[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 97 (Thursday, June 25, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7095-S7097]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. DODD:
  S. 1382. A bill to improve and expand the Peace Corps. for the 21st 
century, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Foreign Relations.
  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a piece of 
legislation--and not just any old piece of legislation, I might add, 
because this organization I am about to talk about had as much to do 
with the formation of who I am as my family did: the Peace Corps 
Improvement and Expansion Act of 2009.
  I would point out that some 35 years ago a young man from 
Massachusetts and an equally young man from Connecticut were elected to 
the House of Representatives. A fellow by the name of Paul Tsongas and 
myself were the first two former Peace Corps volunteers to be elected 
to the Congress. Paul Tsongas went on to be elected to the Senate, I 
think, in 1978. He is no longer with us. He died tragically a number of 
years ago. His wife Niki is now a Member of the House of 
Representatives from Massachusetts.
  Paul Tsongas and I were great friends and enjoyed sharing stories 
with each other for many years about our respective Peace Corps 
experiences.
  Paul Tsongas served in Ethiopia--one of the earliest programs, if not 
the earliest program, in that country. I served in the Dominican 
Republic from 1966 through 1968 as a Peace Corps volunteer up in the 
mountains of that country, not far from the Haitian border. The Peace 
Corps experience for me was as formative, as I said at the outset of 
these remarks, as anything else in my life, with the exception of my 
own family; growing up with wonderful five brothers and sisters in 
Connecticut and a family who was deeply involved in public service.
  The Peace Corps experience was formative, and so over the years, I 
have expressed a great deal of interest in the organization and the 
various administrations that have served in Washington since the late 
1970s through the 1980s and 1990s and this decade. So my interest in 
the organization is strong.
  The contribution of the Peace Corps has been remarkable over the 
years. It is one of the few Federal agencies that enjoys almost 
universal support from the American public. It has had greater moments 
of celebration and public awareness than at others, but it has been 
consistent in the minds of most Americans. This organization sends 
mostly younger Americans, but not always younger Americans, to serve in 
underprivileged nations, nations that are struggling, including Third 
World nations, to make a difference in the lives of others. It has been 
a unique contribution to the world.
  There are many other volunteer organizations--some in our own 
country, some in other nations--but I think the Peace Corps holds a 
special place in the minds not only of our own fellow citizenry but 
also millions of people around the world who have come to know those 
Peace Corps volunteers--as I said, mostly younger people but not always 
younger people--who serve and spend 2 years working with them in their 
villages or urban areas, not only making a difference in their daily 
lives but also getting to know them, getting to know us. People who 
would never have the chance to come to America got to know America 
because they got to know that young American who was learning their 
language and spending time with them and making a contribution to 
improve their lives.
  Well, for 48 years, the Peace Corps has stood as a uniquely American 
institution. I know other nations make contributions. This is not a 
unique idea for ourselves. But what other great nation would send its 
people abroad not to extend its power or intimidate its adversaries, 
not to kill or be killed, but to dig, to teach, to empower, and ask for 
nothing in return. For 48 years, those men and women--180,000 of us--
have returned, as stronger, wiser, and more inspired people prepared to 
live our American lives of service.
  For a half century, the Peace Corps has shaped our lives and the 
identity of all Americans; who we are as a people and what we hope to 
achieve, not only for our own Nation but also for others who share this 
planet with us.

[[Page S7096]]

  Today I rise to offer a piece of legislation for one simple reason, 
Mr. President: I want the Peace Corps to continue playing that role 
that it has for the last half century for another half century to come. 
But before we consider how the Peace Corps can grow going forward, I 
think it might be worth remembering just how it came into being. Where 
did it all start? How was it created?
  Like an awful lot of groundbreaking ideas, Mr. President, the Peace 
Corps might not have survived a board meeting or a subcommittee hearing 
where the idea was first proposed. It was a wild notion in many ways, 
so breathtakingly outrageous that it could only have been born out of 
idealism, youthful energy, and--perhaps a key element--too much 
caffeine. For you see, the Peace Corps was born at 2 in the morning.
  It was October 4, 1960, and a then young Senator from Massachusetts 
by the name of John F. Kennedy was running for the Presidency. He was 
running hours late, as candidates often do, for a campaign stop at the 
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. John Kennedy assumed that most of 
the crowd would have gone home by that late hour. But when he arrived 
at the student union, at the campus in Ann Arbor, he found 10,000 
students waiting outside in the frigid dark to greet him. As public 
officials and holders of elective office, I think we can sympathize 
with then-Senator Kennedy at that hour, having endured months of late 
nights on a campaign trail, uncomfortable beds, and a bad diet along 
the way. I suspect he might have been sorely tempted at that late 
hour--as all of us have been from time to time--to offer a perfunctory 
thank-you to the Michigan students for hanging around all that long, 
recite a memorized stump speech--having given it on countless 
occasions, he would know it from memory--and send them home and retire 
himself.
  But something besides a chill was in the air that night in Ann Arbor. 
Floodlit and shivering, the crowd began to chant his name as he climbed 
the steps to the student union, and Senator John Kennedy realized this 
was something special. He realized he owed these students more than 
just that perfunctory set of remarks. So at 1:30 or 2:00 in the 
morning, on a frigid night in Michigan, he challenged them as a 
candidate, as a United States Senator, and he asked:

       How many of you, who are going to be doctors, are willing 
     to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how 
     many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and 
     spend your lives traveling around the world?

  I believe, Mr. President, that challenge is the Peace Corps' founding 
document. It didn't begin with a white paper or a TV ad. It began with 
a simple question.
  In the days that followed the Kennedy rally at the student union in 
Michigan, students drafted a petition, circulating it to colleges all 
across the State, and within a couple of weeks across the country, 
presenting several scrolls ultimately to John Fitzgerald Kennedy 
containing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of names. Some 
30,000 letters flooded his office asking him to continue with this 
idea.
  So I think it is fair to say, Mr. President, the answer to that 
question--are you willing to serve your country by serving the world?--
was an overwhelming yes by a generation almost 50 years ago. Of course, 
several other pressing questions also followed: How do you build an 
organization around that raw energy? How do you pay for that? What do 
you even call that idea or organization?
  John Kennedy's top advisers were already working on those issues. 
After all, they had decided, if we don't start doing our part for the 
developing world, they were concerned--and rightfully so--the 
Communists around the world would. At a time much like today, when our 
Nation faced conflicts with people who knew as little of America as we 
knew of them, this case for a Peace Corps could be made not only in the 
lofty rhetoric of idealism but in the cold hard language of 
realpolitik.
  The notion that service could be a part of our foreign policy--indeed 
that it could be a powerful weapon in the Cold War--was truly a radical 
idea. It suggested that there could be more measures of strength than 
caliber or tonnage. It argued that the world needed to see our ideals 
not just in ink but incarnate in the person of Americans with dirty 
hands working under a hot foreign sun. It said: You cannot hate America 
if you know Americans.
  The skeptics quickly descended upon John Kennedy's idea. Richard 
Nixon called the Peace Corps ``a haven for draft-dodgers.'' Former 
President Dwight Eisenhower called it ``a juvenile experiment.'' Even 
those old foreign policy hands who supported Kennedy's idea thought it 
was a fine idea, as long as it was kept small. Academics and State 
Department officials agreed: Proceed with caution, they urged. Start 
with just a few hundred volunteers. Don't create a fiasco, they said. 
Don't let this experiment get out of hand.
  If they had gotten their way, I suspect the Peace Corps might not 
even exist today. But just as a late-night burst of exuberance gave 
birth to the Peace Corps in Ann Arbor, a similar bolt of sleepless 
inspiration kept it alive. In a hotel room in downtown Washington--not 
far from where I am on the floor of the Senate--with only a few 
typewriters and a stack of blank papers, two aides--only two of them; 
one named Sergeant Shriver and the other named Harris Wofford, who 
turned out many years later to be a colleague of ours in the Senate--
comprised the entirety of the Peace Corps staff that had been tasked 
with figuring out how to put this outrageous idea into practice.
  The one thing the two of these men knew, Sergeant Shriver later told 
us, was that the conventional approach then in vogue wouldn't work. 
America would only have one chance to get it right. So it was that 
Sergeant Shriver happened to be in the office at 3 o'clock in the 
morning--not unlike the hour at Ann Arbor--reading a paper prepared by 
a State Department employee who had sent along some ideas. His name was 
Warren Wiggins.
  Warren Wiggins called his paper ``The Towering Task,'' a reference to 
JFK's first State of the Union Address, where the young President said:

       The problems are towering and unprecedented and the 
     response must be towering and unprecedented as well.

  Warren Wiggins called for a towering and unprecedented Peace Corps. 
He wrote:

       One hundred youths engaged in agricultural work of some 
     sort in Brazil might pass by unnoticed, but 5,000 American 
     youths helping to build Brasilia might warrant the full 
     attention and support of the President of Brazil himself.

  Where a handful of young people might present a nuisance to a foreign 
ambassador, an army of motivated young Americans could make a real 
difference. Besides, wasn't it a moment for great ambition?
  At 3 o'clock in the morning, Sergeant Shriver read Warren Wiggins's 
conclusion: The Peace Corps needed to begin with a ``quantum jump,'' 
and it needed to begin immediately, by Executive order, with as many as 
5,000 to 10,000 volunteers right away. By 9 o'clock that same morning, 
Warren Wiggins himself was sitting alongside Sergeant Shriver in that 
very hotel room drafting a report for the President of the United 
States.
  Within a month of that date, President John Kennedy had created the 
Peace Corps by Executive order. Within 2 years, more than 7,000 young 
Americans were serving across the globe, and that number had more than 
doubled by 1966, the year that I joined the Peace Corps.
  One of those young Americans--as I mentioned, the person speaking to 
you this afternoon--was a 22-year-old English major at Providence 
College who arrived in the small village of Moncion in the Dominican 
Republic. As a young person, I spoke barely any Spanish. I had little 
idea I was doing, and I certainly didn't have a clue that more than 40 
years later I would be standing on the floor of the United States 
Senate explaining that the Peace Corps gave me the richest 2 years of 
my life.
  I owe those 2 years, and the impact they had on all of my years 
since, to John Kennedy's 2 a.m. question and Warren Wiggins paper that 
Sergeant Shriver read at 3 in the morning.
  From the story of the Peace Corps, and my own story, we can learn 
three things: First, the Peace Corps works,

[[Page S7097]]

Mr. President. Besides simple labor and goodwill, every American we 
send abroad brings with him or her another chance to make America known 
to a world that often fears and suspects us and our motives. Every 
American who returns to our country from that service comes home as a 
citizen strengthened with the knowledge of the world in which he or she 
has just lived.
  As Sargent Shriver said, ``Peace Corps Volunteers come home to the 
USA realizing that there are billions--yes, billions--of human beings 
not enraptured by our pretensions, or our practices, or even our 
standards of conduct.''
  Second: size matters. The perils of a small, timid Peace Corps are 
just as clear today as they were in 1961. Just as then, advocates of a 
stripped-down mission make the same arguments: sending untrained, 
untested students only aggravates our host countries and raises the 
chance of a mishap--so let's send a few experts instead. And just as in 
1961, our response is fundamentally the same, and still fundamentally 
correct: of course we need volunteers of the highest quality. But we 
need the highest quantities, too.
  Third: size comes at a cost. The bigger any organism grows, the 
slower it gets. The Peace Corps that charted its course in a hotel room 
with a staff of two now enjoys a staff of over a thousand and a fine 
office building close to the White House. But even the most 
groundbreaking ideas must all make, in good time, what the philosopher 
Gramsci called ``the long march through the institutions.'' And where 
President Kennedy once predicted that, within a few decades, our Nation 
would have more than one million returned volunteers, today fewer than 
200,000 have had the opportunity to serve.
  The legislation I offer today is designed to help the Peace Corps not 
only grow--and I have joined the many voices calling for it to grow 
dramatically--but also reform.
  To those who know and love the Peace Corps, reform is an 
uncomfortable subject. After all, we don't want to destroy what has 
made this institution so remarkable and unique. There wouldn't be a 
Peace Corps if JFK had stuck to the script in Ann Arbor. There wouldn't 
be a Peace Corps if thousands of students, acting on their own 
initiative, hadn't caught his attention with their movement. There 
might not be a Peace Corps if Sargent Shriver had listened to the 
respectable voices of caution in the early days of 1961.
  The Peace Corps is unlike any other organ of our government because 
of its uniquely grassroots origin. And we can't treat it like any other 
organ of our government for those reasons.
  So the Peace Corps Improvement and Expansion Act of 2009 does not 
include a list of mandates. It does not micromanage.
  Instead, it asks those who have written this remarkable success 
story--from the Director to managers and country directors to current 
and returned volunteers--to serve once more by undertaking a thorough 
assessment of the Peace Corps and developing a comprehensive strategic 
plan for reforming and revitalizing the organization.
  Just as JFK's question to those Michigan students sparked the Peace 
Corps, asking questions today, some 50 years later, I believe will 
strengthen it. How can volunteers be better managed? How can they be 
better trained? Can we improve recruiting? Are we sending our 
volunteers to the right countries? Why do we have volunteers in Samoa 
and Tonga, but not in Indonesia, Egypt, or Brazil? Are we still 
achieving the broader goals of the Peace Corps and helping our country 
meet 21st century challenges?
  Most of all: How can we strengthen and grow this remarkable 
organization without losing the spark--the ambitious sense of the 
possible that led JFK to stay up late dreaming with those students in 
Ann Arbor and Sargent Shriver to stay up even later reading Warren 
Wiggins's paper?
  Warren Wiggins died 2 years ago at the age of 84. His obituary quoted 
Harris Wofford: ``I think he embodied the watchwords that were once 
given to me: We must be more inventive if we're going to do our duty.''
  Inventiveness and duty: two qualities that don't often go together. 
But the Peace Corps is the result of just such a combination. It has 
strengthened our Nation, improved the world, and stands today as one of 
the signal accomplishments of the 20th century. It has been supported 
by Republican and Democratic administrations over the last 50 years.

  As I said at the outset of these remarks, except for my own family, 
nothing has meant more in my life--or in the lives of so many others--
than the experience I enjoyed so many years ago.
  Today we honor the accomplishment of this organization. But let us 
commit to strengthening and expanding the Peace Corps by passing this 
legislation which I will send to the desk momentarily. Let us strive to 
inspire future generations to walk the path of service and exploration, 
the one that led me and thousands of our Nation's citizens to nations 
such as the Dominican Republic or Ethiopia, where Paul Tsongas served, 
and then years later to arrive at this institution, which I cherish and 
love as well. And let us never lose that spirit, that idealism, that 
ambition that led a young President of a young nation to ask a 
generation to serve.
                                 ______