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

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