Picture this: A twentysomething New Jersey woman is ferried by plane to a remote jungle area of Guatemala in 1963 and dropped off to make a home from a hut in a small northern village. For two years she feeds poor Guatemalan children and broadcasts health and nutrition tips over an archaic radio system.
Jump ahead 30 years to Wall Street. A lawyer, whose real penchant is politics in New York City, rises in the wickedly competitive field of investment banking.
What do these scenes have in common?
Carol Bellamy, a corporate-minded public servant appointed by President Clinton last June to lead the Peace Corps, the agency created by President John Kennedy amid a New Frontier idealism that seems distant today.
As the first agency volunteer to hold the post of Peace Corps director, Bellamy has a mandate to change the Peace Corps, and is bound to make it into a different one than she knew as a volunteer in Guatemala in 1963.
“In the early days, they kind of just sent us bright-eyed, bushy-tailed folks in and told us, `Go here, figure out what to do.’ It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was almost that bad,” said Bellamy during an interview at the Peace Corps’ headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Bellamy, 51, is no longer the college graduate ready to change the world with a bachelor’s degree, enthusiasm and a two-year foreign stint. It is hard to picture this professional woman living in squalor. But her steady voice and sturdy frame support her claim that the Peace Corps taught her how to get back up after falling down.
She is as ready as ever for public service, even after serving as a state senator from New York City in the 1970s, New York City Council president from 1978 to 1985 and losing campaigns for mayor and city comptroller.
And that does not include her years of legal work as a managing director at Bear Stearns & Co. during the last several years and in the late 1980s as a principal at Morgan Stanley & Co.
Despite what she calls a “significant” reduction in salary to $123,700, Bellamy vows to accomplish great feats. Kennedy once envisioned 100,000 volunteers returning to America every year, and Congress has sought in vain for years to find funding for at least 10,000.
Bellamy plans to increase the number of volunteers from its current 6,500 to 7,500, even if Congress does not approve the agency’s requested budget increase to $226 million from $219 million. She says she already is trimming costs by leaving nearly a third of the agency’s political-appointee posts unfilled.
As if fighting for her agenda already, Bellamy slaps the wooden table as she ticks off her preliminary priorities.
In addition to increasing the number of volunteers, she wants to beef up their skills training, “turn up the volume” on Peace Corps publicity, expand the agency’s domestic programs in which returned volunteers work in public schools or receive scholarships to continue other social service work and better safeguard the security of volunteers in an “increasingly volatile world.”
As she pushes ahead with her agenda, Bellamy can’t help but be aware of troubles that have dragged the agency down. Topping the list is the strain the agency has been under since late 1992, when it began sending too many volunteers too quickly into the newly independent countries of Eastern Europe.
“What I don’t want to do is go around and open up another 27 million countries,” said Bellamy, with a tone of exasperated humor. “I’m being a little facetious, but we’ve opened up so many countries so quickly that one of the things I want to do is stabilize the programs in those countries and make sure what we’re doing makes sense.”
However, Peace Corps problems go back further than 1992 In the mid 1980s, the Reagan administration tried to cut the Peace Corps several times, leaving Congress to maintain or increase funding for the agency.
During the Bush administration, management of the Peace Corps floundered under the leadership of Paul Coverdell, now a Republican senator from Georgia. Coverdell made 27 trips to Georgia during his first 18 months as director. Under Coverdell’s charge agency audits showed a high rate of attrition among volunteers, lack of supervision for overtime compensation and inflated salaries for some top agency personnel.
The lack of a former Peace Corps volunteer in the director position has been a travesty, critics argue. It helps explain why Bellamy’s appointment, which was easily confirmed by the Senate last October, won applause. One Washington Peace Corps staff member who has served under several recent directors said, “After what we’ve been through she’s totally refreshing.”
In January, Bellamy was in Chicago emphasizing the Peace Corps’ domestic programs, which tie in with President Clinton’s national service initiative.
At Hartigan Elementary School near the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side, Bellamy showcased one of the Peace Corps’ few domestic programs. She met with Lynn Wallace, a returned volunteer, who is receiving an agency graduate scholarship while continuing her public service as a Spanish teacher.
Bellamy also met with newspaper editorial boards to drum up media attention for an agency that some people have forgotten, she said, and attended a reception with returned volunteers and parents of volunteers.
“The Peace Corps, I think, still is thought very highly of and positively of by people generally,” Bellamy said. “But if I got any negative comments when I was appointed to this job it was `What a great job, but is Peace Corps still around?’ so I want people to know Peace Corps is alive and well and stronger than ever.”
Stephen Thomas, an attorney with Sidley & Austin and former Peace Corps volunteer who hosted the reception for Bellamy at the Chicago law firm, was impressed by the new director.
“She obviously thinks about the Peace Corps from the time she gets up to the time she goes to sleep at the end of the day,” Thomas said.
Nonetheless, Thomas, who had not met Bellamy before her Chicago visit, says he is somewhat at odds with her plan to build up Peace Corps’ domestic programs.
“The focus of the Peace Corps has always been overseas,” Thomas said. “My own personal feeling going into the Peace Corps, and to this day, is that it is to introduce ordinary U.S. citizens to their brothers and sisters throughout the world.”
Bellamy contends that all three traditional Peace Corps goals-economic development, sending Americans to other countries and making use of their experiences back home-should be included in Peace Corps’ programs and budget.
“We all are kind of in our time warp: We all have our snapshot of what the Peace Corps is, which is probably true, but it’s lots of other things too,” said Bellamy, who has visited staffers in Guatemala, Senegal, Madagascar, Micronesia, Morocco, Thailand and the Philippines.
After spending most of her life in New York, the move to Washington and into the federal government was a shift for Bellamy, who initially turned down the position because she had planned to run for New York state comptroller this year. But when the incumbent stepped down in early 1993 and Bellamy was passed over for the appointment to finish the unexpired term, politics seemed to lose some of its allure, she said.
“She ran into a titanium ceiling on women’s political careers in New York state,” said Joe Conason, managing editor of the New York Observer, a weekly political and cultural affairs newspaper. “The governor (Mario Cuomo) could have helped her, but instead he opposed her …. I think she saw that opportunities were pretty closed.”
Meanwhile, Bellamy’s interest in the Peace Corps position grew and lured her from the city she loves. Now she lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the Dupont Circle neighborhood in Washington.
“My guess is she’s gone to Washington because she’s starting a new phase of her career,” said William Josephson, a law partner at Freid, Frank, Harris, Schriver and Jacobson in New York. He became a friend of Bellamy and her roommate when the three attended the New York University School of Law in the mid-1960s.
Bellamy entered law school the week she returned from the Peace Corps in 1965. Earlier, Bellamy, at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, she had gotten her bachelor’s degree. Her mother, Frances, is still by her daughter’s side for important events such as her Senate confirmation hearing.
Bellamy has never been married and does not have children.
“I was a kid of the ’60s so I also went through the ’70s of the superwoman: gorgeous woman married to handsome man, rising in the corporate ladder, two cute children; dog Muffy,” Bellamy says sarcastically. “And you have a beautiful house, and it’s all done with no stress and strain. And we tried to convince people that this was so, and it was totally full of crap-, I mean it was full of stress and strain.”
She has no regrets about the route her life took.
“I’ve loved what I’ve done in my job, and I’m very happy,” said Bellamy. “On the other hand, I also have some very good friends.”
Among them are Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Alice Rivlin, deputy director for the Office of Management and Budget, professional colleagues and mountain-hiking partners.
And with a lot of other New Yorkers making frequent treks to the capital, Bellamy does not feel far from home, she said.
Does she find it difficult to perform as America’s altruist worldwide after years as a money-maker on Wall Street?
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Not at all. Wall Street, like every other place, has a bottom line. The bottom line there is how much money can you make. So government is not how much money you can make, but it is the best utilization of resources, setting goals, trying to reach those goals.”
