Kennedy School Class Day Speaker: U.S. Senator Harris L. Wofford

One full hour before the Kennedy Foundation fund raiser was even scheduled to begin, a lone taxicab pulled up in front of the massive John F. Kennedy Library.

Out stepped an elderly man in a rumpled grey tweed jacket and equally wrinkled slacks. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet to pay the cab driver, then picked up a small brown tweed garment bag and walked past an indifferent press corps into the library.

U.S. Sen. Harris Llewellyn Wofford Jr. (D-Penn.) had arrived.

Wofford, 66, is so low-key, he doesn't wear studs on his tuxedo. When he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat opened when Sen. John F. Heinz '63 suddenly died last May, the Republicans were overjoyed.

After all, politicians are suppose to have polish and magnetism.

"He's an egghead type, and I don't mean that disrespectfully," Robert C. Jebelirer, the Republican president pro tempore of the Pennsylvania Senate told The New York Times last May. "I just don't see Harris Wofford as having the personality to shake hands and rub elbows."

Nevertheless, Wofford defeated former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, 56 percent to 44 percent, by turning the election into a referendum on the policies of the Reagan-Bush era and on national health care.

But even Wofford realizes his victory was part of a larger trend and not a personal vote of confidence.

"I think my election was a signal that people believe this country is on the wrong track," Wofford says. "We triggered something interesting."

But while the citizens of Pennsylvania may have voted for national health care, they got a senator whose entire life has been devoted to public service.

Wofford's resume reads like that of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He helped to introduce nonviolence to the American civil rights movement. He co-founded the Peace Corps. He was a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy '40 and wrote a book, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties.

Wofford was elected in large part due to his pro-national health care stance, but his interest lies in public service. After all, Wofford is the embodiment of public service.

"I came through the election with a mandate, namely to try to get action for national health insurance," Wofford says.

But give him a chance, and the conversation wanders away from health care and towards a vision that fuses New Deal and New Frontier values into a national youth service program.

Wofford envisions creating a "Peace Corps to America," a youth service program for the nation's parks and cities modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and Wofford's own Peace Corps. He hopes to enlist upwards of one-third of America's youth.

"It wouldn't be mandatory," Wofford says, adding that he hopes to adopt a Kennedy-style appeal to enlist support for the program.

It is this vision of national service which Wofford plans to discuss in his Class Day address at the Kennedy School of Government today.

These are lofty ideals in a time of cynicism and paranoia regarding big government.

But Wofford speaks wistfully of a time when government was a good thing. "Government used to be simple and clear" Wofford says. "It used to work."

Wofford's idealism stems from a childhood shaped by Roosevelt and the New Deal.

"I fell very early for Lincoln, Roosevelt, the founding fathers," Wofford says. "They were heroes of mine."

Captivated by Roosevelt's fireside chats, Wofford became a fiercely partisan Democrat at age 10. He refused to ride in his father's car, for example, because it had a "Landon for President" sticker in the back window.

Wofford's strong commitment to his ideals are refreshing in an age of flip-flops, empty promises and fence sitting. But Wofford claims that he chafes under the "idealist" label.

"I'm not an idealist," Wofford says. "The nature of an ideal is that you don't achieve it in this world. I believe in following ideas where they lead, and they may lead into disappointment. I'm realistic about that."

Wofford, born April 1926, began his life in politics at 16, when he was a Congressional lobbyist.

The Tennessee native and his wife went to India after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1948 to study economics and Gandhi's civil disobedience tactics. They wrote about their findings in India Afire and proposed that the American civil rights movement adopt nonviolence as a credo.

"Gandhi's followers challenged me, sometimes in the direct form of "Why have you never gone to jail against segregation laws?" Wofford says.

Wofford's nonviolence mantra won Martin Luther King Jr.'s support, and he arranged for the emerging civil rights leader to visit India to discuss civil disobedience tactics with Gandhi's followers.

Wofford's friendship with King proved invaluable in the 1960 presidential election: When King was jailed in rural Georgia for driving without a license a week before the election, Wofford convinced then-Senator Kennedy to offer Coretta Scott King his help in securing King's release.

"The call" helped Kennedy win the crucial Black vote and lifted the Massachusetts senator to victory over his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon.

But his devotion to the civil rights movement did not stop outside the media spotlight. He was the first white to attend Howard University Law School since 1905.

After such an eventful life, is the senatorship the pinnacle of his public career? To answer, Wofford gestured at the room around him, at the murals of Kennedy and his words which adorned the walls of the library.

"It's hard to sit here and look at John and not say that the Peace Corps and the Kennedy period were the top things in my life," Wofford says.

"But my present job is the best I've ever had, if only in terms of an opportunity to make a difference," he asserts.