American Experience

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Peace Corps

Requires the RealAudio Player. Download the player from Real.com.

I think what the Peace Corps meant to young people was a chance to break out of the normal pattern of one's life. If you normally went from high school to college and then got into a profession and settled down, the Peace Corps offered you the chance to just say, I'm going to do something adventurous, not at all expected, something different, traveling to a foreign land and also knowing that you were helping people while you were carrying out your own adventure. You had that feeling that you would be helping people to learn to read or injecting people and giving them the chance to prevent disease from happening. It was that combination of feeling like you were saving the world and maybe saving yourself at the same time.

The best part of Jack Kennedy in some ways was the way in which he made politics such an honorable profession and made people feel like by doing public service, by being in the Peace Corps, by helping other people, that you could lead a life that was so much richer and broader than by simply having a career, making money and having your own family. He made people feel that life would be lived more fully if they helped their fellow man. And that was part of him. I mean he, himself, had chosen public life at that point, his whole family had chosen public life and somehow that choice was reflected on the country at large and it made them feel that life would be a little richer than it would otherwise be by broadening it and helping other people at the same time as you were loving what you were doing yourself.

I was a freshman in college when JFK ran for the presidency and there was such a sense of excitement about that campaign. He made you feel like things were going to change, the country was going to be different. I can still remember when he gave his speech proposing the Peace Corps and saying to myself, I want to do that. It meant breaking loose from the ordinary pattern of going to college and graduate school and going to Africa and helping people and giving injections. Somehow it meant that your lives were going to be broader as a result of JFK. For me probably there was also the sense, being Irish Catholic, of feeling like this was the first Catholic President, that it symbolically meant something for everybody that I was a part of, to become President.

Return to Interviews >>