Peace Corps training center in Hawaii
From the presidencies of John F. Kennedy through Donald Trump, the Peace Corps has dispatched 200,000-plus Americans to 140 countries. Now, with the overseas aid agency’s future more uncertain than ever, former volunteer Alana DeJoseph has produced and directed a full-length documentary film about it.
If the Peace Corps played a political role during the Cold War, it was to spread the free market gospel in post-communist Eastern Europe.
A Towering Task, The Story of the Peace Corps, brings the Peace Corps’ history alive with archival footage, news clips, and original interviews. It features President Jimmy Carter (whose mother aided leprosy patients in India), Maria Shriver (whose father was the agency’s first head), Congressman Joe Kennedy III (JFK’s grand-nephew and a volunteer in the Dominican Republic), Oscar-nominated director Taylor Hackford (who served in Bolivia), Congresswoman Donna Shalala (who constructed an agricultural college in Iran), and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The 107-minute nonfiction film is narrated by four-time Oscar nominee and two-time Golden Globe winner actress Annette Bening.
A Towering Task also incorporates canny pop culture references, notably the Peace Corps’ snazzy PSAs voiced by Harry Belafonte: “It’s the toughest job you’ll ever love.” The agency was created by President John F. Kennedy, who was inspired by a 1958 novel, The Ugly American, which deals with establishing an international entity to counterbalance communist influence in the developing world.
When Kennedy advocated the concept during his 1960 presidential campaign, GOP candidate Richard Nixon condemned it as a way for young men to dodge the draft. As President, Kennedy tasked his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to launch it by March 1, 1961, under an executive order. For many Americans today, the Peace Corps embodies the public service and youthful idealism that JFK represents.
DeJoseph, an award-winning filmmaker, has not produced a hagiography of “Kennedy’s kids.” A Towering Task reveals tensions between the do-gooder impulse of Peace Corps volunteers who joined with a missionary-like zeal and policymakers’ Machiavellian maneuvering to use the agency as an instrument of foreign policy.
In its early days, some leftists scorned the Peace Corps as “the velvet glove of imperialism” aimed at winning hearts and minds during the Cold War. In the Dominican Republic, the Corps played a unique role as a go-between during the 1965 U.S. invasion, but the conflict over the volunteers’ role erupted during the Vietnam War. In 1970, the Committee of Returned Volunteers occupied the agency’s Washington, D.C., office and flew the Viet Cong flag.
Interviewed for the film, former Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, who volunteered in the Dominican Republic and quotes Fidel Castro telling him, “I never found one CIA agent in the Peace Corps—believe me, I tried.”
When Nixon became President, he tried phasing out the Peace Corps by making it part of a larger bureaucracy, triggering a decades-long struggle for the agency’s independence. During Reagan’s presidency, Corps members became embroiled in Central America’s civil wars, and aided in famine relief in Ethiopia.
If the Peace Corps played a political role during the Cold War, it was to spread the free market gospel in post-communist Eastern Europe. As volunteers explained in Elizabeth Cobbs’s All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, “This is how you do capitalism.”
Although A Towering Task was shot before the current pandemic, a Trump speech emphasizing his “America first” ideology bodes ill for the outward-looking, foreign assistance-oriented agency with allegedly altruistic motives.
Jason M DeWitt
Director Alana DeJoseph
I emailed DeJoseph about the Peace Corps’s current predicament during the coronavirus pandemic. DeJoseph, who served in Mali, replied: “With all volunteers evacuated for the first time in the Peace Corps’s history, the agency is in completely new territory. Evacuated volunteers have closed their service.”
DeJoseph explains that in “the best-case scenario, the agency will have to wait until it is safe to deploy volunteers again and then rebuild.” In the worst case, this could be seen as a good time to kill off the Peace Corps completely.
“At a time when the global community is facing global problems that don’t respect borders (pandemics, climate change), when we have grown more fearful of each other, but have to work more closely with each other than ever,” she writes.
A Towering Task, The Story of the Peace Corps will have a virtual theatrical release on May 22.