The Newest Frontier

Telephones jangled, the switchboard blinked, and drifts of incoming mail accumulated on the desks. Workmen pushed office furniture around the corridors. The scene, in a suite of offices in Washington's International Cooperation Administration Building, was chaotic. Earlier in the week, President Kennedy had announced the formation of his Peace Corps of volunteer workers in underdeveloped countries (TIME, Feb. 24), and the half-organized headquarters was engulfed with requests for information, applications from would-be recruits. In other parts of the capital, the story was the same: Congressmen reported a deluge of mail; the White House was hard pressed to answer 5,000 letters. The Peace Corps had captured the public imagination as had no other single act of the Kennedy Administration.

Pilot Program. At his press conference, the President announced the establishment of a pilot program, by executive order, financed by unallocated foreign aid funds and directed by his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver. Simultaneously he sent a special message to Congress, asking for legislation to organize the corps on a permanent basis under the supervision of the State Department. "This corps," he said, "will be a pool of trained men and women sent overseas by the U.S. Government or through private institutions and organizations to help foreign governments meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower." By the end of the year, the President hoped to have 500 to 1,000 trained corpsmen working abroad.

Initially, the Peace Corps program will be restricted to sanitation and agricultural projects and the teaching of English as a secondary language. Ultimately, Shriver and Kennedy envisage a corps of several thousand skilled Americans working on such diverse projects as vocational guidance taught by Swahili-speaking American instructors in Tanganyika and the eradication of malaria led by bright young American doctors on the ''fever coast" of Central America.

Accent on Youth. It will be an elite corps, with no room for capricious adventurers, Kennedy emphasized. Recruits will be screened, and only the most skilled, emotionally cool and dedicated workers will be selected. Corpsmen will serve without salary, will live inconspicuously. Their only compensation will be the satisfaction of doing a humanitarian job in the cause of peace, and the enrichment of living in foreign lands and working on a professional level that would be unthinkable for most people until they were 40 or more.

With more than 100,000 applications anticipated in the first six months, Shriver & Co. expect no difficulty in finding the talent they seek. Although there will be no age restrictions, the accent will be on youth, since young men and women between 21 and 30 have more time and fewer responsibilities than older applicants. Men eligible for military draft will be deferred until Peace Corps service is completed, but the Peace Corps will not be a substitute for the draft.

Inevitably, the corps was called to service amid a chorus of skepticism ("Albert Schweitzer's Salvation Army," cracked one cynic). But the first wave of applicants were not bothered by the critics or the technicalities. They just wanted in-Forest Evashevski, recently retired football coach at the University of Iowa, was ticketed for a headquarters job; Olympic Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson and Dr. Howard Rusk, chairman of New York University's Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, were among those volunteering to help where they could.

Sally Bowles, 22, daughter of Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, and Nancy Gore, 23, a daughter of Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore, pitched in to help at Sarg Shriver's bedlamic headquarters. Neither had yet been put on any payroll. "But." said Sally, "I'm happy."

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