Former Senator Harris Wofford (PA-D) recalled that Kennedy wanted the Peace Corp to grow quickly, not stumble downhill from its initial years.
"He told me he wanted the Peace Corps to reach 100,000 a year. He said it would then be considered serious. In one decade, it would reach 1 million volunteers."
Why grow quickly and robustly? Because if we had done that vision, we would have not only contained scary "isms," we would have fostered understanding, education, and logical answers to world problems that would have made today's world safer and saner.
PCVs serving throughout the world, 1961-2013
(Image by PLEF People's Lobby Education Foundation) Details DMCA
Before John Kennedy got the time to retool America's public policies into a magical Camelot, bullets engulfed him and drained the light from America's charismatic hope challenging the future.
With his death we began doing one of the few things we do best, we rained bombs and war on friendly little brown people who admired America. After over one million war-related Vietnamese deaths and over $500,000,000,000 in war costs, we took our wounded vets home and watched over 50,000 of them become homeless PTSDers (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
By the latter half of the 1960s, the non-supplemental annual Vietnam War budget was about $16.26 billion to cover our 413,000+ soldiers, giving American taxpayers a short term cost of about $39,342 per soldier. At that time the annual cost to field a Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) was about $7,743.
Imagine if our public policy knowledge had been deep enough to not buy into the fear strategy that an "ism" was about to encircle us and destroy our way of life, and war was the only way to survive against a bearish, bungling centralized economy.
With Nixon in charge of the Vietnam War, we continued our march toward 50,000 + dead American soldiers. Then he began dismantling the infrastructure of JFK's envisioned Peace Corps that he saw as filled with too many hippie, BA generalists. In addition, the peaceful infrastructure that war-wizened Eisenhower envisioned was replaced with one tied to special interests and the military industrial estate of which he had warned us.
Did the human, physical, and financial resources spent on the Vietnam War halt the spread of crazy "isms" and address "needs"? Did it win hearts and minds?
Look at a few of today's troubled nations where, were we smart enough, we could have sent an army of do-gooders to exchange knowledge, spread understanding, educate potential crazies, and better address needs for the past 50+ years. Unfortunately, over those 50 years we didn't send an army, we sent a mere handful of platoons to too few troubled places.
Imagine if Congress, the President, and the electorate had been smart enough to use just 10% of that single year war budget (financed largely by LBJ's War Tax) and spent it instead on winning hearts and minds. Ten percent of that one year budget could have fielded 209,906 PCVs.
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