Redding Resident & Peace Corps Draftsman Reflects On Org's Early Days

REDDING, CT — Sixty-two years ago this month, the Peace Corps was founded. Since then, more than 240,000 Americans have joined the agency and served in 142 countries.

The storied history of the Corps might have played out a little differently were it not for the work of Redding resident Dan Sharp, age 91.

In 1960, Sharp was a young lawyer working in San Francisco and active in John F. Kennedy's campaign for president. As a result of that work, he found himself in the Cow Palace audience when the soon-to-be elected presidential candidate sang the praises of the yet-to-be-invented program for young ambassadors, which strongly resonated with the young lawyer.

"For the previous two years, I'd been leading a very serious study group at the World Affairs Council on US foreign policy for what was then called the Third World, the lesser developed countries," Sharp said. "I was very sensitive to the importance of what he was proposing, because our foreign policy then toward the Third World was to embrace dictators, and not really much in our interest."

After hearing Kennedy's speech, Sharp said he felt like he "was struck by lightning." and knew he had to be part of that new organization.

The next day, he asked for and received a leave of absence from his day job as deputy attorney general of California. Except there wasn't any organization to be a part of, just an office where "a couple of dozen people were trying to figure out how to create the Peace Corps" all working for Kennedy's brother-in-law Sargent Shriver.

Sharp says he showed up at the office, knocked on the door, and when asked his business, explained he was there to help start the Peace Corps.

Shriver must have seen something in the Harvard-trained attorney, as he promptly had him named to the US delegation to the United Nations. From that perch, he traveled to Geneva, Montreal, Paris and Rome to negotiate treaties with UN agencies the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Labour Organization. He did this all in the next 12 months, before the age of 30.

As the Peace Corps gained momentum, so did Sharp's career. Shriver sent him to Peru to start an office there, and later to temporarily serve as the Peace Corps director in Bolivia. After that, he worked in the organization's Latin American division for a few years.

"Until one day, I decided I better go back and be a lawyer, or else I never would be," Sharp told Patch. "So I said goodbye to Shriver, and he said, 'Well, of course, you can leave anytime you want. But before you go, do you have any lessons for what you learned? Because you were among the first Peace Corps directors we had overseas.'"

Sharp said he couldn't help but notice that the second wave of Peace Corps leaders were "making the same stupid mistakes" as he had done, and suggested the organization institute a training program. Not surprisingly, Shriver gave the job of creating the program to Sharp, and two years later he was "promoted to be part of the dozen people who were running the Peace Corps worldwide."

The gig bloomed over the next seven years. Sharp said he would have stayed even longer, but someone pointed out he already had written himself out of the job. While drafting the organization's charter years earlier, the lawyer had written a clause that limited the tenure of paid staff to five years.

"And the reason we did that was we didn't want the Peace Corps to become a bureaucracy," Sharp explained.

For the first time in his life, Sharp said he found himself having to do a job search. Connections made at the UN soon found him busy creating the Stevenson Institute of International Affairs at the University of Chicago.

Along the way, Sharp realized that "the private sector had a lot more money to do good things," and he began distinguished careers at Xerox and ITT, among other global organizations. Later, he became CEO of President Eisenhower’s American Assembly at Columbia University, and the CEO of the Eisenhower Foundation, which he called "probably the best 15 years of my life."

In 2018, Dan and his wife, Revelle, left their home of 40 years in Stamford and moved to Meadow Ridge in Redding.

Global tensions may have been more tightly wound 62 years ago, but the retired architect of one of the world's foremost diplomatic organizations said today's internal conflicts have more than compensated.

"I think the split within the United States is getting worse, not better. There is a substantial number of people who don't know the difference between lies and truth, and don't want to know."