The Peace Corps originated not as a campaign promise or a diplomatic ploy but in a burst of global humanitarianism. Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and Japan dispatched contingents of young, secular missionaries to the Third World at about the same time that presidential candidate John F. Kennedy proposed the Corps in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. This “parallel spirit” emanated from new truths that appealed especially to the young (p. 8). In the wake of the Holocaust and Sputnik, many rejected narrow national self-interest for a universalist commitment to world community. From Albert Camus’s novels, students learned that mass conformity could not prevent individuals from seizing responsibility through a heroic, existential act. In Australia, Canada, and Britain, volunteers launched their own programs and then shamed their governments into supporting them.

The United States, of course, spun these ideals in its own way. Universalism often sounded like Americanism writ globally, and faith in youth and action mixed easily with criticism of stodgy bureaucracy. With The Ugly American rather than The Plague for a script, the Peace Corps cast itself as the adversary of the technical, infrastructure-building, big-money approach to development that characterized U.S. programs from Point IV to the Agency for International Development (AID). Sargent Shriver, the first director, took careful precautions against the contaminations of professionalism or national interest. The preferred recruit was an “AB generalist” whose qualifications were enthusiasm and a can-do attitude. Shriver’s insistence that the Peace Corps have no connections to other U.S. programs probably planted the unshakable suspicion that it was a front for the CIA.

Above all the Peace Corps was sincere. Shriver hung Peanuts cartoons in his office. Volunteers agonized over whether they ought to pound their own cassava rather than paying to have it pounded for them. Recruits learned in orientation that Peruvian villagers could be motivated by the example of an outsider’s sacrifices, so when opposition proved stubborn volunteers blamed themselves. Young & Rubicam created advertising campaigns that celebrated the Corps’s comfort with self-doubt (“The toughest job you’ll ever love”; “Make America a better place. Leave the country”). The United States had its own problems, as one ad observed, “in Watts, in Detroit, in Appalachia, on its Indian reservations” (p. 131). The administration might have a credibility gap, but not this agency.

Still the ironies crept in. The Corps carried the Kennedy legacy, but Lyndon Johnson was its real patron. Johnson, whose offer to electrify the Mekong Valley “gave help a bad name” (p. 210), befriended the Corps when Kennedy abandoned it, squired it through Congress, and established it as a permanent, independent agency, all the while graciously dedicating it as “a living memorial” (p. 186) to his slain predecessor. The Corps made its biggest push in defiantly neutralist Ghana. Kwame Nkrumah shut out AID but welcomed volunteers as teachers in a crash education program. But while the Peace Corps “had few exact ways to measure its usefulness or to predict the long-range consequences of its intervention” (p. 158), industrialist Henry J. Kaiser unmistakably transformed Ghana with just the kind of technical ugly Americanism volunteers disdained: an aluminum smelter powered by the huge Akosombo hydroelectric dam. Nkrumah snubbed Malcolm X in his rush to meet Kaiser at the airport.

Cobbs Hoffman notes that the founders were never sure that the Peace Corps could or should change the lives of poor people in host countries. Jawaharlal Nehru assured Shriver that “young Americans would learn a great deal in this country,” but, he added, “I hope you and they will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came” (p. 156). Breakthroughs were few, despite an impatience with incrementalism programmed into the agency’s mission. Shriver began a tradition of explaining this shortcoming by asserting that the Peace Corps was always more about creating citizens than curing poverty. Volunteers learned civic virtue on the job, and brought that spirit home to America. Cobbs Hoffman accepts this explanation, noting that “self-understanding rather than cynicism should lead us to acknowlege that the Peace Corps did at least as much for the United States as it did for any country in which its volunteers served” (p. 5). But cynics might reply that this rationale was heard in the United States more often than abroad, where the Peace Corps was advertised as a development program.

Although they prized their bureaucratic autonomy, Peace Corps administrators obeyed the fashions of development theory as slavishly as their AID counterparts. Community development, a style of intervention that involved Taylorizing villages by introducing small efficiencies in the component parts of rural life – a better well here, a credit union there – became an early orthodoxy. Volunteers strained, and nearly always failed, to devise some meaningful project. Meanwhile, teachers, busy and appreciated in their African schools, were viewed at headquarters as slackers unless they built an irrigation complex in their spare time. The Corps joined the Green Revolution in the 1970s, sponsored Small Enterprise Development in the 1980s, and pushed “sustainable” development in the 1990s. In each case, development strategies justified the agency’s mission in Washington while adding to the confusion of volunteers and often preventing poor countries from getting the help they wanted.

Perhaps inevitably the spirit of the Peace Corps returned to haunt Shriver’s heirs. After My Lai, volunteers could no longer be certain of America’s mission or their own ability to be agents of change. Former volunteers attacked the agency as an instrument for the pacification of the Third World. In May 1970 while Richard Nixon plotted to abolish the agency, a group of returned volunteers occupied the headquarters building and unfurled a Viet Cong flag. Nixon merged the Corps into a new agency called ACTION, but Watergate and a charismatic administrator, Joseph Blatchford, prevented further damage. The original ideals were now gone, Cobbs Hoffman contends, swept away by bureaucratic compromise and post-Vietnam disillusionment.

To write of sincerity, heroism, and love as part of a U.S. foreign policy initiative is to defy an ironic sensibility characteristic of historical and perhaps all academic writing. Professors value detatchment, the authors of the Port Huron Statement complained, “passion is called unscholastic.” Cobbs Hoffman defies this convention by accepting at face value volunteers’ own interpretations of their experience and their place in history. Volunteers speak of how their work reaffirmed their faith in their country’s capacity for goodness and built bonds of solidarity that transcended divisions of nationality, power, and wealth. The Corps was imperfect but genuinely uncynical. Its “spirit contrasted sharply with much foreign policy whose impact was far greater, but it was nonetheless real” (p. 259).

But the sharpness of this contrast comes from taking some stories at face value and not others. Johnson’s Vietnam policy, and his offer of a TVA for the Mekong, were not motivated by self-interest or racism, but as Lloyd Gardner has shown, by the same universalist impulses that inspired the Peace Corps. As Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby observed, the men who ran the war were “not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.” Cobbs Hoffman’s contention that the Peace Corps was a “movement,” like SDS or SNCC, overlooks the importance of opposition to movement politics. Peace Corps volunteers made sacrifices, some lost their lives, but their political act did not presuppose the hostility of the majority. Their choice of cooperation over confrontation placed them closer to Johnson than to Fannie Lou Hamer. This, too, was a spirit of the sixties, but not the spirit.

The Peace Corps was a development agency, and development fuses self-interest and altruism in its double meaning. Is development simply the expansion of the market, or is it an effort to furnish the victims of the market with a measure of justice and decency? “Even if these two levels can be distinguished in theory,” Gilbert Rist warns, “they are closely bound up with each other and make it possible to switch in a flash between solution and problem, antidote and poison, hope and reality.” The secular messianism of volunteers invests the slogans of development economics with moral urgency. More than a fig leaf to conceal the intrusions of trade and investment, at some times and to some people it is the only justification for such intrusions. Volunteers’ compassion, sacrifice, and even opposition affirm the paradigm. As the postmodernists say, power (or in this case cynicism) does not reside in governments, or corporations, or policies; it’s in the discourse.