How I Invented the Peace Corps (sort of).

• Author: Kamens, Gerlad
• Position: Personal account

How I Invented the Peace Corps (sort of)

By Gerald Kamens

One morning in March 1959, a top secret policy paper appeared on my boss's desk at Dwight Eisenhower's Bureau of the Budget--later reborn as the Office of Management and Budget. Its subject: How to counter the Soviet Union's success in staging massive peace festivals, aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Europe's and Asia's youth.

As a newly minted budget examiner fresh out of grad school, I labored on a never-ending series of weighty foreign policy proposals. These went up, through several layers of review, to the Cabinet members making up the National Security Council--the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, CIA, etc--and ultimately to Ike himself for decision.

Tossing this latest proposal to me, my boss, George, asked if I had any bright ideas on how to beat the Russkies at their game, possibly figuring that at 23, I was close enough in age to those Soviet-seduced youth to have a thought on the matter. I immediately thought back to my Quaker Friends in Philadelphia--who'd sent me to Washington to "advance the cause of peace." They used to talk about the need to understand the Russians better, to seek common ground with them.

My current milieu, under the Eisenhower-Nixon team, had a somewhat different thrust. I realized I was slowly forsaking my original good intentions, for what seemed to be a higher reality.

I mulled it over that night--recalling what I knew of the Quakers' overseas work camps. Next day, I typed a three-page paper proposing a worldwide extension of those camps, with a few revisions. A new Youth Corps, under the U.S. flag.

We'd recruit teams of volunteers, young men and women, train them in the language and customs of the countries to which they'd be assigned for a year or two. Living close to their overseas clients, they'd work on a wide array of educational and developmental projects. This would, I argued, engage the energies of our young people, and win the world's accolades--in a way that our traditional diplomacy and foreign aid never could.

My iconoclastic boss liked the idea. After jazzing up my paper with a stronger anti-Soviet tone, George sent it up the chain of command to the Bureau's Assistant Director for National Security Affairs. The latter tossed it into the hopper of the various Cabinet Under Secretaries who debated such things. Much to my surprise, it survived several levels of review.

The BOB's role in the National Security Council was...