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I’m proud to be here with the National Peace Corps Association, to honor a cause that has done so much to shape my life—and the lives of so many people in this room.

And I’m glad to be here with Senator Harris Wofford, one of the Peace Corps’s guiding lights; former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider; members of the NPCA Advisory Council, Ron Boring, Gordon Radley, and Paul Slawson; and all of the members of the Director’s Circle whose support is so vital to NPCA in its efforts for a vital and independent Peace Corps.

But for all of the hard work put in by everyone in this room—if no one stayed up past midnight, there might not be a Peace Corps. That a great nation should send its youth abroad, not to extend its power, not to intimidate its enemies, not to kill and be killed, but to build, to dig, to teach, and to ask nothing in return—it’s one of the most radical ideas I know.

It’s not the kind of idea that comes out of a subcommittee, or a board meeting, or whatever would have been the 1960s equivalent of PowerPoint. Rather, the idea behind the Peace Corps is the kind you stumble on in the wee hours, after your third cup of coffee, when all the more conventional business of the day has been put to bed.

That’s the uniqueness of the idea we’ve inherited. Most of us here have lived with it for the whole length of our adult lives, until it stoped seeming so unique. But if I can restore its outrageousness just a bit this morning—if I can remind you of the surprise you may have felt when you first heard that such a thing as the Peace Corps existed, and that the world’s most powerful nation was paying good money for it—I think I will have done my job.

So let’s start with this fact: The Peace Corps was born at two in the morning. On October 14, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy was hours late for a campaign stop at the University of Michigan. He guessed that most of the crowd had already gone home—but when he drove up to the student union in the dark, he found them waiting for him in droves. Ten thousand students had waited all night, outdoors, in the cold to hear him speak.

Now, you know I’ve done my share of national campaigning, and the stories are true—it’s exhausting. I can only imagine, from personal experience, that Senator Kennedy was coming off of several months of late nights, uncomfortable beds, and bad food. So the temptation must have been overwhelming to give the Michigan students a “Thank you for coming out,” recite a few lines from memory, and send them home.

But at some point—whether it was when he first began making his way into that enormous, floodlit crowd, or whether it was when all ten thousand of them began chanting his name as he climbed the student union steps—Senator Kennedy realized that this was special. He realized he owed them more.

And what he gave them was a direct challenge: “How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”

I believe that that challenge is our Peace Corps’s founding document. And it’s a fitting one. We didn’t get out start with a white paper, or a vetted speech, or a campaign commercial; in fact, we didn’t get our start with a statement of any kind. We began with a question. Showing up for a candidate is one thing—but how many of you will take that dedication and use it to repair the world?

That was the question—but if you had asked the next day, the odds were good that it was going to stay a question, that it was going to degenerate from a powerful challenge to merely a nice, forgettable idea. John Kennedy didn’t have an organization in mind, he didn’t have funding—he didn’t even have a name for it.

In the early going, he only had one thing. It was a petitition. It was drafted by Michigan students a few days after Kennedy asked his question—and its answer was an emphatic “Yes.” It circulated at colleges all over the state, and by the time its sponsors were ready to present it to JFK in person, it had grown to several scrolls bearing thousands and thousands of names. Just days before the election, they handed them over to JFK. He paused a second and then grinned: “You need them back, don’t you?” As Harris Wofford reminds us, these were the days before the Xerox, and the students hadn’t had time to copy down all the names.

But JFK didn’t need any more proof—letters answering his challenge were flooding into his headquarters, and soon they totaled 30,000.

By then, his top advisors were working on a plan in earnest, and soon it was rolled out. They didn’t rely on Senator Kennedy’s unscripted call to service—they made the case for a Peace Corps in the hard language of realpolitik.

In the first official speech on the Peace Corps, one idea was dominant: the Russians—if we don’t start doing our part for the developing world, the Communists will. So yes, the Peace Corps found its place in the realities of the Cold War, just as it is finding its place now in the uncertain world of this new century, when we face conflicts with people who know as little of America as we know of them.

But the idea that service could be a tool of foreign policy—even, in some ways, a weapon of war—was radical in itself. It says that that there are more measures of strength than caliber or tonnage or blast-radius. It says that the world needs to see our ideals not just in ink, but incarnate in the young man or woman with dirty hands who is working in the sun beside you. It says that you can only hate America if you don’t know America.

And that idea took shape because of a few thousand students who knew their moment when they saw it—and because John Kennedy’s campaign had the nimbleness and the imagination to seize on it. Sargent Shriver wrote that the Peace Corps would probably “still be just an idea but for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty….It was almost a case of spontaneous combustion.”

If the story of the Peace Corps were a movie, it might end then and there. We can imagine JFK’s call being triumphantly answered, and, as the credits roll, streams of young volunteers shipping off the next day. But even the most revolutionary ideas have a way of coming back down to earth. Even as Kennedy moved to make the Peace Corps a centerpiece of his administration, the criticism began. Richard Nixon called it “a haven for draft-dodgers.” Dwight Eisenhower called it “a juvenile experiment.”

And in a way, blanket criticism like that was the easiest to deal with. Far more dangerous was criticism from the inside, the kind that came from old foreign policy hands who responded, in essence: “What a wonderful idea—but keep it small!”

Because a strong consensus was forming among academics and State Department experts: “Proceed cautiously, start with small pilot projects, don’t make mistakes, limit the program to 1,000 or 2,000 for a beginning…don’t let this experiment get out of hand.” Some thought that the number of volunteers should be no more than 500. They spoke convincingly about minimizing risks, guarding our reputation, and avoiding a fiasco. And if they had gotten their way, serving in the Peace Corps would be, to coin a phrase, safe, legal, and rare.

The fact that it isn’t—the fact that many of us are here this morning at all—is due to another late-night moment of inspiration.

It happened at the Peace Corps’s first official headquarters—a hotel room in downtown Washington. At that point, the staff of the Peace Corps totaled two: Two Kennedy aides, Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford, holed up in that hotel room with stacks of paper and a few typewriters, trying to figure out how to put this outrageous idea into practice. But despite regular calls from JFK asking them what was taking so long—this was in February of 1961, about three weeks after the inauguration—they hadn’t even figured out the name yet.

What Shriver did know, he later told us, was that he couldn’t stand the cautious, conventional approach that was in vogue. He knew that America would only have one chance to get this right—but he needed the intellectual ammunition to prove it.

He found it at three in the morning, halfway through a stack of letters and memos. Someone had wanted him to read a short paper by a man named Warren Wiggins, a midlevel employee at the State Department. The paper was called “The Towering Task,” and it took its name from a line in JFK’s first State of the Union address: “The problems…are towering and unprecedented—and the response must be towering and unprecedented as well.” Wiggins was proposing that the Peace Corps be just such a huge endeavor.

He began by methodically tearing down the case for a small, cautious Corps. First, a tiny commitment wouldn’t be enough to win the support. He wrote the imaginary reaction of a foreign ambassador asked to host just 100 American volunteers: “1) What can 100 youths do? 2) What will Washington think of next? 3) We have too many Americans here in this country, anyway. 4) What a terrible chance we are taking with all these kids.”

In other words, 100 kids are a nuisance—but multiply that nuisance by 50, and the equation changes entirely. As Wiggins wrote: “One hundred youths engaged in agricultural work of some sort in Brazil might pass by unnoticed, except for the problems involved, but 5,000 American youths helping to build Brasilia might warrant the full attention and support of the President of Brazil himself.”

But if a tiny Peace Corps would do next to nothing for the host countries, it would do even less for our country. The tremendous student response to JFK’s question was still fresh in everyone’s mind; but if the plan for caution was taken seriously, it meant that only two or three graduates from every college would ever have the chance of serving. And if, after inspiring a generation with talk of towering problems and torches being passed, Kennedy announced nothing more than a stripped-down, underfunded bureaucracy—it would be nothing less than hypocrisy.

Instead, Wiggins concluded, the Peace Corps needed to begin with a “quantum jump.” It needed to begin immediately, by executive order, with 5,000 to 10,000 volunteers and the potential to grow to as many as 100,000.

The idea hit Sargent Shriver like lightning—he fired off a telegram, and within six hours, Warren Wiggins had arrived at the hotel and working on a report for the President. Within a month, Kennedy had created the Peace Corps by executive order. Within two years, more than 7,000 young Americans were serving abroad. And by 1966, 15,000 were.

One of them was a 22-year-old English major from Providence College, who arrived in the small village of Monción in the Dominican Republic, without much Spanish or the faintest idea what he was doing, without a clue that more than 40 years later, he’d be standing in the Capitol, telling you that the Peace Corps gave him the richest two years of his life. I owe those years, and the shape of all the years after, which they molded so much, to John Kennedy and his unscripted 2 a.m. question, and to Warren Wiggins and his unpretentious 3 a.m. paper.

From this story—which above all is a story of spontaneity, and government working at its best, and the remarkable things that happen when leaders really listen—I think we can draw two lessons.

First, size matters. The perils of a small, timid Peace Corps are just as clear today as they were in 1961. Just as then, advocates of a stripped-down mission make the same arguments: Sending untrained, untested students only aggravates our host countries and raises the chance of a mishap—so let’s send a few experts instead. And just as in 1961, our response is fundamentally the same, and fundamentally correct: Of course we need volunteers of the highest quality.

But we need the highest quantities, too. Every American of good willl we send abroad is another chance to make America known to a world that often fears and suspects us. And every American who returns from that service is a gift: a citizen who strengthens us with firsthand knowledge of the world.

As Sargent Shriver said, “Peace Corps Volunteers come home to the USA realizing that there are billions—yes, billions—of human beings not enraptured by our pretensions, or our practices, or even our standards of conduct.”

President Kennedy predicted that, within a few decades, we’d have more than one million returned volunteers. They’d add immeasurably to our debates on foreign policy. They’d be a formidable voting bloc, calling leaders to account when they neglect the world. But despite a promising start, we are far short of President Kennedy’s goal—today, there are fewer than 200,000 returned volunteers, after nearly a half-century.

For the sake of the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of the world, we have a lot of catching up to do. I say we should double the Peace Corps.

But there’s a second lesson in the story I’ve told today. Size matters—but it comes at a cost. The bigger any organism grows, the slower it gets. The Peace Corps that charted its course in a hotel room with a staff of two now enjoys a staff of thousands and a fine office building close to the White House. And that’s all to the good—the Peace Corps couldn’t act on the dramatic scale we want it to act on, without all that apparatus behind it. Even the most groundbreaking ideas must all make, in good time, what the philosopher Gramsci called “the long march through the institutions.”

But there wouldn’t be a Peace Corps if JFK had stuck to the script in Ann Arbor. There wouldn’t be a Peace Corps if thousands of students, acting on their own initiative, hadn’t caught his attention with their movement. There might not be a Peace Corps if Sargent Shriver had listened to the respectable voices of caution. Virtually alone among all our organs of government, the Peace Corps is unique for its grassroots origin.

So as we grow the Peace Corps—as we get it the volunteers it needs and the increased funding it deserves—we must respect its roots. We must work to make it more decentralized, because service at its best is personal and spontaneous, and because volunteers know far more about conditions on the ground than we in Washington ever will.

We can start that transformation today. In the Senate, I’ve introduced a Peace Corps bill that would give volunteers more initiative and responsibility. We can set aside a portion of the annual Peace Corps budget as seed monies; volunteers can use the money for demonstration projects in their host countries or for “third goal” projects at home to promote understanding of the world. We can encourage volunteers to take advantage of the private sector by authorizing them to accept, under carefully-defined circumstances, donations to support their projects. We can bring the Peace Corps into the digital age by establishing websites and email links for use by volunteers in-country. And finally, we need to bring more volunteers into the decision-making process—they should have input into staffing decisions, site selection, language training, and country programs.

So we ought to work to make the Peace Corps bigger, and more decentralized, at the same time. I believe we can, at the same time, extend its worldwide reach and honor its grassroots past. Doing both is the best way to be true to the spirit that created it: the spirit that turned student activism into government action, that combined Cold War diplomacy with the spontaneous need to serve.

Warren Wiggins died last year, at the age of 84, and there was a line in his obituary that sums up the spirit behind our Peace Corps better than any I can think of. The obituary quoted Harris Wofford: “I think he embodied the watchwords that were once given to me: We must be more inventive if we’re going to do our duty.”

Inventiveness and duty: They’re qualities that don’t often go together. Duty can stifle imaginations; and creativity, in turn, can take us far afield from what we owe to others. Putting our creativity in the full service of our duty—it is one of the most difficult tasks there is. But it can be done—and when it is, what great things we can achieve!

The Peace Corps is proof. Today we honor it, and pledge ourselves to keep it young—because it’s done so much to keep us young ourselves. We are blessed to have had it in our lives.

Thank you.