[OPINION] The corps' celebrity and size may have diminished, but its longevity is a testament to its importance. In some ways, the Peace Corps, which celebrates its 50th anniversary Tuesday, is a shadow of what it once was. It had so much pizzazz in the early days that newspapers proclaimed the names of new volunteers as if they had just won Guggenheim fellowships. Now, the number of volunteers — 8,655 — is about half of what it was at its highest in 1966, and not everyone knows the Peace Corps still exists. The first director — the irrepressible, inspiring Sargent Shriver, who put the program together in six months — made the cover of Time in 1963. The current director — Aaron Williams, a former volunteer with decades of experience in international development — barely gets his name in the papers. At a panel discussion at George Washington University a couple of years ago, Christiane Amanpour, then chief foreign correspondent of CNN, listed factors that had contributed to American worldwide popularity in the past. "There was a Peace Corps," she said. Yet the Peace Corps, despite its loss of celebrity and size, has improved a great deal during its 50 years...

The family joke was that President John F. Kennedy handed his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, a lemon and Shriver turned it into lemonade. The lemon was the new Peace Corps, and Shriver, who died on Tuesday just six weeks short of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, transformed that lemon in 1961 into the most dynamic, popular and exciting agency of the new administration. The success of the Peace Corps made Shriver a national celebrity...

Since the beginning, most writers about the Peace Corps have either derided it or heaped praise on it, but never understood it. In this book, David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, two former officials of the organization, never mock or gush about it but always understand it. Their work is tough, realistic criticism, so tough and real that it is sometimes cruel and occasionally unfair. But it tells us, as no other book has, what the Peace Corps is all about. In assessing the work of the 30,000 volunteers sent to the Third World since 1961, Hapgood and Bennett conclude that “as a contributor to development in the Third World, the Peace Corps can make no great claims to accomplishment. . . . Volunteers have filled a lot of jobs, but their utility on those jobs, and often the utility of the jobs themselves, is questionable.” The writers do see more hope for the future. “An enormous potential clearly exists in the Peace Corps. ...” they write. “If the Peace Corps can build on the isolated cases of its success that its volunteers have registered, then its help to the Third World could be much greater than it has been to date.” But, even if the potential for development is unrealized, Hapgood and Bennett see a great deal of worth in the project...