摘要：The Peace Corps, established by the Kennedy Administration, became an important foreign
policy instrument for US-Ghana relations during the nascent stages of Ghana¡¯s postindependence
democracy. As the first country to be a beneficiary to the program, President
Kwame Nkrumah was initially skeptical of this U.S. foreign policy, but eventually warmed up to
the concept. In this paper, I will explore some underlying factors that contributed to the eventual
transformation of the Peace Corps into an important element of bilateral collaboration and
partnership for both the United States and Ghana during the Nkrumah administration. I will also
discuss important formative flashpoints that led to the inauguration of the program starting from
the speech given by John F. Kennedy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor through the
Cow Palace official proclamation in San Francisco and the ensuing diversity of trainings that the
earlier volunteers participated in. All these chronological analyses are constructed within a
broader geopolitical purview which emphasizes the realist power contentions that characterized
the Cold War East-West political dichotomy. The question undergirding this paper, then, is: Was
the Peace Corps a Cold War foreign policy instrument critical to the execution of United States¡¯
proxy wars with the Soviets or was it a foreign policy crafted solely for the altruistic purpose of
carrying out humanitarian assistance in Third World nations or was it intended to serve both?
