The Idea That Wouldn’t Die

Seven Defining Moments in Peace Corps History

Let’s face it: Peace Corps has seen better days.

In the past year, six programs have announced closures or canceled cohorts, including South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia—a host country since 1962—and dozens of staff positions have been cut both at headquarters and abroad. The agency, once firmly independent, has seen the State Department and Congress pledge closer oversight. Recruitment is down, with more than half (55 percent) of available Volunteer placements going unfilled, compared with just 6 percent in 2019.

But before we declare the end of JFK’s bold experiment, consider another truth in this 65-year story: Peace Corps has already faced more than one existential threat, and has always come out in one piece. Indeed, it has often emerged even stronger.

As we look back at the first 65 years of this American institution, we will tell the Peace Corps story in seven parts, defined not by decade but by periods shaped by international geopolitics, presidential administrations, global health crises, and even the RPCV community itself.

In assessing where Peace Corps stands today, the future of the agency seems more uncertain than ever. But uncertainty does not mean obsolescence. For more than six decades, Peace Corps has embodied some of America’s most enduring ideals—volunteerism, civic responsibility, global engagement, and a belief in the power of person-to-person connection. Those values remain woven into the fabric of American life, giving lasting relevance to the Peace Corps mission and bolstering confidence in its future.

CHAPTER 1 | America’s First Youth Movement (1960–1966)

When John F. Kennedy first challenged American college students to volunteer abroad in 1960, it wasn’t as part of a carefully managed presidential campaign. He did it off the cuff, in the middle of the night, because, when he arrived at the University of Michigan at 2 a.m. after a long day of campaigning, he found 10,000 college students waiting for him, eager to serve an inspiring leader who offered a new perspective on what it meant to be an American.

Among those students was Judy Guskin, who knew immediately that it was a call the students would answer.

“Kennedy told us that world peace was in our hands,” she remembered. “The world was emerging from colonialism, there were 34 new countries, and we wanted to show that we were committed to direct participation in the betterment of underdeveloped communities around the world.”

Guskin and her colleagues organized a letter-writing campaign to make that commitment clear, leading to her unofficial title as “the mother of the Peace Corps.”

“The efforts of people like Judy Guskin and her husband were critical—I mean, letters poured in to the White House for this,” said historian Elizabeth Cobbs, who wrote All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, the only comprehensive book about the history of Peace Corps at the time it was published in 1998.

For Cobbs, that grassroots origin story is what makes Peace Corps the first example of a distinctly youth-led movement in the United States during a decade that would see continued activism.

“It was such an important time,” Cobbs said, “when there was a profound worldwide impulse to be better, and a reaction in the U.S. to racism and decolonization.”

Peace Corps arrived right on time.

CHAPTER 2 | The Bubble Bursts (1967–1978)

When JFK was assassinated in 1963, Peace Corps found a friend in his vice president Lyndon Johnson, but that support vanished with the next administration. Even before he took office in 1969, Richard Nixon publicly expressed skepticism about the Peace Corps, seeing it as a bastion for radical activists and draft dodgers.

His disdain would only be reinforced by the May 1970 sit-in by the Committee of Returned Volunteers, which occupied a wing of the Peace Corps headquarters building for 36 hours and hung a Viet Cong flag from a window as a statement against the Vietnam War.

By July 1971, Nixon had folded the agency into a new body, ACTION, while slashing its budget, cutting 100 staff members, and planning a further 33 percent cut the following year. He pulled back once he recognized the bad PR that would result from calling thousands of Volunteers back from the field. In any case, Nixon soon had other matters to occupy his attention in 1972.

“Watergate saved the Peace Corps,” Cobbs plainly said.

CHAPTER 3 | Heart of the Nation, Butt of the Joke (1979–1991)

The post-Nixon era of Peace Corps, defined by its longest-serving director, Loret Ruppe, was a quiet time during which the agency got back on its feet. Its steadily increasing budget largely kept up with inflation, Volunteer counts stabilized, and independence was fully restored by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

What most defined this era, though, was the cementing of Peace Corps’ place in the American identity.

In 1985, two of the era’s biggest comic actors, Tom Hanks and John Candy, satirized the program in the movie Volunteers, cementing some tropes in the public consciousness (the naive idealist, played by Rita Wilson; the overeager do-gooder, played by Candy; and the privileged rich guy escaping responsibility back home, played by Hanks). Still, the gentle mockery showed how deeply entrenched Peace Corps now was in American popular culture.

Not long after, in Dirty Dancing, one of the top-grossing films of 1987, the main character, Baby (played by Jennifer Grey), plans to join Peace Corps, a fact used as shorthand to establish her high moral character.

The agency began to shed its political edge and came to represent America itself.

CHAPTER 4 | New Maps, New Missions (1992–2009)

The fall of the Soviet Union and the decolonization of Eastern Europe, which began in 1992, reaffirmed Peace Corps’ important role in U.S. foreign policy. A 10 percent increase in the agency’s 1993 budget led to 10 new programs in Eastern Europe, with still more opening in other regions.

But just as the world was becoming wider, it was also becoming darker: The emergence of the AIDS epidemic posed a threat both to Volunteers and their host-country partners. The first antiretroviral drugs didn’t come to market until the mid-1990s, and even then, they were not readily available in most of the places Peace Corps operated. Carol Bellamy, the first RPCV to lead the agency when she became director in 1993, quickly recognized the threat.

“I had come in planning to reduce the number of teaching assignments in places where we had been training teachers for decades,” Bellamy said. “But we started hearing from countries, particularly in Africa, where they were losing more and more teachers to HIV/AIDS. So we had to do a 180-degree turn on that.”

Bellamy also had to address the risk to Volunteers, introducing new training and resources to help reduce their chance of exposure to the virus.

It was an issue that would become a major initiative of Crisis Corps, later renamed Peace Corps Response, which was created in 1996 as a rapid-response version of Peace Corps that placed returned Volunteers in short-term assignments, leveraging the skills of a robust RPCV community that numbered around 150,000 at the time.

By the turn of the century, Peace Corps had found its feet once again, with more Volunteers—around 7,268—serving in the field than at any point since the 1960s. Peace Corps was meeting the challenges of a changing world.

And then a new shock to the global order arrived when al-Qaida flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, sparking two major U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

By then, Peace Corps had reduced its presence in the Middle East down to two programs, Jordan and Morocco, though when the attacks took place the agency still operated in many Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia.

Jody Olsen, who served as deputy director from 2002 to 2009, remembers that period in her memoir, A Million Miles: “The 9/11 tragedy changed the Peace Corps,” she wrote. “Recognition seeped in slowly over the year following as fear of more attacks on Americans became direct challenges to Volunteers being safe anywhere in the world.”

The director at the time, Gaddi Vasquez, had to do what several directors before him had been called to do when he was confirmed in 2002: reshape the organization to meet the needs of a changed world.

“Safety and security rose immediately to the absolute top of the list,” he said. “That led to the establishment of the Volunteer Safety and Security office as soon as I started my role.”

The new team was soon put to the test with the evacuation of Volunteers from Côte d’Ivoire following a failed coup attempt and growing instability in neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Vasquez knew that they had to get it right.

“The safety and security aspects were absolutely critical,” he said, “because I wanted to give people in the field and those contemplating serving in the Peace Corps a sense of confidence and trust.”

Vasquez also invested in recruitment, enlisting the help of Hollywood celebrities like Forest Whitaker and Matthew McConaughey (relive his classic 2003 “Would It Be Crazy?” radio spot on YouTube).

The ads helped, and by the time the 2008 presidential election came around, it felt like Peace Corps, and volunteer service in general, was cool again. That year, both John McCain and Barack Obama agreed to “pause” their campaigns just two months before the election to affirm their shared support for public service. Once in office, Obama set about realizing his commitment to double the size of Peace Corps, driving a nearly 18 percent increase in the 2010 budget.

Carrie Hessler-Radelet, who was appointed by Obama first as deputy director of Peace Corps, and then director, remembered the tremendous support he provided.

“Obama saw the Peace Corps as the ‘first mile’ of American diplomacy,” she said. “He really talked about the Peace Corps.”

CHAPTER 5 | A Duty of Care (2009–2020)

Unfortunately, the momentum would soon face the most significant test the agency had ever had to deal with regarding Volunteer safety.

The 2009 murder of Volunteer Kate Puzey in Benin was different from other times Volunteers had died during service, in that she was killed by a local man employed by Peace Corps after agency staff failed to protect her anonymity when she reported allegations of abuse against him.

Complicating the official response was the fact that Puzey’s death happened during the transition period between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. When Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams and Hessler-Radelet, his deputy director, were eventually confirmed, a backlash had already been building against the agency.

“A number of Volunteers were communicating in various online forums that there were safety lapses within Peace Corps, especially related to sexual assault,” said Hessler-Radelet. “And it was true, we were not doing our best. We were not following best practice.”

The public response was so strong that the ABC news program “20/20” produced a prime-time report on Puzey’s death and the broader issue of Volunteer safety and security in 2011.

Soon after, Williams, who had initiated a top-down assessment of the agency as soon as he took on the role, was called before Congress to testify at hearings for the Kate Puzey Act, which would mandate new procedures and resources to protect Volunteers.

“Every Peace Corps director wakes up in the morning concerned about one thing: Volunteer safety and security,” Williams said. “It became a crucial issue because of the high-profile nature of this case, so we pivoted and did everything we could to put in substantial reforms to protect Volunteers.”

Among those more than 30 reforms were hiring a victim’s advocate, launching new training sessions and peer support networks, and partnering with nationally recognized leaders in the field of sexual violence prevention, like the organization RAINN.

“The Sexual Assault Risk Reduction and Response Program we started was exemplary,” said Hessler-Radelet, who assumed the role of director after Williams’s term ended in 2012. “There were permanent changes to Peace Corps policy. It was one of the most important big reforms we made.”

And there were other big reforms on the recruitment side, from an updated Peace Corps logo to the 2014 decision to allow applicants to choose their country and program for the first time in the agency’s history, which Hessler-Radelet knew would be controversial, even as she felt it was critical to attracting more applicants.

She was right, and under her leadership and that of Jody Olsen, who took over in 2018, Peace Corps managed to stem the decline in Volunteers that had marked the years after the congressional hearings. Their efforts restored a stable core of Volunteers, more than 7,300 strong, by 2016.

CHAPTER 6 | Still Standing (2020–present)

And then, once again, the world turned upside down with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The closure of the China program in February 2020 was the first domino to fall, and by March, Olsen found herself with a rapidly narrowing list of options to keep her 7,300 Volunteers safe.

“We saw it was collapsing,” Olsen recalled. “The country directors were telling the regional directors that things were not looking good.”

When officials in Ukraine and Mongolia called the local Peace Corps country directors to tell them the countries were closing their borders (before, she notes, alerting the U.S. embassy), she knew what she had to do: “At that point it wasn’t just about COVID. If you can’t get Volunteers in and out of the country, they cannot be there.”

What followed was a mass mobilization to evacuate every single Volunteer across 61 countries, an effort Olsen remains proud of.

“We did our evacuation in nine days,” Olsen said. “We evacuated 7,000 people from 7,000 villages; nobody got sick, nobody got hurt, nobody got lost.”

Meanwhile, a nationwide reckoning about race in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 quickly spread among the RPCV community.

A social media campaign known as Decolonizing Peace Corps (@decolonizingpc) grew to have more than 10,000 Instagram followers as its organizers asked tough questions about the paternalistic and neocolonial elements of Peace Corps, often overlooked or avoided entirely within the community.

“I had been talking about this with friend, and fellow Volunteers, and I had so much support that I figured, ‘Let’s have this conversation in public,’” Lindsay Allen, a COVID-19 evacuee who served in Mozambique and organized the effort, remembered.

“There was a lot of pushback from some groups on Facebook, but we also had many supporters—some of them Peace Corps staff—who messaged us to thank us for raising these issues.”

When Volunteers began returning to service in March 2022, so much about the world remained uncertain.

And when Donald Trump’s second term brought a slash-and-burn campaign against foreign aid and global development programs in the guise of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the future of the entire sector was called into question.

But while USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and AmeriCorps have either been shut down or drastically reduced in size and scope, Peace Corps still stands, its budget, as yet, mostly untouched.

The agency remains aspirational, with a stated goal of having 8,000 Volunteers in the field by 2030, and it announced a new initiative, the Tech Prosperity Corps, with a central focus on using American AI technologies to help partner countries, particularly in Asia, develop their technology sectors.

Paul Shea, who led the agency as acting director while the Tech Corps was being developed, told WorldView that he sees the program as a natural evolution of the agency’s core values.

“Since 1961, Peace Corps Volunteers have been innovators, exchanging skills and knowledge with community members to help create sustainable change,” Shea said. “By embracing technology thoughtfully and responsibly, the Peace Corps can remain relevant, adaptive, and impactful while staying true to the values that define who we are and what we do.”

CHAPTER 7 | All Eyes on the Future

So, as the next chapter for Peace Corps unfolds, one place to look for signs of what’s to come is at the people running it.

In May, the White House named State Department official Christopher Landau as the acting director for Peace Corps, the fourth since 2025.

This came just weeks after the White House nominated Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Riley Barnes to take on the job permanently if confirmed by the Senate.

Despite the volatility in its leadership, there are signs of a stable future for the agency that weren’t there at this time in 2025.

If the new administration were to regress to the DOGE days and potentially deploy the nuclear option—abolishing the agency outright—some have proposed that the next chapter of Peace Corps be outside of the public sector altogether.

Economist and Brookings Institution scholar Lex Rieffel (India 1966–68), long outspoken in his calls to reform the agency, explored what that could look like in a 2024 article written with former NPCA President Kevin Quigley (Thailand 1976–79).

The two argued that the mission of Peace Corps might be best realized with its transformation into a mega-NGO.

“One special advantage of being an NGO is having a board of directors composed of influential leaders able to hire an entrepreneurial and visionary CEO,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, in a world increasingly skeptical about the foreign policies of successive U.S. Republican and Democratic administrations, the Peace Corps as an NGO would gain the kind of credibility possessed by globally admired organizations like Doctors Without Borders.”

For 65 years, Peace Corps has endured because it embodies an attractive idea about the kind of country America aspires to be: outward looking, service minded, and willing to invest in human connection across borders and cultures.

Every era has forced the agency to adapt, and each time, predictions of its decline have been followed by reinvention.

Whether the next chapter unfolds through technological innovation, institutional reform, or a renewed grassroots movement, the central question remains the same as the one Kennedy first posed in 1960: Will Americans choose to serve?

History suggests the answer is yes.

---

Greg Emerson is an editor and digital consultant who served in Morocco and Peru from 2003 to 2005.