For more than 35 years, the Peace Corps has pursued John F. Kennedy's vision of helping people of the Third World build a better life. Yet with the exception of a few celebrations of its early years, little effort has been made to document that organization's history. Now a former deputy director of the Peace Corps offers a first-hand look at life in the agency—both in the field and at headquarters—and a radical reinterpretation of its history during the Nixon and Ford administrations. By the end of the 1960s, the Peace Corps was in disarray. Debate raged over its effectiveness, and many new volunteers embraced the antiestablishment behavior of the day's youth. When President Nixon appointed Joseph Blatchford as director in 1969, some insiders felt the agency's days were numbered—especially when Blatchford set about re-evaluating the Peace Corps' mission and initiated a program called New Directions to reorient its work. Many observers simply lump Blatchford's efforts with the failures and faults of the Nixon administration. David Searles, however, contends that the new director's initiatives revitalized the Peace Corps and made it a more relevant organization. Searles faithfully relates the history of these policies and their implementation in the field, drawing on his personal experience as country director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines. He shows how, despite constant carping from veterans of the early Peace Corps and much furor at headquarters, New Directions reenergized the agency and renewed and reaffirmed the Peace Corps' mission. Searles's descriptions of political maneuverings are incisively observed, and his firsthand characterizations of Peace Corps life richly impart the joys and frustrations of volunteer work. The Peace Corps Experience will give historians a new perspective on the agency and will also interest anyone who has served in the Peace Corps or who wants to understand it.

For over 50 years, more than 225,000 Peace Corps volunteers have been placed in over 140 countries around the world, with the goals of helping the recipient countries need for trained men and women, to promote a better understanding of Americans for the foreign nationals, and to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. The Peace Corps program, proposed during a 2 a.m. campaign stop on October 14, 1960 by America's Camelot, was part idealism, part belief that the United States could help Global South countries becoming independent. At the height of the Cold War, the US and USSR were racing each other to the moon, missiles in Turkey and in Cuba and walls in Berlin consumed the archrivals; sending American graduates to remote villages seemed ill-informed. Kennedy's Kiddie Korps was derided as ineffectual, the volunteers accused of being CIA spies, and often, their work made no sense to locals. The program would fall victim to the vagaries of global geopolitics: in Peru, Yawar Malku (Blood of the Condor), depicting American activities in the country, led to volunteers being bundled out unceremoniously; in Tanzania, they were excluded over Tanzania’s objection to the Vietnam War. Despite these challenges, the Peace Corps program shaped newly independent countries in significant ways: in Ethiopia they constituted half the secondary school teachers in 1961, in Tanzania they helped survey and build roads, in Ghana and Nigeria they were integral in the education systems, alongside other programs. Even in the Philippines, formerly a U.S. colony, Peace Corps volunteers were welcomed. Aside from these outcomes, the program had a foreign policy component, advancing U.S. interests in the recipient countries. Data shows that countries receiving volunteers demonstrated congruence in foreign policy preferences with the U.S., shown by voting behavior at the United Nations, a forum where countries’ actions and preferences and signaling is evident. Volunteer-recipient countries particularly voted with the U.S. on Key Votes. Thus, Peace Corps volunteers who function as citizen diplomats, helped countries shape their foreign policy towards the U.S., demonstrating the viability of soft power in international relations.

For almost 60 years, the United States government has sent more than 230,000 of its citizens abroad to serve as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) for two-year tours, often in very poor countries. As these Volunteers work in grassroots development, helping to build local capacity, they also serve as citizen diplomats and contribute to U.S. public diplomacy. The unique experience of the Peace Corps provides the Volunteers knowledge and a profound understanding of another country or region of the world. Volunteers continue to serve their country as they bring their experience and knowledge back to the United States. Many of them go on to serve in the State Department and in the United States Agency for International Development. Some have even risen to the top ranks of the Foreign Service. Thomas Nisley argues that the Peace Corps is an important tool of U.S. foreign policy that contributes on multiple levels. As these citizen diplomats do their work, they help to improve the popular image of the United States, contributing to U.S. “soft power.” Soft power is a co-optive power, getting others to want what you want. After a general exploration of how the Peace Corps contributes to U.S. foreign policy, the book takes a direct focus on Latin America. Dr. Nisley provides evidence, along with a theoretical explanation, that PCVs do indeed improve the popular perception of the United States in Latin America. He then examines three different periods in U.S foreign policy toward Latin America and shows how the Peace Corps made its contribution. Not all U.S. policy makers have equally recognized the role of the Peace Corps in U.S. foreign policy. Some have even dismissed it outright. This book argues that the Peace Corps plays an important role in U.S. foreign policy. Although the Peace Corps is much stronger today than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. foreign policy would be well served if the Peace Corps were further strengthen and expanded, not only in Latin America but in the world. We should considered the wider policy benefits of the Peace Corps.

President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. In the fifty years since, nearly 200,000 Americans have served in 139 countries, providing technical assistance, promoting a better understanding of American culture, and bringing the world back to the United States. In Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers, Angene Wilson and Jack Wilson, who served in Liberia from 1962 to 1964, follow the experiences of volunteers as they make the decision to join, attend training, adjust to living overseas and the job, make friends, and eventually return home to serve in their communities. They also describe how the volunteers made a difference in their host countries and how they became citizens of the world for the rest of their lives. Among many others, the interviewees include a physics teacher who served in Nigeria in 1961, a smallpox vaccinator who arrived in Afghanistan in 1969, a nineteen-year-old Mexican American who worked in an agricultural program in Guatemala in the 1970s, a builder of schools and relationships who served in Gabon from 1989 to 1992, and a retired office administrator who taught business in Ukraine from 2000 to 2002. Voices from the Peace Corps emphasizes the value of practical idealism in building meaningful cultural connections that span the globe.

March 1, 2021, Peace Corps turns sixty. Its mission—to teach a skill and to spread the Peace Corps brand of goodwill around the world—still resonates. In No Greater Service, author Alvin J. Hower highlights its relevance yesterday, today, and the years to come. This memoir offers a stirring, personal, vivid, and action-packed account of a Peace Corps volunteer’s remarkable life in the underserved areas of the southern Philippines. With curiosity, empathy, and wry humor, Hower creates a distinct Peace Corps photo memoir. An avid photographer, he produced more than 5,000 images of everyday people and the awe-inspiring beauty of a nation of 7,641 islands. He was a teacher and social worker in General Santos City, and a management consultant for a mission school in the remote mountains of Lake Sebu, Surallah, working and living with the indigenous T’boli people featured in the August 1971 National Geographic Magazine. No Greater Service also serves as a history of his host country, providing information about its complex customs and traditions as well as the notable stories of Filipinos he met and their fascinating updates fifty years later. At times hilarious, others sad and grim, it also shares a love story of his romantic alliance with a Filipina girl.

In an era filled with mistrust for big government and big business, Charles Goodsell goes against this grain to draw attention to public agencies admired for what they do and how well they do it. In his groundbreaking new book, Goodsell places renewed focus on organizational mission and its potential to be a strong energizing force in government—one that animates a workforce internally and attracts admiration and talent externally. He offers a normative template for the mystique that underlies this phenomenon and highlights—in six rich case studies—a driving sense of purpose, a cultural and motivational richness, and a capacity for tolerating dissent while still innovating and learning. Analyzing what works best (and what doesn’t), Goodsell provides a metric through which agency mystique can be evaluated and modeled. Goodsell’s fresh take on public agencies not only defines good public administration in terms of ethical conduct, constitutional accountability, and performance effectiveness, but argues that the field must add the crucial standard of institutional vitality.

Based on previously unused primary sources obtained from both sides of the Atlantic, this study provides a more fundamental, consistent, and balanced source-based assessment of the role of the U.S. Peace Corps across its entire existence in Africa. The study sheds light on a new and intriguing historical perspective of the Peace Corps’ meaning and significance. Though the main trust is Cameroon, the study offers a window to understanding Peace Corps performance in all of Africa, and the larger global community. It examines Volunteers’ service in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Guinea, showing how the agency transitioned from a Cold War agency to the Post-Cold War era, while asking important questions about the continuous relevance of Peace Corps in Africa. In addressing the topic, the book goes beyond the Peace Corps and delves into America’s "Achilles heels," which was the culture of anti-black racism, showing how it impacted U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. The book interrogates modernization theories showing how those ideas shaped the creation of the Peace Corps, but ultimately contributed to the agency’s problems. The book questions the Peace Corps’ effectiveness as a development organization and much more. Yet for all the agency’s problems, the Peace Corps served as a rite of passage for returned Volunteers to make everlasting contributions to American life and society. This book contributes to modern African and American studies, and to diplomatic history.