Peace Corps Commemorative
The Peace Corps program was established by Executive Order 10924, which was issued by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961. The program was legislatively authorized by Congress on September 21, 1961, with passage of the Peace Corps Act (Pub.L. 87–293). Between 1961 and 2013, over 215,000 Americans joined the Peace Corps. The National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit organization for Peace Corps alumni, established the Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation to advocate for a commemorative to honor the mission of the Peace Corps and the values on which it was founded.
Joseph Blatchford
P. David Searles in his book "The Peace Corps Experience: Challenge and Change, 1969-1976" says that the five-year rule required that all staff members leave the Peace Corps not later than the fifth anniversary on the date they were hired and even Shriver observed this rule when he stepped down as the first Peace Corps director on March 1, 1966, five years after becoming director to the day. Searles said that Blatchford saw the five-year rule as one way to help assemble his own team, just as Jack Vaughn had done when he became director in 1966. "The loudest and most outraged of political partisanship came in 1971 when Blatchford used an important Peace Corps policy, generally ignored by his predecessor, to terminate nearly one hundred staff members, including twenty-seven country directors. The rule was instituted to ensure that the agency would never suffer the fate of other government bureaucracies: premature calcification resulting from an aged and spent permanent staff." Author P. David Searles says that Shriver's concerns about finding "competent overseas directors" proved groundless.