Robert C. Terry, Jr. Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Patricia Wand
Interviewee(s): Robert C. Terry Jr.

Patricia Wand: Today is August 23, 2018, and this is Patricia A. Wand. I am interviewing Robert C. Terry Jr., who was a staff member with the Peace Corps in East Pakistan from 1961 to 1963 in a program that was mixed in its assignments. First, Bob, thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed with me today. I think you represent an extremely important part of the history of Peace Corps and your perspective and your experience is going to be a valuable part of the record for our Peace Corps archives. So let's.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: May I make a comment first?

Patricia Wand: Absolutely.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I want to start off by thanking you and your teammates for continuing the oral history work started by Bob Klein, whom I knew somewhat from Ghana I. As a boy historian who has not only made oral history interviews but also made use of them in the JFK and other archives, I'm a thorough enthusiast of oral histories.

Patricia Wand: Wonderful. Well, then, this is great work. We have two people who believe in this process talking today. So let's start early on. How did you get involved in Peace Corps where I'm going to go back further than that in a few minutes, but I think this is a good place to start. How did you get involved in Peace Corps?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, the proximate cause without going into family history, Boy Scouts and all that kind of thing, was that I, after serving as a naval officer, had spent the better part of two years living, working as a journalist and student in India and Pakistan in the years 1957 to 1959. And then I came back to this country, went to graduate school. And so as a result, I had a huge advantage going into the Peace Corps because I knew where India and Pakistan are. As we know, many people have to rush down to the library to find out anyway. But the nature of my work there had to do with rural development. And so I was interested in the idea of the kind of Peace Corps, partly because of the work the missionaries did that I reported on as well as others. And so when the idea came along, when I was in graduate school, I was tracking it very carefully. And make a long story short, at one point in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was at Harvard at that point, we got a call from Tom Matthews, on the Peace Corps staff in Washington, who was looking for people to start running around the country explaining to people what this crazy idea was. This was specifically in I'd say April of 1961.

And so I put together, helped to put together, a group of people from the Cambridge area, all of whom had some kind of international background through the Experiment in International Living or other kinds of service programs. And so we constituted the first Peace Corps recruiting team for the staff. And we went around the country hither and yon, about maybe a dozen of us. So that was answer number one. Answer number two is that I have a long association with a private volunteer organization, they're now called NGOs, non-government organizations, at that time called the Experiment in International Living. And the Experiment and its president then, Gordon Boyce, as you may know, and others and over history, had a lot to do with the start of the Peace Corps. Sarge Shriver himself was an Experiment alumnus and as it turned out, the Experiment was at the Peace Corps, of course, as you know, when it started, had nothing except a group of empty rooms with a telephone on the floor in each room in the own Rochambeau building, in the medical building in Washington. And so it had to contract. So it contracted with universities, some private organizations, some labor unions to get the skills that it needed to get up and running fast. Shriver’s religion was Catholic and fast. And so it so happened that the Experiment was contracted by the Peace Corps to become both the trainer and the field manager of the project in East Pakistan, which became known as Pakistan I. Other organizations like Notre Dame, Harvard, Heifer Project, various others, had similar roles with other countries. I don't know who Columbia was, anyway.

Patricia Wand: Rutgers, for example, was the training site but didn't have anything to do in-country. These things were different.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: There were different arrangements in different places about which I do not know anything. But in our case it was both the over the country trade training in this country and then overseas management. And I was brought on board as an Experiment staff member and recommended to propose to Shriver as a staffer to be what is now called in aid lingo, the contractors overseas representative or the field liaison representative. We had the fancy term at that time. And I went through this starting day one with all the trainees together at our training site, which was at a place called Putney in Vermont, southeastern Vermont.

Patricia Wand: Okay, I'm going to interrupt. Only because I want to hear about the training. But I also this is a good time maybe for us to go back and you to give me us just a little insight about your childhood that may have motivated you or enticed you to become involved internationally. You mentioned Boy Scouts, for example, volunteer work that perhaps you or your family did. Just a little insight on your background in your family so that we have that as part of the record.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I do the same thing with oral history, interviews with my teammates. Well, there's so, in terms of family background, I'd say that my mother and grandmother were significant because they were both civic minded people. I remember as a teenager, my grandmother, who at that time lived down and up in Virginia, took me around. And I was lucky because I was the oldest in my generation. So I got the best of my grandmother. But she took me to Monticello and Williamsburg and Washington. And I still have a photograph of the nation's Capitol, which I took back then as a kid at that time. But then partly because of that reason, I became a Boy Scout on day one when I turned 12 and stayed in scouting for quite some time, became an assistant scout master in school and such. And then I mentioned already I had a long association with the Experiment in International Living. And I can go into details if you want. But also as a college student, I became interested in the American Friends Service Committee and spent some time one summer working in a work camp in Mexico village, Mexico, with a Friends service Quaker group of Mexicans and Americans. So although I'm a suburban kid born and bred, at least I learned something about the fact that there are villages and something about the Third World. And it so happened by chance, although I did not appreciate it at the time, this village was located almost next door to the National Agricultural Institute in Mexico, which was the home of Norman Borlaug. Yes, the father of the Green Revolution, who did the work in developing so-called miracle wheat. But the point about that is that I was sensitized to that kind of work. And so when I went to India and Pakistan and as a student and reporter after my Navy years, I focused on rural development aid because I knew there was important at both agricultural economies and such, and B, because it gave a good excuse to travel around the countries and see a lot of different kinds of projects, a lot of different kinds of efforts in that field.

Patricia Wand: Right. So high school, where was your family living when you went into high school?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Suburban Boston. And I grew up in a public school in Brookline, Massachusetts, just west of Boston. And then high school. I went to a place called Milton Academy, a private school in the south, so that South Boston, which has, however, a strong service tradition in its nature and background and does to this day. And then I was fortunate enough to go to Harvard after that. And I might also mention that I was fortunate to go to Harvard on a full Navy scholarship, so I started out in life as a naval officer, which I consider several years on a destroyer at sea as being my internship in management and also some mismanagement.

Patricia Wand: Sure, you learned a lot from those mistakes and adventures. So did you, you were you already recruited in part of the Navy when you were an undergraduate or did you join? How did you get into the Navy?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: The Navy, as you many people know, the services have so- called ROTC programs, which are also training for the Navy. I think, to my knowledge, may or may not be right at that time, was the only one which tried to recruit officers who would go through ROTC programs. However, they would be required after graduating not to serve just a couple of years, but more a longer period of time in return for full scholarships. And the hope was that people in that program was called the Hollaway program after the admiral who designed it. I believe their hope was that they would continue on to make a career in the Navy to broaden the officer base of the Navy. I chose not to stay in for a career. Some people did. I don't know. I don't know over time how successful that was over as a whole. But I had the good fortune to be a regular naval officer, USN and not USNR for whatever that's worth. And so serve my full requirements.

Patricia Wand: And so how many years then were you?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So I had three years and three years at sea as a destroyer officer right out of Newport, Rhode Island.

Patricia Wand: Right. Got to see the world. Everything.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, parts of it, because this is in ’54 to ‘57. And we had the usual things up and down the East Coast. The Caribbean. Went down to Ecuador one time, but also we were out at sea in the North Atlantic in November, December 1956 during the Hungarian Egyptian crisis. And our job was to be part of a barrier patrol to check ships coming across the ocean. But then I had a couple of tours with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. So that was the see the world part, but also a little bit up in the North Sea.

Patricia Wand: So you were post Korean conflict.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes. Post Korean active conflict.

Patricia Wand: Yes. Yeah, right. Right. Well, that's a really interesting prelude to your Peace Corps work in your development work, isn't it?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, I think it's valuable. People sometimes their eyebrows go up when I told them I was a naval officer. But Sargent Shriver, Warren Wiggins, a lot of other Peace Corps people were also military officers by virtue of being veterans from World War II. One of my close buddies in the Peace Corps was essentially a classmate from the Academy, Naval Academy. There were a number of people. So my teammates, volunteers, were veterans from World War II, including a 62 year old who had been a WAC officer at the time. So I think it's relevant because it gave me, you know, experience working in a large government organization, bureaucratic organization, for better or for worse. And so I had some experience dealing with government organizations. And then my professional training background at graduate school was, in fact, public administration. So I had the advantages in going to India and Pakistan of, A, knowing where they are, B, having talked to many, many government officers in those countries in relation to rural development projects, C, dealing with the Foreign Service. My first year of graduate school was at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, which was a training ground for the Foreign Service, which was my initial interest. The trouble is I became spoiled by the Peace Corps and so I never went into the Foreign Service.

Patricia Wand: So that's a great segue. Although before we leave your family of origin, how many siblings do you have?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Two younger sisters.

Patricia Wand: So you were the oldest?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah. Yeah, right.

Patricia Wand: So let's forge ahead here to the training that you were involved with at the Experiment for International Living and under contract with the Peace Corps. Tell us about that training and also being totally new Peace Corps. How did you recruit and select the people you brought in for that training? Did you have a hand in that?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: No, no. Well, first one additional point about getting in in the first place. The Experiment had a long history of doing service kinds of cross-cultural education. And I remember in February of 1961, the Experiment had gatherings and meetings like we do for a year now from time to time, and we had the regular sort of annual winter gathering up in the hills, in the snow banks of Putney, Vermont. And the speaker whom our president, Gordon Boyce, had come up to speak to us at that time was a Congressman by the name of Henry Reuss, Henry S. Reuss, R-E-U-S- S, Democrat of Wisconsin. And we had a hell of a snowstorm and I was assigned to get out and drag him through the snow drifts from the Hartford International Airport up to Putney, Vermont. And, you know, but for the sake of the record, people should know that Henry Reuss was the author on the House side of the Peace Corps legislation. In brief, he and he, his wife was an experimenter. His son was an experimenter. So he knew. The story of Henry Reuss in brief was that he himself was a lawyer by training, had worked with the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II. As a congressman, he was interested in international affairs during a visit in Southeast Asia. Looking at foreign aid projects, he was disappointed by some of the megabuck engineering projects, highways to nowhere in the jungle, and extremely excited by and impressed by a group of young Americans who were then teaching, in I think it was either Cambodia or Las, under a program known as International Voluntary Service. International Voluntary Service, IVS, was a program run by 10 or 12 church service committees funded by the then called the ICA, International Cooperation Administration. And the format that they used was very similar to what the Peace Corps eventually developed, namely getting young Americans with agricultural or teaching or engineering backgrounds who would live and work for a couple of years in various places. And they there's a lot of history behind this. They were in Southeast Asia. They were in various parts of North Africa, and there is a history. And so that became a pretty clear model. But as a result of that, Henry Reuss came back to this country and proposed legislation for what he called a Point Four Youth Corps, putting together his experience of the point for with what he had seen on the ground in Southeast Asia with the International Volunteer Service. That didn't go very far in the House of Representatives under a Republican administration, President Eisenhower at the time. But he did succeed. And this is recorded in his memoirs and also in my book that I'm writing. He did succeed in getting some money through the Congress for the Colorado State Research Foundation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Maurice Robertson was the leader of it, to do a kind of a feasibility study and to look at the various kinds of experiences that were available through the work of the Experiment and the International Voluntary Service and the International Farm Youth Exchange and 4H clubs and this that and the other, which was relevant potentially to the formation or notion of a Peace Corps. And that study was done and that was published and became a one of the research guidelines that Shriver drew upon. Harris and Shriver, various others drew upon for the design of the Peace Corps.

Patricia Wand: So where all those service efforts, volunteer efforts, did they track they begin after World War II or had any of them started earlier than the Second World War?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I think the answer is probably the most of them was probably post-World War II. However, the work of the American Friends Service Committee and the work of the Brethren Service Committee, the so-called peace churches, the Mennonites, those started in the previous, in the 1930s or in the 1920s even, in small ways.

Patricia Wand: Right after the first war. Yeah.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah. And then the Experiment in International Living, that program started. That was not as much of a work program as a cross- cultural educational program, that started back in 1932.

Patricia Wand: Oh it did, in ‘32. OK, yeah. This is really valuable.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So the point I'm getting to finally is that so I get jazzed up, if you will, by meeting and talk with Henry Reuss in the car in the snow and on the ski slopes and hear him talk about the Peace Corps. So during that spring between February, March, April, May. As I said, I and other colleagues and friends of mine in the Cambridge area tracked what was going on with the Peace Corps.

Patricia Wand: Was Reuss already referring to it as Peace Corps?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, by that time, yes.

Patricia Wand: Did it have a brand yet?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes, because, go back. Kennedy floated the idea, as you know.

Patricia Wand: In Michigan.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: As in Michigan, not in that term. But he said how many of you would be willing to give. But he did use the term Peace Corps in the formal proposal, which he made at the Cow Palace in San Francisco about 10 days before the election in 1960.

Patricia Wand: Right.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: November. Then the trouble. So by that time, the term Peace Corps. And the other point is that Hubert Humphrey had also developed the idea and there's a story behind that, too, with one of my colleagues somewhat independently of Reuss, but they were sort of working in parallel. And a colleague, a young staffer for Hubert Humphrey came up with a suggestion of the term Peace Corps, which and then Humphrey and Reuss turned over their work to the Kennedy team, Shriver and his team, when they'd started to work on it. So the answer to your question is yes, by that time the term Peace Corps was a standard term.

Patricia Wand: And the students who worked on it, the students from Michigan sponsored a conference at American University in March.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Which I attended.

Patricia Wand: And you attended that conference in March of 1961?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: American University, right?

Patricia Wand: Right. Well, that would be.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I still have the document of it.

Patricia Wand: Uh huh. That is very valuable.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And I think I chaired one of the working sessions.

Patricia Wand: Right. Right. Yeah. That's a very important document in terms also of student activism around peace.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, this is my view, but by no means original. And Sarge says the same thing. And you know very well as who’s who. At 2:00 in the morning, no press. Kennedy popped off the idea. Harris Wofford described it as an idea in the air. It just came out with it. And it could have died right then.

Patricia Wand: Absolutely. Except for the students.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Exactly. So, and this is, in fact, in my view, looking at a number of these programs over the years. Typically, it's the servers, the people want to get into the program, who are ahead of the sort of leaders, so- called, who are putting it together. And you get, it's a common pattern that you get all of these volunteer programs have, I think it's fair to say, far more applicants than there are places available. That's true then, that’s true now.

Patricia Wand: Right. You know, this is extremely interesting. And I know you're working on a book on this in this regard that will include some of this. Let's get back to the training. You know, so you were standing in the right place at the right time. You'd had a great experience with the Experiment in International Living. They knew you. You knew them, and you were ready to help.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: On the matter you asked about before, I had nothing to do with the selection and the training. In the case I mentioned of the spring time the group of us went around the country. Our role was to talk with groups, newspapers, anybody would listen to us, to try and get the concept established and some of the basic ideas about what it was going to involve and what was required and such. We had nothing to do with, I mean, it depended upon individuals then to come up and volunteer. But at that time and that's recorded quite well, there were people knocking on the doors and sending letters and all the rest of it. And so they had to eventually fill in applications, things like that. And I do know the records from the files when the Experiment, and I assume the same thing was true for Rutgers and Columbia, Notre Dame and other places, when the program was assigned to them, they looked over those who were being assigned to it. I think it was a selection division by that time which made the choices of assignments of who would go. And so, the first I had to do with any of my teammates was when I met them going up to Putney at the beginning of training.

Patricia Wand: And that you said was in August of 1961 and they came to Putney, Vermont, to the campus.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without going into too much detail, the Experiment was the brainchild of a dedicated fellow by the name of Donald W. Watt, uh, Donald B. Watt. W-A-T-T. Who made his home in Putney, Vermont. Putney was a small village to about five, six miles north of Brattleboro, Vermont, and it grew there and grew around the world, as a matter of fact, in other countries. So you had this crazy, complicated name up in this village up on a hillside in Vermont, but had worldwide connections. It did. And so not long after that, as the sprout grew, the chances arose for it to acquire a lovely former home house down in Brattleboro, Vermont, about 10 miles down south. So it is now that's the headquarters now. And but at that time, as I said, it was in Putney.

Patricia Wand: So how many recruits, if you will, volunteers showed up in August at the Putney camp?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, at that time they were trainees, and they were not volunteers until they passed muster. So at that time, they were trainees. And our group was it was, the concept of the program was for about 30. And as I mentioned before we started recording, it was supposed to be a mixed group on purpose. That was a decision by both the American staff member who put it together. His name was David McEachran and by the Pakistani authorities, East Pakistani authorities. And because they did not have the. When Shriver went around the world in May of ‘61 and I have all the recordings of all this, he went and visited with the governors and so on to various countries and the president and the governor of East Pakistan, an enthusiastic general by the name of Azam Khan had a long list of about 200 and the newspaper man with Shriver.

Patricia Wand: 200?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Volunteers that he wanted, he said they wanted somebody for every job known to man for the newspaper’s man comment. And as it turned out, when David McEachran, the staff member, and the Pakistani civilian civil servant in charge, the additional staff secretary got down to it. They decided on about 30. And this included two or three nurses, several civil engineers, some people to work with something called the Academy for Rural Development in Comilla, some people in the universities teaching some people in a housing project near Dhaka. But as I said, on purpose, it was designed to be multi-disciplinary because nobody knew what was going to work and in fact, to jump ahead. Some things worked well and we had about four or five groups which followed us, for example, nurses and high school teachers. But other kinds of jobs did not work well, particularly in universities, which were difficult institutions, politically unstable. So the way in which the project designed was complicated, but in fact, it worked out to do what was intended was to see what worked and what didn't work. So as a result, from a training point of view, it was the devil because it was not all teachers or all nurses or all engineers or all surveyors, as happened, for example, with Tanzania and El Paso or Harvard with Nigeria or in Ghana in Berkeley, with Ghana I. So, as I say, the staff members of which I was one at that point for the training program, had to really work hard to try and figure out ways to figure out what would be useful for orienting these trainees to the kind of work they would get into.

Patricia Wand: So what did you do?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, it varied from place to place. It would take more time than you want to listen to. And I wouldn't remember all the details anyway at this point. But I mean, so that nurses went to some hospitals in Boston, Washington and in New York, for example, and others went to other places. And at some of it worked out probably better than others, but they had at least some audition. Of course, one of the problems was not surprising. The kinds of job descriptions that we had to work with were quite general, because in all fairness, neither David McEachran on the Peace Corps staff people nor the Pakistanis really had much of a clear concept as to how this is going to work in great detail. So nowadays, of course, is far more sophisticated. But we had to work with fairly general descriptions.

Patricia Wand: Actually, you know.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And there was also a librarian, a couple of librarians.

Patricia Wand: Yes, right. You know, Peace Corps still doesn't always get it targeted. It's just the ambiguities of life changes. So, so and I know many of the programs were very ambiguous in those particularly in those early years. But so you had a challenge in training. So what kinds of courses then were you able to offer to all? Did you have, did you say you had 29 recruits?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, no, we had I think their training the original number was 33 or so. And I recall one trainee dropped out voluntarily, a woman who was, and I do not know the details, but I know she was considerably overweight. So we put it that way. Another one was a bricklayer and he was touted as the best damn bricklayer in the city he came from. And he was a vet, Navy, middle aged 36. I was at that time 29. Had lived overseas, as well as a quick and very attractive guy, well-spoken. And one morning we woke up in the dorm and he wasn't there. And he packed up his trowel and drove his car and never and never showed back again. He just so, yeah, self selection.

Patricia Wand: Self selection. Right.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So to wrap it up, so to speak, we lost a couple of people that way, I think maybe one other, possibly for medical reasons. At the end we had 30 at the very end and I had nothing to do with final selection that was done by an outside selection board. And furthermore, I was already in country. I'd been sort of had a couple of weeks to get organized. But one young lady, a nurse, we had two close calls. One was with a fellow who's going to be here today, as a matter of fact, Tom McMahon by name. An interesting story, had a medical condition which and funnily gets put into the Peace Corps through the enthusiastic intervention of our doctor. But the other was a young lady, a nurse who had an ongoing problem of maybe tuberculosis. I forget exactly which. And the doctors, the Peace Corps doctors decided that it would be too risky at that time to send her because they did not know enough about it. But two years later, she came with another group because by that time, A, the Peace Corps knew more about the competent medical service available in Bengal, Pakistan. And she had also improved. And so she not only served her term with Pakistan IV as a nurse, but she went on to a career of about 30 years overseas and nursing education all around the world. Her name was Cindy Tice, T-I-C- E. Unfortunately, she died recently, but she's part of the story that I've been tracking in the book.

Patricia Wand: That's wonderful. So then we can assume in training you offered some orientation to the country and a little cultural exposure?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: The training curriculum, and I have some in my head, I have all the papers, but and there's a clear record of it also. But that was negotiated between the Peace Corps and the Experiment and Pakistan, but mainly the Peace Corps and the Experiment. So is what you might say, A, American history, B, obviously area studies of various kinds, geography, economics, government and such. Obviously the largest single subject in terms of training, time and effort was language. So we had a group of Bengali language teachers, instructors, and all of us were in Bengali language training for probably four to five hours a day. And there was a six day week and a 12 hour day and such. And then there was some time allocated for sort of individual subject area work. And that was tailored to these requirements of the engineers and the student, the university agriculture got. And so that was done on site to the extent it was possible. And then others, they had some time to go off site, for example, to hospitals in Boston or agricultural places elsewhere and things like that.

Patricia Wand: So what about physical training? Many of the training programs in that era had really intense physical exercise, swimming, running. I mean, many of us did that. Mountain climbing, rappelling, rock climbing. Did you do that?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: The answer is yes, but probably not to the extent that you remember. Did you go to Camp Bradley?

Patricia Wand: And I did not go to Camp Bradley, but I was at the University of New Mexico where they had a replicated program.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: You know, the camp in Puerto Rico, which is on the record, also was set up, particularly with the advice of the Outward Bound program in the U.K. But the answer was we had a good deal of that too also, you know, life saving exercise, of course, physical checkups with our medical doctor. And indeed, there were very subtle, amusing accents. The men, Tom McMahon I mentioned, who almost didn't get in and then did get in. And he survived and became a great story. He broke a nose because he didn't, he wasn't used to playing soccer. He was tall and he had a vulnerable nose. And then the 62 year old somehow got in a van. They were going somewhere on those doggone hills and she somehow fell out of the van.

Patricia Wand: No seatbelts back in those days.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: No seatbelts, no. Picked herself up, got back in the van, went on. So sort of things that makes you mutter and cut your teeth now. But anyway.

Patricia Wand: So training had its challenges. Tell us now what happens when you welcome this group. You said you went a few weeks ahead of time to East Pakistan, you know, to set that helped set things up. And now what happens when they arrive? How do they get there? And what do they do in those first few weeks?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, first, just a slight before that, after the formal training period was about a week or ten days home leave. And they all went home and then came back to New York. At that point, they became volunteers, not trainees. And indeed, they were all loaded on a Pan American flight at Idle, then called Idlewild Airport. I am not in that picture because I was already overseas, but they were all loaded on the plane and absolutely crazy. The Peace Corps said you're going to fly straight through against the sun from New York to Calcutta and Dhaka, and we hope you're alive when you get there. That was, of course, before many people had had much experience flying around the world and people didn't realize that flying east is a hell of a lot more difficult on the body than flying west. But I had done a little of that. So to answer your question, I went ahead by a week or two. And that's for you?

Patricia Wand: Oh, this is for me. Sure. OK, I want to. We're talking about a photograph that Bob has just handed me. It's a photograph of the 28, 29 or so trainees who have just become volunteers in New York and they're high handed, all holding a large banner that says Pan American, which makes me think perhaps they were flying Pan American.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Pan Am One I think it was called.

Patricia Wand: Right. And it says, well, it says Pan American Welcomes Peace Corps, The Experiment in International Living Pakistan Training Project. And they all are dressed in the costumes of the sixties.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes, look how they’re dressed. Everybody is dressed to the nines.

Patricia Wand: Dressed to the nines.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Nowadays, they wouldn't be.

Patricia Wand: The ladies have hose and high heels and the men all have coats and ties and overcoats because this was probably chilly by October when they were on their way.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Some hats.

Patricia Wand: And hats, yes. I don't see any hats on the women, but there are hats on a number of the men. So anyway, it's a great photograph. And I know you’ll put this in the archives.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I can do that. Moreover, I do have a bit of the identification of each of the faces and I have some other photographs later on to that too.

Patricia Wand: This is great.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Ok, so the result. So switch ahead. I'm already in Pakistan. Dhaka, D-A-C-C-A, the capital of East Bengal, East Pakistan, historically and politically. And with me is Dr. Donald Watt, the Experiment’s founder.

Patricia Wand: Right.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Because part of the methodology of the Experiment in International Living in its approach to international cross-cultural educational exchange is, what have become now commonly understood concept by then but at that time was not well understood, namely family homestays. So part of our training program in-country was living individually with Bengali Pakistani families in Dhaka for about three weeks. And Dr. Watt was there to set up those homestays as part of the in- country training. But I knew from experience, as did he, that we were going to get a bunch of 29 bodies that could hardly move after flying against the sun for whatever amount of hours in the hot sun. So what we did was when they first arrived, I had by that time made contact with and was welcomed by and helped enormously by a combination of the American Consulate General in Dhaka and quite a number of families who were either diplomatic families or with AID at that time, or with nonprofit organizations working there, such as the Asia Foundation and CARE, some engineers and others. And they had been some of them had met Sargent Shriver when he first went through for a day in May and they had been interested in and they were all eager to learn about what this Peace Corps was going to be. And they were they were both interested and excited, but they also scared because they weren't sure who was going to appear and how was going to work out. So to make a long story short, we got off the plane and we put them to bed in families, American families, for two or three days and said, your job is to get some sleep, get some good food, get your feet under you, and then we'll start working.

Patricia Wand: So they stayed a few days with American families and then you were able to find a Bengali family for them to stay with?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: The training, in-country training, which lasted for the better part of five or six weeks, which people now would say maybe a too long, but still was in two part. First, family homestays. Everybody, myself included, live with Pakistani families in Dhaka for two or three weeks. First one half, and then the other half. And the half that was not living with families were in a formal training program at a place called the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development, P-A-R-D, Academy for Rural Development, which was located at a district headquarters town called Comilla. C-O-M-I-L-L-A. So Pakistani Academy for Rural Development at Comilla. There was also an Academy of Rural Development in West Pakistan. It's a place called Peshawar up in the northeast frontier, northwest frontier. So that's why it's important to understand that. There's a story behind that. Again, in brief, Shriver, when he visited on May, I think it was 7th of 1961. By good luck, by good luck, instead of, he had met some Harvard economic advisors posted to the planning commission in Pakistan, both in Karachi and in Dhaka. And he, by chance, ran to them and they said, A, go to East Pakistan as well as West Pakistan. B, go to the Academy for Rural Development. The Foreign Service had set up a whole series of very formal interviews with government officials. Shriver sent a cable and this is this is not just my memory. This is all from field notes. Shriver sent a cable ahead saying, cancel all those formal meetings. I want to go to the Academy for Rural Development, A. B, meet the governor. That will be the only official meeting, and, C, that I want to meet with people in Dhaka who are with the NGO community because he had a bias, shall we say, toward that sort of experience.

Patricia Wand: You know, I think we did not mention on this recording that East Pakistan is now called Bangladesh.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Thank you.

Patricia Wand: Very important fact for the listener to remember.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So as a result, I often refer to it as East Bengal, which is politically and culturally and historically accurate. But you're absolutely right. Thank you. It was called East Pakistan, but essentially in brief, Pakistan was created in 1947 at partition when the British left British India to make a separate new country where there was a Muslim majority population. The larger part in the West, consisting of about five provinces and many different local languages and genetic backgrounds and things like that, it's called West Pakistan, which is today called Pakistan, and the other is called East Pakistan. On the east side, again, a Muslim majority area, which historically had been during British period, there was friction between Hindu West Bengal and Muslim East Bengal. So East Pakistan was carved out from that. And by contrast to West Pakistan, East Pakistan was homogenous. Everybody spoke Bengali. They had a common historical and racial background as well, unlike the West. So there's a long history there. And as for the record, of course, East Pakistan rose up in rebellion and the war of 1971 made it independent as Bangladesh.

Patricia Wand: In ‘97.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Sorry, in 1971.

Patricia Wand: ‘71. Excuse me. Yes.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So that at that time when we were there, there were intimations already of tensions. But those kind of tensions were not a significant factor in our project, unfortunately. But then I spent many years in Bangladesh since then. And I'm sorry, capacity's that's not the story later on. But still.

Patricia Wand: So we've got our volunteers.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: However, there is a point where we had a bit of a problem, because at that time in 1961, I lived with the family at his request of the chief secretary, the chief secretary. There's no corresponding person in the United States under that title. But in the British administrative system, he was the chief civil officer in a province or a state. And he, there was over him was a governor who was appointed politically by the powers that be. But he was the chief civil servant. And the family I lived with, the chief secretary, was the first Bengali chief secretary. The previous chief secretaries and senior officials and governors of East Pakistan came from guess where?

Patricia Wand: India?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: West Pakistan.

Patricia Wand: Oh, West Pakistan. Interesting.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Right. So we were already, and when it came to a matter of homestays, it created a problem also because a number of families who, it was not an easy matter for Dr. Watt to do this. He and I worked on it together, but he was the leader to, the concept of living with a Pakistani family, that was new to them. And there was new also to American officials at the time, and a number of them were very skeptical of it. But to make a long story short, what happened was eventually that the service clubs, Rotary Club and Kiwanis and the Lions particularly said, we'll take these people in. But the problem arose in the sense that a number of the elite of East Pakistan were not Bengalis. They were business people or civil servants or people from West Pakistan. So they didn't speak Bengali. They had to speak in English. So we had some problems in a way because some of the volunteers were placed in yes, they were Pakistanis, but B, they were not Bengalis.

Patricia Wand: So they weren’t going to learn the Bengali language, for example, among other things.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: We started learning a little bit about the east-west difficulties and problems on the spot right there, then and there, but so that the training in-country ranged from in terms of time from about November 1st of 1961 to about December 15th, and consisted of two parts, a training and language, continued language training at Dhaka University in Dhaka. And then the other part was two or three weeks living at the Academy for Rural Development in Comilla with an absolutely brilliant leader and faculty to get oriented to. It was basically a very rural country. And so not everybody working in villages, but almost everybody was working people with those backgrounds. So having that kind of rural background was. And what happened was that when Shriver went and visited the Academy, he was highly impressed by the Academy's director. Everybody else was, too. And he was a man of genius.

Patricia Wand: Was he a Pakistani?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Patricia Wand: So this was a Pakistani founded or organization? A research organization and education for rural development?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Right. He was a very interesting person, a Muslim, obviously. He was originally an ICS officer. ICS has referred to the India Civil Service, which is the elite civil organization in the government of British India, and later both Pakistan and India. And he was so disappointed by the behavior, what happened in the Bengal famine of 1943 when there was horrible, three million Bengalis die because of famine, partly brought on by World War II and Japanese bombardment and partly through some government mismanagement. He did the unheard of thing of resigning from the ICS, went to work for two or three years as a common tradesman. He was very much interested in Tolstoy and his ideas. Eventually became a teacher and became the principal of a college in Victoria. It, in Columbia, in Comilla, became a government. So the reason going that background was that he was a man who had high status as an educator, high status as a former government officer, as well as his own learning. And he was put in charge of the Academy, which was founded in large measure by the Ford Foundation, by the way, both academies. And he was a man of enormous influence and respect. The volunteers loved him. I loved him, everybody. And he had anyway. So we had this period of time.

Patricia Wand: What was his name? I didn't get his name.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: His name is difficult. Akhtar Hameed Khan. I'll spell it. A-K-H-T-A-R, Akhtar. Second name Hameed, H-A-M-E-E-D. And Khan, K-H-A-N. Khan is a common name for, of stemming from Central Asia, the Mongols of a chief or chief or headmen. So Khan is a much respected title, but now it's become a common family name as well. But so Akhtar Hameed Khan was the name of the director of the Academy for Rural Development.

Patricia Wand: Thank you very much.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah, so come just for Christmas of 1961, we finished all that language and family home stays in Dhaka, rural orientation at Comilla, and then people spread out to their job locations.

Patricia Wand: And were you, in effect, the country director in?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Uh, I was in effect, the sort of provincial director at that point. Formally, no. I was a contractor to the Peace Corps. But the Peace Corps at that time had a young man, became a good friend, who was charged with being the Peace Corps representative in East and West Pakistan. And this background becomes important because those are two essentially different countries, not only linguistically, historically, but also they're separated by fifteen hundred miles. So whoever was trying to run back and forth had a hell of a job living out of a suitcase, dealing with the foreign service offices, which were a little puzzled, if not sometimes less than enthusiastic about this new bureaucratic creature coming onto the block, the Peace Corps, and dealing with. Again in West Pakistan, they had a similar approach of a variety of jobs and a much larger geographic area. So Jim Moody, bless him, was running around trying to learn, touch base with, explain, communicate with Washington and put together the sort of details of these programs. So for some time at the very beginning, I was sort of there essentially by myself. But technically speaking, I was not representing the Peace Corps. I was representative for the Experiment. But in for practical purposes, in many respects, I was the Peace Corps rep too but eventually a Peace Corps country director was chosen, fellow by the name of Kingston Berlew, a lovely guy, and then also a deputy Peace Corps representative for the West wing and then one for the East wing. They were called wings and the one in the East wing was an old friend and colleague of mine, buddy in the Navy and college, who came out, Paul Slawson by name, and he was became my boss for that purpose. So the Peace Corps representative was in each.

And then in the case of a couple of projects that came after us, one was managed by the Experiment again, another was managed by the University of Minnesota. They were particularly engineers working in rural public works and maybe another one or two. So there was a similar kind of arrangement with the Peace Corps charge. But the subcontractor, the contractors being from other institutions, but they were responsible to the Peace Corps. So we had to be careful in speaking with and getting help from the American consul general to be sure that they understood that such. So I had to be careful about that. But it worked out well.

Patricia Wand: Right. Right. So how what how did you help to facilitate the work of the volunteers as they worked in many different fields? You know, what might your average an average day look like in that role?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, to put it glibly here, I was in charge of people doing jobs about which I knew nothing. I knew nothing about librarianship or nursing or engineering or it was. I was a bureaucrat. I was an administrator. So therefore, my role was, in some respects minimal. But I made a principle of coming from Experiment experience as well as Navy experience that I was on the road and I touched base with the volunteers every two or three weeks. And we were located around the country by design, not because of me, but because of the way the approach was put together. They were concentrated in four geographic areas. So in that respect, it was relatively easy instead of being and they were sort of grouped. So in a city in the northwest, there were a couple of nurses, as well as some engineers and some people at a university. In Dhaka there were several people at schools and university. At Comilla Academy, there were a number of volunteers in one location. And then at a housing development project just to the west of Dhaka, a place called Mirpur, M-I-R-P-U-R, there were a number of volunteers who are working there. So I made a policy of riding the circuit every couple of weeks so that I kept in touch with them as they were getting into their jobs. And in terms of technical help, I could not be very helpful, but my role was to be sure that they were loved and being taken care of.

Patricia Wand: And felt supported.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Supported, right. And we set up, you know, ways of, the Experiment set up arrangements so that they could write letters and sent them back there. And they got transcribed and sent around with all their families and friends every whenever they wanted to. And eventually we got we had, you know, gatherings from time to time also. So and then I would also touch base also with their supervisors so they would know that that there was somebody around who was responsible and in charge. So gradually, over time, you know, we got to know each other back and forth. And I got a sense as to those volunteers who were through a combination of circumstances in pretty good situations and those who are not in good situation. And to summarize, without going through a lot of agonizing detail, come about April, May, five or six months out.

Well, I can summarize quickly. There was a fellow by the name of Charles Peters, Charlie Peters, who was the chief of evaluation in Washington.

Patricia Wand: I know him. I've heard him.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And he had been up to Putney while we were in training and had gotten to know us a little bit. And then he went running around the world. Sarge sent him around the world to various countries to take a look at what we think is going on. And he came to Pakistan and he was absolutely devastated because both in East and West Pakistan, there were quite a number of jobs which were turning out to be essentially non- jobs. And to be fair about it, you know, the concept of many people in Pakistan, both Pakistanis and Americans and other some of the countries, the sort of reigning paradigm in their heads was that of the foreign expert that came from the Marshall Plan, the post-World War development of Europe, where the circumstances were quite different. Yes, Europe was devastated after World War II, but it had a manpower and educated manpower, great, they needed capital, they needed capital goods and they needed some technical assistance for that time. So there were jobs in Europe for lawyers and economists and agricultural experts and so on who would work with their peers, if you will, in a number of European countries. The situation was very different in the Third World countries where you did not have that rich resource of educated manpower, nor did you have a history of industrial or even economic agricultural development. I mean, India and Pakistan were characterized by either agriculture economies, but they were essentially dependent on very traditional kinds of agriculture, had not developed the kinds of modern agricultural techniques that we take for granted now.

So what I'm trying to say is that the in many cases, the Pakistanis say in good faith, they said, yes, we'd like to have some volunteers, but they weren't quite sure what these volunteers were going to be doing. And the concept that American people were going to come and work, not in charge of Pakistanis or as advisers to them, but as subordinates to them. That was new. That was new. So it took a lot of learning on all sides is what I'm trying to say. And in the case of the Academy for Rural Development, the director and his faculty, and I'm still in touch with a lot of those faculty members are a good friend of ours. They had spent a couple of years at Michigan State University before they went back to Comilla to set up the academy. So they were familiar with American students, American young people, American culture. And so they were very skillful and knew how to, A, put them to work, listen to them figure out jobs that could do. That was not the case in some other places, for example, hospitals, universities or other places. So as I said, to make a long story short, about May or June of ‘62, it was pretty clear that about half of my people were in odd jobs. And Charlie Peters wrote a note back to Washington from a hotel room in Karachi in despair in about March. And that's on the record.

So what to do? Essentially what I did was to try to make a lemonade out of a lemon, and I put together an effort to take volunteers who were not being very well, either fully employed or not employed enough, and to put send them out in groups of two or three and together with Pakistani authorities to look at other possible jobs in other institutions, in other locations. And to make a long story short again, and we had some terrific help from the American consul general, a young lady there by the name of Alex Johnson, the consul general graciously agreed to let her work with us for intensively for two or three months.

And she did a lot. We had a lot of paper and support forms and things of that sort. So the volunteers would go out in groups of two or three and they’d go and live for two or three or four days at location X or Y and scope out what was needed. But that time they had had enough experience. They spoke some Bengali, they had some living experience. They knew about the food, they’d had diarrhea and things like dysentery, and they’d got over that. Whereas when poor Jim Moody or his predecessor, David McEachran, sort of set their jobs in the first place on the fly in 1961, in sort of June, July, August. I mean, they'd go and they’d talk with somebody for, you know, have a nice conversation with the vice chancellor university for 15 minutes. And they said, we’d love to have some volunteers. But when it came down to the nuts and bolts of housing, toiletry, cooks, cooking, teaching assignments, all of this, none of those details worked out. So I don't want to criticize because it's easy to do that ex-post facto, which is not fair. But we were able to try and learn from that experience.

So we had this program, which I call, piece back two, Peace Corps Pakistan number two, and essentially developed jobs for, A, my unemployed teammates and, B, for new volunteers coming in, because by that time, maybe somewhat to our surprise, but the government of Pakistan in both East Pakistan as well as the central government, had put in a request for more volunteers, A, in nursing, B, it turned out they had a project of so-called pilot high schools trying to work in high school levels to give a more advanced curriculum and say mathematics and things of that sort, which was rather weak in the school system then and such. So we were able to find jobs for most of my volunteers who were underemployed or unemployed. And it turned out that a number of them, for example, at the housing project in Mirpur to the west of Dhaka, essentially non-jobs. So that worked out pretty well. So the end result was that number one, all of these volunteers served their full two years. Nobody left early, either for medical reasons or for other reasons.

Patricia Wand: Wow. That’s quite remarkable.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I will not say that every job was successful. No, nor will they. And we have the final report here, similar to the one you had in Colombia. And these include a lot of the volunteer work and they're very clear about what worked and what didn't work. But on balance, I'd say probably it's probably fair to say that 60, 70 percent of the jobs, including the new ones, worked out well. As one example, there were a couple of nurses, a nurse and a medical technician, up at a medical college hospital in a northwestern university town called Rhashahi, R-H-A-S-H-A-H-I, and with a wonderful guy in charge, the colonel in charge of the medical hospital. And they had tough jobs because nursing is no easy business. But the interesting story is that they left feeling that they really hadn't done well. And later on, other nurses came and followed us, including the gal, Cindy Tice, whom I mentioned, who had been postponed from our group and to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital and the nurses in charge, a local matron. The nurses in charge had come down from Rhashahi into Dhaka and they couldn't stop talking about the two gals who were up in Rhashahi because they set a standard of kindness and procedure and so forth and so on that they emulated. So some of these things worked out better than we expected later on. So it was learning all the way around.

Patricia Wand: Absolutely. Well, you were really.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So let’s see. My role was, A, keeping in touch with the volunteers and gradually, of course, they didn't need me as much. They got settled on their own, established, and I wasn’t going to be helpful. But I began then helping the Peace Corps colleagues at that time to develop jobs for more volunteers coming because they've been requested by the government. And we were sort of conflicted. We in the field were conflicted because we had enough problems with non-jobs and here was more going to come. So we put a lot of reliant time and effort into doing that kind of work. Then finally, we had, as other groups have done also, we had, you know, kind of a one year gathering all together and then a formal COS, close of service, conference at the end. And I put that together. Meanwhile, I had to put together a staff in Dhaka of Bengalis to work with. The wonderful story there is important, I think I mean, we had a Bengali staff party just for the mechanics of financial management, secretarial staff, things of that sort. But we needed somebody to sort of go around who would be far more effective than I could be working with the volunteers about, you know, language and Pakistani relations in the world and things. When I was in India, I had attended the conference of young Asian leaders run by the American Friends Service Committee and the British Friends Service Committee. And there I had met a young man. His name was Anowar Hossain, H-O-S-S-A-I-N, which was a common Bengali name, common Islamic name, Anowar Hossain, who I then met again in Dhaka because he had been associated with the Quaker center in Dhaka at that time, who became very good friends of ours and very helpful to us. Also, both partly just as friends, but also from a practical point of view, because of their local knowledge. And make a long story short, eventually I hired Anowar to be my deputy and he joined full time. I others have been suggested to me, but I didn't like the cut of their jib. So I'd been in that part of the world enough to have some sense as to who were more reliable and who were not. And he was a social worker by training and by inclination, had worked also with service to do a lot of national and international and people. And he was accepted by the volunteers, essentially took over the project management for me because I turned my attention to working with the Peace Corps staff on new people coming in and then to finish off the story. He stayed a couple of years thereafter. After I left with the successor project, I spent some time with the Friends Service Committee in Lahore, and then he had a 25 year career with UNICEF working in various parts of the world.

And then later on, this is going a little further on. But I was working in Bangladesh later on, among other various jobs with the Red Cross, Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, and Anowar was back and retired from the UNICEF at that time. His wife was learning what the hell am I going to do with this guy? So we got him a job working with the Bengali, the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society. And he was an ideal kind of a person because he was Bengali, but he spent many years outside of the country. So he didn't have a lot of political baggage.

Patricia Wand: He knew what needed to be done. Right. So when did Pakistan II, the new fresh crop of volunteers, come in? Did they come in during the time, the two years you were there?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Some did, some didn't. Well, one group, I think in particular was a group of nurses following and the nurses I mentioned already for those four jobs. And there were several those there was a project, a whole series of programs developed as a result of experiments at the Academy for Rural Development in what was called the Rural Public Works Program. And this had to go back to the point about foreign experts. Eventually we and the Pakistanis that we all began to realize what would be the role of so-called middle level manpower. People would be the lower skilled lords, younger or less professionally qualified foreigners, not senior experts, economists or doctors or agriculturalists or engineers, but people with, you know, professional training, but typically younger. And this level, this concept of mid-level manpower was, in fact, as you may recall, was pushed by the Peace Corps. They ran a conference in Puerto Rico, I think it was in ‘64, maybe it was, and they published a book about it matter of fact. But the Rural Public Works Program was conceived and developed at the Academy Rural Development with a combination of using Peace Corps volunteers, typically with engineering and construction backgrounds, who could work together with village councils and with Bengalis in towns and villages around the country to take on small scale works programs, approach roads, small check dams, small buildings, schools. Things of that sort are the kinds of jobs which commercial civil engineers felt were beneath them or were not going to be worth their time and effort because they were going to sit in Dhaka and get paid a lot of money and or work on big projects. But for villages are crucial because in many cases, villages were isolated. Geographically, you didn't have a market road, for example, or didn't have ways of storing.

Patricia Wand: Schools or health centers.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Health centers, right. So a large program of rural public works was built. And there's a literature about this for whatever purposes. And if you want later on, I can provide a lot of citations to support these things. So when the University of Minnesota produced, they ran a whole project, maybe a couple of them focused on rural public works, which came out of the essentially pioneering work, which is done by a combination of our two or three of the engineer people in my group, together with the director and the Academy of Rural Development, had come along. So in answer to your question, a group came for nurses. Another group came for rural public works, another group came for the high schools, and then some came after I had left. But far from based on our work and I think something in the area of the exact number, I think about 150 or 200 or so volunteers followed us in the years afterwards.

Patricia Wand: So about you said about 200.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes. The exact number I'm not dead sure of, but.

Patricia Wand: Right. So well.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Coincidentally, just to pitch one thing. One of the things I did was to, being a writer and a journalist of background, and because our people were scattered, my project was to put together a national sort of newspaper, if you will. I got a bunch of people in the local community who would volunteer to, for example, the wife of the CARE director and somebody else from the Asia Foundation, who are still friends today, and gave them assignments to go around and talk with the volunteers, do stories of the work they were doing, the nurses, the schoolteachers, the engineers, and so on. Other projects in other countries have also various kinds of journals. I'm well familiar with that, but this is one we put out.

Patricia Wand: And so there were newsletters that were compiled between July 1962 and July 1963 by people living in and working in East Pakistan.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah, that was my in my calling, I was the editor. And then had staff people I had running around and some of the volunteers wrote articles in some of the staff people wrote articles.

Patricia Wand: So I'm looking at something that is titled East Pakistan Peace Corps Journal. It's a bound volume of about two and a half inches thick. It's made of, the pages are some of them a carbon copy writing style. Some of the mimeographs, some of them newspaper reprints or photographs that have been pasted in. It's a wonderful wealth of information about that one year period.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And I'll pass this on eventually to Karen up at the, uh.

Patricia Wand: The Kennedy Library. It will go into your, with your papers. That is going to be a wonderful addition.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And there are other projects in other countries that have done similar kinds of things.

Patricia Wand: Yes, yes. Yes. But we don't always have them available to us. That's really, really a great thing. So, you know, we are, we've done a really pretty in-depth look at those two years and your role in helping to get Peace Corps started in East Pakistan. And so it's really time for you to leave. But I have a personal question for you. Were you in East Pakistan alone as a bachelor, if you will?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes.

Patricia Wand: You didn't have a family at that point?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: No.

Patricia Wand: Right. Right. As of course, all I'm assuming all the volunteers also were solo without family.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, they do. Good point. Thank you.

Patricia Wand: In those early days, married couples didn't go in together.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: However, they came out together.

Patricia Wand: They did, so many!

Robert C. Terry Jr.: We had four marriages.

Patricia Wand: Within the two years?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yeah, well three. Actually, three and a half in a sense. Two were between volunteers in my group. One was between one of my volunteers and of one who succeeded, a nurse. And then another was my colleague and buddy, Paul Slawson, who married a volunteer from West Pakistan. They’re married still today. And these marriages have all lasted, by the way.

Patricia Wand: Wonderful. That's great.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: So my line is that I married my wife as a result of Peace Corps experiences there. So I make the pitch to the Peace Corps with the best experience that's been going. Matching service.

Patricia Wand: Matching service, absolutely. Well, so, you know, we're really we're getting close. And I want to have you talk a little bit about how you brought closure to your two years and what your feelings were as you left Pakistan. And then what did you go into after that? And then I have a closing question for you that’s reflective.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, there's a whole other series of things we can talk about, depending on what your tolerance is, because of what people have done since. But to answer your question, let me just show you two or three things. This is a little bit. This is a picture of Shriver.

Patricia Wand: Yes indeed.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: In India, when he came through in May.

Patricia Wand: May of ‘61.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: The fellow on the left is David McEachran. The fellow on the right is Harris Wofford. This is Joe Whitter, who was in the Peace Corps staff but later became the head of AID. This is, I think, Roger Ernst, who was the American Foreign Service officer at the time. This is when he was leaving India, having talked with Nehru and on his way to Karachi to talk with the Pakistanis.

Patricia Wand: This is a wonderful picture, photograph.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And again, I've got the citations with that.

Patricia Wand: The identification of everybody. It's wonderful to see a young Harris Wofford. Wow, very vibrant as he still is in his 90s.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And here's an example of, there's the accused. That was our COS conference. COS being close of service.

Patricia Wand: So here we have, I'm looking at the.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: That's the beginning.

Patricia Wand: The beginning picture with their holding a Pan American Airways welcoming banner. And now I'm looking at them looking much more relaxed and really acculturated. I see them wearing the costumes of their counterparts in East Pakistan.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And it was also our Bengali staff colleagues that was like our accountant and or a couple of secretaries in the office, staff and such. This was the 62 year old who I told you, the WAC officer.

Patricia Wand: Oh and is this she, right there? Right there. Yes.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: And then I'm up there and then Paul Slawson is here, my colleague.

Patricia Wand: So you're up here with the number one in front of you. So I know it just so happens that it's wonderful.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Just for just for history's sake, there's some later ones. That was our gathering. I think that was a thirty-fifth anniversary gathering we had up in Putney, Vermont. At least that's these are some of our Bengali colleagues. This is the fellow I'm saying I mentioned. He was one of our faculty members at the academy. And he has since become a quite a star in his own life. That's his wife. And then he was another one of our faculty members who became an ambassador. There's me. A doctor who worked with us and such.

Patricia Wand: I think you were looking a little younger then too.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Yes. This is, I think the forty-fifth that's in Washington, D.C. That's our group of ragtag characters, and that is Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, who joined us at the time. This is our gathering, our fourth-fifth.

Patricia Wand: This might be thirty-fifth.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I think the thirty-fifth.

Patricia Wand: I recognize these T-shirts. Yeah I have one like it. I think it was from the thirty-fifth. Now which is you?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Oh yes, I'm there looking very unattractive.

Patricia Wand: But still among the taller of them all.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: That was a gathering. We had at.

Patricia Wand: In 2006.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: In Helena, St. Helena, California. And that was our director, King Berlew, I mentioned, lovely guy who’s still around. Jim Moody was our, he came out of that. That was one of our colleagues in the embassy who are a great help. Ruth Downing was a volunteer who helped us. And she became later a Peace Corps deputy director in Thailand. And this is where, I had this shirt here, it’s our Bengali shirts.

Patricia Wand: Right. Isn't that great.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: On the question of sort of the end of service thing, I’ll if you pardon, blow our own horn a little bit. I told you that Charlie Peters came through, an evaluator, and then Tim Adams, another evaluator, came through about a year later. And things have got a lot better. But Charlie, as I said, wrote a report in despair from Karachi. But by the end of the program, he put a note on the cover of the next evaluation by Tim Adams in which he said, this is one of the great Peace Corps groups, not one quitter when most of them had every excuse to quit. This is this is quoted actually in the best book about the Peace Corps, The Bold Experiment. It was written by Gerald Rice back in ‘86. Then I came across, by sort of chance, the consul general at the time we were there was a fellow by the name Charles P. O'Donnell, wonderful guy who was a senior foreign service officer later on, became a professor, did a very good book on Bangladesh. His number two man at that time, the political officer in charge, was a man by the name of Arthur K. Blood, B-L-O-O-D, who then went back to East Pakistan at the time of the Liberation War in 1971 and wrote the famous Blood Telegram, which he and other members of the American consulate general signed protesting American policy, which was essentially overlooking what was happening in East Pakistan at the time, when they were being essentially slaughtered by West Bengali, West Pakistani troops. And that did in his career, unfortunately. But he wrote a book later on called A Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat.

And in it, I read through it sort of just out of duty at one point. And then all of a sudden I came across this statement. “A bright day was the arrival of the first Peace Corps contingent in the mainland of Asia.” Our group was the first on the mainland, I think, Philippines I was a week or two ahead of us. “Greeted with much skepticism, the AID directorate, the AID director was sure that those kids, quote unquote, kids, would never finish their two-year tour of duty. I was intrigued by all that youthful vitality and confidence.” Pardon me. “The group's leader, Bob Terry, was a truly impressive fellow who had exhibited an unusual blend of inspirational leadership and down to earth common sense.” Thank heavens. “He and his group did exceedingly well, defying predictions to the contrary.” I mean, he sums up essentially two years right there.

Patricia Wand: Yeah, right. Well, you know, you started when you were forging new territory. No one had ever done this before. No one had ever sent volunteers to the communities to work side by side.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: That's why I make the point of distinguishing between the sort of reigning paradigm at the time of the foreign expert and essentially with Peace Corps, not just us, but the Peace Corps generally was able to establish this concept of capable middle-level manpower, which is now well accepted. And you have all kinds of service programs around the world, not just America, but other countries as well, which are doing similar kinds of work.

Patricia Wand: Absolutely. And it’s making a difference. Yeah, it really is. It's amazing. But, you know, our time is drawing near here and there are multiple topics we could follow up on. But I'm going to encourage the listener to check in with your published works, because I know you're recording a lot of this to help preserve the Peace Corps. You know, but I have a closing question. And I also want to give you a chance to sort of summarize some things. But my closing question to you is, you had the unusual experience of being able to serve in the U.S. military and then you had the opportunity to serve, if you will, in the Peace Corps. How do you compare those? How do you how would you put those together in your life exposure experience?

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, I was not the only one. That's one thing. My colleague Paul Slawson, I mentioned was an academy graduate, Naval Academy graduate, who had served four or five years in the Navy longer than I had, and then he decided to leave the Navy and we were in graduate school together. And then he spent five years in the Peace Corps actually, and then did many things since then. Then there were others, as I mentioned, those like Shriver and Warren Wiggins, but there are others who also had had military experience. And then you had the reverse combination. One of my volunteers, Sherwood Tira by name, became a naval office after his Peace Corps service and served for quite some, you know, service, active duty and then a law. And then we had one case, tragically, not in my team, but one of the later volunteers in Bangladesh who was drafted, sent to Vietnam, and died in Vietnam.

Patricia Wand: I have a colleague like that in my training group.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Unfortunately, so I guess I'm not sure I have anything particularly unusual to say about it, except that I think that there are both forms of service and they're both necessary. Let's put it that way. The military has its role properly speaking and but the Peace Corps has a lot more to offer, I think, in the long term, at a lot lower cost than the military. And the military recognizes this. And one of the interesting aspects in this regard, Pat, is that you may well be aware of this. There is now, there is now underway a variety of efforts over the years to promote the concept of national service. And I've been part of that colleagues of mine also. And one of the major forms that's taken is that of service learning, a combination of service programs backed up by educational work in colleges and universities, not just told you, but also even schools. Social service learning has become a large part of the job, the educational community, and that's as a result of a Peace Corps work. But I'm getting to a slightly different form. That is that a number of people, especially retired senior flag officers, military officers, have joined together with Harris Wofford and educational leaders to promote the concept of a service year, and that under that title is coming based in Washington, D.C. and they are trying to promote the concept that all Americans should provide a year of service of some kind military, educational, foreign, domestic, whatever, at some point in their years between 18 and 28, and that this ought to be become a matter of standard practice. It hasn't happened yet, but there are a lot of people who are working on it. And among the champions for this are not just people like us, but admirals and generals who recognize the value of these kinds of the equivalents of military and non-military service.

Patricia Wand: Right. So you've shared an awful lot, Bob, thank you so much. And I want to give you the last word.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, I would just say that as we know, they're not former volunteers. They’re returned volunteers. In my case, I spent a better part of 30 years working with a technology and management company called Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I spent a lot of time on assignments in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, coming directly out of my Peace Corps experience there because I was able to come up with a combination of language and local knowledge and skills, as well as modern management techniques to work with a variety of organizations in those countries. Other volunteers have done sort of similar kinds of things for our Peace Corps. People have done similar kinds of things. I helped to start the Massachusetts Service Corps back in 1965, which was an effort led originally by Larry Fuchs, who was the Peace Corps representative in the Philippines and as one of the first state level service programs since that. Since then, as you know, in this country, there have been a number of them, California, New York, other places. And in fact, it's a whole core network around the country of various kinds of service programs. One interesting thing is that you have now corporations. Business corporations, which are encouraging employees to provide service. That does not use the format of the Peace Corps with two solid years, no, but it does allow and encourage them to take a chunk of time to take on a particular kind of project or together as a team as well. And this is, again, because employees want to do it. It's volunteer driven as distinct from leader driven, if you will. Let's see. I guess I would say without going to a lot of history that I spent a lot of time with the National Peace Corps Association with the idea of national service, which eventually developed with the service running. But I was not a leader in that. One of my colleagues was. Eventually I was on the board of the Peace Corps Association. That's how I met my wife, who was a volunteer at midlife in Honduras after a 20 year business career and such. And then finally, being a history buff by training at Harvard, I was, my training was a history in literature. And furthermore, I knew that what I read in the Peace Corps is by definition historical, if only because it was first.

Patricia Wand: Truly.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: But so as a result and being a packrat by nature, I kept all the records and made them. And I've done a lot of I did about 40 oral history interviews with my teammates. Wonderful, because it's all very well to be enthusiastic about what somebody may have done many, many years ago, long ago and far away to see. What's more important is what they did since. And so what I'm trying to do in a word in the book that I'm working on is not only tell the story of how the Peace Corps concept developed civic service, but also how it was practiced in the case that I was involved. But in part three, the stories of people since then. And just one example of that, the fellow I mentioned who barely got in for medical reasons and hopefully is here today, became a civic leader in Reading, Pennsylvania, started a couple of companies, engineer by training. He had been a volunteer with us, volunteer leader with us in Bangladesh, Bengal, East Bengal. And then he became the mayor for eight years, Tom McMahon by name. So there were some interesting stories in that regard.

There's one other story I just want to touch on quickly. One of the volunteers by the name of Florence Tighe, short name McCarthy, who was a California 4H club leader by training. This goes back to Boy Scouts, in that case 4H club. And it's a longish story. But in brief, she was tasked by the director of the Academy at Comilla to reach out to village women. All the faculty of the Academy were men. In a rural conservative Islamic society, they could not look at, let alone talk with or work with women. Kiki was charged by the director with trying to do that. She did eventually using 4H club kind of skills and background and common sense. She was a sociologist by training and developed the first woman's program of the Academy, which eventually took root. The person who replaced her, the Bengali social worker who replaced her in charge of the program, eventually after the Bangladesh War and the development of Bangladesh, became the person in charge in the government for women's programs in the rural Bangladesh. Invited Kiki to come back. She went back to then Bangladesh, lived in Dhaka for six years, and I used to see her all the time because I would go there and consulting assignments and she, with some colleagues, did all kinds of research work in support of these kinds of programs and had a lot to do with the. And Bangladesh has become an economic miracle, not because of, but part of the reason is because of the role of women and the empowerment of women and done partly by what she did, but also by what Bengalis have done through an organization in particular called BRAK and also the Grameen Bank that I mentioned. And she now lives in Australia and has been a leader in working with universities all over east and southeast Asia, trying to help them start service learning programs. So there's a lot more to the story than just two years long ago, far away. And that's. Tune in later on for that.

Patricia Wand: That’s the aftermath. So thank you again, Bob. This has been inspiring and so informational. Thank you and I'm delighted that we were able to make this happen.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Good, well I’ll be delighted also.

Patricia Wand: This is Pat Wand and Bob Terry has remembered one more thing he wants to add to this recording.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Well, actually, there’s two.

Patricia Wand: You go for it!

Robert C. Terry Jr.: I had a role in helping to start the Massachusetts Service Corps in Boston in 1965. And then I, the experiment to serve and help returning Peace Corps volunteers created an academic institution called the School for International Training, which became a certified academic institution, a master's degree level. And that was designed specifically. I was part of that team. I was not the leader. My colleagues were much more senior to me, but that was to try and help returning volunteers come back to this country. Number one, reflect and think about what they've been doing and how they're doing. And number two, to be qualified sort of in terms of credentials for with your language training or people management kinds of skills.

Patricia Wand: I know graduates of that program, the master's degree program.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Right. Separately I ended up working with Henry Reuss later on as his legislative assistant and also worked for Hubert Humphrey at one point and then Gene McCarthy in 1968 as head of his advance staff. And at the end of it, we put together the McCarthy Historical Project, and I was the first director of that in which we started off doing oral history interviews of the survivors of the McCarthy campaign of 1968. So that's one of the reasons I'm interested in oral history. But the final story and then I'll stop is that a group of people in the mid ‘70s in the Boston area got together. And there's an organization based in Great Britain called Oxfam.

Patricia Wand: Yes.

Robert C. Terry Jr.: Oxford Famine Relief Committee. And it's a complicated story. The essence of it is summarized on my website, which is www.robertcterry.com, but essentially a group of us in the Cambridge, Boston area who had a combination of Peace Corps backgrounds, some experience in Bangladesh, experience overseas, an interest in civic service, essentially established what we called Oxfam America. And that started out in the basement of a Unitarian church in Newton, Massachusetts. Now, it's a multi-million dollar, very well-established organization with a large budget and a large work all around the world and is part of a network of Oxfams in about, I think, 11 or 12 different countries around the globe now. So there's a whole organization called Oxfam International, which does a tremendous job. And then I was a trustee for a while. Also the Experiment and a former director of NPCA. Then I'll stop.

Patricia Wand: All right. Wonderful. Thank you again for these additional facts.