A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps

On college campuses around the country these days, some blunt questions are being asked about the Peace Corps.

Here to answer those questions is R. Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps.

Mr. Shriver, don't young Americans have enough to do here at home without going overseas?

Whether a person is working for Civil Rights or to combat disease and hunger here at home or abroad, is irrelevant.

The big thing is to be doing it someplace.

Why should they?

Because these are the problems that are going to control the future that they are going to live in, the world in which they're going to live.

[Bauer] I remember like it was yesterday, the day we got off the airplane.

You looked at volunteers' faces, they were scared, they were big eyed, like, "What am I getting myself into?"

[Kennedy] It will not be easy.

None of the men and women will be paid a salary.

They will live at the same level as the citizens of the country which they are sent to, doing the same work, eating the same food, speaking the same language.

[Gautam] I was a little boy, a student up in the mountains of Nepal and one day we hear the news that Peace Corps volunteers are coming to our town.

Two of them, they're going to be English language teachers.

I'd never seen an American.

Everybody was curious, "What are they like?"

[indistinct chattering] [Ahadi] It doesn't really make too much sense from a local community perspective, like what it is that you're trying to do here?

As a Peace Corps volunteer at the age of 22, I landed in a little village that tested everything that I thought I understood about the world.

[Chayes] In order to be overseas the way we were in the Peace Corps, you have to relinquish your identity just a little bit.

You have to relinquish your American perspective just a little bit and adopt the perspective of ordinary people in the country where you are.

[Cobbs] To help young Americans understand the rest of the world is vital to American leadership.

How can you lead a world you don't understand?

[Kennedy] Helping other nations build the strength to meet their own problems, to satisfy their own aspirations, to surmount their own dangers.

The problems in achieving this goal are towering and unprecedented.

The response must be towering and unprecedented as well.

[narrator] The year was 1958 and The Ugly American was at the top of the bestsellers list.

Set in a fictional Southeast Asian country, the book was a cautionary tale.

It showed American diplomats who made no effort to integrate into the communities where they served, while their Soviet counterparts learned the native language and customs, so were successfully spreading Communism in the region.

The Ugly American conveyed a sense that America was losing in the Cold War, in the battle for ideas, in the competition to win the hearts and minds and engage with these newly emerging nations and developing countries where the vast proportion of the global population lives.

[indistinct] [narrator] One early reader was the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

He considered the message of the book so vital that he had a copy delivered to every one of his colleagues in the Senate.

And the world was ready for America to understand it better and to have a more constructive role in the world.

[Cobbs] America found itself in a very difficult balancing act at the start of the 1960s, which was feeling that you both have to be there as the backstop of world security, and at the same time understanding that these are independent countries and what they treasure is their independence.

If the United States is going to maintain its strength and its prestige, we must not only be strong militarily and economically, we must be firm diplomatically.

[narrator] The 1960 presidential race between candidates Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon unfolded, historically, on television.

I would say our prestige is not so high.

No longer do we give the image of being on the rise.

No longer do we give an image of vitality.

[narrator] Many issues separated the candidates, including their ability to connect with young voters.

Following the debate on October 13th 1960, Kennedy flew to Michigan, where he would continue his campaign through the state the next day.

But when he arrived at 2am in the college town of Ann Arbor, a group of almost 10,000 students had gathered in hopes he might speak, and a microphone had been placed enticingly in front of the Michigan Union.

Kennedy saw an opportunity.

[Kennedy] 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?

On your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.

[Coyne] By chance I happened to be there.

Kennedy came and all he wanted to do was go to bed, but there was a need on the part of the students for him to say something.

[narrator] Two graduate students, Judy and Alan Guskin, were so inspired, they wrote a letter to the editor of The Michigan Daily, pledging to work in countries where their help was needed.

In a matter of weeks, they had a petition with hundreds of signatures.

[Josephson] They went to JFK's stop in Ohio and presented him with a petition asking for the creation of what became the Peace Corps.

And JFK said, "This is something unusual.

"We need to respond to this."

[narrator] By 1960, programs similar to the Peace Corps had begun in Australia, Great Britain and Canada.

In fact, that same year, other members of the U.S. Congress, most notably Senator Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Henry Reuss, had been working on introducing legislation for a peacetime volunteer program.

So, it was an idea in the air and Kennedy helped bring it down from the air.

[Kennedy] I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a Peace Corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service.

[narrator] Richard Nixon swiftly condemned Kennedy's idea in a written statement, just two days before the election.

He wrote, 'Senator Kennedy proposed the establishment 'of a so-called "peace corps."

'The proposal he makes is to say in effect to young men 'who are eligible for the draft, '"if you will volunteer for a peace corps 'you can evade your obligations."'

Though Nixon's attack couldn't stop the progress of this increasingly popular idea, his accusation that Peace Corps volunteers were draft dodgers would haunt the agency for years to come.

On Tuesday November 8th 1960, John F. Kennedy won the election by a narrow margin, and became the 35th president of the United States.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

[Jones] I was a student in university.

John Kennedy was elected president.

He asked us what we could do for our country.

And I liked John Kennedy and I said, "Sign me up.

"Where do I go?"

[Ward] There was something magical about President Kennedy saying that you could have this experience, you could represent your country and you could do so in a way that was a contribution to humanity.

I think that it sort of hit a nerve, an altruistic nerve.

[narrator] Poll numbers showed 70% of Americans were in favor of the Peace Corps, and on arrival at the White House, Kennedy was presented with 25,000 letters from people volunteering for service.

More letters than he had received on any other subject.

Kennedy needed someone to take the ball and run with it.

There are too many Kennedys in public office right now.

How do you personally answer that question?

Well, I say, "My name is Shriver."

[Rice] The Peace Corps from the very beginning was associated very strongly and very personally with John F. Kennedy.

The truth is that he was a busy man and he didn't have a lot of time to get into the Peace Corps in any great detail.

He delegated that basically to Shriver.

[Shriver] I'd gone back to Chicago when the phone rang.

It was the president on there and he said, "Listen, you've gotta come down here to Washington "and run the Peace Corps."

I said "Well Mr. President, you know, "I don't know anything about any Peace Corps."

And he said "Listen Sarge, the truth of the matter is "that everybody thinks the Peace Corps "is going to be one of the greatest fiascoes in history.

"If it turns out that way, "it's much easier to fire a relative than a political friend."

[M. Shriver] He was the one on the ground who had to conceive of it, who had to implement it, who had to go through all the different bureaucracies, who had to go to the countries to see that American men and women could come into those countries and work in those fields.

[Teddy Shriver] He was an idealist and he had plans of changing the world, one child, one community, one country at a time and as long as it was going to take with as many volunteers as it was going to take, that was his kind of vision behind the Peace Corps.

[Timothy Shriver] It's worth noting that the Peace Corps is the product of a relentless energy and determination and that it took a fight to create this institution, to sustain it, to fund it, to win its political backing.

It was not an open-and-shut case.

[narrator] If Shriver was to capture the momentum and the next class of college graduates, he needed a comprehensive plan for a worldwide Peace Corps, and he needed it within weeks.

Shriver quickly began assembling a task force, which would consist of "the brightest and the best" minds from across many disciplines.

He asked them to bring proposals for approaching the enormous task of creating a Peace Corps.

Sarge called me after the inauguration and said, "We've got to pull together some people right away "to start a task force."

[Coyne] They rented two rooms in the Mayflower Hotel down the street from the White House, and began to call people who had any connection with the idea of volunteer service.

[Rice] Harris Wofford and Shriver, they knew each other very well.

And between the two of them they had a stream of people and ideas coming through.

[Cobbs] And there were a number of people who said, "Well, you've got to start small.

"Get a few people and make sure they don't blow it.

"Make sure the thing works."

Each of us had received a copy of a memorandum called "The Towering Task" by Warren Wiggins and Bill Josephson.

It said that this idea of the Peace Corps, if it's small, it's not going to have any real impact in the world.

Either there would be significant numbers of volunteers in various countries, or there wouldn't be.

And if there wouldn't be, we speculated that foreign leaders would not be interested and the Peace Corps would not be important to them.

So those two factors combined to lead us to propose a major Peace Corps, a Peace Corps of hundreds of thousands.

It appealed to Shriver because it was big and bold and that's what distinguished it from the other proposals that were coming in from academia and the private sector which were a bit more timid and incremental.

The Towering Task said, "No.

Go big, go bold."

[narrator] The Towering Task paper became the philosophical backbone of the report Shriver and his team sent to the White House.

The Mayflower gang recommended Kennedy create the Peace Corps by executive order to bypass the slow process of congressional approval.

Kennedy's advisors debated the wisdom of spending political capital so early in his administration.

But on March 1st 1961, three short weeks since the task force met for the first time at the Mayflower Hotel, Kennedy took a leap of faith.

I have today signed an executive order providing for the establishment of a Peace Corps on a temporary pilot basis.

I'm also sending to Congress a message proposing authorization of a permanent Peace Corps.

And so, he took a real gamble.

And there were a lot of people, especially in the U.S. State Department, who were pretty worried about that.

We should not underestimate the tremendous cynicism about this idea of young people, young Americans going out and running around the third world.

We should not forget that there was a lot of political opposition to the Peace Corps.

[narrator] A vocal group of diplomats and politicians had strong reservations to the Peace Corps, including the heads of other foreign aid divisions within the government, who saw this program either as competition, or as a half-baked idea doomed to interfere with international efforts already in place.

Tell me when you're ready.

We have just returned from a trip around the world, highlighting visits to African and Asian countries on behalf of the Peace Corps.

[Rice] Shriver went around the world in the summer of 1961 to invite the invitations.

He went himself to countries in Asia, and Africa, and Latin America.

We have returned with a number of very specific conclusions.

[reporter] Specifically, that Peace Corps volunteers would not be welcome?

No.

The eight countries we visited, without exception, indicated that they would welcome the Peace Corps.

And in fact, the extent of the welcome which they gave us, and the numbers of people that they indicated that they'd like to have, far exceeded our highest expectations.

[Rice] And he persuaded these countries that this was something worth doing, that it was in their interest and that they should invite the first Peace Corps volunteers.

[Schwarz] And certainly, all those heads of state said, I'm dealing with the president's brother-in-law here, "Well, sure, we would love to invite 200 volunteers "to teach somewhere here."

[narrator] With the international community on board the Peace Corps had only a few months to recruit, select and train applicants before the first groups of volunteers would arrive in their host countries.

After initial selection, Peace Corps volunteers get from two to three months of intensive training in this country before they are finally assigned overseas.

[narrator] The first applicants completed extensive paperwork, answered probing personal questions, submitted to medical tests, endured a six-hour exam, and provided several references.

They were asked to commit to a two-year assignment in a country to be determined later.

For the first few years the Peace Corps turned down four out of five applicants.

[Garroway] They get training in the language and in the law of the country to which they'll go, and an understanding of its culture and its customs, and a sharpening up of their own skills.

[Rice] Most of the early volunteers were young people.

They were not skilled technicians by and large.

Shriver and his team then grasped very quickly that the training of these people was going to be very important.

[Garroway] Here at Rutgers University a group of volunteers scheduled to work in agriculture and community development in Colombia, South America, are learning the language of that host country.

At Ohio State University another group here of Peace Corps volunteers gets ready for its assignment in India.

[Adams] The first number of groups that went overseas were almost all trained in universities.

It was an attempt to try and figure out, how do you prepare people to work in other environments and other cultures?

And a lot of experimentation because it hadn't been done particularly before.

[narrator] The length of training, after some debate, settled on three months, and included classes in technical skills and American studies, international relations, and the culture and language of the country where volunteers were going.

[Adams] They soon recognized that you have to get closer to the reality.

So, from university training they went to regional training where they set up four sites around the world.

[Garroway] For many volunteers, the next stop after stateside training is the Peace Corps Camp in Puerto Rico.

Here each volunteer is given a taste of the rigorous life that he or she will lead for the next two years.

[Adams] It was basically like a boot camp where you would do an hour's calisthenics at six in the morning and run a mile and then do eight hours of intensive language training and learn how to kill a chicken and grow crops all sorts of general community development activities to prepare you to go wherever you were going to go.

[Bellamy] We were climbing mountains.

We were jumping off mountains on ropes.

We had to shimmy across a line between two mountains.

I showed this training to the present volunteers now, and they were just totally shocked.

It was typical of early Peace Corps.

They were just trying everything they could figure out.

[Jones] You realize, "I can do more than I thought."

For example, in training, we had to swim with our hands and feet tied.

I mean, walking into a slum community is something I'd never done before but if I can swim two lengths of the pool underwater, I guess I can try that, too.

[narrator] In addition to selecting volunteers, the Peace Corps had to hire staff to train and support volunteers in host countries.

[Peters] I arrived April 27th 1961.

It had opened the doors March 1st.

I was in pretty early.

It was still quite chaotic.

I was hired and I'd worked for at least a week there before I got around to filling out the application for employment.

[Garroway] At Texas Western College a group of volunteers are getting classroom training and field training, too, for their project in Tanganyika in Africa, which is the survey and building of farm to market roads in that country, and to make geological surveys to discover untapped mineral wealth.

[Peters] When I got to Texas Western, the staff told me that there was a little problem with the qualifications of our volunteers.

We had promised the Tanganyika government surveyors.

This meant that I had to come back to Washington and say, "We've got to do a lot of rush training with these guys."

[Coyne] We had little experience in developing countries.

So, no one really knew what was to be expected.

[Josephson] One of the things that we were very, very concerned about was whether or not there would be both receptivity on the part of foreign leaders, and meaningful assignments for them to do.

[narrator] But moving quickly was part of Shriver's strategy to get Peace Corps legislation passed in Congress.

He knew if volunteers were already in the field, it would be harder to vote against it.

And he made sure Peace Corps staff recruited at least one volunteer from each of the 50 states, so every Congressperson had constituents serving when it came time to vote.

Sargent Shriver and those founders hustled like crazy on Capitol Hill.

It was literally buttonholing people in the men's room, pushing them to vote for the act.

[narrator] On September 22nd 1961, Congress voted to make the Peace Corps a permanent agency and authorized a $40 million budget for its first year.

The mission of the new agency, to promote world peace and friendship.

There were all sorts of debates about, "What's this thing going to do?

"What are those kids going to do when they get over there?"

[narrator] Bringing technical assistance to the international communities that requested volunteers was only the first of three goals conceived by the founders of the Peace Corps.

They had two other, less tangible goals in mind.

For foreign communities to get to know Americans, and for Americans to bring knowledge of another culture back home.

Part of the whole Peace Corps culture is that we are human beings going to share an experience with the people in some interesting other part of the world.

We'll learn from them.

They'll learn from us.

We teach each other.

The question about who went into Peace Corps first is one that is a running feud.

We liked to think we were, Tanganyika One.

And in fact, I understand that one of our group has the volunteer number one.

I took it to mean that he must have been one of the first to be accepted.

Colombia One, we of course say we're number one.

We started training first, probably a month before Ghana.

But the big question is, who went into country first?

Ghana One went to Ghana just a week or so before Colombia One went to Colombia.

[Gross] We always say we were the first because one of our teachers' schools started a week ahead and that made him the first volunteer to go to work.

The only reason they're the first group is that they got in the country first.

[McPhee] Which should put to rest who was first.

[Cobbs] For a while they kind of dismissively said, "Well, those are Kennedy's kids," and the idea was, "Well, these are amateurs."

[Orth] I walked right off the Berkeley campus, practically just having turned 21, and went to Columbia University for Peace Corps training, and then I went to Colombia the country, which I had barely heard of before I was accepted into the Peace Corps.

I was the only African American in my group of 100 people.

[Ward] We had very few people of color and very little diversity in the Peace Corps.

Now that's not the Peace Corps' fault by itself.

Most of my friends in college from that period were engaged in some form of civil rights activity.

All the white kids were congratulating me on the achievement, and most of my Black friends were all, "You need to go south if you want to help people", and "Why are you going overseas?"

[Bordas] I'm the youngest daughter of a large immigrant family and I was the first to go to college.

Going in the Peace Corps to me seemed like a way to serve the world.

And the way I looked at it is I was giving back to this country that had given me so much opportunity.

[Orth] In those days, opportunities for women were very scarce.

So, the idea of being able to go into the Peace Corps which was an open-ended adventure where you're totally on your own and whatever happens after two years is what you made happen.

I loved that challenge.

[Cobbs] Amateurism was the heart of the whole thing.

It was the idea that we wanted to trust young people, we wanted to take their enthusiasm, their ingenuity and let it go and see what happens.

Good morning, Ed!

-What's in the news?

-Same old stuff.

Wilbur, do you think the Peace Corps would send a horse to Pakistan?

The media loved it the first few years.

The Peace Corps could use me, Wilbur.

You know, to improve the image of the Ugly American Horse.

Shriver gave a lot of attention to getting publicity.

A lot.

[Peace Corps voiceover] If you'd like to work 16 hours a day helping people help themselves, join the Peace Corps.

[narrator] The Peace Corps had limited money to spend on advertising.

The agency appealed to the Ad Council which agreed to create public service announcements free of charge.

The PSAs were striking and would boost recruitment by keeping the Peace Corps in the public eye.

These were very, very popular.

One was the famous half glass thing.

[Peace Corps PSA voiceover] If you want to get into the Peace Corps here's your first test.

If you think the glass is half empty, forget it.

If you think it's half full, you might be the kind of person we're looking for.

It all depends on how you look at things.

[Coyne] These ads in the first years, they were picked up and used all the time because they were new and interesting and well done, so that helped launch the name of the Peace Corps.

One of the PR people told me that they'd had a cover in Time and a cover in Newsweek and one other magazine, and Sarge said, "Well, what about Life?

"Can't you get it?

What's wrong with you guys?"

Shriver and the team were very worried that there would be a major mistake or scandal in the early days that would feed the cynicism and the skepticism and the criticism that was out there of, "This thing can never work, "this Peace Corps thing can never work."

[narrator] But with the media attention came the firestorm around the inevitable first scandal in the Peace Corps, only one month after volunteers began serving, the result of a dropped postcard.

The first mistake was not very shocking by today's standards.

A young woman volunteer, she wrote a postcard home about the conditions in Ibadan in Nigeria.

There was a lot of poverty and she described this in a postcard about the squalor and how poor people were.

[Cobbs] She described what she saw, and some of which she thought was appallingly, as she said it, "primitive."

Now the problem was she wrote that on a postcard, and that postcard got picked up somehow by somebody, and a Nigerian student duplicated it and passed out copies to hundreds of other people, and it really became an international incident.

[narrator] Nigerians were so offended that many demanded the program be shut down.

I think it revealed Peace Corps' naivet in the sense that there was this assumption that young people could go out and represent us as smoothly as any diplomat.

[Rice] And the President stood behind the Peace Corps.

And in fact, just shortly after this incident, the President was meeting with a group of volunteers on the White House lawn as they were heading off to whatever country.

[Coyne] And then he came down and went around to the group in front and said, "Where are you going?"

I distinctly remember him walking away from us and he said, "Well, I better go back to work," and so, he started to go back then he turned around and looked in the famous way and he said, said to all of us, "Well, please write."

Everybody standing there sort of petrified by this whole moment, and then he said, "But no postcards."

[narrator] In its first year, the Peace Corps opened programs in eight countries, received over 12,000 applications, and trained over 500 new volunteers.

As more requests for Peace Corps volunteers came from countries around the world, the young organization struggled to keep up with the demand for new programs.

By 1964 there would be over 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers serving in almost 50 countries.

[Orth] I was assigned to urban community development, and that didn't necessarily mean big physical projects.

However, one day, this posse of men came down dramatically from the mountaintop with a horse for me, and then they took me up to the mountains and said, "We want to build a school."

So, I helped them build a school.

Two rooms, 35 students, and they named the school for me "Escuela Marina Orth."

[narrator] More than half of the early volunteers worked as teachers.

Another 30% of volunteers worked in the area that would become known as community development, and the remaining 20% were assigned to fields like, agricultural extension, health care, and public works, and administration.

It's a presumptuous idea in many ways.

The idea that you take, I was an English literature major, and dropped into the Dominican Republic, and that somehow, I was going to eradicate ignorance, poverty and disease.

[Dudt] So, there has to be a lot of self-questioning.

Why am I doing this?

And what do I have to offer somebody who's been practicing farming for 80 years?

And I'm a music major.

[narrator] From its first days, the Peace Corps was the subject of a tantalizing rumor, and one that proved hard to shake.

The United States doesn't just willy-nilly send volunteers to a country, a country must request it.

But for the local people, they can look at that volunteer and sort of be suspicious.

So, you have this ambiguity.

On the one hand, we admire them for their sacrifices.

On the other hand, are they really doing something else other than going to the classroom to teach?

[Josephson] We're operating in a Cold War atmosphere.

We knew the Soviet government and their allies would and in fact did try to portray Peace Corps volunteers as spies and CIA agents.

And whatever we did, we wanted to make sure that we did nothing that might feed those stories.

I spent a number of hours over the years with Fidel Castro, as the chairman of the foreign relations committee.

Castro said to me one night when we were talking, and he knew I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and he said to me, "I want you to know something.

"Over the years, if I could just find one Peace Corps volunteer "who was a CIA agent.

It's all I wanted was one.

"If I could find one, I was going to run with that forever."

He said, "But I want you to know in all the years, "I've never been able to find one, and I've tried.

"Believe me," he said, "I've tried."

[narrator] In 1963, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a letter to ambassadors in countries with incoming volunteers, stating, "The Peace Corps is not an instrument of foreign policy "because to make it so would rob it "of its contribution to foreign policy."

It was part of the geopolitical strategy of the United States, but it was also part of a time when there was a lot of idealism.

What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek?

Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.

Not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

[Gautam] I ran to the residence of the Peace Corps volunteers and knocked on their door, and I said, "I'm sorry, it's very early in the morning, "sorry to disturb you and wake you, "but there's something important I don't know if you have heard.

"Your president, John F. Kennedy has been killed."

[Wand] Suddenly we heard a very loud knock on the back door, and it was our landlord.

He said, "Le mataron el Presidente."

I was still learning Spanish and I kept thinking to myself, "Oh, no, I'm not understanding what he's saying."

And for the rest of the two years that I was there, every time we met someone, every time, people would offer us condolences, "We're so sorry about the loss of your president."

[Peters] One of the most amazing things in my memory of the years I was there were the stories of people all over the world in the smallest village coming up to the volunteers after Kennedy was shot and weeping and consoling the volunteers, feeling that sense of loss themselves.

It was possible to have Peace Corps in India in the '60s because President Kennedy is the only foreign leader to be as respected as Mr. Nehru.

The day of his funeral was a state holiday in India.

For no other foreign leader has that been done.

[narrator] In February 1964, just months after Kennedy died, President Lyndon Johnson chose Shriver to lead America's "War on Poverty."

[narrator] But in the end, Shriver would have to walk away from his beloved agency.

Losing Shriver, its magnetic leader, marked the end of an era for the Peace Corps.

[Leroy] When I told my family and my grandparents and neighbors about Peace Corps, they're like, "I've never heard of it before.

"You mean that thing back in the '60s that JFK did?

"It's still around?

No way."

So, as we enter here, we get to see the different types of mangroves.

I shipped out March 4th 2014, to come down here to the Dominican Republic in Santo Domingo.

We did two weeks of training in the capital, then we went to a campo in Monte Plata where we got to learn a lot of Spanish, you know, four, five hours a day to get us ready to live on our own.

[Leroy] Building ecotourism, it'll help 54 fishermen and their families, maybe two or three neighborhoods.

The ecotourism project that I am doing here is working with a group of fishermen to reduce their need to fish and also bring in a second income.

Doing a kayak tour in these mangroves, we can bring up to 20 people out there at a time.

They're not even part of this world anymore.

They're in a whole other place.

[announcer] What began as a revolution by followers of exiled Dominican President Juan Bosch quickly deteriorated into outright anarchy.

President Johnson ordered Marines into the country to protect the democracy.

The American nation cannot, must not... ...and will not permit the establishment of another communist government in the western hemisphere.

[narrator] The Dominican Revolution would be a first crucial test of the Peace Corps' independence from U.S. foreign policy.

When the revolution began, the Peace Corps had already been in the Dominican Republic for three years and volunteers had embraced the people and the culture.

We were a great curiosity.

I don't think white Americans had ever walked those streets.

So, we attracted young kids who were running after us.

They wanted to play baseball.

Baseball is big in this country, we played baseball.

It allowed the Dominicans finally to put us in a pigeonhole.

Oh, they're Americans doing sports.

That's fine with us.

We tried explaining the Peace Corps, forget it.

[Jones] The first thing they wanted to do was put street names on the streets and numbers on the houses, and I said, "Why?"

They said, "So we can receive mail."

You look at maps of Santo Domingo at that time and where they lived is blank white space.

There are no street names, no streets, there's no nothing.

Invisible people.

[narrator] When the fighting started in April 1965, most U.S. citizens were evacuated quickly.

[Jones] You could see the airplanes in the sky attacking the bridge, you could hear on the radio people asking for blood.

And then rebels began patrolling the streets of the barrio.

Guys who I played baseball with were walking the streets with rifles.

And then the Marines landed.

[Meisler] I don't even think that Johnson thought about the Peace Corps when they sent all these Marines in.

And the Marines ended up fighting against the side that most of the volunteers sympathized with.

Not all Americans fled rebel-held parts of this city when the revolution broke out two weeks ago.

The Peace Corps volunteers stayed on, they are still here, and they're still welcome.

I spoke to a man yesterday, actually, who said that since volunteers do live directly with the people, feel some of the same things they do, eat the same foods, live the same type of life, I think they find some sort of identification with the volunteers, as we do with them.

[reporter] Equally important, many volunteers are well-known in the neighborhoods where they've lived for almost a year.

They've been used, too, as intermediaries.

A Peace Corps official helped negotiate the release of captured U.S. Marines and sailors, a few days ago.

[Adams] Peace Corps was the only international organization allowed to cross into rebel territory.

The rebel leader came on national radio and said leave Peace Corps alone.

They're neutral.

So, some of us took a Peace Corps truck, it was about a one and a half ton truck, and we just went down to the CARE warehouse and the AID warehouse and said, "We're here to pick up food.

"We're from the Peace Corps."

We didn't have any authority.

We loaded up rice and beans and one and a half tons of food.

[Dodd] It's hard to explain today, can't imagine it today, but everyone else was asked to pretty much leave the country except the Peace Corps.

In Vietnam today there is another war.

In that struggle, soldiers are necessary.

So, too, are the other workers of peace.

The day, I hope, will soon come when the Peace Corps will be there, too.

[Hackford] Six close friends of mine that went to Vietnam were killed.

It was a major force that you had to deal with.

So, for me, to make a choice of whether I knew I was going to be drafted.

Was I going to go to Vietnam?

Was I going to go in the Peace Corps or do something else?

[Peace Corps voiceover] It's one thing to predict the future.

It's another to help make it.

Write the Peace Corps.

[Laitin] My draft board was unwilling to give me a conscientious objector status, but said that they would lose my file if I accepted the Peace Corps invitation which I already had in hand.

[narrator] While draft boards could grant deferments for Peace Corps service, there were no guarantees.

In fact, some volunteers were even drafted while on their Peace Corps assignment overseas and had to leave voluntary service to report for military service.

During the early '60s there was that incredible moment of idealism, but then when Vietnam started, it was a tough time for the Peace Corps because young Americans were less likely to want to join something that was connected to the government.

I plowed up a little tiny plot of land and I planted potatoes and the instructions said before you do, to prevent the cutworm from taking your crop, you put this in the soil.

Well, I put it in the soil and when I was there, I was reading Silent Spring and I read about insecticides.

You put it in the ground and it doesn't go away, and it poisons us.

And then I thought to myself, wait a minute.

What's this term "malathion" she was talking about?

I went out and I got the instructions, I put malathion in the ground in Bolivia.

I'm going "Here, I'm coming here to help these people.

"I just poisoned the ground."

But that process of what you learned, you carry with you.

[narrator] By the time Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, massive protests against the Vietnam War had become a regular occurrence across the country.

[Cobbs] Nixon initially was supportive of the Peace Corps.

Many Republicans had supported it so he didn't come in ideologically opposed to the Peace Corps.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

To protect our men who are in Vietnam, I have concluded that the time has come for action.

[narrator] In April 1970, President Nixon announced the expansion of the war in Vietnam to neighboring Cambodia.

Enraged anti-war protesters marched on Washington D.C., including an organization made up in part of former Peace Corps volunteers.

Knowing the nation would be watching, members of the Committee of Returned Volunteers hatched a plan to shine a spotlight on the Peace Corps.

As the Peace Corps is a part of the U.S. government dedicated to peace, it's right up there in the title, the Peace Corps really ought to come out against the war.

And so, there was this plan to then take over and say, "Since you're not coming out against the war, "we're taking over the offices."

We went up a back stairway, we didn't take the elevator.

We went into the offices and told these two or three secretaries we were taking over, they had to leave.

And then we immediately kind of barricaded ourselves into that part of the offices and... ...you know, put out the Viet Cong flag... ...which I think was a mistake.

It was the flag of the forces that our military was fighting.

They weren't going to stand to have that flag on their building.

In fact, they put out an American flag.

[narrator] The stunt was covered in newspapers from coast to coast.

[Cobbs] Nixon did not want to hear criticism of his Vietnam policy from young people, especially those whose salaries he was paying.

[Schwarz] It demonstrated basically to the world that Americans were not supporting their president.

[narrator] President Nixon issued a directive, captured in a March 1970 memo.

He said, "A quiet phasing out of the Peace Corps is in order."

The plan was to move the agency under a new umbrella with several other volunteer organizations.

[Nixon] I will send a special message to the 92nd Congress asking that the Peace Corps, VISTA, a number of other agencies now scattered throughout the Federal government, be brought together into a new agency.

A new Volunteer Service Corps that will give young Americans what they do not now have offered to them.

A chance to transfer between service abroad and service at home.

Peace Corps, historically, had always been a stand-alone agency.

And it never had to share the space or the attention with anybody else.

The best way to kill something off is to take down their flag, and when Peace Corps was moved under this agency, ACTION, it lost so much of its visibility.

[Peace Corps voiceover] ACTION is VISTA, the Peace Corps, RSVP, Score and other volunteer programs that are helping people to help themselves.

Don't crawl under a rock.

Get into ACTION.

[Cobbs] Fortunately for the Peace Corps, Richard Nixon had bigger problems to deal with.

Watergate intervened and it would be a lot of trouble to try to get rid of the Peace Corps altogether.

[narrator] The Peace Corps program in Thailand had remained open throughout the Vietnam War, but the country was also home to many U.S. military bases.

Even after the war ended in 1975, volunteers found themselves in a changed landscape.

[Carroll] The people in my group felt very dedicated that because of the 15, 20-year history of war in Southeast Asia led by the United States, that it was time to help make peace.

None of us really had a sense of that enormous U.S. military presence in Thailand.

There were U.S. servicemen everywhere.

[narrator] Hundreds of thousands had been displaced by the war in Vietnam, and in nearby Thailand some Peace Corps volunteers served on the front lines of a growing refugee crisis.

[Quigley] I lived in the most isolated province of Thailand at the time.

There is a contradiction between Peace Corps volunteers working in refugee camps, refugees who really are generated by the consequence of U.S. foreign policy.

[Meisler] The Peace Corps did not recover from the feeling during the Vietnam War that you don't work for the U.S. government.

You had this feeling that you stay out of it because you're the smile on the tiger's face if you're the Peace Corps volunteer.

[Cobbs] And so, a lot of Americans began to feel like, "Maybe we are imperialists.

"Maybe what we're doing "out there in the world isn't the right thing."

And so, the shine went off the Peace Corps.

[narrator] Peace Corps volunteer numbers declined rapidly through the '70s.

[singer] What's there to live for?

Who needs the Peace Corps?

[narrator] The Peace Corps was entering its adolescence, and in America's "backyard," many Central American countries were heading into their 15th year with the agency.

I served in Honduras.

As a civil engineer I was able to help with water systems, little bridges, roads.

There was more work than there were engineers.

[Siegel] I was assigned to be the public health nursing director for a community clinic in a large valley that was surrounded by mountains.

Most Hondurans had this notion that all Americans are blond and blue-eyed.

So, when they met me, it was hard for them to accept that I was American.

[Will] My wife and I served in Honduras.

We were both put into agriculture.

I guess because I'm from Ohio they assumed I was a farmer.

Talk about cultural imperatives.

There's nothing more important to people's culture than what they eat.

[narrator] Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976.

It was well known that his mother, Lillian Carter, had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-'60s.

When I was president, I knew my mother had benefited greatly from the Peace Corps and had benefited others.

[narrator] But even a sympathetic White House could not bring back the Peace Corps' glory days.

The Peace Corps had seen a string of seven directors throughout the 1970s, and the constant change in leadership compounded its struggle to maintain an identity under the umbrella of ACTION.

When I got a call in 1979 asking me sort of out of the blue to consider being the Peace Corps director, Peace Corps was an agency within an agency.

[narrator] On November 4th 1979, the American embassy in Tehran was stormed by Iranian student revolutionaries, throwing Carter's presidency and his bid for a second term into crisis.

Three of the hostages, who had been working in the foreign service, were former Peace Corps volunteers.

President Carter would lose the White House to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Peace Corps could not count on the support of a new administration, and in the new decade the agency and its mission of world peace seemed out of sync with young Americans.

[Hessler-Radelet] I couldn't wait to be a Peace Corps volunteer, but part of it was a strategy to get out of the country because I was also overwhelmed by just feeling that people were much more interested in making money than serving humanity, and that was depressing.

This is ridiculous, really.

Now, I am obviously not of Peace Corps fiber.

It's not that I can't help these people, it's just that I don't want to.

The Peace Corps doesn't often make it into movies, but when it does, it's usually for comic relief.

There's often not a real understanding of the concrete kinds of work that the Peace Corps does.

It'll help you better prepare storing food for the up-and-coming monsoon months.

Also...

I had been going out and teaching how to prevent diarrhea, right, one of the biggest causes of under-fives' death.

They had taught us this song sung to the tune of "Old McDonald Had A Farm" in French, how you prevent diarrhea.

I think I became known as the "diarrhea lady" because people would see me and start singing the song.

[Bartlett] I got to work with kids, I got to work with adolescents, I got to work with women and men.

I just really got to have a strong feel of what was going on in the community.

I mean, I was in heaven.

[Hastings] When I joined Ronald Reagan was president.

It was an age of a lot of international engagement.

I was sent to Swaziland between South Africa and Mozambique and was a rural high school math teacher.

[Cobbs] The Reagan administration was pretty infamous for trying to cut off any of these do-gooder type programs.

Peace Corps was not in good shape at all.

The rumors coming from Washington were that the Peace Corps was going to be ended.

[narrator] President Ronald Reagan appointed Loret Miller Ruppe director in 1981.

She was married to a Republican congressman and had many allies in Washington, but had little work experience.

Some in the Peace Corps community were baffled.

They thought she was a housewife from the Midwest who could be easily manipulated.

And that was not the case at all.

She was part of the Bush team.

She wasn't well-known outside of Republican and Michigan political circles because she really didn't have any international experience to speak of.

[narrator] In 1981 the Peace Corps was still tied to ACTION and a number of domestic volunteer programs.

But Congress was considering legislation that would give the agency the autonomy it had been seeking for years.

Though Reagan didn't support the bill, and Ruppe wouldn't publicly disagree with the president, it was whispered that Ruppe was secretly campaigning for the legislation behind the scenes.

[Scotton] We were accused of going against the administration and going up to the Hill surreptitiously and recruiting support from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

We had to be careful because there were some people in the White House who were trying to get rid of us.

[Adele Ruppe] She went door to door on the Hill and advocated for the Peace Corps to become an independent agency.

I think if she hadn't done that, I'm not sure that the Peace Corps would still exist.

[Cobbs] Ruppe resold the Peace Corps to Congress.

[narrator] In December 1981, Congress passed the bill.

The Peace Corps was now a permanent agency within the Executive Branch of the government.

[Leisz] It was overcast, lightly snowing.

I was in front of the White House.

And I happened to be walking by exactly when she walked out.

She looked at me and said, "Steve, you'll never believe what just happened!

"I was just in a cabinet meeting with President Reagan, "and the Prime Minister from Fiji was there."

[Ruppe] Ratu Mara, a very distinguished gentleman, drew himself up and said, "President Reagan, I bring to you today "the sincere thanks of my government and my people."

Everyone held their breath, total silence.

"For the men and women of the Peace Corps "who go out into our villages, "who live with our people."

He went on and on.

I beamed.

Vice President Bush leaned over afterwards and whispered, "What did you pay that man to say that?"

Many young men and women from your country gave us loyal and devoted service through the Peace Corps.

Thank you Mr. President.

[Ruppe] A week later, OMB presented the budget to President Reagan with a cut for the Peace Corps.

President Reagan said, "Don't cut the Peace Corps.

"That man last week, "it's the only thing I got thanked for!"

The budget went up.

[Dodd] During the eight years of Ronald Reagan, I think the budget of the Peace Corps increased almost every year.

It was the only federal program that Ronald Reagan supported.

By the example of these Peace Corps volunteers, people throughout the world can understand that America's heart is strong, and her heart is good.

One of the biggest challenges my mom faced when she became director of the Peace Corps was making it relevant again.

[Schieffer] The compelling pictures from Ethiopia have caused an outpouring of sympathy and brought in financial contributions from around the world.

And now, it turns out, many people want to do even more.

Do you have any farm experience, agriculture or skilled trade experience?

[Schieffer] Suddenly, people are volunteering in droves to join the Peace Corps.

Something that hasn't happened in years.

[Scharffenberger] It was 1984, the drought had been going on and getting worse and worse.

It was really when pictures from Ethiopia started appearing on TV of starving children that America and the rest of the world woke up.

[narrator] In an effort to address the crisis, the Peace Corps would send almost 1,000 volunteers to seven countries as part of their African Food Systems Initiative.

These volunteers were chosen for their knowledge of different agricultural fields, and the Peace Corps placed them in teams where they could combine their skills for maximum benefit.

We want to send these teams to Africa to join the other volunteers working there to promote food production throughout the continent.

And to try to do something about this food crisis that you have there.

Well, Mr. Scharffenberger, you are an old Africa hand, to say the least.

How is all this going to work, this new team effort?

What do you think about it?

Well, I think this is really what has to happen.

The idea behind it was that hunger and feeding people is not just about growing things.

There's a whole chain of activities.

Everything from getting the seeds to irrigation, crop storage, crop processing, marketing, all these elements that had been looked at piecemeal and had not been put together.

Last January, Peace Corps Director Loret Miller Ruppe announced a recruitment drive for agricultural volunteers for Africa.

In the following weeks the Peace Corps was besieged by responses.

Soon you will be in Africa, where you will be a vital part of the relief aid to help the millions suffering from malnutrition and starvation.

I wouldn't say she was opportunistic but she saw opportunities.

[Scharffenberger] Loret was interested in Africa from the word go.

She was not averse to say, "Well, this is an area "where Peace Corps can make a difference.

"Let's get behind it."

My mother recognized that the Peace Corps had to be resilient and flexible enough to change with the times.

[narrator] But young people still weren't flocking to the Peace Corps like they used to.

The agency launched a new plan to reach out to older Americans who would bring valuable work and life experience to their assignments.

[elderly woman] Guess what the Hacketts are doing?

[elderly man] Taking another cruise.

No.

They've joined the Peace Corps.

You're kidding!

What in the world is the Peace Corps doing?

[Belafonte] Peace Corps.

The toughest job you'll ever love.

I hope more of our older Americans will consider joining the Peace Corps to put their experience to work.

Maybe I should get my own resume ready for that day when I'm ready to look for my next job.

[narrator] Peace Corps training had always involved a cross-cultural component.

Volunteers took classes in political philosophies, cultural differences, world affairs and American history.

[Americans Abroad voiceover] We'd like you to listen to a presentation about communism.

[narrator] Though training was intended to be politically neutral, it evolved to reflect the times.

In the early 1980s, the message was not subtle.

[voiceover] You may not agree with what you hear or think the presentation is objective.

It's not intended to be.

How could Loret Miller Ruppe stay in the good graces of the Reagan State Department and also further the Peace Corps mission?

[narrator] In 1983, Ronald Reagan asked Henry Kissinger to lead a commission which would make recommendations for U.S. foreign policy in Central America.

There was civil unrest in Nicaragua and the Reagan administration was looking for support for its desire to quash what it saw as a dangerous communist uprising.

[Meisler] Kissinger wrote a report for Reagan on how to help Central America, and if you read it carefully it says, "Keep killing the left wing, "but at the same time "bring in aid and Peace Corps volunteers."

And so, suddenly Honduras had the largest number of Peace Corps volunteers in the world.

Now you could make a case, it's one of the poorest places it deserved that, but that isn't the reason they had it.

[Bartlett] Peace Corps volunteers in my group, they already had some caution and skepticism around what our government was doing in Central America at the time.

Some of them knew about the civil war going on in Guatemala, the problems going on in El Salvador and obviously the war in Nicaragua.

It was this broader political, economic, social context that I just really had not thought about.

[Schwarz] During that time the United States was basically mounting a proxy war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

And at the same time, you had 400 volunteers in neighboring Honduras, a country the size of Ohio, and that proved to be very controversial.

There was a sense that Peace Corps was there to win hearts and minds in Central America while the military and the CIA took care of other business.

[Bartlett] The kids loved soccer.

Or they would pretend to be horses galloping or they would just draw things in the dirt.

They had great imagination.

I learned that the National Guard from Texas was gonna be coming to our area.

One day we were outside playing and tanks rolled down our dirt road.

The kids, shortly after the unit came through, they started playing war.

[narrator] For eight years the Peace Corps flourished under Loret Miller Ruppe's passionate leadership.

She is still the agency's longest serving director.

But to ensure its survival, the Peace Corps fell into line with the Reagan administration's agenda.

In spite of having independence on paper, the Peace Corps' tug of war to remain separate from U.S. foreign policy would continue.

The Peace Corps is alive and well and is doubling in size, and to those who ask, "The Peace Corps.

Is it still around?"

We say, "What do you mean?

Where have you been?

"We're around.

All around the world!"

[Gonzalez] Coming here right after Ebola, I was a little bit worried and my family was a little bit worried.

Yeah, when our families heard that we were coming to Liberia, the first thing was, "Oh, you're going to catch Ebola."

And the second thing was, "Are you sure it's safe?"

Peace Corps volunteers do make a big difference and in many places where we have a shortage of teachers trained in professional disciplines, you know, like science and English, they have come in and just filled a gap that have made a difference in the quality of the education of our people.

[Gozdziewski] Being the first group that comes after Ebola, where there were no volunteers, I think we realized that change is going to take a little bit longer than just our service.

[Gonzalez] My hopes for my classroom are giving my students a different perspective, having a different attitude of what education they can have, and kind of seeing their own potential.

We really need our students, our Liberian children to learn that whatever it is that they want to be, they can be their full potential.

And for that they need excellent teachers.

The Peace Corps right now, I really love the enthusiasm.

I love the youthfulness, but most of the students, they think they are their friends.

When a lot of the Americans come here, automatically they have a status.

And they're put in a situation where there's so much that is expected of them from the local Liberians, that it's kind of hard for them to live up to that expectation.

[Gonzalez] Many of these people have never met an American ever in their life.

So, we become the whole, we become America for them, which is a lot of pressure.

Yeah, and like putting yourself in that position, it really is a job.

-A 24/7 job!

-Yeah.

[narrator] In 1989, a revolutionary wave swept across Eastern Europe.

Communist regimes toppled and the Berlin Wall came down.

The Cold War was over.

On "Focus" tonight, the Peace Corps.

For the first time in a long time, it's back in the news.

The State department's recent decision to pull 260 Peace Corps volunteers out of the Philippines, prompting a rebuke from that country today.

But while those volunteers are heading home, thousands of others are heading overseas to countries where, until recently, they never would've been welcomed.

Tonight, Henry Champ joins us from Washington for a look at the changing Peace Corps, adapting to a changing world.

Now, more countries than ever are clamoring for volunteers.

Unthinkable a year ago in the once-communist east, American Peace Corps workers are learning Hungarian in order to teach many more Hungarians English.

Hungary is in a hurry to master the intricacies of Western technology, and speaking English is a priority.

We are building a link that is critical to the United States in what has become an interdependent world.

How do you build new relationships?

You build them often with people who are deeply suspicious of you.

And so it was under President Bush, George H.W.

Bush, that the United States started to send volunteers to Eastern Europe and ultimately to China, as well.

Peace Corps programs in Poland and Hungary, and then soon in Czechoslovakia, are another tangible element of America's sustained commitment to Central and Eastern Europe's democratic transformation toward a Europe whole and free.

[narrator] The first Bush Administration took advantage of the shifting political landscape, and opened up Eastern Europe to the Peace Corps.

And as the Soviet Union broke up and the new countries were established, the United States was quick to send in its ambassadors of peace.

[Olsen] As they were changing, they said, "We really want the Peace Corps."

In particular, it was about English, and it was about learning, and it was about training teachers.

[narrator] The first meetings in Eastern Europe were arranged through the American embassies in Hungary and Poland.

Representatives of the Peace Corps came prepared to offer up to 50 volunteers in the new programs.

The Hungarians requested 10,000 volunteers.

The Peace Corps countered with 60.

[Beil] The Peace Corps going into Eastern Europe in the '90s was the first President Bush's gift to the newly liberated Eastern European countries.

I think that most old volunteers were not happy about it.

It just wasn't Peace Corps.

[Dudley] I was really surprised when Peace Corps announced that they were going into Eastern Europe because it didn't fit my definition of what the Peace Corps experience was.

[Schwarz] Do Peace Corps volunteers necessarily have to be living in very modest means, the mud hut, in order to make a contribution of value?

[Geisler] The Polish people really embraced us.

And they were interested in our culture, not just politics.

Our job was to work in the teacher training colleges.

We weren't just teaching them the language.

We were teaching them the methodology of instruction.

[Oleksenko] The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

One year later the Peace Corps came to Ukraine... ...and it was perfect timing.

Americans were received as Gods if not semi-Gods, you know.

[narrator] While the Peace Corps was welcomed in most Eastern European countries, some Soviet Republics were concerned about America's motives for sending volunteers to their newly-formed countries.

Back home, others saw an opportunity to broaden the scope of the Peace Corps in a changing world.

[voiceover] When I say "Peace Corps Volunteer," you think.

Have you ever thought?

Or?

Today's Peace Corps is businesspeople.

It's people working on the environment, teachers, farmers, nurses.

Not just young people.

Ever thought of joining them?

Peace Corps.

The toughest job you'll ever love.

[Cobbs] And so, they got a lot of volunteers, many of them older businessmen, businesswomen who went and said, "Okay, this is how you do capitalism.

Capitalism 101."

The first members of a group the Soviets once called "anti-communist subversives" are now in Moscow, to instruct the Russians in the ways of capitalism.

Jonathan Sanders has our report.

[Sanders] It took 31 years for the Peace Corps to reach Russia, frozen out by Cold War suspicions.

But this morning 100 volunteers arrived to teach Russians about business.

Now the Peace Corps is older.

Average age of today's arrivals?

41.

They bring skills badly wanted in the new Russia.

-Accountant.

-I had a consulting company.

A university administrator.

I have 13 years of business experience in banking.

So, you had volunteers who were told to come in suits and with business cards, and the other volunteers were English teachers.

English was the language of capitalism, so Peace Corps was becoming relevant again in the end of the Cold War.

[Hessler] The moment when I joined was in the 1990s it was sort of an interesting time because in some ways, this was the period where everybody said, "History is finished and the Cold War is over," and so, I think in a way, my generation, there was not the strong patriotism and even the idealism tended to be muted.

[announcer] Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan.

It's truly a privilege and an honor to be here on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Peace Corps, to welcome you here to the White House.

The Peace Corps symbolized everything that inspired my generation to service.

Today, the Peace Corps' "Towering Task" is just as vital as ever.

[Gearan] It was the 35th Anniversary of the Peace Corps.

How do we take this agency, build upon it, think about it in a looming 21st century context and, for me, expand the opportunities for service?

[Hessler] China was an unusual place because there had been a lot of anti-Peace Corps propaganda, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

It was portrayed as a wing of American foreign policy.

They send their idealistic young people overseas to try to turn the world toward capitalism, and there was some truth in that.

My grandson, Jason Carter, was a Peace Corps volunteer as well.

He was the first great-grandchild of a Peace Corps volunteer who served.

He was in South Africa.

[Jason Carter] When I got to the Peace Corps, Nelson Mandela was still president in South Africa, and their post-Apartheid struggle was just beginning.

We get to South Africa, we know we're going to go work in schools and part of our project we knew was to take these schools that had been tools of the Apartheid regime, and turn them into what we all hope schools are going to be, which are tools of liberation and education.

[Hessler] The Peace Corps wanted to push something called "Green English," which was trying to teach your English courses with an environmental subtext and a couple people tried it, and then one kid's like, "Okay, I'm going to start small."

"We're going to have a debate today.

Is littering good or bad?"

and it just like split the class right down the middle because half the kids were like, "Well, you know, I know people that work as garbage men "and as street cleaners, "and if the people don't throw the trash on the streets, "then they're not going to have a job".

It kind of gives you a different perspective on what people do and how they view the community.

[Cobbs] There was a moment in the 1990s which everyone called the "peace dividend," which was this idea that, "Well, thank goodness the Cold War is over "and we don't have to think about "the rest of the world very much anymore.

"Let them take care of themselves."

There was a kind of inward turning, naturally enough that happened there, and so you didn't necessarily have to think too much about the Rwanda genocide or the HIV crisis.

I had my primary project where I did a lot of child survival nutrition with the community, and then as one of my secondary projects I really focused on the HIV/AIDS education.

It was a time where there was a lot of denial.

[Schneider] When I came in as Peace Corps Director, HIV/AIDS was just exploding in Africa and so one of the things that I did was to say that every volunteer serving in Africa will work on HIV/AIDS education, if not as their primary task as a secondary assignment.

[Nolan] Almost every night at the village where I was living and working, I would hear off in the distance funerals.

So, my assignment was actually to teach English and build a library for the local community, but it became immediately apparent to me that the most pressing issue for this particular community was really curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic that was ravaging the whole countryside, really.

[narrator] The HIV epidemic demonstrated to many Americans how connected they were to the whole human population, regardless of national borders.

After the new Millennium, global issues would come to the forefront for the Peace Corps in unexpected ways.

[Owens] We got placed in Peace Corps in the spring, and I went in the fall of 2000 to Paraguay.

I went to Bolivia in August of 2000.

[Tepley] My family brought me to the airport, and they brought me all the way to the plane, and they waved goodbye as I boarded that plane.

They weren't afraid of sending me off, but it was my first big international adventure and they knew they weren't going to be seeing me for two years.

[Manning] I mostly taught English.

My school was up on this little plateau.

And so, they had an old gondola.

It's called the jopan, and that's what I rode to work every day.

That was pretty cool.

I could walk around but who wants to walk around if you can ride on a jopan?

I served in Benin, 2000 to 2002.

I was a small enterprise development volunteer.

[Tepley] I did my three days of training and then boarded the train for Russia and arrived in Moscow in August of 2001.

[narrator] On September 11th 2001, over 6,600 Peace Corps volunteers were serving in 78 different countries.

It was a rainy day my allergies were bothering me and I was sleeping.

And one little boy came back from school and he's like, "Wendy, Wendy, Wendy!

There's a plane that crashed!"

There were people coming past the house and knocking and sitting there, and sort of like almost how you would express your condolences if somebody passed away.

[Tepley] There was a lot of terrorism in Russia.

They were sympathetic, of course, but I felt like the underlying kind of message was, "Now you know what it's like."

9/11 hit very hard, because what it did was it meant that some parts of the world where we had hoped to increase the size of the Peace Corps, particularly the Middle East, that just wasn't going to happen.

I was supposed to go to Kazakhstan and they annulled that invitation because of 9/11 and they did that for safety reasons.

[Vasquez] Suggestions were made to me, "Boy, are you going to have a tough task "convincing loved ones, "relatives, parents allowing their children, "their loved ones to serve in Muslim countries."

[Garlinghouse] In Niger, where I served, it's 97% Muslim.

During the 9/11 attacks, my lens on Muslims was some of the most deeply religious, community-oriented people I've ever known.

It was not these extremists.

[narrator] On February 15th 2002, President George W. Bush announced plans to strengthen the Peace Corps.

The war has thrust upon us an enemy who hates everything the Peace Corps stands for.

Which means that the Peace Corps must be reinvigorated.

I have called for twice as many Peace Corps volunteers over the next five years, to return the Peace Corps to the strength it had in the mid '60s.

[narrator] But like many other presidents before him, President Bush would not meet the promise to double the number of Peace Corps volunteers.

Without a corresponding increase in the budget and staff, the number of active volunteers rose to just under 8,000, a small bump from where it had stagnated for years.

[Martin] Ukrainians are probably the nicest people that I've ever met in my entire life.

And the people here are just so amazing, so warm and so welcoming, but nobody gets to see that side.

And Miss April is going to continue our lesson.

So, do you all know what anagrams are?

These are new words... American volunteers, they bring the world, the big world, the global world to Ukraine.

When I told people that I was going to Peace Corps Ukraine their first reaction was like "Why would you go there?"

There's like a conflict going on.

It's not safe to go there.

We have red zones, yellow zones, green zones, areas where we can and can't travel freely.

We run drills and we have this huge emergency evacuation plan, like all of the volunteers know exactly what to do if something goes wrong.

But because there is a war going on this is actually really a great time for the Peace Corps to be working there.

[Krupska] When volunteers arrive we try to introduce them to Ukraine so that later they can reflect on their experiences, interactions and discover their Ukraine for themselves and start to love it.

[narrator] Since its early days, the Peace Corps had been largely ignored by the press.

So, it came as a shock when, in 2003, an investigative piece published in the Dayton Daily News exposed serious problems with volunteer safety.

Although a congressional hearing was held, reform legislation failed to pass.

But flaws in the agency's systems would be on painful and public display soon, when a heart-breaking tragedy received national attention.

My name is Lois Puzey and I'm here on behalf of my daughter, Kate Puzey, who was murdered March 12th 2009, while serving with the Peace Corps in the West African nation of Benin.

[woman behind camera] Oh, it's a video!

Sorry!

Hi!

Kate had joined the Peace Corps in 2007.

She was really well-integrated in her village, doing lots of good work with the girls in the village.

[narrator] Kate Puzey had heard rumors that a local man, a teacher at her school and part-time trainer with the Peace Corps, had sexually harassed some of the young female students.

[Kase] And apparently this was something that weighed on her.

Volunteers are trained to tread lightly on these matters.

How do you respect the culture that you're a guest in, but at the same time do what's right?

[narrator] Shortly before the end of her service, Kate Puzey's worst fears were confirmed when she learned the teacher had raped two of his young students.

She informed the Peace Corps in an email, asking for anonymity.

But the email was leaked, Kate Puzey was given no special protection as a whistle-blower.

[Kase] A girl was coming over to do her hair and she saw blood coming out from the mosquito net on the porch where Kate was sleeping.

[narrator] Kate Puzey had been murdered, just a few days after sending her email.

I was the one who made the call to the family, and... ...it was very difficult.

[narrator] But Kate Puzey's family was given almost no information about the circumstances leading to her death.

In their search for the truth, the Puzey family discovered the Peace Corps had a history of mishandling volunteers who reported sexual assault.

The family began campaigning for legislation to be passed to protect future volunteers.

And when their initial attempts failed, they turned to the media.

In 2011, 20/20 aired a damning report that not only told the story of Kate Puzey, but also featured interviews with many sexual assault survivors in the Peace Corps community.

[Ross] The Peace Corps' Deputy Director said the agency is working hard to do better.

I was sexually assaulted as a Peace Corps volunteer and my assailant was a very high-ranking Peace Corps staff person.

There was no program for sexual assault in the Peace Corps, no place to go, no hotline.

[narrator] The 20/20 report outraged many viewers, and Congress agreed to listen to testimony from Returned Peace Corps volunteers and families of victims.

[Puzey] In the future there will be another volunteer like my Kate, who will want to do the right thing.

Honor Kate's sacrifice by doing the right thing now, so that future volunteers can serve safely.

[narrator] Later that same year, Congress passed the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act, which included plans for sexual assault risk-reduction and response training for volunteers, as well as a confidential system for reporting dangerous situations and crimes.

So, I didn't speak a word.

And I didn't say anything for more than 30 years until all those volunteers sharing their very real, very painful stories with great courage, that I actually had the courage to speak my own story.

I had to become vulnerable as a leader first before I could lead the agency through one of its darkest hours.

[Robinson] I felt more secure in Benin than I have in a lot of places I have ever been.

I felt safe.

I would be at the internet cafe in my village until like midnight, I'd walk up and down the roads by myself.

[Hessler-Radelet] Most volunteers say that they feel more safe in their community than they do almost anywhere else because they are so much a part of their community, and they are so loved by their community.

The Peace Corps, by definition, is a case of managing risk.

If you're going to do your job well, you better reach out, you better have people know you and you better have the kinds of relationships that are necessary to make you effective.

One of my volunteers was Chris Stevens.

He was a teacher in a rural area.

He really exemplified what Peace Corps did.

[narrator] In 2012, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, Christopher Stevens, was named ambassador to Libya.

He learned the language and immersed himself in the culture.

He was well-known throughout the country for being approachable and listening to the concerns of the local people.

On September 11th 2012, Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed during a violent uprising in Benghazi.

[Obama] Chris Stevens was everything America could want in an ambassador, as the whole country has come to see.

How he first went to the region as a young man in the Peace Corps, how he believed in Libya and its people and how they loved him back.

[Hill] Managing risk and getting out there is part and parcel of being a Peace Corps volunteer, I think it's part and parcel of being an effective diplomat, which Chris Stevens was.

[Joe Kennedy] If you look through our State Department ranks, look through ranks of international development organizations, you'll find an awful lot of former Peace Corps volunteers.

[narrator] The Peace Corps' three goals have remained constant over the decades.

The first goal, to provide technical assistance, and the second, for citizens of other countries to get to know Americans, happen entirely overseas.

I understand that I am not the typical face of Peace Corps.

So even though we're volunteers, we are paid by the US Government and we are representative for the American people in that respect.

[Josephson] I think it is important that the volunteers be as representative of the population as they can be.

Peace Corps has always fallen short in recruiting minorities, probably always will.

I served the Peace Corps with many white Americans, I also served the Peace Corps with many Black Americans and Asian Americans.

And Black and Asian Americans have a different experience in the Peace Corps.

As somebody who grew up with a lot of pride in Africa and wanted to travel to Africa to have this sort of connection to my culture, I didn't expect the first time that I went to Africa, I was going to still have to deal with all the same issues of America.

There was preferential treatment given to a white volunteer.

So, if we're all sitting there together, the white volunteer's going to get treated and served first.

I thought they would see me as an African American.

But honestly, they see me as an American first, and they don't really see my race straightforwardly.

And that exposure allows people in these local communities that we serve in to realize that America is very diverse.

[narrator] But the third goal, which begins when volunteers get to know the people where they serve, continues after Peace Corps service is over, when volunteers bring their experience home.

Usually what happens is you end up having a whole lot more good being done to oneself.

And you come away from the Peace Corps almost a little embarrassed, realizing that you got a whole lot more out of it than you were able to give.

[narrator] After completing their two years of service, most volunteers refer to themselves as "Returned Peace Corps Volunteers," or "RPCVs," and they number in the hundreds of thousands.

[Marchewka] But then after the volunteer comes back, it's more important now than ever for RPCVs to get involved with community development or local politics or just being a voice for people that are marginalized in the United States.

Because I think as volunteers, we have a unique ability to listen to hear someone's story and try to look at it from their side.

[Gearan] The American landscape is dotted with Americans who have taken two years of their life in service to others, that are now returning with that perspective.

That informs their families, that informs their communities, that informs their professions.

[Orth] It took me years to understand how deeply the Peace Corps experience affected my ability to be a good journalist, because it was in the Peace Corps that I really learned empathy.

So, I, to this day, am an ambassador for Mozambique, saying that people have to go to Mozambique.

And so, in many ways, it's this reciprocal kind of relationship that is really hard to quantify by government standards.

The impact that Peace Corps has is something that can't be measured in the short term.

It can only really be understood in the long term.

[narrator] Every year the Peace Corps produces a report to justify its Federal budget to Congress.

But recent years have brought increasing pressure for transparency and measurable results, so the agency has added impact studies in an attempt to produce quantifiable evidence to lawmakers and the American public.

To me you will never prove the value of the Peace Corps with numbers, never.

The best way of demonstrating the value of the Peace Corps, I believe, is stories.

[Fleming] There have been over 4,000 volunteers that have served in Liberia that now live all over the world.

And when the whole world was watching the Ebola virus take hold in Western Africa, the over 4,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers could stand up and say, "I know Liberia, let me tell you something about Liberia."

[narrator] The Peace Corps has evacuated groups of volunteers for safety reasons many times over the years.

In 2014, the agency had to work quickly when a handful of Ebola cases in Western Africa exploded into a major outbreak.

In Liberia, the number of infected people would number in the thousands by the end of the year.

[Banton] Monday, there were no signs, people weren't really talking about it.

By Tuesday afternoon, there were signs and hand washing stations everywhere.

Bleach so thick your hands were soapy and your pants were white when you wiped your hand.

And that happened overnight.

[Keenan] I'm kind of gearing up for the second year of teaching.

Leaving Liberia and going back to the U.S. was like the furthest from my mind.

Then the next day, you get a text message from the country director that two Peace Corps volunteers have been exposed to Ebola in Liberia.

We're starting an evacuation process.

And then a week after that, you're sitting on your parents' couch, just kind of like, "What happened?"

By Friday morning at 7am, 48 of them went on a plane.

By Tuesday, all 108 volunteers were evacuated from Liberia.

There are a lot of people coming who had a lot of experience working with governments, working with partners, but not a lot of people who were willing or even if willing, had the experience working outside of Monrovia.

[narrator] Three Americans and over 30 local Liberian Peace Corps staff stayed on.

Many worked directly with the Center for Disease Control, which was struggling to educate remote communities on preventing the spread of Ebola.

CDC couldn't go in as Peace Corps did because they had no idea that the different entry points to actually talk to these people.

Peace Corps did because they've already been doing that for the last 60 years.

[narrator] The partnership between the CDC and the Peace Corps in Liberia reached over 1,000 villages, and over 40,000 people in rural areas.

Just being here, just remaining here, sent a big signal to a lot of people, even if there were just a few of them, but the fact that the institution as an institution still had presence when we knew a lot of other entities fled, sent a different message of friendship and support.

[narrator] During the Ebola epidemic, nearly 5,000 people died in Liberia and over 10,000 were infected.

Health care workers were on the front lines, and 8% of Liberia's doctors, nurses and midwives died of the disease.

In 2016, the World Health Organization announced that Liberia was Ebola-free, and the Peace Corps reopened its volunteer program.

Liberia's future right now, we think, is kind of hanging on science and technology, and we think that Peace Corps has a key part to play in that.

[Sirleaf] It's a global village.

Our own experience with a disease tells you that too crosses borders without a passport and there is no way in today's communication revolution that you can close the doors.

You hear a lot of talk about how we're becoming a globalized world, but the relationships people value in this country are local.

Family, city, state, country, they are local.

There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship.

We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.

[Cobbs] A lot of Americans don't own passports and haven't traveled abroad and don't expect to.

And so, it's a really good question, why do we need citizens who understand the outside world?

I found out one day, right, and then the next day, I'm leaving.

And then that Monday I woke up to a text message saying, "Pack."

Everything's chaos.

Everything's chaos.

Everyone's sad.

[McAndrew] So, to me it happened over the course of, it went from something my parents were obscurely worried about to, over the course of one week, a global evacuation.

[Sy] When I was telling people that I'm leaving, "I'm leaving.

"Tomorrow is my flight."

You know, people couldn't believe it.

They were just in denial, and I was like, "No, really, I'm leaving."

They weren't even crying.

They were just in shock.

I was hugging people, I was hugging these little girls who just looked at me and it was as if there was a ghost, like they couldn't even, there was no emotion behind them, because it was legit shock.

They were literally like, "What?"

Like, "What do you mean you're leaving tomorrow?"

[Sy] And then all the kids came to my house, all of them, and they, like, got in a circle, and they sang a song, like a goodbye song.

And then, some of them started crying, and then I started crying, and it was just a mess.

[McDonell] The thing that's kept me up, it still does, is just the thought of betrayal.

Like, I betrayed that trust.

[narrator] Like its three goals, the Peace Corps' mission of world peace and friendship hasn't changed since its founding, but the world has changed around it.

And as the agency enters the second half of its first century, nationalism is on the rise across the globe, and the Peace Corps is sending volunteers to serve in communities on the forefront of worldwide problems like climate change, disease, and mass migration.

Well, I'm glad that the Peace Corps still has the word peace in its name, which I think to me and other people, it may be a constant reminder that the United States of America, which has been involved in more wars, perhaps, than any other country on earth.

Since the Second World War we've been at war about 30 different times, still have a commitment to the overall concept and high ideals of peace.

[Tim Shriver] If you really want to build peace, what will do it?

If it's not human beings understanding each other and being less afraid of each other, what is it?

[Shalala] We're part of a global community, and therefore investing in the rest of the world.

But we're creating, with the Peace Corps, a new generation of friends, and a new generation of entrepreneurs, and people that are going to lift their own communities out of poverty and provide opportunities.

In Zulu, they define Ubuntu, which is humanity, like this.

They say "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" which means "A person is a person through other people."

[Wofford] The Peace Corps has made a notable start, and it's a start because so much still has to be done.

[Garcia] There was always this saying when we would get on a bus, or on a pickup truck, because we used to hitchhike a lot to try to get places, and it's called "ah noms."

It's right there.

We're almost there.

[Kennedy] All this will not be finished, but let us begin.