Yankee, Don't Go Home!

"Sargent Shriver," said Washington wags last week, "is only a corporal now." Shriver had not exactly been demoted, since he had been pleading for six months to be relieved of one of his two jobs. Finally, Lyndon Johnson decided that Shriver, who had been director of the Peace Corps since its inception in 1961, should now devote full time to the 16-month-old Office of Economic Opportunity, which he has also headed from the start.

After assigning Shriver to the war on poverty, the Great Society program nearest his own heart, Johnson named as Peace Corps director Jack Hood Vaughn, 45, former U.S. Ambassador to Panama and, since March 1965, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Before his ambassadorial assignment, Vaughn had directed the Peace Corps' Latin American program and will now, as Johnson said it, "return to his first love." 149 Victories. A slight (5 ft. 8 in., 150 lbs.), combative redhead, Vaughn was reared in Michigan, where he spent so much of his youth boxing that he did not graduate from high school until he was 20. He won the Michigan Golden Gloves as a 124-lb. featherweight, logged 149 victories in 172 amateur and professional fights--and was never knocked out (though his nose was broken three times, his jaw once).

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Vaughn enlisted in the Marine Corps, was twice wounded on Okinawa, and was eventually discharged as a captain. He earned his master's degree at the University of Michigan in 1941, then spent ten years in Bolivia, Costa Rica and Panama as a U.S. Information Service officer and coordinator of U.S. aid projects. In 1961, Shriver grabbed him. Says Vaughn: "The Peace Corps idea had great appeal to me, and the people I knew who were putting this idea into effect appealed to me even more."

Beekeepers & Fish Hatchers. Vaughn takes over the Peace Corps as it approaches its fifth birthday. Since its first year, when there were 526 volunteers in 13 countries, the corps has grown apace, now has 10,380 volunteers at work in 46 countries from Afghanistan to Venezuela. Its annual appropriation has risen from $30 million to this year's $114.1 million. Fifty percent of the Corpsmen are teachers, the rest are involved in rural and urban-community development, health projects, agriculture and public works.

Nonteaching volunteers wind up as beekeepers in Cameroon, accountants in Afghanistan, architects in Tunisia, fish hatchers in Togo. Two dozen men and women volunteers live in some of the world's most scabrous slums, the hillside favelas outside Rio de Janeiro, where they run medical clinics, teach and do social work. This month, when torrential rains and landslides claimed some 200 favelados' lives in Rio, the Corpsmen helped evacuate stricken families, set up emergency health stations, staffed mass vaccination centers.

Feather in the Cap. The Peace Corps today recruits 85% of all volunteers directly from college--and because U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of social protest, finds itself looking for a new kind of volunteer. "We don't want beatniks," says Deputy Director Warren Wiggins, "but we have nothing against beards." The "quiet activists" that Wiggins seeks "don't carry placards. They do things like tutoring Negro school kids. They work without fanfare." In Wiggins' view, the best volunteer has "a basic service motivation, a certain flexibility, a lack of racial prejudice, a certain degree of adventurousness, a sense of idealism."

Plainly, with Shriver's departure the first, handcrafted era of the Peace Corps is ended. Under his guidance, says Wiggins, "we have transited from a feather in the cap of America to a large-scale operation of sufficient human resources to be of consequence in the changing nations." Now, adds Vaughn, "its character is established. My job is to help it continue to do well." But Vaughn's task may prove tougher than it looks.

Innate Altruism. Like any other five-year-old, the Peace Corps is experiencing growing pains. It suffers from sibling rivalry with VISTA, the domestic poverty corps directed by Shriver. Despite intensive recruiting on 1,500 U.S. campuses, an advertising campaign mounted at cost (and sometimes too cutely) by a major agency, a whopping 42,068 applicants--not to mention the added inducement of a two-year deferment for draft-age men--the Corps in 1965 fell nearly 1,000 short of its 9,500-volunteer goal. One reason is that today's college student tends increasingly to postpone any job commitment and is often able to discover foreign lands on his own.

The truth is that joining the Peace Corps no longer has quite the glamor it once had--or seemed to have. As Samuel Babbitt, a former Peace Corps staffer and now assistant dean of the Yale Graduate School, points out, the Corps no longer holds for potential volunteers the "tremendous emotional response keyed off by the hero worship of President Kennedy."

Nonetheless, the Peace Corps still appeals to the innate altruism of American youth, and virtually every country to which volunteers have been assigned has welcomed them, asked for more and often given singular send-offs to homebound Corpsmen who have completed their tours of duty. In a remote settlement in Southern India recently, a young Corpsman announced that he would soon be returning to the U.S. to get married. Distraught villagers tried to induce him to stay by offering him anything he might want--including his pick of the local maidens.

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