Archive - January 23, 2019

During the Kennedy/Nixon campaign Martin Luther King was arrested in Georgia. King’s wife, Coretta, then pregnant with their third child, feared her husband would be killed in jail. Her fear turned to terror after he was yanked from his cell in the middle of the night and taken to a maximum-security prison in Reidsville, Georgia. By the time she reached Wofford, a friend since the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, she was hysterical. Wofford helped hatch a plan. “The idea came to me… . Why shouldn’t Kennedy just call Mrs. King? She was very anxious. Why can’t Kennedy call and say, ‘We’re working at it; we’re going to get him out. You have my sympathy.’ A personal, direct act.” With encouragement from Shriver, Kennedy placed the call during a campaign stop in Chicago. King was released the next day after Robert Kennedy, his brother’s campaign manager, made another call – this . . .

  By Robert D. McFadden Harris Wofford with President Bill Clinton during the first national recruitment effort for AmeriCorps volunteers at the University of Maryland in 1999. Mr. Clinton named him to lead the service organization after Mr. Wofford left the Senate.     Harris Wofford, a former United States senator from Pennsylvania whose passion for getting people involved helped create John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps and other service organizations and made him America’s volunteer-in-chief, died on Monday night in Washington. He was 92. His son Daniel said his death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of a fall at Mr. Wofford’s Washington apartment, The Associated Press reported. By the time he became a senator in May 1991, appointed after his predecessor was killed in an aircraft accident, Mr. Wofford was already 65. He had been a lawyer, an author, a professor, the president of two colleges, . . .