The Peace Corps' Secret

originally published in The Washington Post on March 17, 1999 by Michael Kelly (the first American Journalist Killed in Iraq).


The Peace Corps is modest; the legislation establishing the agency required it to perform only three tasks: "to help the peoples" of host countries, "to help promote a better understanding on the part of the peoples served, and a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people." Done, almost by definition.

The Peace Corps is, on America's behalf, self-interested. In his 1960 Cow Palace speech proposing the Corps, John F. Kennedy made repeatedly clear that the primary strategic function of Corps volunteers was not to altruistically help the world's suffering poor but to serve as anti-Soviet propagandists by deed for the American way.

The Peace Corps is, on its own behalf, not self-interested, at least by bureaucratic standards. Its charter forbids its officials to serve more than five years, which forces the agency to remain young and active, and discourages careerists. This structurally enforced ethos attracts thousands of people each year to volunteer for two years of hard, dangerous work (220 volunteers have died in service).

The Peace Corps is subversive. It attracts idealists and free spirits, and it does not tell them that they are to advance American foreign policy. But they are, and they do, because they think they are not so doing. "Of course 90 percent of Peace Corps alumni will assure you that they were never, ever an arm of American foreign policy," says Carroll. "Which simply proves that the whole thing works: It is an arm of American foreign policy precisely in as much as it is not an arm of American foreign policy."

A creation of government that actually understands and exploits human nature. What an idea.