OCTOBER 14TH, is what many of us consider the “official” anniversary of the beginning of the Peace Corps. On that date in 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy flew to Michigan from New York, where he had just completed a third presidential debate with the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Kennedy agreed to say a few words, late as it was — after 2 A.M. — to over 10,000 students who had gathered at the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan.
     Speaking extemporaneously, he threw out challenges to the students: How many would be prepared to give years of their lives working in Asia, Africa and Latin America? How many would serve as teachers, doctors, and engineers? He spoke of the need for them to make a personal contribution, of the greater effort to be made and of the value of sacrifice. “On your willingness,” he said, “not merely to serve one or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether we as a free society can compete.”
     “No one is sure why Kennedy raised the question in the middle of the night at the University of Michigan,” wrote Sargent Shriver in later years. Possibly Kennedy thought of the Peace Corps at Michigan because someone reminded him that Professor Samuel Hayes taught at the University’s International Studies Department. Hayes, in a report which he had submitted to Kennedy in September, had argued a case for American volunteers working in the Third World. Other staff members felt that Kennedy’s remarks were a counterattack to a criticism that Nixon had made during the debate earlier in the evening. Noting that the United States had become involved in foreign wars under Wilson, FDR, and Truman, Nixon had described the Democrats as the “war party.” Harris Wofford, a member of the Kennedy campaign team, and later one of the architects of the Peace Corps, later wrote, “Stung by Nixon’s word, Kennedy may have remembered the idea of a Peace Corps and spoken as he did in order to counteract the image of a Democratic war party.”
     Kennedy did not actually mention a “Peace Corps” or “volunteer” at Michigan, but his remarks clearly embodied the spirit of the idea. For him, Ann Arbor was a turning point.

The Cow Palace speech
Three weeks later, on November 2, 1960, Kennedy was in California and gave a major address at the Cow Palace auditorium in San Francisco. Nearly forty thousand people jammed the hall to hear a speech crafted by Theodore Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, and Archibald Cox. The speech was called, “Staffing a Foreign Policy for Peace.”
     Pinpointing weaknesses in vital areas of U.S. foreign policy, Kennedy warned that the United States would have to pay the price for its neglect of the newly independent countries of the Third World. He pointed to the paucity of American technicians at work with the peoples of the developing countries. He noted that Asia had more Soviet than American technicians and that a similar trend was becoming apparent in Africa. Stressing the impact that skilled Americans might have in the Third World, “building goodwill, building the peace,” he proposed a new government organization to accomplish this task, a Peace Corps.
     President Eisenhower at the time ridiculed the Peace Corps as a “juvenile experiment.” Nixon said the agency would be a form of “draft evasion,” and Senator Barry Goldwater remarked that the Peace Corps would be the advance work for a group of beatniks.
     And then the Daughters of the American Revolution at their 70th Continental Congress warned against a “yearly drain” of “brains and brawn . . . for the benefit of backward, underdeveloped countries.” Worse still, as they saw it, in the Peace Corps young Americans would be “living under abnormal conditions . . . and not with fellow-compatriots in barracks, as is customary in the armed forces.” With Volunteers thus “separated from the moral and disciplinary influences of their homeland,” the DAR saw only dire and “serious consequences.”
     Well, the Daughters got it partly right.

Later analysis
Nevertheless, three years after the “experiment” began, a Time Magazine cover story concluded that the Peace Corps was “the greatest single success the Kennedy administration has produced.”
     After Kennedy’s death, Theodore C. Sorensen, special counsel to President Kennedy, would say that the Peace Corps was the only new idea to emerge from the 1960 campaign. (From 1995 to 1997, Sorensen’s daughter, Juliet, would serve as a health Volunteer in Morocco.) Harris Wofford in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, would write, “Of all the social inventions of the sixties, the Peace Corps has been the most successful. It is John Kennedy’s most affirmative legacy.”
     In a talk given at the 35th Anniversary Celebration of the Peace Corps in 1966, Theodore C. Sorensen said, “John F. Kennedy often invoked the old saying that ‘success has a hundred fathers and failure is an orphan.’ He would be the first to acknowledge that the Peace Corps, one of his proudest achievements, had a hundred fathers: a bill by Hubert Humphrey, a speech by James Gavin, an article by Milton Shapp, the example of the Mormons and a dozen other religious organizations, a petition from Michigan University student responding to his impromptu midnight challenge, and dozens of others.”
     Today we don’t know really who first conceived of the idea of a Peace Corps, but it was John F. Kennedy who gave it birth, and all of us who served gave it life. So, in many ways, like Kennedy, it is also our greatest achievement.
     Happy 40th Birthday Everyone!

In the September issue of PeaceCorpsWriters.org
A Writer Writes
Simone Zelitch (Hungary 1991–93) joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Hungary, which, by coincidence, was the setting of her novel-in-progress about a Holocaust survivor and her gentile daughter-in-law. Assigned to the University of Veszprem in western Hungary, Simone taught teachers-in--training,
     That novel, Louisa, her second, is being published this month by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and has earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Such acclaim is a first for a Peace Corps writer. In this month’s “A Writer Writes,” Simone tells how she began her highly praised literary novel.

Letter Home
We’re in Africa again for our letter home. This issue, it is West Africa, and Joyce Lombari (Chad 1993–95) is writing home after a year in Bessada, Chad. Unlike the last issue’s reserved prose of Kathleen Moore (Ethiopia 1965–67), Joyce wears her heart (and her prose) on her sleeve. This is a tough letter to Mom and Dad and spells out the hard emotions that so many PCVs experience overseas.

Peace Corps Trivia
We’ve added a new column to our mix of items this issue. It’s Peace Corps trivia — and hasn’t there been a lot of it over the years? We start with the story of how Vice President Al Gore is linked to the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps History
In the early years of the Peace Corps, before email and desktop publishing, and when the agency was still trying to define what Peace Corps Volunteers “really did,” a series of short monographs were typed up and printed out for the headquarters and overseas staff to read and discuss. The monographs were also circulated on college campuses in an attempt to reveal more about the opportunities and frustrations of Peace Corps life than what appeared in the press. The idea for the monographs was that of Donovan McClure (PC/W 1961–65 ) who came to Washington with Sargent Shriver as the director of Public Affairs and then became Country Director in Sierra Leone. McClure commissioned several Volunteers and staff members to write about the agency. Several of these monographs made it into print in The Peace Corps Reader, a paperback book published in September 1967 and published by Quadrangle Books for the Peace Corps.

     However, the majority of the essays were tossed away or left unread in overstuffed desk outboxes. Nevertheless, a few papers became legendary within the agency during those early days. One was written by Meridan Bennett (PC/W 1964–67). Bennett, with David Hapgood (PC/W Evaluation 1964–66), wrote one of the first books that assessed the work of Volunteers. It was entitled, Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps, and was published by Little, Brown in 1968. Before that came, Bennett’s “The Real Job of the Peace Corps: One Man’s View” and we are delighted to be publishing it for the first time ever.