N 1966, I CAME DOWN TO WASHINGTON from New York. It was a time in our country when the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War divided the nation. I had been tapped to work as a staff member in the Public Affairs and Recruiting office for the Peace Corps.
     On my very first work day in Peace Corps/Washington, I was told to join Warren Wiggins, the Deputy Director of the Agency, in his government car for a one-hour ride to a conference for new campus recruiters at Tidewater Inn in Easton, Maryland.
     Wiggins, preoccupied with his opening speech to the conclave, said very little to me except to read out a phrase or two of buzz-word laden prose, mostly unintelligible to me as the new guy, and ask for my comments. At the Tidewater Inn, Mr. Wiggins rose to the podium, and hardly got through a page of his much-worked speech to the 200 assembled in the main hall, when the pointed interruptions and questions began.
     Although a bit baffled by the lack of respect and believing all government employees meek and accepting, I was equally at sea in trying to understand the basis for the complaints.
     The main gripe among the articulate and forthright assemblage of mid-twenties, new hires was that in their very recent overseas experience, Peace Corps Medical officers were prohibited from distributing contraceptives to PCVs although there was no such ban with regard to the U.S. Military. While in the late 1960s the HIV/AIDS pandemic was very much in the future, in most areas where Peace Corps worked, other, more common sexually transmitted diseases could be a major problem.
     The second gripe centered on the Vietnam War and the Peace Corps unwillingness to take a stand when most of its potential and active clientele had strong anti-war views. It was considered a question of credibility.
     Wiggins survived the cries of hypocrisy and double standards by appealing to their loyalty to the much-admired Peace Corps, by cautioning them not to throw the baby out with the bath water by censuring the Agency for policies beyond its immediate control.
     At the ensuing luncheon and in the ante-rooms, I had opportunities to engage my new colleagues in less heated discussion and returned to Washington much in awe. I had none of their battle scars, had not worked to better the world in far off places, had not lived in the proverbial mud hut, and could not converse fluently in any language but English, certainly not Swahili, Tagalog, Hindi or Amharic. I was awed by the RPCVs in the room, and many of these new Peace Corps employees were about to come to work for me as Recruiters.

Peace Corps “blitz” recruiting*
Peace Corps, then at its peak, had over 15,000 overseas or in numerous stateside training programs, and my office, one of the largest in Washington, had a staff of 200, half of whom were out-posted to Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, and, added on my watch, Atlanta. We were the largest “employer” of recent college graduates after the U.S. military, and in those booming late 1960s our “suitcase recruiters” visited 900 colleges and universities each academic year, some of them, like UCLA, Berkeley and University of Michigan, two and three times. Each recruiter in the 9-month academic year logged about 100,000 air and car miles, slept in cheap motels and noisy student unions, and worked six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. Like the circus, they packed up after the last Saturday event and traveled to the next college town on Sunday. There were also the talk shows, the newspaper articles, the celebrity photo ops, all of which stretched a 24-year-old’s limits of organization, persuasion and directorship, but all typically came off smoothly.

De-bureaucratize the Peace Corps
The Recruiting machine required precise scheduling, advance visits, analysis of the graduating college seniors and their skills, and the production and just-on-time shipment of recruiting materials including everything from portable booths, brochures on the overseas experience and skill needs, handouts, posters and importantly, applications.
     My particular contribution to the effort my first year in Washington was — with the help of our resident graphic artist — to de-bureaucratize the brochures and application forms by adding color, front cover pictures of Africans, Asians and Latinos being helped by Peace Corps Volunteers, and the like.
     I also headed a new division called Applicant Services geared to keeping those who had applied as a result of campus visits “reinformed” about Peace Corps, and where their particular applications were in the selection and assignment pipeline. The Agency had in place a time-consuming, cumbersome, hand sorting process led by distinguished academics who had screened and selected the first team of U.S. astronauts. Attesting to the Agency’s popularity among young Americans, tens of thousands of applications clogged the system, many from high school students and university underclassmen not yet ready or able to join up.