This Day in Presidential History (JFK Establishes Peace Corps)

March 1, 1961—Acting on a late-campaign challenge at the University of Michigan the year before, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps, challenging America’s youth to work for international development. Three days later, he appointed as its first head his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver.

The idea was not originally the President’s—that honor fell to Rep. Henry Reuss and Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. By the end of JFK’s “Thousand Days” in the White House, however, the agency had become indelibly associated with him, with 7,300 volunteers answering his call to international service in 44 countries. That number more than doubled at the organization’s zenith, in 1966.

As I argued in a prior post, posterity has cast Kennedy and his 1960 rival for the Presidency, Richard Nixon, as characters out of Shakespeare—Prince Hal vs. Richard III.

At the time of their closely fought race, they were almost equally matched in government service (both coming to Congress in the class of ’47), separated by only four years in age, and, the debates notwithstanding, not that far removed from each other in terms of the Cold War issues that dominated political discourse of the age. 

Subsequent revelations about JFK’s dealings with what successor LBJ called “a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” out to eliminate Fidel Castro have further reduced the contrast between the two most successful politicians of their era.

But I retain the belief of my youth that Kennedy left Americans feeling better about government and their part in it than Nixon ever did.

Even try, if you can, to leave Watergate out of the equation. Can you imagine Tricky Dick, the man for whom politics was preeminently a blood sport, calling on the idealistic instincts of his countrymen? I think not.

In fact, in his second inaugural address, in a rather flat-footed attempt to invert a now-legendary piece of rhetoric from JFK, Nixon said: “In our own lives, let each of us ask—not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself?”

Nixon initially predicted that the Peace Corps would merely become a haven for draft dodgers, and when he got his hands on the organization he tucked it into the umbrella agency ACTION (an action reversed eight years later by Jimmy Carter, whose mother was a volunteer in the Sixties).

To be sure, the Peace Corps was not entirely without fault over the years. In the late 1970s, one of my high school friends observed, after doing a stint with the Corps in Africa, that it was one of the most inefficient, most bureaucratic organizations he could ever imagine.

But the organization also left a positive imprint on many, more of the 150,000 volunteers who passed through it over its nearly 50-year history. Former volunteers include Christopher Dodd, Donna Shalala, Robert Taft, Carol Bellamy, author Paul Theroux, and film director Taylor Hackford.

Unlike other assassinated Presidents—Garfield and McKinley—JFK in the popular imagination has assumed martyr status that rivals Abraham Lincoln’s, despite the fact that his achievements do not match the magnitude of the Great Emancipator’s.

But maybe the public is not entirely wrong in regarding the two Presidents in a similar light.

Both, though hardened by war—one in middle age, the other in youth—still managed to call on what Lincoln termed, in one of the most poignant phrases of his Presidency, “the better angels of our nature.”

Undoubtedly, the Peace Corps represented the better angels of Kennedy’s nature, as well as all of ours.