[Alumni-chat] The Origin of the Peace Corps

[L Powsner]

Interesting tidbits.

 

Laurie

lrpjak at verizon.net

 

  _____  

From: CarHaag at aol.com [mailto:CarHaag at aol.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:16 PM
To: lrpjak at verizon.net
Subject: The Origin of the Peace Corps

 

Laurie, 

You may know this story.  I found it riveting because I was there that night
but knew little about the event.  Further, I found out the man (and woman)
most responsible for the Peace Corps turned out to be a former President of
Antioch, Al Guskin.  Wow!   


I also came across the most complete history of Antioch College, including
how it came to the resent sad events.   It was riveting and seemed honest:


http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=14306
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=14306
&R=115BF221> &R=115BF221 
  
Carl

U-M heritage
Read and contribute to Your U-M History. Submit your story and read U-M
history from the people who lived it.
JFK at the Union: The unknown story of the Peace Corps speech
by James Tobin
January 15, 2008
Audio: JFK's speech
Related: Speech transcript

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Well after midnight on October 14, 1960, presidential candidate John F.
Kennedy arrived at the steps of the Michigan Union. Legend has it that he
first proposed the idea of the Peace Corps here. The truth is a little more
complex, but far more interesting. File photo courtesy Ann Arbor News.

Senator John F. Kennedy's motorcade rolled into Ann Arbor very early on the
morning of Friday, October 14, 1960. The election was three and a half weeks
away. The Democratic nominee for president and his staff had just flown into
Willow Run Airport. A few hours earlier, in New York, Kennedy had fought
Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, in the third of their
four nationally televised debates. The race was extremely close, and
Michigan was up for grabs. Kennedy's schedule called for a few hours of
sleep, then a one-day whistle-stop train tour across the state.
The campaign got word that students had been waiting outside the Michigan
Union, where Kennedy was to spend the night, for three hours. As the cars
reached the corner of State and South University, Kennedy's speechwriters,
Theodore Sorensen and Richard Goodwin, looked out the window. Students,
densely packed, were milling all over the steps and sidewalks and into the
street. Some carried signs or wore Kennedy hats. There were signs for Nixon,
too. Cries arose as the cars pulled up.
"He won't just let them stand there," Sorensen told Goodwin. "He's going to
speak. Maybe that'll give us a chance to get something to eat."
They hadn't prepared a speech, but Kennedy was good at extemporizing in a
pinch. He might have given the students a quick greeting and a standard
pitch for votes. No one knows why he chose, instead, to ask them a question
that would launch the signature program of his administration and ignite the
idealism of a generation.
Since early in the campaign year, there had been scattered proposals for a
volunteer corps of young Americans who would go abroad to help nations
emerging from colonialism in Africa, Asia and South America. Kennedy had
asked for studies of the idea, including from Samuel Hayes, a U-M professor
of economics and director of the Center for Research on  Economic
Development. In early October, his staff had floated the idea in a press
release, but no sparks had been struck. And Kennedy, according to aides, had
been leery of the idea, fearing the damage Nixon might cause, in the jittery
atmosphere of the Cold War, by calling him naïve about foreign affairs.
Possibly it was a remark of Nixon's that drew Kennedy's mind back to the
idea. In the debate the night before, the vice president had reminded the
national audience that three Democratic presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman—had taken the U.S. to war. Kennedy may have
wanted to strike a note that would associate his campaign with peace.
In any case, he did not actually propose a program. He issued a challenge.
Listen to a recording of JFK's stirring speech here
Read a transcript of the speech.
Speaking into a microphone at the center of the stone staircase, with aides
and students around him, Kennedy began by expressing his "thanks to you, as
a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University." (A recording
shows that this got a shout from the crowd.) The campaign, he said, was the
most important since the Depression election of 1932, "because of the
problems which press upon the United States, and the opportunities which
will be presented to us in the 1960s, which must be seized."
Then he asked his question:

How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days
in Ghana? Technicians or engineers: how many of you are willing to work in
the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your
willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year 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 a free society can compete.
I think it can. And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the
effort must be far greater than we've ever made in the past.
Therefore, I am delighted to come to Michigan, this university, because
unless we have those resources in this school, unless you comprehend the
nature of what is being asked of you, this country can't possibly move
through the next 10 years in a period of relative strength.

He said he'd come to Ann Arbor merely "to go to bed"—drawing a ribald roar
from the crowd—then: "This is the longest short speech I've ever made, and
I'll therefore finish it." The state had not built the university "merely to
help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle," he
said. "There is certainly a greater purpose, and I'm sure you recognize it."
He was not merely asking for their votes, but for "your support for this
country over the next decade."
The students roared again. Then Kennedy went up to bed, telling an aide he
appeared to have "hit a winning number."
Were you present at JFK's famous speech? Do you have connections to the
early days of the Peace Corps? Share your story at Your U-M History
That was it. He had spoken for three minutes. There were 50 or 60 reporters
with Kennedy, but few mentioned the senator's remarks. Russell Baker of the
New York Times reported that during JFK's entire swing through Michigan, he
said "nothing that was new"—which was true, if one counted the early-October
press release. But in the aftermath of the speech, something new began.
The following Tuesday, October 18, Congressman Chester Bowles of
Connecticut, a Kennedy supporter and advisor, spoke to students in the Union
ballroom. He, too, proposed what the Daily called "a U.N. civil service,
which would send doctors, agricultural experts and teachers to needy
countries throughout the world."
Among Bowles' listeners were two married graduate students, Alan and Judy
Guskin. From Bowles' talk, they went to a diner where they drafted a letter
to the Daily on a napkin. The letter was published the following Friday. The
Guskins noted that Kennedy and Bowles had "emphasized that disarmament and
peace lie to a very great extent in our hands and requested our
participation throughout the world as necessary for the realization of these
goals." The two then pledged to "devote a number of years to work in
countries where our help is needed," and they challenged other students to
write similar pledges to Kennedy and Bowles. "With this request," they
wrote, "we express our faith that those of us who have been fortunate enough
to receive an education will want to apply their knowledge through direct
participation in the underdeveloped communities of the world."
Over the next two weeks, events moved fast. The Guskins were contacted by
Samuel Hayes, the professor who had written the position paper on a youth
corps for Kennedy. Together, they called a mass meeting. Some 250 students
came out to sign a petition saying they would volunteer. Hundreds more
signers  followed within days.
Then Mildred Jeffrey, a Democratic state committeewoman and UAW official
whose daughter attended U-M, got word to Ted Sorensen about what Kennedy and
Bowles had wrought in Ann Arbor. Sorensen told Kennedy.
On November 2, in a major address at the Cow Palace in San Francisco,
Kennedy formally proposed "a peace corps of talented young men and women,
willing and able to serve their country
for three years as an alternative or
as a supplement to peacetime selective service." (Nixon responded by calling
the idea "a cult of escapism" and "a haven for draft dodgers.")
On Sunday, November 6, two days before the election, Kennedy was expected at
the Toledo airport. Three carloads of U-M students, including the Guskins,
drove down to show him the petitions. "He took them in his hands and started
looking through the names," Judy Guskin recalled later. "He was very
interested."
Alan asked: "Are you really serious about the Peace Corps?"
"Until Tuesday we'll worry about this nation," Kennedy said. "After Tuesday,
the world."
Two days later, Kennedy defeated Nixon by some 120,000 votes, one of the
slimmest margins in U.S. history. Some argue the Peace Corps proposal may
have swayed enough votes to make the difference.
"It might still be just an idea but for the affirmative response of those
Michigan students and faculty," wrote Sargent Shriver, JFK's brother-in-law
and the Peace Corps' first director, in his memoir. "Possibly Kennedy would
have tried it once more on some other occasion, but without a strong popular
response he would have concluded the idea was impractical or premature. That
probably would have ended it then and there. Instead, it was almost a case
of spontaneous combustion."
Alan and Judy Guskin were among the Peace Corps' early volunteers. They
served in Thailand.
Sources include articles in The Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News and
the following books: Robert G. Carey, "The Peace Corps" (Prager, 1970);
Richard N. Goodwin, "Remembering America" (Little, Brown & Co., 1988);
Gerard T. Rice, "The Bold Experiment" (Notre Dame, 1985); Karen Schwarz,
"What You Can Do For Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps"
(Morrow, 1991); Sargent Shriver, "Point of the Lance" (Harper & Row, 1964);
Theodore C. Sorensen, "Kennedy" (Harper & Row, 1965); Harris Wofford, "Of
Kennedys and Kings" (FSG, 1980).

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James Tobin is an author and historian. His most recent book is To Conquer
the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight.
 


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