"American Taboo" by Philip Weiss

I was never ambivalent about my service in the Peace Corps or my support for the goals of the organization. These misfortunes and hundreds more throughout its history do not indict the Peace Corps mission or cast in doubt its efficacy. The problem (which comes and goes), precisely characterized and illuminated by Philip Weiss, has been the tacit understanding within the organization that its myriad and mostly predictable troubles are taboo, not subject to public or even congressional scrutiny, and my own experience can do nothing but confirm Weiss' conclusion.

As a writer and former volunteer, I wasn't inclined to overlook the skeletons in the Peace Corps closet, and in 1983 I pitched the story of Peace Corps casualties (victims of violence, psychological burnouts, suicides, political scapegoats) to Playboy magazine and was given the assignment. What happened next has everything to do with the dynamics Weiss so painstakingly investigates in "American Taboo." I flew to Connecticut to meet with the family of Philip Cyr, a volunteer murdered in Nepal by bandits, but my interview with the grieving parents was interrupted, incredibly, by a phone call from the then-director of the Peace Corps, Loret Miller Ruppe, who advised the Cyrs not to talk. A short time later, Peace Corps headquarters issued a worldwide memo to its staff threatening disciplinary action against anyone who spoke with me. My sources (and friends) within the organization stopped taking my calls. My Freedom of Information Act request for documents was kicked back at me with a price tag of more than a million dollars.

Despite Peace Corps stonewalling and crude obstruction, I completed the article but, beginning with Playboy, every major general-interest magazine in the country turned it down, a phenomenon later explained to me by C. Michael Curtis, a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, who had read the piece. The Peace Corps, Curtis said, was a sacred cow, and no editor wanted to be responsible for undermining its exalted image.

But my intention, and Weiss certainly seems to share it, was never to take down or disparage the Peace Corps, but to air out structural flaws, with the hope that future volunteers would be better prepared to overcome the challenges that would confront them, physically, psychologically and emotionally, in the far-flung corners of the world. Idealism's survival is under constant numbing pressure in any government institution, especially at the federal level, where it slowly decays on the vines of politics and bureaucracy, and over the years the Peace Corps, America's most idealistic institution, has labored to preserve its shining reputation, though sometimes at the expense of the very principles it embodies.

Some readers of "American Taboo" will argue that the events surrounding the murder of Deborah Gardner that Weiss so compellingly reconstructs happened under the auspices of a Peace Corps long past, perpetrated by a relatively small group of people who never genuinely embraced or practiced the values of the Corps, or did in fact embrace but selfishly corrupted. The bigger concern, in my opinion, is who controls the story of the Peace Corps, who controls the story of Deb Gardner, and to what purpose. The Peace Corps, always, was really about us, what sort of people we Americans would be, who we were not just at home but in the world. "American Taboo" makes the answer much less clear and reopens the conversation at a critical point in our history. Not since Vietnam is the country more in need of self-reflection and self-assessment than it is now. For that reason alone, I hope "American Taboo" finds a wide audience.

But there's even a better reason. "American Taboo" is a spectacular debut by a writer who must be applauded for his clarity and fairness, the lean elegance of his narrative untainted by cynicism or the indiscretion of agendas. Unlike the individuals in the South Pacific and Washington who brought shame and dishonor to the noble service of almost a quarter of a million Peace Corps volunteers and staff for more than 40 years, Philip Weiss is a great American, a true patriot who lives and breathes and writes in the sunlight of a moral universe. That no one could protect Deborah Gardner when she was alive is perhaps understandable; that no one, for the sake of human dignity and decency, protected her when she was dead is forever inexcusable.

Now Weiss, the only real guardian angel in the life that was Deb Gardner's, rides in this storm, and his words have summoned a justice long denied.

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