What strikes anyone reading about the creating of the Peace Corps was 1) how creatively it was organized; and 2) how fast it was put into operation. The reason was that the ‘founding fathers’ (and they were only fathers) took chances. Wofford remarks in Of Kennedys & Kings how a management consultant said to him one evening, “You guys had a good day today. You broke fourteen laws.” Then the consultant promised to straighten out the paper work and urged then all on, saying, “Keep it up, we’re making progress.”
     Wiggins in his interview with me listed 7 reasons why the Peace Corps was so successful in those early days of the Kennedy administration.
     1)  Bill Josephson and Warren Wiggins kept the idea of a “Peace Corps” simple. At first, the PCVs were only to teach English. As Wiggins told me, “Our cardinal rule in crafting ‘A Towering Task’ was to make the agency simple, workable, understandable, and within the competence of young Americans.” When it got started the Peace Corps Volunteers did a lot more, but in the beginning that was an explicit, verbalized statement of what the Peace Corps would be.
     2) The staff was anti-professional and anti-bureaucratic. “I don’t know from whence some of that came,” Warren recalled, “other than that I always prided myself on being a maverick, outspoken, audacious, irreverent.”
     3)  They were all amateurs. “We were,” said Wiggins, “a whole group of people who were amateurs in the business of being a government agency that ran volunteers.” The staff also was made up a wide assortment of people who, with a few exceptions, had no professional skills in volunteering and no international experience.
     4) The Peace Corps staff paid no attention to the hierarchies of professionalism. Wiggins recalled how the staff approached the teaching of English as a second language. “We called in the national association of teaching English as a secondary language,” he said, “and asked for help in developing a training program. They were all excited by this and said we needed to train for two years. I told them we didn’t have two years. They cut the training back to 18 months and said they couldn’t be responsible unless the Volunteers had 18 months of training. So, we said four months is the max, and we’re going to teach a lot besides teaching English as a second language. They left and we never paid attention to them again.”
     What the Peace Corps did was write their own books; teach their own courses. “We were ahead of the game, and we did not rely on the professionals,” Wiggins summed up. “For example, we had two former heads of the American Psychological Association heading up selection, but the selection process was anti-establishment. It didn’t run like normal selection processes.”
     5) The Peace Corps from the first considered the Department of State the enemy, and plotted to see that State never got its grips on the agency. The anti-establishment staff didn’t want the Peace Corps as an establishment. “I was so proud,” Wiggins recalled, “that for a couple of years we never had policy directives. We only had interim policy directives. And that was lovely.”
     6) The staff also didn’t want a personnel office in the agency and were able to get away with it for a few years. “Then we finally appointed someone,” Wiggins said, “but she had no power.”
     7) The Peace Corps staff took the long-term view about their work. Warren recalls an early public service ad. It was two photos of Chimbote, Peru. In the same ad there is a photo of Chimbote before the Peace Corps, and a photo of Chimbote after the Peace Corps. Both photos are the same. “You can’t tell the difference,” Wiggins says. “What a marvelous ad!”
     Looking back, one sees that being anti-establishment, amateurish, anti-professional was what made the Peace Corps work
     Shriver knew he had to start big to make the Peace Corps work and here was Wiggins, the Deputy Director of the Far Eastern Division of the International Cooperation Administration–and expert!– telling him that bigger was better and that the Peace Corps need not be a small experimental project. Wiggins and Josephson had given Shriver with their memo “A Towering Task” a song Shriver wanted to sing. And Shriver, and all those anti-establishment amateurs he had brought into the Peace Corps, started to sing, and they have been singing the same chorus ever since.

The signs that the special role for the Peace Corps in foreign aid was in trouble were all over Washington. Wofford ran into Ralph Dungan in the White House mess (Wofford was then a Special Assistant to the President on Civil Rights) and Dungan told him the Peace Corps would be a subdivision of the new AID. “Not if Sarge has anything to say about it,” Wofford tossed off, half joking, but also firmly believing Shriver walked on water.
The truth was that all these “new guys” Shriver brought in to work for the Peace Corps believed Sarge could get anything he wanted from the White House. But Shriver was scheduled to leave D.C. and the U.S. Who would carry the fight that was developing in D.C.?
Before leaving for his ’round the world trip to secure placements for PCVs, Shriver lobbied Sorensen, Dungan, and Labouisse, trying to persuade them of the absolute necessity of having an “independent” Peace Corps. Shriver also wrote Vice-President Johnson and sent a memo to JFK saying that it would be a “political mistake” for the Peace Corps to be “one of the categories of assistance in the new foreign aid bill.”
Kennedy was also “out of the loop” and did not chair the April 26th meeting. (At the time he was dealing with the repercussions of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Ralph Dungan step in to chair the AID meeting and Dungan, Labouisse, and David  Bell, director of then Bureau of the Budget, all recommended that the Peace Corps should be a subdivision of AID.
Representing the Peace Corps at this White House meeting were Wiggins and Josephson. They argued against this “bureaucratic tidiness” favored by Kennedy’s aides. Josephson took extensive notes, and immediately afterward, Wiggins cabled Shriver who by then had reached India. Wiggins’ message read: “Peace Corps not, repeat not, to have autonomy. Dungan describes  himself as acting on behalf of the President.”
Like Labouisse, Dungan believed that the Peace Corps should be part of AID and that the President need not be troubled by the “arguments of amateurs,” as Rice puts it in his book.
According to Rice in The Bold Experiment Wiggins and Josephson suspected that Dungan had not been objective. “There was some evidence that he had intercepted Shriver’s memorandum to the President and had prevented it from reaching him.”
But Dungandidn’t know who he was dealing with in Shriver and these ‘new guys’ in town. Wofford was right. Shriverwasn’t giving up in this fight with the presidential assistants over ‘turf.’
From India, Shriver cabled Wiggins and told him to ask Vice-President Johnson if he would intercedon behalf of the Peace Corps. He told Wiggins to get in touch with Bill Moyers, then Johnson’s aide. “Moyers took on the crucial role here,” writes Rice. At the time, Bill Moyers was only twenty-four, but Johnson’s key aide, and Moyers loved the Peace Corps, in fact, he would soon leave Johnson’s VP Office to work at the Peace Corps, taking a low-ranking job as Associate Director.
Johnson called Kennedy and asked for a private meeting. This was on May 1, 1961. As Bill Josephson later described it, and as reported by Gerard Rice, “Johnson, on his way to the Oval Office, picked up Henry Labouise and Dave Bell by their respective ears and began telling them what the foreign aid program really should do.”
No formal record was kept of the conversation between Kennedy and Johnson. Warren Wiggins told me in my 1997 interview, “by force of personality (not logic) Johnson cajoled the President into overturning a unanimous decision of his newly appointed staff, including the heads of the Bureau of Budget, the Department of State, the Foreign Aid Administration and the Civil Service Commission.”
Thanks to Johnson, Kennedy reversed this decision and gave the Peace Corps independence. Shriver would declared Lyndon Johnson “a founding father of the Peace Corps.”
Later Moyers ran into Dungan in the White House. Dungangreeted him with a wry smile and said, “Well, you sons of bitches won.” Dungan did not like the front-page headline in the New York Times: “Peace Corps Wins Fight for Autonomy.”
Somehow, the whole story of the Peace Corps’ battle for independence had been leaked to the press, much to the embarrassment of Labouisse, Dungan, and other Kennedy aides. This story, written by Peter Braestrup, summed up, “For Peace Corps officials, it was an important victory.” Wofford called it the “the biggest early decision” in Peace Corps history. According to Wiggins, “It is very doubtful if anything like the Peace Corps as we know it would have emerged if it wasn’t for Kennedy’s decision.”
Scott Stossel in his book Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriverwrites how Dungan was furious at the “hotshots in the Peace Corps” who had outfoxed him.
Bill Josephson later recalled, “Ralph Dungan called me and said we were on our own [as an agency]. I said, ‘Would you like to come over and talk about this? We’re going to be working together for a long time.’ And Ralph said, ‘Absolutely not. You are on your own. Don’t ever come here asking for help.’
If the Peace Corps wasn’t going to play by the rules established by the White House staff or by AID, then it shouldn’t expect to get any assistance or sympathy from Ralph Dungan or anyone else at AID. The Peace Corps had its independence; it would have to sink or swim on its own.
Well, the Peace Corps has been swimming very nicely ever since, thank you.

Warren Wiggins would tell me in an interview I did with him in January 1997 (published in RPCV Writers & Readers) that the greatest weakness of the original idea of the Peace Corps was that it didn’t have a constituency beyond “the youth of America.” The Peace Corps, Warren said, “was not an outgrowth of development experience. It didn’t have a constituency in the Congress, the press, or other leadership institutions in the U.S. nor did it have a constituency abroad.”
     This proved to be an immediate and immense problem. Kennedy had created a Peace Corps and no one wanted it! There were 25,000 potential PCVs waiting to go do something for America, but no Third World country asked for them.
     Getting requests for PCVs was a major problem. “Shriver almost terminated me in those early months,” Warren recalled in his interview. “He would never admit that, and I am not sure if it was conscious. Hell, getting overseas requests was my function and I couldn’t get any.”
     Wiggins sent out the word via normal diplomatic channels, but no one replied. Shriver was getting antsy. Kennedy was getting antsy. Then Kennedy decided to send Shriver overseas and seek placements for Volunteers. “My ass was saved by that foreign trip,” said Wiggins, “and I wasn’t even on it!”
     On April 22, Shriver began a twenty-six-day venture in personal diplomacy that took him to Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. With him were Ed Bayley, Bill Kelly, Franklin Williams, and Harris Wofford.
     Who were these guys anyway?
     Edwin Bayley was the first director of public information for the Peace Corps, coming from Wisconsin where he had been the executive assistant to Gaylord Nelson, the governor. (Wofford writes in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings, that  Bayley always complained Shriver was running the Peace Corps as if it was the last stages of a presidential campaign.) Bayley left the Peace Corps early on to become information director for AID.
     Bill Kelly was in charge of contracts. He came to the Peace Corps on May 15, 1961, to organize its contracts office from scratch.
     Franklin Williams was the chief of the division of private organizations, (developing programs through the United Nations) and had great influence within the agency and beyond his title. He had been (since 1958) the assistant attorney general of California, a close friend of Frank Mankiewiez, and had run Kennedy’s black voter registration drive.
     Harris Wofford was the first person Shriver called when they put together the Mayflower Hotel Gang to start the Peace Corps. He had worked on the Kennedy campaign with Shriver, would become Kennedy’s civil rights special assistant, and later director of the Ethiopia project and the Peace Corps Representative in Africa.
     Traveling around the world, the group arrived in India and met Prime Minister Nehru. In Ghana they met Kwame Nkrumah. In Tanganyika it was Prime Minister Julius Nyerere. Shriver got permission to send PCVs to India, Ghana, and Tanganyika. They got permission, everyone on the trip agreed, because Sarge charmed the leaders of these three countries. Wiggins would say, “If Shriver had not made that trip, we would not have had a Peace Corps.”
     Wofford would write in a memorandum to Kennedy on Mary 25, 1961, after their trip, “Shriver is a born diplomat. I have never been witness to so successful an international operation. His meetings with government officials, newsmen and private citizens all produced good results for the Peace Corps and U.S. relations. Our ambassador and other overseas officers in every country expressed to me and others their admiration and appreciation of Shriver, their amazement at how much was accomplished in such a short time, and their increased hopes for the Peace Corps in their respective countries.”
     With three commitments from developing countries the Peace Corps was in the words of Warren Wiggins, “in business.”

 

The Mayflower Hotel Gang outlined “seven steps” to form the Peace Corps in a February 22, 1961 memorandum to Kennedy. This memo is interesting for several reasons. The first point Shriver made was that the Peace Corps should be established by an Executive Order within the Mutual Security Program. William Josephson, then the only lawyer in the ‘new’ Peace Corps was the principal author of the President’s Executive Order. [This is not entirely true for Shriver was a lawyers, as was Wofford, among others, but Josephson had come in with Wiggins with their Towering Task Memo, and was a government employee, as was Warren Wiggins who was made Director ad interim. And, therefore, the FIRST DIRECTOR of the agency.] Shriver was appointed by Kennedy on March 4, but subject to Senate confirmation. It was May 21 before Shriver made his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his appointment was confirmed. In fact, he became the director only one day before the first Volunteers received letters from President Kennedy himself–on May 22, 1961–asking them to join the new Peace Corps.
     By January 1, 1962, a year after Kennedy had become president, the Peace Corps had trained and placed 580 Volunteers in 10 countries. By the end of 1963, 7,000 Volunteers were in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and what they then called Oceania.

 

What Shriver also said in his original memo to Kennedy was that other countries should establish programs like the Peace Corps. He wanted Kennedy to send a letter to all heads of state at the United Nation “to avoid as best we can the possibility of misunderstanding in the rest of the world about the Peace Corps’ function and purpose and irritation with an appearance of arrogance in assuming that young Americans automatically can teach everybody…” Shriver suggested that Kennedy “invite other countries to form their own Peace Corps units and propose that this become a truly international project through UN coordination.”
     Other nations did create programs like the Peace Corps. In fact, Great Britain had their version of a ‘peace corps’ in operation before the U.S. and soon France, Germany, etc., and Japan, were sending volunteers into the Third World.
     Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s published in ‘98 is a terrific book that goes into this ’spirit of volunteering’ that swept the world. While the U.S. didn’t invent such volunteer movements, or were they first to ‘go abroad,’ the Peace Corps was the first government sponsored agency, and that made all the difference in terms of size, influence and importance.
     In launching the new idea, Shriver also suggested that the President cable [no emails then] U.S. Ambassadors, U.S.I.S and ICA representatives, and other overseas officials to expect to be “flooded with questions.” Shriver said they should be “able to give accurate and helpful answers. Also they should be asked to give careful consideration to possible Peace Corps projects.”
     Shriver also wanted JFK to make a public announcement at a live TV-press conference about the establishment of the Peace Corps. “The emphasis should be on the establishment and description of the Peace Corps rather than on the person chosen to direct it.”
     The one question was the actual ‘nature’ of the Peace Corps. While the agency was being created by Executive Order, and would be (as Shriver suggested) “established within the State Department,” Shriver wanted the Peace Corps to be semi-autonomous, and that idea of being “semi-autonomous’ became a huge stumbling block in the establishment of the agency. It would take LBJ to solve Shriver’s problem and the future of the agency.

At the time of Shriver’s February 22, 1961 memorandum to President Kennedy–stating that the Peace Corps should be established as a semi-autonomous agency–there was a lot of professional resistance to the whole idea of sending young Americans overseas to do good. Career diplomat like Elliot O. Briggs described the Peace Corps’ team cry as “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo. Let’s go out and wreak some good on the natives,” as Wofford reports in his book, Of Kennedys & Kings.
     Throughout the State Department diplomats were indifferent to hostile to the whole idea of a Peace Corps. But not Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s new Secretary of State.  Rusk told Shriver that he thought the Peace Corps idea was “first-class.” (Rusk’s sister, during my time as an APCD in Ethiopia, would also work as an APCD in the Empire.)
     Henry Labouisse, who was appointed in 1961 as head of International Cooperation Administration (ICA), Eisenhower’s foreign aid agency, had a policy of massive capital investment accompanied by a few expert advisers. This program proven to be unsuccessful, nevertheless, he feared that sending inexperienced “youngsters” into strange cultures would be inviting disaster and embarrassment. Labouisse wanted the Peace Corps placed under firm control of Kennedy’s new AID program where its progress could be strictly monitored. When ICA became AID. Labouisse lasted one year as its head, then went off to Greece as ambassador from 1962-’64; he later was head of Unicef. 
     In late March of ‘61 Shriver realized there was a problem with his vision of a “semi-autonomous” Peace Corps when he saw a draft of Kennedy’s speech on foreign aid. Shriver saw that the President had sandwiched the agency inside of AID. He was attending a meeting at the White House and spotted a large chart of the new AID super-agency: the Peace Corps was off in a far corner, listed as a  “resource.”
     All of Kennedy’s aides: Goodwin, Ralph Dungan, and Sorensen said it only made ’sense’ to put the Peace Corps under the umbrella of the new AID. Kennedy, however, was still undecided and Shriver got to him and the speech on foreign aid given on March 22 was vague about the Peace Corps, saying only that the new agency would have “distinctive identity and appeal.”
     Shriver thought he had ‘won’ this battle with the White House and the Peace Corps would emerge as a semi-autonomous agency in the new administration, independent of AID, but Shriver was wrong.
     In these first frantic days of creating the Peace Corps timing was everything. What mattered most was who was in the White House Oval Office when a decision was being made. The problem for the Peace Corps was that Shriver was not only not in the room, he wasn’t even in the country.
     According to Gerard Rice in his book, Kennedy had told Shriver to visit Third World leaders and tell them about the Peace Corps ‘viability’ in order to generate requests for PCVs. So Shriver went off around the world and was in India when Henry Labouisse (who was always against Shriver’s grand plans for the Peace Corps) was setting up a meeting for Kennedy to decide how all foreign aid programs, including the Peace Corps, would be incorporated into AID.
     The meeting was scheduled for April 26, 1961. On April 17, 1961, a force of 15,000 Cuban exiles landed at Cochinos Bay in southern Cuba. Now JFK had bigger problems than where the Peace Corps would find a happy home in his new administration.

In Shriver’s memo to Kennedy, Sarge had written, “We have submitted to your Special Counsel legal memoranda showing how the Peace Corps can be created as a program agency in the State Department within the existing Mutual Security framework….Congress can consider the program fully when it deals with the requests for specific legislation and funds for FY 1962.”
     Shriver and the others who had drafted this memo and come up with the “idea of a Peace Corps” saw the new agency as being within the State Department so that it “can work closely with State and ICA, drawing on their personnel, services and facilities, particularly pending reorganization of the whole foreign aid program. But the Peace Corps should be a semi-autonomous entity with its own public face. This new wine should not be poured into the old ICA bottle.”
     While the Band of Boys in the Mayflower Hotel thought this was a great way to create a new agency, it wasn’t seen that way at the White House.   Gerard Rice in his book The Bold Experiment:JFK’s Peace Corps reported that Ted Sorensen, then Kennedy’s special counsel, told Shriver the Report was very different from what he had envisaged. The people around Kennedy were thinking of a small, low-cost addendum to the overall foreign assistance program, and here Shriver had produced this “Towering Task” concept, pushed by Wiggins and Josephson and also supported by Shriver, Wofford, and others where the Peace Corps would be established fast and big. Wiggins and Josephson were thinking of sending thirty-,fifty-, and even a hundred thousand PCVs overseas. [What were those guys smoking in the Mayflower Hotel? And this was years before Eliot Spitzer discovered the hotel!]
     Rice writes, “Wiggins also felt strongly that if Kennedy did not set up the Peace Corps at the beginning of his administration by swift executive action, then there was a possibility the program might never see the light of day.”
     [Harris Wofford tells the story that Kennedy had asked Max Millikan of MIT, a long-standing economic adviser, to work up a 'Peace Corps idea' for him. Kennedy reportedly was worried that "naive young Americans" might become embroiled in some debacle overseas and that blame would be changed to Kennedy's inexperience in foreign affairs. (Remember the Bay of Pigs?) Millikan came up with a lengthy memorandum entitled, "An International Youth Service" that favored a corps that would be limited and tentative, a program of only "several hundred young people in the first year or two." Volunteers, for example, would go to Nigeria, live in college dormitories, and go out during the day to work in the nearby community. Wofford said Shriver gave this memorandum to prospective Peace Corps candidates and if they agreed with Millikan's limited approach to the creation of the Peace Corps, they weren't hired.]
     While the Peace Corps Executive action idea hit a wall inside the White House, it got help from Larry O’Brien, special assistant to Kennedy for congressional relations. He liked the idea and thought using it to create the Peace Corps would be the “effective tactic.”
     Shriver on one-on-one with Kennedy convinced him to use the Executive Order approach and the Peace Corps became the only program of the Kennedy administration allowed the distinctive status of an “emergency agency.”
     But Kennedy was taking a political risk, as Rice points out, in that he was making a political and personal pledge to the new agency, to what the Mayflower Gang had dreamed up. He was focusing public attention to it: newspapers were writing daily stories about its creation, watching its development.
     Also, coming into focus and national attention were the major figures of the early administration. Besides Shriver, the new faces of the new agency were Wofford, Wiggins, and Josephson. These were not household names, and more new names to Washington were being added quickly to this list. It seemed that everyone who wanted to work for the Kennedy Administration wanted to work at the Peace Corps.
     But there were more problems for the Peace Corps. One was the placement of Volunteers. No country had requested those 25,000 people who had already written Kennedy wanting to do something for their country. The other problem was the more touchy: how independent would the Peace Corps be in Foggy Bottom. As Bill Moyers put it, “The old-line employees of State and AID coveted the Peace Corps greedily. It was natural instinct; established bureaucracies do not like competition from new people.
     Shriver, Wofford, Wiggins, and Josephson were in many ways new people. The only different was that they were smarter then the ‘old-line employees’ when it came to playing bureaucratic games and they were about to show Foggy Bottom how touch football was played in the new Kennedy administration.

Shriver introduced Wiggins and Josephson at the February 6th meeting and distributed copies of “A Towering Task.” From this point on, Wiggins and Josephson became the engine room of the Peace Corps. Shriver describes Wiggins as “the figure most responsible” for the planning and organization that brought the Peace Corps into being.
     Twice more in February Kennedy telephoned Shriver to ask about progress on the Peace Corps. The final draft of the report was done with Charles Nelson sitting in one room writing basic copy, Josephson sitting in another room rewriting it, Wofford sitting in yet another room doing the final rewrite, and Wiggins running back and forth carrying pieces of paper. Shriver then made the final edits. On the morning of Friday, February 24, 1961, Shriver delivered to Kennedy what was, in effect, the Peace Corps Magna Carta. He told Kennedy: “If you decide to go ahead, we can be in business Monday morning.”
     It had all taken less than a month. On March 1 President Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the Peace Corps.

The day after the inauguration, Kennedy telephoned Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps should be organized and then to organize it.” When he heard from Kennedy, Shriver immediately called Harris Wofford.
     At the time, Shriver was 44; Wofford was 34. They had become good friends during the campaign. Wofford had worked as Kennedy’s adviser on civil rights, and together they had worked on the talent hunt for staffing for the new administration.
     Initially, the Task Force consisted solely of Shriver and Wofford, sitting in a suite they had rented at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Most of their time was spent making calls to personal friends they thought might be helpful. One name led to another: Gordon Boyce, president of the Experiment in International Living; Albert Sims of the Institute of International Education; Adam Yarmolinsky, a foundation executive; Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame; George Carter, a campaign worker on civil rights issues and former member of the American Society for African Culture; Louis Martin, a newspaper editor; and Franklin Williams, an organizer of the campaign for black voter registration, and a student of Africa.
     Shriver had scheduled the first official meeting of his Task Force for February 6. Despite the recommendations, opinions, and reports they had received, Shriver and Wofford had made relatively little headway in defining the new program in terms of specific size, costs, organization, and objectives. Kennedy had called requesting a report by the end of February, and Shriver had to concede that, as of yet, he had not even settled on an official name for the new agency. While it was less than two weeks since the President had given him the assignment, “Kennedy wanted to know what was taking us so long,” says Shriver.
     Kennedy had given Shriver a report written by Max Millikan, the director of the Center for International Studies at MIT. The report stated that the development of such an agency should be slow, placing several hundred people in the first year or two. This opposed everything Shriver believed in. Shriver later wrote, “We knew the Peace Corps would have only one chance to work. As with the parachute jumper, the chute had to open the first time.” It had to be new, in both size and thrust.
     Unbeknownst to Shriver and Wofford, while they were busily managing the Task Force, two officials in the Far Eastern division of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) were working on a Peace Corps plan. Warren Wiggins, who was the deputy director of Far Eastern operations in ICA, was still in his 30s but had already helped administer the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. He was totally dissatisfied with the manner in which American overseas programs were run; he called them “golden ghettos.”
      With Wiggins was Bill Josephson, just 26, and a lawyer at ICA.
      They started with a program which would be limited to sending young Americans overseas to teach English. But as they worked on it, their vision broadened.
     The paper they prepared detailing their recommendations they called “A Towering Task,” taking the title from the phrase Kennedy had used in his State of the Union address: “The problems . . . are towering and unprecedented - and the response must be towering and unprecedented as well.”
     They sent copies to Wofford, another to Richard Goodwin at the White House, and to Shriver. As Wiggins said, “we wanted to make sure Shriver would get it.”
     Shriver read the paper late on Sunday, February 5th. He thought it was brilliant and immediately sent a telegram to Wiggins inviting him to attend the Task Force meeting the next morning. With that, the so-called “midnight ride of Warren Wiggins” became an early legend in the Peace Corps.
     Meanwhile, Wofford had read the Wiggins proposal and he called Shriver at 7 a.m. to talk to him about it. Shriver told Wofford that Wiggins had already been invited to the first Task Force meeting.
     Wiggins had written the proposal in the hope that it might, as he said, “stimulate thought.” In fact, it provided a philosophy for the Peace Corps throughout the Kennedy era.
     Wiggins fundamentally disagreed with most of the academic and other institutional approaches which counseled caution and a slow beginning. Instead, he advocated initiating the Peace Corps with “several thousand Americans participating in the first 12 to 18 months.”
     What Wiggins and Josephson had going for them was that Shriver agreed.

On the Michigan campus, after hearing Kennedy, two graduate students - Alan and Judy Guskin - wrote a letter to the editor of The Michigan Daily, the university newspaper, asking readers to join in working for a Peace Corps. (The editor of the Dailywas the future radical, Tom Hayden. The paper later won a journalism award for its coverage and support of the Peace Corps movement.) On campus, students began to circulate a petition urging the founding of a Peace Corps. This effort began to spread onto other campuses in the midwest and east.
     Then a Democratic National Committeewoman and UAW official, Mildred Jeffrey, learned about the students’ response from her daughter Sharon, who was studying at the university. Jeffrey put the students in touch with the Kennedy camp.
     At first, they couldn’t reach anyone until they got to Ted Sorensen who liked the idea of a major speech on the subject and promised to tell Kennedy about the Ann Arbor petitions. By now the Michigan petition was also being circulated at other Big Ten universities and at colleges throughout Michigan - I signed at Western Michigan University where I was studying, as did a dozen other friends who later became early PCVs.
     In the Republican camp, Nixon was still being urged to embrace the Peace Corps idea. Two Michigan faculty members - Elise and Kenneth Boulding - who were critical of Kennedy’s cold war stances, pushed for the students to be nonpartisan with the idea. But when Nixon wouldn’t take up the plan, the Guskins turned to Kennedy in late October.
     Because Kennedy’s people had (incorrectly) heard that Nixon was on the verge of proposing an overseas volunteer program for college graduates, they urged Kennedy to move out front with the idea before Nixon could claim it as his own.
     On November 2, the Guskins were notified that at the Cow Palace that evening Kennedy was going to make a major address on the Peace Corps idea. And more important–at least to them–he wanted to meet with the couple and the other students taking the lead in the petition drive. This was six days before the general election.
     The Michigan students were told to drive to Toledo, Ohio, where they would meet up with Kennedy when he stopped on his way back to Washington. They could deliver their petition - this was the same petition that we had signed at other Michigan schools–in person.
     About this meeting, Wofford writes in his book: “Kennedy grinned at the long scroll of names, and sensed the students’ discomfort when he started to put the petition in his car. ‘You need them back, don’t you?’ he asked. He had guessed right; it was before the era of Xerox and they had not copied the names and addresses.”
     How important was this petition? How important were those students in the creation of the Peace Corps?
     In his book, Point of the Lance, Sargent Shriver concluded that the Peace Corps would probably “still be just an idea but for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty. Possibly Kennedy would have tried it once more on some other occasion, but without a strong popular response he would have concluded that the idea was impractical or premature. That probably would have ended it then and there. Instead it was almost a case of spontaneous combustion.”
      So, as they say, ‘in a very real sense’ we can thank two graduate students at the University of Michigan, Judy and Alan Guskin, for making the Peace Corps a reality. And they, too, left the University of Michigan campus to become Peace Corps Volunteers in Thailand.