All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s - Softcover

Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674003802 ISBN 13: 9780674003804

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The nation was powerful and prosperous, the president was vigorous and young, and a confident generation was gathering its forces to test the New Frontier. The cold war was well under way, but if you could just, as the song went, “put a little love in your heart,” then “the world would be a better place.” The Peace Corps, conceived in the can-do spirit of the sixties, embodied America’s long pursuit of moral leadership on a global scale. Traversing four decades and three continents, this story of the Peace Corps and the people and politics behind it is a fascinating look at American idealism at work amid the hard political realities of the second half of the twentieth century.
More than any other entity, the Peace Corps broached an age-old dilemma of U.S. foreign policy: how to reconcile the imperatives and temptations of power politics with the ideals of freedom and self-determination for all nations. All You Need Is Love follows the struggle to balance the tensions between these values from the Corps’ first heady days under Sargent Shriver and beyond to the questioning years of the Vietnam War, when the Peace Corps was accused of being window dressing for imperialism. It follows the Peace Corps through the years when volunteering dropped off―and finally into its renewed popularity amid the widespread conviction that the Peace Corps preserves the nation’s finest traditions.
With vivid stories from returned volunteers of exotic places and daunting circumstances, this is an engrossing account of the successes and failures of this unique governmental organization, and of the geopolitics and personal convictions that underpin it. In the end, the question that is most compelling is whether the Peace Corps most helped the countries that received its volunteers, or whether its greater service was to America and its sense of national identity and mission.

About this title

Review:

Everyone has heard of the Peace Corps, and that's no accident. When the agency was started in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, one of the top priorities was making it known virtually overnight, and some of the most talented advertising professionals in America donated their expertise to publicizing it. With John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as director, the Peace Corps represented the high ideals of a crucial decade in American history. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University, details the first decade of the Peace Corps, focusing on the struggles to create the agency, the political skill that made it flourish, and the influence of the Vietnam War, which Hoffman refers to as the Peace Corps's "evil twin."

From the Back Cover:

The Peace Corps, conceived in the can-do spirit of the 1960s, embodied America's long and sometimes troubled pursuit of moral leadership on a global scale. Traversing four decades and three continents, this story of the Peace Corps and the people and politics behind it is a fascinating look at American idealism at work amid the hard political realities of the second half of the twentieth century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0674003802
• ISBN 13: 9780674003804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 318