Archive - January 31, 2013

As we near March 1, 2013, and another anniversary of an agency that appears to be ‘disappearing’ from the view of most Americans, if not Congress and the White House. How often do we hear, “Is there still a Peace Corps?” from the men and women on the street. It seems that for the public the Peace Corps failed away with the “Kennedy Generation.” But what brought about the Peace Corps in the first place? I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about its creation. These ‘impulses’ we might say are close to being lost in the fog of history. There were, however, several generally accepted desires that coalesced in the last days of the Fifties, framed by a number of people in speeches and in prose, and with the election of John F. Kennedy, became a reality as a federal agency. Most of the . . .