eunice went back to Sarge and told him: “Jack feels that you and Lyndon demanded that the Peace Corps be separate and that therefore you ought to get your damn bill through Congress by yourselves.” “The business of trading favors,” Wofford wrote in Of Kennedys and Kings, “was bad enough among politicians, but it seemed even worse to him among brothers-in-law. Because of that family relationship, [Shriver] says, he ‘never spoke one more word to President Kennedy asking him or anybody in the White House ever to do anything for the Peace Corps—ever again.’ ”
Shriver later recalled his reaction to Jack’s response.
In wanting to have the Peace Corps have a separate identity … I then found myself saddled, you might say, with all of the responsibility, because I had made that request. So I said, “Okay, if it’s my baby, I will never ask anyone for help again.” And I never did.… I just took the bull by the horns and said, “Okay, it’s the Peace Corps against everybody else.” If it had to be done entirely by ourselves, I was damned well sure it was going to be done successfully.
From the moment Eunice conveyed the president’s go-it-alone dictum for the Peace Corps, Shriver said, “I really went to work.” Shriver approached Hubert Humphrey and Henry Reuss, who, as sponsors of previous legislation relating to the Peace Corps, were natural choices to be floor managers for the bill in the Senate and the House. Humphrey’s assistance was crucial. As Senate majority whip, Humphrey had considerable influence over his fellow Democrats; and with a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he was well positioned to help shepherd the bill from committee to the Senate floor. In anticipation of having to help a Peace Corps bill through Congress, Shriver had on March 5 paid a call on the most powerful man in the House of Representatives, Lyndon Johnson’s old congressional colleague Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, seeking his advice and support.
In late March he had placed Bill Moyers—who despite his youth had had plenty of legislative experience from working as LBJ’s deputy when Johnson was Senate majority leader—in charge of establishing a congressional liaison office for the program, modeled on the White House operation run by Larry O’Brien. On March 22, the office had begun planning its congressional strategy. Josephson took the lead in drafting the bill, with the assistance of Moyers, Wiggins, Morris Abram, and Roger Kuhn, a lawyer who had drafted legislation for the ICA. Kuhn and Abram argued that ultimate authority for the Peace Corps should reside in the program’s director, in order to signal its independence. Josephson disagreed, arguing that authority should in the end reside with the president, so that if the Peace Corps were to come under bureaucratic assault at some point in the future, it would have the president’s protection. The sacrifice of some autonomy, he argued, would be well worth the insurance this would provide. Josephson also suggested that the Peace Corps ask for only a year’s appropriation at a time. If the program had to approach Congress every year, Josephson reasoned, it would assuage congressional anxiety about the Peace Corps’ becoming “a renegade, uncontrollable organization.”
The drafting of the bill was completed on May 11, and it was submitted for review to the Bureau of the Budget, the State Department, and the White House. At this point, Shriver and Moyers cranked into action, storming Capitol Hill. Hubert Humphrey had told Shriver, “Forget about talking to women’s clubs in Detroit.” Shriver had been making speeches to various groups across the country in the hopes of building and sustaining popular support for his program. “They don’t get your bill passed. We in the Congress do. Don’t sit down to another meal between now and the time your Peace Corps bill comes up for a vote unless there is a senator or a congressman sitting by your elbow.… Make each senator feel like you care about his views. Massage our egos.” Moyers also sought advice from LBJ, who like Humphrey advised that Shriver and Moyers call on as many individual congressional members as possible. “You’ve got a great asset in Shriver,” Johnson told Moyers. “No member of Congress will turn you down because it is the president’s brother-in-law and they will know that that will give them cachet as well as access” to the White House.
Peace Corps legend has it that between them Moyers and Shriver personally called on every single member of Congress. As one of Humphrey’s aides later commented, “Shriver and Moyers carried on the greatest romance act with the Congress since Romeo and Juliet, and they literally saw over 400 House members and senators.”
Shriver and Moyers launched each day with a breakfast on Capitol Hill with several congressmen. Following breakfast they would wander the congressional office buildings, going from appointment to appointment, preaching the gospel of the Peace Corps. Moyers would brief Shriver before each meeting, telling him the congressman’s background and interests and recommending how Shriver should couch his description of the program. Sometimes, once all their scheduled appointments for the day were through, Shriver and Moyers would patrol the congressional hallways from door to door, looking for offices with lights on, trying to find more people to talk to.
“You know why I really voted for the Peace Corps?” one House member later asked. “One night I was leaving about seven-thirty and there was Shriver walking up and down the halls, looking into the doors. He came in and talked to me. I still didn’t like the program but I was sold on Shriver—I voted for him.” This scenario, or variations on it, recurred over and over. One night, Shriver and Moyers were walking the halls and came upon the office of Barry Goldwater, the notoriously conservative senator from Arizona. As Shriver recalled, he turned to Moyers and said, “I think I’ll just go in and ask him whether or not he would vote for the Peace Corps.” Moyers told him not to bother, that they had no chance of winning over Goldwater. Shriver recalls, “I said, ‘Well, I’m sure that we’re not going to get him if we never even ask him.’ So we rapped on the door and went in, and fortuitously he was there and willing to talk to us. We talked for an hour, after which he said, ‘That sounds like a great idea. I’ll vote for it.’ ”
All through the spring and summer of 1961, Shriver and Moyers kept up their barrage on Congress—“saturation bombing,” they called it. Shriver was eager not to appear partisan, and he pursued Republicans and Democrats with equal vigor. But he concentrated on the program’s most ardent and public doubters, like Goldwater, Southern conservatives, and Congresswoman Frances Bolton of Ohio, who said she thought the Peace Corps to be a “terrifying scheme” and that it gave her “the shivers to think of ill-prepared American youths getting into all kinds of trouble in remote foreign lands.” One by one, he brought the doubters into the Peace Corps camp. Marguerite Stitt Church, a Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, later said she could think of no one who had “made such an effort to bring his story personally to members of Congress.”
On June 1, Hubert Humphrey introduced the Peace Corps bill in the Senate, asking for $40 million in appropriations for the first year. Later that month, Shriver appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He dazzled the committee, not only with his charisma, but with his detailed knowledge of Peace Corps spending plans. He knew how much everything would cost—from jeeps to administration overhead—and repeatedly assured the committee that the program would be cheap and efficient.
With the vote looming sometime in the late summer or early fall, Moyers and Humphrey calculated that the Peace Corps bill would likely pass. It helped the bill’s cause that the Peace Corps selection committee had seen fit to recruit and announce volunteers from the districts of the doubting congressmen, adding to the pressure for a yea vote. By midsummer, it seemed conceivable that the Peace Corps might send volunteers into the field before the bill was voted. There was a danger in the Peace Corps’ appearing to outrun its mandate—thereby further antagonizing Congress—but Shriver thought the chances for legislation would improve if volunteers were already in action.
The process of volunteer selection and training had been under way throughout the summer. Soon, however, it became apparent that recruiting and selecting volunteers would be harder than had been expected. During the task force planning phase, Shriver had anticipated there would be 15,000 serious applicants within the first few months of the program. But by the time Shriver embarked on his tour of Southeast Asia and West Africa in late April, the flow of applications had slowed to a few hundred per week.
Shriver took pleasure in telling Congress that it would be hard to become a Peace Corps volunteer and that selection standards would be rigorous. Every applicant had to provide six references and then submit to a battery of tests—one of which was a six-hour general exam—established by psychologist Nicholas Hobbs, the Peace Corps’ first chief of selection, who had helped screen Air Force personnel during the Second World War. This winnowing process meant that only one out of every five applicants made it through to training, with additional cuts being made during the training period. Although this process did ensure a higher caliber of volunteer (and it did assuage Congress), it also made Shriver’s projections about the number of volunteers who would be in the field before 1962 that much harder to reach. In May, Warren Wiggins sent Shriver a telegram in Africa warning that if the number of applicants didn’t rise soon, the program would be in trouble. Newspaper reporters were starting to ask, “Where are all those aspiring volunteers Shriver has been braying about?”
At Wiggins’s urging, Shriver refocused his attention on recruitment and assigned Bill Moyers to spearhead those efforts. Shriver assured reporters that the recruitment process was going well and that if the quantity was somewhat lower than anticipated, well, the quality was even higher than he could have hoped. Privately, however, he was “in a sweat,” worried that he would not be able to deliver on the promises that he had made to foreign heads of state and that this would enrage Congress.
Consequently, he threw himself into recruiting, personally approaching CEOs (whom he asked to grant leaves of absences to volunteers) and college presidents (whom he asked to promote the program among their student bodies). Meanwhile, he authorized a substantial public relations and advertising effort: Peace Corps advertisements appeared in subways and on television; a Peace Corps information booth was set up in the middle of Times Square. Shriver and his public affairs staff fed Peace Corps stories to newspaper reporters and magazine journalists, to great effect: the Peace Corps had astonishingly good press coverage from the moment of its launch.
Shriver had a knack for publicity and formulated the Peace Corps’ image in such a way that would attract attention. Sometimes his apparent predilection for gloss over substance surprised even his public relations staff. Once, a staff member brought him a detailed, generally positive piece that had just appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Shriver read it, said, “That’s nice,” and then casually put it aside. A few minutes later, when he was handed a Chicago gossip column that described him changing from his business suit into a tuxedo as he sped in a taxicab from the airport to the White House for a dinner, he lit up with pleasure. “This is how to score,” he scrawled across the clipping. “Let’s have more of this kind of thing.”
“The Peace Corps,” CBS commentator Eric Sevareid said archly, “is pure intentions supported by pure publicity.” But although there is no doubt that Shriver had a showman’s desire to entertain, these antics were driven by a serious purpose: Shriver calculated that by giving the program an aura of dash and color to go along with its natural reputation for adventurous hardship in the field, he could keep the American people interested in the Peace Corps.
The publicity assault paid off. By June the Peace Corps had received enough applications to yield a good number of qualified volunteers, and Shriver was once again able to concentrate on his member-by-member sales job on Capitol Hill and on his wooing of foreign leaders.
In June he flew to West Africa to meet with Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea. Guinea had become an independent state only in 1958, and Toure was a strong leader, a fierce nationalist who was in the process of turning the country into the first overtly Marxist state in Africa. Both Red China and the Soviet Union were already providing manpower and technical assistance. The Kennedy administration was eager to keep Guinea from turning to the Soviet Union for further succor or financial support. Providing Peace Corps assistance might be one way of doing this. Although Toure would in fact soon make Guinea into a quasi-client state of the Soviet Union, Shriver did succeed in getting the Peace Corps into Guinea, and the program’s presence in a Communist-inflected country gave it considerable international credibility.
Shriver returned from Guinea to find the Peace Corps legislation still hanging in the balance. Some members of Congress, still fuming that the executive order appeared to have bypassed their right to advise and consent, were threatening to exact their revenge by delaying a vote on the bill indefinitely. Unwilling to approach Kennedy or his staff for assistance—and unlikely to receive it at this point, even if he had—Shriver turned once again to the man he was coming to recognize as a political genius, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, Shriver knew, was as shrewd a congressional tactician as ever graced the Capitol. So he wrote to the vice president in July, explaining that further delay in passage of Peace Corps legislation would “seriously damage” the program and “embarrass the president and the administration politically.” Johnson responded right away, and he met personally with key senators to press the case for the bill.
Still, the bill continued to languish. As August approached it became apparent that the biggest obstacle to its passage in the Senate was not, for the moment, Republicans hostile to foreign assistance but rather the indifference of Arkansas senator William Fulbright, who chaired the all-important Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was a Democrat and for the most part friendly to the administration, but he was highly skeptical about the Peace Corps’ potential effectiveness. He worried that it would have a hard time attracting high-quality volunteers and that it would alienate the developing world by being only a one-way—not a reciprocal—program; inflicting ill-trained youth on developing countries as a way of “helping” them could only appear patronizing. More selfishly, Fulbright also worried that the Peace Corps might prove an unwelcome competitor for his own Fulbright Fellowship program, which provided funding for educational exchange. Although it seemed unlikely that Fulbright would decline to release the bill from his committee and thereby prevent a full Senate vote, Shriver feared that the Arkansas senator would recommend shrinking the program before voting on it.
Sure enough, on August 3 the New York Times quoted Fulbright as recommending decreased funding for the Peace Corps. In the draft of the bill circulating on the Hill, Shriver had requested $40 million for fiscal year 1962; Fulbright was intimating that he wanted the figure cut to only $10 million. Such funding cuts, the Times reported, would “cripple the Peace Corps, embarrass the President abroad, and encourage the more conservative House [of Representatives] to make even deeper cuts.”
Infuriated, Shriver lobbied everyone he could think of, requesting that they apply whatever pressure they could on Fulbright and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Peace Corps appropriation serious danger being cut in half,” Shriver cabled to Ambassador Galbraith in New Delhi, in a typical plea. “Respectfully suggest telephone call from you to chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressing your evaluation and support for our program. Your opinion highly regarded by the chairman who is today our principal stumbling block.… Our request $40,000,000. Urgent it not slip below $35,000,000.”
Shriver was concerned enough that he even violated his pledge never to ask anything of the president or his staff. On August 3, he asked Larry O’Brien, the White House congressional liaison, to support the Peace Corps cause with Democratic members of the Foreign Relations Committee. It would be “good to point out to them the political importance of that committee’s reporting out $40,000,000. Unless the Senate committee reports out that much, we will be cut substantially in the House.… I hesitate to bother you when you are so busy on other matters, but I believe very firmly that the Peace Corps is essential to the political image of President Kennedy.”
Shriver had gleaned from Moyers numerous lessons about how Congress worked, one of which was that momentum was crucial. His greatest fear, as he intimated in his memo to O’Brien, was that if the liberal-leaning Senate began trimming funding for the Peace Corps, the more conservative House members would take this as a cue to slash even more deeply. Thus he had, on August 2, sent a frustrated memo to the president, asking that he make more active use of his bully pulpit in promoting the program. “Unless we can build a climate of opinion in which the Peace Corps is considered ‘must’ legislation,” Shriver wrote, “we are in trouble—regardless of the general goodwill that surrounds this proposal.” The White House, Shriver continued, must provide sufficient leadership and pressure so that there will be no doubt in the minds of Congress that the president feels the bill must be passed this session. Unless the White House supplies this leadership, the lateness of the session alone”—it would be ending in the fall—“may doom the chances for Peace Corps legislation and appropriations this session.” After the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted, the whole Senate would have to vote; then the House would have to vote on its bill; then the two bills would have to go to a House-Senate conference to be reconciled. The congressional session might end, Shriver worried, before a bill was sent to Kennedy for his signature. “Bill Moyers and I have been living on the Hill,” Shriver told Kennedy. But “at this point the Peace Corps itself has done all it can on the Hill.” It was time for the White House to do its part.
On August 4, Shriver testified in the House, and he was grilled by hostile Republicans. “Throughout the two hours of verbal bombs in the chilly atmosphere,” the Washington Post reported, “Shriver rarely showed any sign of discomfort. He did bite his lip, and clenched his fist a time or two. But he remained composed and answered every question politely and in detail.” When he left the House floor, an aide took him aside to give him some exciting news: While he was testifying in the House, Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee had unanimously (14–0) approved legislation to authorize the Peace Corps—and the entire $40 million to finance it. The full Senate and House still had to vote, but a major obstacle had been surmounted.
Now Kennedy brought his presidential weight to bear on the issue. “The Peace Corps,” he said in a press conference on August 10, “has had a most promising beginning, and we have an opportunity if the amount requested by the Peace Corps is approved by Congress, of having 2,700 volunteers serving the cause of peace in fiscal year 1962.”
The debate over the bill began on the full Senate floor on August 24. Hubert Humphrey and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield took the lead in arguing against an amendment proposed by Iowa Republican Bourke Hickenlooper that would have “cut $15 million out of the unnecessary fat” in the Peace Corps appropriations request. Fulbright said he still had “misgivings” and voted, along with seven other Democrats, in favor of the funding reduction, but the Hickenlooper amendment was defeated. On August 25 the Peace Corps Act passed the Senate.
Shriver’s attention now turned to the House. He knew the House was generally more likely than the Senate to slash his funding, but he was particularly concerned about the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, headed by the fearsome Louisiana Democrat Otto Passman, who was as conservative as anyone in Congress on fiscal matters. He loathed public spending; he abhorred foreign aid. He would not, needless to say, be inclined to grant Shriver’s funding request.
Shriver and Moyers and their aides had paid multiple visits to Passman, where they had been treated to his florid denunciations of the Peace Corps. Oddly enough, in all the time he spent cultivating the colorful, flinty Southerner, Shriver had grown to like and respect him. That feeling was reciprocated. In his memo to Kennedy of August 2, Shriver had noted that he and Moyers “may even have laid the foundation for at least the beginnings of a good working relationship with Congressman Passman.”
This didn’t mean that Passman would make life any easier politically for Shriver. “You know, Ah lahk you Saahge,” Passman would drawl, “but the Peace Corps is a terrible idea and I’m not going to vote for its full appropriation.” In conversations in his House office, Passman was ever the courtly gentleman, but he warned that he would savage Shriver and his team during congressional testimony. “Nothin pehsonal, Saahge,” Passman would say before grilling him relentlessly on the House floor.
The day before the House vote, opponents of the bill were trying to delay action on the bill until 1962, or to slash its funding in half. Shriver, wanting to leave as little as possible to chance, continued to lobby individual congressmen, spending all his free time on Capitol Hill. This effort paid off in an unexpected way. As Shriver recalled, “When the Peace Corps legislation was on the floor of the House, I still did not have an office of my own [in the Capitol], and so I was sitting in a cubbyhole off a corridor in the House Office Building making frantic phone calls to my political strategists. Old Judge Howard Smith, a Virginia representative and the apotheosis of conservatism, walked by and shouted, ‘Hey, Shriver! What are you doing there?’ I explained my predicament. And this courtly curmudgeon—who might never in his life agree with anything I stood for—took me into his office, sat me in his chair, and instructed his secretary to give me the run of the place and the use of his phone.”
This was a significant gesture. Congressman Smith was, as Shriver noted, a hard-core conservative and a likely opponent of the Peace Corps bill. Smith was also chairman of the House Rules Committee, in which position he had the power to prevent bills he didn’t like from even getting to the House floor. By September, Shriver had personally called on Smith four or five times; as a consequence, the two men had struck up a cheerfully adversarial friendship.
Smith seemed to develop a strong respect for Shriver. Still, Smith wasn’t about to use personal affection as a justification for voting in favor of a bill that his conservative constituency loathed. He couldn’t vote for the Peace Corps legislation. So he absented himself from the Capitol on the day the vote was to take place, claiming pressing business elsewhere. This meant that although he wouldn’t be casting a vote in favor of the Peace Corps, he could at least avoid having to cast a vote against it.
Better yet, Smith allowed Shriver the continued use of his office while the congressman was away from the Capitol. This was not just a matter of convenience. As Rules Committee chairman, Smith had an office directly off the House floor. The congressman was sending a powerful message to his colleagues: I may not be here to vote on this bill, Smith seemed to be saying to his congressional peers, but you can all see that I’ve given its principal advocate the use of my office and you can infer my thoughts on this matter from that. “I had the chairman’s goddamned office,” Shriver recalled. “And anybody who had any doubt in his mind about the bill was on my side right away. It was not that they were voting for the Peace Corps; these guys were voting because they wanted to maintain a nice relationship with the Rules chairman.”
With Smith’s tacit support, the bill sailed through: On September 14, the House passed the Peace Corps bill by a margin of 288 to 97. After a House-Senate conference reconciling their two bills, President Kennedy signed the Peace Corps Act on September 22, establishing the Peace Corps on a permanent basis.
Of all the bills Kennedy sent to Congress, only the uncontroversial disarmament agency bill had passed by a larger margin in the House than the Peace Corps bill. Much of this was attributable to the cultural climate: The pent-up idealism of the 1950s was ready for expression, and the Peace Corps was its outlet. Public support for the idea had been strong ever since Kennedy had first raised it on the campaign trail. Moreover, despite the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was still enjoying his honeymoon period with Congress. With the president and the public so strongly behind the Peace Corps, Congress felt considerable pressure to fall in line behind it as well.
Even so, Shriver’s personal role in getting the legislation passed was remarkable. The speed with which he conceived and threw together a new organization, the success he had in coaxing invitations from wary developing nations, the remarkable two-man assault he and Moyers staged on Capitol Hill—all this helped give even some diffident members of Congress great confidence in the Peace Corps director. (“If we had ten Sargent Shrivers we could conquer the world,” said Wyoming senator Gale McGee.) Many of them, in fact, later said that even though they disliked the Peace Corps, they had voted for the bill because they thought so highly of Shriver. President Kennedy paid tribute to this notion when, as he signed the bill on September 22, he turned to his right, grinned, and said, “Also, I want to express my esteem for the most effective lobbyist on the Washington scene, Mr. Sargent Shriver.”
As the New York Times reported a few months later, the passage of the Peace Corps legislation “erased the impression long held in some Washington circles that Shriver is merely another Kennedy-in-law, a glamorous Yale dilettante who espouses liberal causes … and married the boss’s daughter Eunice. Now, he suddenly begins to look like one of those rare animals in Washington: the fellow who can get things done.”