So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (21 page)

Then followed for me a moment of sheer terror. The president—my president—reached under the table and pressed the second of what appeared to be a series of call buttons. “My God,” I thought, “the floor is going to open up under me like in a James Bond movie. Or maybe he’s called for the bombing of—what? A country, perhaps, or maybe just my home later that evening.” I was then relieved, however, when a waiter appeared with 7UPs for him and Valenti, and a closer glance at the buttons revealed that his alternatives were Coke and Pepsi.

He then turned to Moyers and told him if the “sniping at American policy” by the Peace Corps volunteers didn’t stop “immediately,” he would instruct his ambassador in Santo Domingo to send all the volunteers home at once.

Thus it was that I caught a plane to the Dominican Republic later that afternoon, with a hastily assembled suitcase, an instant visa obtained by Moyers, and some thought as to how I could keep the volunteers on the island without compromising the Peace Corps’ independence and its freedom from U.S. foreign policy—and my own increasingly weakened sense of my integrity. It therefore turned out to be most fortuitous that the Peace Corps volunteer sent to the airport to meet me in Santo Domingo was Kirby Jones.

Kirby was then in his early twenties and a real leader of the roughly one hundred rebellious volunteers, working closely with their Dominican counterparts, whether nurses, social workers, teachers, or even laborers, and, pursuant to the best Peace Corps traditions, living among them and sharing their lives and dreams. And the volunteers were, in a phrase later to become better known, “community organizers.” Under the circumstances then, with a popular rebellion gaining strength from the true bases of Dominican society, supported by the enlisted and junior officer ranks of the armed forces, to restore a legitimately elected government and take the country back from the vicious and rapacious hands of those who had despoiled the country for decades, there was no doubt the volunteers supported the
Constitucionalistas,
no matter that their own country was at least nominally on the side of the generals.

Mostly via Kirby, I succeeded in getting the Peace Corps volunteers to curb their comments to the press. The main goal of my trip was easily achieved. The volunteers quickly understood President Johnson’s position; he simply could not stand for “official” Americans challenging—boldly and accurately—his rhetoric about why the marines were in the Dominican Republic. The administration spoke with one voice: “The Constitutionalist rebels were originally well-motivated, but their movement had been taken over by Communists—worse, Castroite Communists—and the Marines were sent to shield Americans from violence and to enforce a cease-fire so that ‘decent’ Dominicans could organize elections and install an acceptable regime until they could be held.” Even though the volunteers shared none of these absurd views and knew, to the contrary, the marines were there to suppress and put down a rebellion in favor of democracy, they understood that officially the United States could not tolerate opposing views from other Americans, and so they agreed not to talk to the press while meanwhile assuring their comrades among the local populations that there were indeed Americans who shared their goals. Above all, the volunteers, who had made good friends in the urban barrios where they were working, simply did not want to go home with the job barely half done and accepted my assurance they could stay, continue their work without interruption, and continue to express their views—just not to the U.S. media.

But the trip had a huge impact on me. I suppose one learns at a relatively early age that every country—especially one’s own—tells useful lies from time to time. But one night, early in my trip to the Dominican Republic, I was in my hotel room talking to my wife on the telephone, and she told me that Walter Cronkite and the other major television network anchors were reporting, literally as she spoke to me, official U.S. government statements that the United States had set up a line of troops to keep the two sides apart and would not let the Dominican forces in to defeat the rebels—that the United States was maintaining a cease-fire. Well, I had seen the U.S. troops waving the Dominican tanks and soldiers through to attack the rebels—I knew that what the U.S. government was saying was a flat, total lie. Of course, some of the good American reporters in the Dominican Republic were saying this, but to see it for myself came as quite a shock. That summer of 1965, furthermore, was the time of the first major infusion of U.S. combat troops into South Vietnam, close to 200,000. I didn’t make a direct connection right away, but I began to figure this capacity to lie in the Pentagon, the White House, and others came from feeling it was necessary to convince right-wingers of our eagerness to resist “extremists.”

Until this time, while I had not paid much attention to Vietnam, I had seen anti–Vietnam War people as mostly a bunch of crazy, leftist kids. Indeed, when country director in Peru, I had sent volunteers a memo telling them they couldn’t have beards, that it wasn’t the right image of Americans and was in fact the image of Fidel Castro. (Fortunately, several volunteers convinced me I had no power to issue such an order, that it was a civil liberties issue.) But with my Dominican Republic experience, I began to think, “Maybe the government is also lying about Vietnam.” The big difference for my generation was television. We could
see
we were being lied to.

“If we’re lying about that,” I thought to myself, “why not at least think about the possibility we’re lying about Vietnam as well?” So I began with rethinking, and reexamining, the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” and its subsequent resolution, and before long I was a strong opponent of the war in Vietnam.

*   *   *

During the previous summer, I and other Peace Corps “veterans” had been invited to speak to the Peace Corps staff in Washington, D.C. I didn’t prepare a talk but, as is almost always my style, sorted through ideas mentally and spoke without notes. Someone in the room had a tape recorder, and a written transcript of the talk was published in a Peace Corps in-house journal.

Much of this speech would be unsayable, even unthinkable, by today’s standards. A government official saying such things would be summoned by a congressional committee—at a minimum. But standards and the atmosphere were different in the mid-1960s. Back then, hardly anyone noticed.

Among my observations in that speech to the Peace Corps were the following:

A prominent political leader of a Latin American country, who has become known as a rather pro-Western leftwing figure on a continent not known for pro-Western leftwing leaders, commented to a U.S. ambassador recently that “you Americans are prisoners of your own language.”

He said that when “in my country we raise candidates or leaders, and we announce to our people during election campaigns that we are anti-capitalists, everyone in the United States assumes that we are, therefore, unacceptable in your terms.” He said, “But in your country, which is, if you should care to use the term—but you can’t because it has been pre-empted by others—a people’s democracy, capitalism works in a particular way. Since the majority of your people have plenty of the goods of life and participate in the social, economic and political life of the country, you assume that your system is called capitalism, and you’re ready to endorse that. But in our country,” said this Latin American leader, “what is called ‘capitalism’ has been practiced for a century or more. The result of it is misery, hunger, non-existent housing—or housing which Americans would not regard as housing because it is a structure only and lacks the most elemental of public service—water, electricity and perhaps some elementary form of sewerage disposal. So people of my country are to be excused if they do not embrace the word ‘capitalism,’ whatever it means, because the system under which they’re operating has not given them any of the goods of life. Indeed, it has put most of them at a level of their society below that at which they were a hundred or two hundred years ago.”

It may sound strange when I say that our Peace Corps mission is essentially revolutionary. The ultimate aim of community development is nothing less than a complete change, reversal—or a revolution if you wish—in the social and economic patterns of the countries to which we are accredited.

I think it would be helpful if we understand how it is that 95, 98 or 99 per cent of the people in Latin America live: in a condition worse than that of anyone in the United States (with the possible exception of some original citizens now on Indian reservations).

 … [A] community development effort in Latin America is an international sit-in. We’re calling attention to situations by being in a place where, obviously, in class terms, we do not belong.

When Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church, goes out, as he did a year ago, to Glen Echo Amusement Park [in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.] and sits in a Ferris wheel with a friend who is a minister and a Negro, it is incongruous. People say, “What is he doing there? He doesn’t belong in an amusement park.” Obviously, he doesn’t, and if he had his druthers he’d never go. There are certainly better things to do on a Sunday afternoon than to get ill on a Ferris wheel. But there he was, and the result was that people looked and noticed and they said, “By God, that place is segregated.” … And that’s what the Peace Corps does.

I went on to explain how the work of Peace Corps volunteers resembled the work of voter registration volunteers in the Deep South, emphasizing the goal was a shift in “political power.” Once local people are empowered, I told the headquarters staffers,

the work of the Peace Corps volunteer is practically done because you cannot control it from there on. Democracy, after all, does not guarantee good government, only representative government. Calvin Coolidge was once told, “There are a lot of SOBs in Congress, Mr. President, and we ought to do something about it.” Coolidge thought about it for a moment and said, “Well, there are a lot of them in the country—and they’re entitled to representation.”

The most eventful moment in my Peace Corps career might have come as I was planning to leave.

Sarge’s flat rule was five years in and out, and I figured I’d return to California. Maybe I’d teach or get back into politics. But in any event, I was happy about leaving Washington, D.C. For a few months in 1964, I was part of a small team that was helping Sarge set up the Office of Economic Opportunity, quickly known in the press and by the public as the War on Poverty (Sarge, who had presided over the creation of the Peace Corps, was doing the same for the OEO).

The conversations were often thrilling because we felt, with justification, that the ideas and programs we envisioned could actually get through Congress and receive adequate funding. My biggest contribution probably was naming the Job Corps; “job” to me was, and still is, the best word in the English language. The Job Corps is still in place and has been one of the federal government’s most consistently successful efforts to reduce youth unemployment.

I knew that a D.C. “bug” exists, that many people who come to the U.S. capital intending to stay only a short while end up never leaving. I had no reason to believe that would include me. Then, one day, while I was still working at the Peace Corps, my phone rang. I picked it up, and what seemed to be the voice of Robert Kennedy said, “Is this Frank Mankiewicz?”—pronounced correctly. I thought it was Dick Tuck, a friend who ran for the California State Senate in the 1950s and was famous for his sense of humor. Dick’s campaign slogan for the empty, concretized Los Angeles River, for example, had been “Fill it with water, or paint it blue.” Tuck had befriended Robert F. Kennedy somewhere along the way and was, by the mid-1960s, quite admired for the accuracy of his RFK impersonations. “Nice job, Dick,” I said, after the voice kept insisting it was indeed Robert F. Kennedy calling, “but what are you calling about?”

Once RFK convinced me, by pointing out his voice was too accurate to be an imitation, our conversation got under way. It seems that RFK, newly elected to the U.S. Senate, was about to take a fact-finding trip through Latin America and hoped to spend a few days in Peru. RFK said some friends had told him I knew a lot about Peru; would I give him an opinion of the State Department’s recommendations for the trip?

The proposed schedule was a classic State Department tour for visiting American VIPs—morning with U.S. kids at the American School, lunch with the Peruvian-U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a visit to some USAID projects and a favored American hospital in the afternoon, and then a reception and dinner at the embassy. I chuckled, as did he, and I asked, “Why are you going to Lima, Senator? You could accomplish all that staying right here in Washington.” He laughed and agreed and asked me for an alternative schedule. I proposed time in the
barriadas,
where millions of Lima’s poor lived in improvised, self-built shack cities, a visit to the University of San Marcos, a hotbed of left-wing anti-American sentiment—much of it justified—and a visit to the U.S.-owned copper mine where workers were exploited. Senator Kennedy thanked me and invited me to his home for a meeting with some fellow Latin Americanists the next day.

Meeting at Hickory Hill was a good crowd of Kennedy people who had been active in Latin American–U.S. affairs, many of whom I had met during my Peace Corps years. We briefed Robert Kennedy well for the forthcoming trip. He even invited me to join him on the journey, an invitation I felt I had to decline, because I was, at least technically, working for the LBJ administration and RFK had started to appear insurrectionist, if not revolutionary, in terms of Johnson’s role as leader of the Democratic Party and of the country.

That impression was only heightened at a State Department briefing a few days later. I was present as the Peace Corps regional director, along with my counterparts from USAID, the CIA, the armed services, and the various State Department regional and country desk officers for the countries RFK was to visit.