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.