John D. Rockefeller IV ’61 was selected, prior to his graduation, to serve on a 33-member Peace Corps advisory council, where his colleagues included calypso singer Harry Belafonte and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

And other students demonstrated their interest in the Peace Corps’ ultimate definition by creating campus committees such as the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee for a Youth Service Program, which aimed to raise interest in youth service abroad and explore the prospect of setting up a national program.

A CULT OF PUBLIC SERVICE

Many attribute the excitement and fervor surrounding the development of the Peace Corps and the Harvard African Teaching Prospect to Kennedy himself.

At a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad meeting in D.C. on March 29, 1961, Kennedy praised the country’s youth for their initial enthusiasm for the Peace Corps, challenging them to pursue “a new era of American pioneering” by carving out a space in service.

Steven V. Roberts ’64 recently wrote a review of Stanley Meisler’s “When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years,” in which he characterized the Peace Corps as a symbol of Kennedy that impacted even non-volunteers in its call for service.

Roberts—now a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University—recalls his time at Harvard as being defined and shaped by Kennedy, whose inauguration and assassination bookended his time on campus.

What Roberts calls “the cult of public service” was a value system that profoundly impacted his collegiate life and those of his peers, many of whom went into public service careers.

“I knew hardly anybody who was interested in going to Wall Street, making money, going into business or anything like that,” he says. “The values that were most honored, the peer pressure that was most tangible, the goals that were most admired in that place at that time were to in some way or another be part of the public policy and political process.”

But Kennedy was not single-handedly responsible for the public service fervor at the time. The energy of the civil rights movement and the international focus in the wake of World War II also shaped and inspired the nation to which Kennedy spoke.

“It was JFK who had the vision and courage to call for the Peace Corps,” writes Craig K. Comstock ’61, a former Crimson news editor who helped organize the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee for a Youth Service Program, in an email. But “the Peace Corps did not spring out of nothing.”

THE REALITY ABROAD

But in the decades after Kennedy, this enthusiasm for public service would fade.

Peace Corps sign-ups at Harvard had dropped 20 percent between 1964 and 1965—in the Class of 1964, 125 students entered the Peace Corps, but the number of applicants dropped to 97 in 1965.

In fact, the number of organization members abroad peaked just five years after the Corps’ inception with 15,556 volunteers.