Thirty Days That Built The Peace Corps:Part Six
Meanwhile, back in Ann Arbor 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 Daily, by the way, was Tom Hayden. The paper later won a journalism award for its coverage and support of the Peace Corps movement.) Students began to circulate a petition urging the founding of a ‘Peace Corps,’ though it was not named as such. 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. She put the students in touch with the Kennedy camp. They couldn’t reach anyone until they got Ted Sorensen, who liked the idea of a major speech on the subject, and promised to tell . . .
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This is an interesting series, John. Much of this is new information for me. We were in The Gambia 1979…