UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #60
KAUFFMAN, JOSEPH F.

KAUFFMAN, Joseph F. (1921-2006)
Professor of Educational Administration; Dean of Students; UW System Vice-President
At UW: 1965-1968; 1973-1986

Third Interview
Interviewed: 2001	
Interviewer: Barry Teicher
Transcriptionist: Bill Meier (3/22/08)
Length: 2 hours

World War II; Family life; Anti-Defamation League; Graduate studies; Employment at Brandeis University; Vice-Presidency at Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Formation of Peace Corps; Kennedy presidential administration; Organizing and training  Peace Corps volunteers; Visit to Peace Corps sites in Africa; Assassination of President Kennedy; Peace Corps morale after Kennedy; JK at UW.

Start of Tape 9/Side 1
BT:	This is Barry Teicher of the Oral History Project.  Today is January 24th in the year 2001. I’m at Joe Kauffman’s house on Annan Drive, is it?
JK:	Lane.
BT:	Lane, on the West Side of Madison.  And we’re going to talk today about Mr. Kauffman’s experience in the Peace Corps.  If you could start out by giving us a brief overview of how you actually began to be associated with the people who worked with the Peace Corps?
00:00:26
JK:	Well when I came back from World War II, I was married during the war.  My wife’s family had moved to Denver, Colorado, during the war and I took advantage of the GI Bill and went to the University of Denver from ’46 to ’48.  I received my bachelor’s degree and my daughter was born during that period.  The first—I was interested in human relations, race relations kind of work.  The first job offer I had was to be the education director of the Anti-Defamation League, which had opened an office in Denver.  I did that for one year and was offered a fellowship at Northwestern University Graduate School in sociology and social psychology.  And I completed the work for my master’s degree on, almost all but the dissertation, PhD, when I was running out of money and the Anti-Defamation League was after me to open an office for them in Omaha, Nebraska, to serve Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa.
BT: 	Was this a new office that they were planning to open?
JK:	 It was, for me to open it.  There was not one in existence.  I succumbed to that.  My son was born that spring and I had run out of money, had no car, and so on, and decided that I would try to finish the doctorate later.  I went to Omaha in 1950.  There was no agenda other than what I would create, and I started to contact people in education, the ministry, and so on for inter-faith work, inter-group relations work.  
00:02:25
JK: 	There was another new staff person in Omaha by the name of Whitney Young, Jr., who was a social worker by training, and he and I became friends and our wives as well.  He had a daughter by the same name as mine, Marcia.  And we talked about things we might do together.  One of the ideas was to try to create a fair employment practices law in Nebraska, which my headquarters staff in New York thought was somewhat ridiculous in Nebraska.  But we decided that the educational value of talking about it would be useful.  We couldn’t get many people in the business community to support us.  At that time it was a very racist society: blacks were not hired or served in stores, department stores, and so on.  In fact, they couldn’t even try on clothes, as I recall.  There was one African-American legislator in the unicameral legislature, and we decided to try to get some support in Lincoln, which was the capital.  It was very hard to find business types who would be helpful; most people were resistant to the idea of such a law.  But there was one person, one family, actually, that was known as interested, and one person in particular who was a senior at the law school, Ted Sorenson by name, who was editor of the law review that year.  And we would visit at his house.  I became very good friends with he and his girlfriend, whom he later married.  And he helped us put together a hearing in the unicameral legislature on the need for ending employment discrimination.  And I taught with him at a couple of inter-faith summer camps, and we stayed in touch.  When I went, in 1952, to be assistant to the president at Brandeis University in Boston, Massachusetts, he had gotten a job as legislative aide to Congressman Kennedy, who was going to be running for the Senate.  And so I guess I was probably the only one he knew in Massachusetts.  When he came into town and to Boston he would let me know and we would get together several times, either at my place or, once, I recall, we met at the Kennedy apartment at Beacon Hill.  So that’s how my relationship with him started.  In fact, when he went to Washington after law school he asked me to write a letter of reference for him to apply for a job with the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.
BT: 	And did he get that job?
JK: 	Yes, but he shortly thereafter went to work for Congressman Kennedy.
BT: 	And you were at Brandeis for what, about eight years?
JK: 	1952 through 1960.
00:05:55
BT: 	And you completed your—talk for a moment about your PhD work.
JK: 	Well, I got my doctorate in education at Boston University.  I was able to get an EdD by going part-time, evenings, weekends.  There was no residence requirement for the EdD and it catered to people who worked in education and couldn’t really leave their job for a year.  And so that’s the degree I got, it was a combination of counseling, student personnel area, and higher education.
BT: 	Now, could you just talk for one moment about what you did, what your job was, at Brandeis?  And then could you continue and talk about how you ended up at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America?
00:06:43
JK: 	Well the first four years at Brandeis I was administrative assistant to the president, Dr. Abraham Sacker, who was the founding president.  The university had opened in 1948 with a freshman class of one hundred plus, and each year added a class.  In 1952 was the first commencement, and I came that summer.  There were no deans or divisions; it was a very small institution.  The president pretty much ran everything from his office.  I did everything from advance work for him to go make speeches and do fund-raising, to drafting letters.  I did all of the work to apply for our accreditation and hosted the evaluation committee when they came.  We got accreditation.  You had to wait until you graduated two classes—we got it right after that.  I worked with an architect on developing a master plan and some of the building of the first buildings at the university.  In 1956 it became apparent that we’d have to have some deans: a dean of faculty, dean of students, dean of administration.  And I had been pretty much the liaison with the students and student government, and troubleshooting with students for the president.  And he made me the first dean of students.  And I finished my doctorate on a part-time basis in 1958.  
00:08:33
JK: 	In 1960 I was contacted by an executive search for New York, actually the former placement director at Columbia University, who said that he wanted to talk to me and I allowed him to do so.  And he was recruiting for a new position that was going to be created as executive vice president at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which is the seminary of the conservative movement in America.  I allowed as how I was not an observant Jew—in fact, we were affiliated with a reformed congregation.  He told me the salary, which was about double what I was making.  I had a mother in a nursing home and was very worried about finances.  And I agreed to meet with the chancellor, the distinguished Rabbi Lewis Finkelstein, who was the leader of the conservative movement.  And I went to New York and met with him and the chair of the Board of Directors and they romanced me to come.  I had many misgivings because I was not really that knowledgeable about the religious literature and I was not an observant Jew in the conservative sense.  We did not keep a kosher home and we were affiliated with a reformed congregation.  
00:10:48
JK:	And nevertheless, I felt the time had come to leave Brandeis and I went to New York that August of ’60 knowing that Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency and feeling that if he won the election I would certainly like to serve in the Kennedy administration.  Ted Sorenson had talked to me in 1959 about whether I was interested in joining the campaign staff, but he indicated it would be lots of travel and there was no certainty that he would win, and I did not want to leave my home.  I never wanted to separate after my two-and-a-half year war experience of separation.  So I declined that possibility.  But I was very interested and listened intently that late July to the convention on radio, I listened to it.  In August I first started my work at the Seminary, although I had done some part-time commuting from Brandeis in the spring and early summer.  You want me to go on?
00:11:54
BT: 	Yes.
JK: 	I met fabulous people at the Seminary: Abraham Joshua Heschel, people of that sort.  The very distinguished academics who were around Columbia University and were involved in some of the inter-faith work at the Seminary.  I was the administrative head involved with the Jewish Museum and the radio and television programs, fund-raising, relationship with the Board of Directors, and the like.  Nevertheless, I had one eye cast on the election.  In September I started to correspond with Ted Sorenson.  He said, “Please send along any speech ideas,” and introduced me to Mike Feldman, who was deputy special counsel and was kind of the research guy of the campaign.  And in those days they didn’t talk about “war rooms” and such.  I wrote several letters, pecked out on my old portable typewriter—I was not a typist, and I never made carbon copies, though I had longhand notes from which I did the typing—and I made several suggestions over a period of a month or two.
BT: 	What kind of suggestions did you offer?
JK: 	Well, they ranged all the way from more emphasis on his heroics in the war, which he didn’t like to talk about, to some quotes from Pericles that I thought would mesh nicely with his style.  Incidentally, a few days before the election in the Faneuil Hall speech in Boston, he quoted Pericles, the words that I had suggested.  And I got a big thrill out of that.
BT: 	I’ll bet.
00:14:24
JK: 	But basically, the main thing among a bunch of things, the main thing that I was trying to address was the feelings of young college students and the need for some expression of idealism.  We were in the Cold War where the Soviets were propagandizing against America.  There were new nations being created and there were struggles in those new countries about whether to be Marxist or free-enterprise democracies, particularly in Africa.  There was the book, The Ugly American.
BT: 	Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that.
JK: 	Which portrayed America in very unattractive terms, and so on.  And my work with young people at Brandeis made it clear to me that there was a certain element of students that would love to respond to some kind of channel for the expression of their idealism—at least for a while; they need not make it a career.  And so I proposed trying to tap that, which I thought young people, particularly college students, would resonate to, especially if it could be seen as an altruistic kind of service that was an alternative to the military draft.  And so I formulated a kind of a youth program idea with those ingredients.  It’s something I thought that you would get a good response to.
BT: 	Now you sent this off to Mike Feldman?
JK: 	Right.
BT: 	And did he respond?
JK: 	Yeah. And in one of the—I think I quoted in my memoir—I still had a letter saying, “Your youth idea program Senator Kennedy referred to last week in Michigan,” or wherever it was.  So he was telling me that he liked the idea and that it was referred to.  When I later made mention of that to Ted Sorenson in Washington, he said, “You’re one of about three hundred people claiming some credit.  We don’t remember any of those.”  But I do have that letter.  I could actually dig it out.  I did quote from it in my memoir.  
00:17:06
JK:	So after the election the only thing that I was interested in was the Peace Corps idea, which on March 1 Kennedy—the President Kennedy—announced as an initiative on an executive order with some pilot programs and contingency funds, and the promise to introduce legislation later that year to create the Peace Corps.
BT: 	Had you had any inkling of Kennedy doing that?  Did Sorenson talk to you about that?
JK: 	No, I didn’t have anything to do with that, except Sorenson said, you know, “Let me know if you’d like to serve in the new frontier,” or whatever.  I said, “The only thing I’m interested in is the Peace Corps idea.”  He said, “Why don’t you come on down and we’ll talk.”  I went down in the first week in April, I think it was.
BT: 	It was April 7th.  Before we get to that, do you have any idea how they came up with the name “Peace Corps”?  Did you ever learn about that?
JK: 	Well I had something to do with that; I talked about a “youth corps.”  And when Kennedy introduced it, he tried to get it as an alternative to the military service, to the draft.  I suppose with the Cold War on and the propaganda battle and the fact that it was an alternative to military service it seemed natural to call it the promotion of peace.  There was—who was it, William James—that wrote of the moral equivalent of war.  It was probably Sorenson who was the main speech writer.
00:19:03
BT: 	So you went down there in April.  Why don’t you talk about that first visit?  That was your first visit to Washington, D.C., wasn’t it?  Why don’t you talk about your first visit?
JK: 	Well, I told the people at the Seminary I had to be away that day, but I didn’t tell them what I was doing.  I went in the night before because I had a 9 AM appointment with Ted Sorenson at the White House, which I had never been to.  I stayed at a hotel—I forget the name of it now—but it was out a little way from the center of the city.  I came in late that evening.  The next morning, at 8:30, I grabbed a cab in front of the hotel and told him to take me to the White House.  I had no idea where it was, and we get caught in terrible traffic.  I was astounded that I hadn’t left enough time, and we were about six blocks from the White House, bumper to bumper, stalled in traffic.  And it was about one minute to nine, and I said to the driver, “How far do we have to go?”  And he said, “About six blocks.”  I said, “How long will it take?”  He said, “There’s no way of knowing with this traffic.”  I paid him, get out and ran six blocks, arrived kind of sweaty, stopped at the guard entrance, told him my name.  They looked up on the list and saw I was cleared to come in.  I walked up that driveway and into the front door of the White House and into the west wing where the offices were; announced myself; Ted Sorenson’s secretary came out and told me he was in a meeting and brought me into his office, which was next to the Oval Office, and brought me a cup of coffee and chatted with me a couple minutes and put me at ease.  Then he came in, apologizing for being late.  I was finally breathing normally.  It was about 9:20 probably by then.  
We talked; he said he wanted me to meet Ralph Ungen, who was one of the top aides.  Ralph later became an ambassador to Latin American and later became the Commissioner of Higher Education it the state of New Jersey, years after.  He was looking for people for the AID Overseas Program—international development—and thinking of my interest in the Peace Corps he thought I might be interested in the technical assistance program.  I made clear to him that I wasn’t ready to go overseas and I was really only interested in the Peace Corps.  I wasn’t looking for a job, actually; I would have been reluctant to go to work in someplace that I wasn’t interested in.  And I wanted something that had to do with educational purpose, particularly a human relations/educational purpose, expanding understanding of other people, of the world, and so on.  I was brought to him because Ted Sorenson had another meeting.  I was brought back to Ted’s office and he said, “How’d it go?”  And I said, “I’m really not interested in anything but the Peace Corps.”  He didn’t really argue with me, but he expressed some skepticism that they didn’t know if it would really take off or not.  There was a lot of opposition to it: the State Department wasn’t happy with the idea that it would be separate; the State Department and the Agency for International Development weren’t happy that it would be separate from the technical assistance program.  And there were people in Congress that regarded it, they called it a “kiddy corps” and worried about what kind of young people would want to do that, whether they would be good representatives of America, and so on.  I said, well, that was the only thing I was really interested in doing.  
00:23:46
JK:	And I could probably have an educational role in the Peace Corps; that would appeal to me; that’s the only thing I wanted to talk about.  He said, “Well OK,” picked up the phone, he called and said, “Get me Shriver.”  He told him about me and said he was going to, Shriver said send him over.  It was across the street from the White House overlooking Lafayette Park and the White House from my office window.  And so he said, “Here’s the address.”  He scribbled it down and told me to go over.  
And then as I was getting out of my chair he said, “Do you have a résumé?”  And I said, “No, I didn’t bring a résumé.”  I really was down there to reconnect with Ted Sorenson and kind of talk about how I’m so thrilled with this youth corps idea.  He said, “I’ve got to go to a meeting,” and he buzzed his secretary and he said, “Can you come in?  Dr. Kauffman will dictate a brief résumé.”  And he said, “I’ll see you later; I may not see you the rest of the day, I’ve got a lot of meetings and you’ll be over there with Shriver.”  So in came the secretary with a pad, ready to take dictation.  There I am, sitting next to the Oval Office, dictating this résumé!  She had it typed in about five minutes.  It was a one-pager.  
And off I went, left the White House, went across Lafayette Park, 806 Connecticut Avenue, as I recall.  I believe it was on the fifth floor, as I later had my office on that same floor.  And I was escorted to Shriver’s office.  He was a very energetic, handsome man.  He gave me a warm welcome and we chatted for a little bit.  And then he buzzed the executive secretary who he had—someone who served as the head of the secretariat, was at the director’s beck-and-call, and record-keeper, log-keeper, and made sure that mail got answered and knew what was going on, where the director was at any time, and so on.  He called him in to tell him to bring me down to Lawrence Dennis, who was also a consultant who was on leave as provost at Penn State University, and who was going to be the guy in charge of recruitment, selection, and training of Peace Corps volunteers at the beginning.  He was on leave from Penn State.  Brad Patterson was the name of the executive secretary.  He had been a Cabinet secretary in the Eisenhower administration.  He brought me down and I spent the rest of the day with Lawrence Dennis.  We knew some people in common in higher education and he was fascinated with my background.  We talked about the kinds of things—nothing had been done; we didn’t have any programs, we just had mountains of mail from the universities wanting to help, and wanting to know what they could do, and wanting contracts, and wanting to be involved.
BT: 	So it was just a great idea at that point?
JK: 	A great idea.  And he said there were going to be three divisions—recruitment, selection, and training—under his office, which was the associate director.  There was another associate director, Bill Moyers, who was associate director for public affairs, which included press relations and all of the publications and all of the public relations, public information kinds of things.  Dennis asked me if I could get a leave of absence because the only way they could appoint people was as a consultant with a per diem, which in those days, as I recall, was seventy-five dollars a day maximum, and twelve dollars a day for room, board, hotel, and meal.  Twelve dollars a day included meals and hotels.
BT: 	That would get you a breakfast now, if you’re lucky.
JK:	 I never stayed in an air-conditioned hotel, as I recall.  They had government rates; I think you could get a room with a fan for six bucks.  I told him that I didn’t think I could get a leave of absence; that I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to ask for it.  And I was totally embarrassed about this, being about my eighth month at the Seminary.
BT: 	And you were enjoying your Seminary work, too, weren’t you?
JK: 	Most of it, but I had problems with seeing myself as the head of an institution where I didn’t speak Hebrew and was not of the piety of the place.  And I tried to explain that to my dear wife that I’d probably have the same trouble if I were head of an art school or an engineering school or something.  It never felt totally natural to me, although they were very respectful and affirmative about me.  And I did quite a bit of good while I was there shaping the place up, raising some money for an addition to the Jewish Museum, and the like.  At any rate, Dennis sent me a telegram a couple of days later offering me the consultantship, making clear that it was on a day-to-day basis, because that was the only way.
00:30:25 End of Side. 
Tape 1/Side 2
00:30:25
BT: 	So he wrote offering you the consultancy on a day-to-day basis?
JK: 	Yeah, he sent me a telegram.  I went in and saw Dr. Finkelstein, who had a long, gray beard and wore a skullcap, and book-lined office—he was a very pious and studious man as well; gentle man—and told him what I wanted to do.  He blessed me and told me that he understood, and that if I ever left to give him first refusal to bring me back to the Seminary.  And off I went, leaving my two kids in school and my wife in our rented house.  And I went to Washington and worked day and night in those days.  It was not unusual to be at the office at eleven o’clock at night drafting responses to letters with Shriver’s signature, or whatever I was involved in.  We’d go into meetings all day talking about how we were going to get this thing going.  The first few program requests were developed by program staff.  Shriver took a couple of overseas trips.  You had to negotiate with a government a request for a program.  And the first three or four programs, as I recall, were the Ghana agreed, and Krugel was the president; Ghana requested some science and math teachers, and English teachers.  They said they’d take some.  Tanganyika—which was called Tanganyika then, not Tanzania—wanted some land surveyors and geologists.  They wanted to build some market roads; there was no way to develop their agricultural community, which was pretty much a subsistence-type, unless they had roads to market.  And so they wanted to stop the road building and they wanted some surveyors and geologists and so on.  I think they put in a request for some nurses as well.  Nigeria wanted some secondary school teachers.  I believe it was Colombia, but it might have been Chile, that wanted some community development people.  Some of the requests were very vague, and you wondered if they were merely pleasing the American government by saying “we’ll take some.”  And trying to figure out how to train people in ten or twelve weeks—cross-cultural relations, some language, the technical skill, and the like, and also assess whether or not they were suitable to be sent overseas—was quite a challenge.
00:33:57
BT: 	Now let’s look at the time frame here.  It really was a short period of time.  You went in April—April 7th—you were offered a job on the 23rd.  You were in Washington not too long after that.
JK: 	We had some people in training in the end of June.
BT: 	And you had people in training at the end of June.  And in that period from when you came to the training period, you people had pretty much established the parameters for what the Peace Corps was going to be and was going to do.
JK: 	Well, we had certain obligations in training.  Congress was worried that people had to cope with communism, and so they wanted—some of the people in Congress were threatening to put it into law, which they eventually did—that part of the training had to be the ability to understand and deal with communist propaganda.  There was, they should be able to understand and explain the American form of government.  So all of a sudden we had certain ingredients in the training program.  We had to examine them medically and psychologically to make sure they were fit to be sent overseas.  Then we realized we have to have some staff overseas, including probably a medical person in some of these countries.  We kept thinking of all the things we had to do.  The problem was when do you actually select the people: before training we didn’t have a way of interviewing people and then deciding to invite them to be trained.  So we decided the training program would also be partly the selection program; that we would invite them to training with the caution that the decision as to whether or not they were selected to go overseas as a Peace Corps Volunteer would come at the end of the training program.  
We had to convince universities to provide housing, food, physical exams, spending money that they would administer during the training program for the trainees.  All the travel, all the logistics would be written into a contract with the university.  Some universities weren’t used to dealing with the federal government; in contractual negotiation there are strict rules for that.  For example, the faculty involved in training programs: government contracts don’t allow you to pay more than 100 percent of a faculty member’s time.  That’s true of today, even, I research, you know?  You get a research grant it’s not an addition to your faculty salary.  So releasing faculty members to teach in the training program, the rules for paying them to do that had to be consonant with federal contractual rules.  
There was an awful lot of work that had to be done.  We spent almost every day in meetings with legal counsel, with government contracting people, with a variety of university representatives and so on.  In fact our first contract, I think, with Wisconsin was with Extension, because they had more flexibility to do contracts.  And some of the California state institutions we negotiated contracts with their foundations, because otherwise we would have had to go through state government to get permission to do these things.  So there were a lot of things to be done, including the vagaries of what the volunteers were going to do when they get overseas.
00:38:23
BT: 	Before we get any further, how did you go about, briefly, recruiting these volunteers?  Did you send out notices to campuses?
JK: 	We had people who went around visiting universities.  We had public information notices on the radio advertising about how to apply.  Then we had to have an application.  Now I drafted some of the application and I put down that you had to have a reference from your dean.  I had been dean of students in a 1200-student campus; I could introduce you to every senior and tell you what the senior was going to do next year.  When I got to Wisconsin later I found that there was no way you could go to a dean and give me a personal testament.  But we had to draft an application.  We had to respond to the application.  We then had, and that included what skills you had, we had to put that in some systematic way.  This was before computers.  Put those in some kind of retrievable fashion, what language skills, what technical skills; in other words, if we were looking for surveyors, we had to find who among the applicants were surveyors, who knew agriculture, and so on.  It was a monumental kind of task.  Then I remember drafting the first letter of invitation to come to training, which I ran by a number of people and, finally, Shriver.  In fact, I think the first letters had his name on them.  They were invited to training at a particular, for a particular country and a particular university.  We had to be sure through our contract with a university that, when they arrived, they would know where to go and there would be someone there to greet them and they would be issued stuff for sleeping arrangements, and there would be meals, and there would be a director appointed that we would approve, and on and on.  And writing the outline of the training program, week-by-week.  So I would assign a staff person to be there from my office.  And then we had some psychologists from selection who would start the screening and interviews, keep track of the people, and at the end declare whether or not—they and the medical people.  Some people were pulled out.  I remember one very upset person who had a stomach ulcer and they wouldn’t let him go to the Far East.  He went anyway on his own and became a big Japanese art collector.
BT: 	Interesting.
JK: 	Stayed in touch with me for a few years after.  But it was a very—there were lots of questions about teaching.  The National Education Association and some of the other teachers groups, education groups, thought that there was no way that you could train somebody in ten weeks or twelve weeks to be able to teach; it required the equivalent of certification in America.  Shriver was absolutely aghast at the attitude.  I reminded one of the education leaders that Frank Keppel, who was the commissioner of education whom I knew, who was the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, had a master’s degree and no courses in education.
BT: 	How about that.
00:43:06
JK: 	And he was commissioner of education.  The needs in these countries were such that there was no way that they would insist on the equivalent of teacher certification in the United States.  And we involved schools of education like Columbia Teachers College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, to do the training for these people.  So we had to cope with all kinds of things: finding an anthropologist who had been to the country, trying to get someone to familiarize them with a language.  They wouldn’t have to teach in the language, but they were supposed to live with the people and not in compounds.  We wanted them to be able to communicate.  Most language departments were aghast at the idea that you would teach something about a language in ten or twelve weeks; they were used to first semester, second semester, third semester, fourth semester, starting with grammar and all the rules.  But we weren’t interest in all that.  The faculty in these universities were not used to trying to convert what they do to a short-range kind of thing.  The technical assistance was interesting, too.  We tried to involve universities that had AID programs in these countries, assuming that they knew something about the culture and the language and the reality of working and so on.  And most of them had people who weren’t really integrated faculty on these AID contracts; very few of them knew.  For instance, at Ohio State they had a contract with India in the Punjab area where we were going first.  And I brought the group to Ohio State, and they didn’t have anyone on the faculty who knew the language or could teach it.  And most of the technical assistance program people that had been involved in India were not on the regular faculty.  You would hire people as part of your staff to go overseas, but they really weren’t regular, tenured faculty on campus after that.  So there were lots of difficulties.  But we had no alternative.  We had nobody overseas.  We had no staff overseas.  We had no way to train people overseas.  We weren’t sure what they were getting into when they went to work overseas.
BT: 	Right, right.
JK: 	So it was a pretty tricky operation.
BT: 	And these training sessions, you said, lasted about ten to twelve weeks?
JK: 	Ten to twelve weeks.
00:46:07
BT: 	After looking at the recruitment process and having these young people there for ten to twelve weeks, could you characterize what kind of student you were getting and what kind of person you were getting?  Who was volunteering to be in the Peace Corps?
JK: 	For the most part they were recent college graduates or about to be college graduates that hadn’t yet established themselves in any kind of career.  They were idealistic.  Many of them didn’t know what they wanted to do, and settling down, joining the rat race was not appealing to them because they didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives.  And this was a way of achieving a moratorium on that plus doing something of which they would be proud, and that they would learn something about themselves different from serving in the military.  It would be a kind of a test of character and courage.  Adventure for a couple of years.
BT: 	Were these people also, did they buy into Kennedy’s New Frontier and the spirit of the country at the time?
JK: 	Oh yes, they wanted to represent America.
BT: 	Would you call them patriotic?
JK: 	Yes, patriotic and idealistic.  And having seen this as an opportunity to serve their country and create a better image of America without having to do that in a militaristic fashion, which was the only way one could serve your country; you served militarily.
00:48:10
BT: 	Was there any concern on your part, and the people in Washington, considering the Ugly American and the image we had abroad, about the safety of these people?
JK: 	There was a great deal of concern about safety.  We trained them as a group but they peeled off in ones and twos in their assignment, so they had to be quite self-sufficient.  There might be two or three or five at a school, but many of them were in ones and twos in fairly isolated areas.  So we were worried about health, we were worried about enemies.  Some of these countries had Marxist groups that were vying with the government to take over the country and so on.  Yeah, there was a lot of concern.  And whenever there was difficulty we pulled people out.  John Torphy was a volunteer in, let’s see, Dominican Republic.  And there was an uprising there and he was pulled out with that group and went to Washington for the rest of his service.  So we pulled people out.  We had a few deaths from accidents, Jeep accidents, vehicle accidents, poor roads.  Some illnesses.  
00:49:56
BT: 	So you had how many people trained by the end of that first summer?
JK: 	On the executive order contingency funding—
BT: 	That’s right, you haven’t been funded yet, officially.
JK: 	We sent eight hundred volunteers overseas at the end of that first summer.  We trained twenty-five hundred volunteers the second summer in forty-three programs in thirty-six universities.  
00:50:34
JK:	I tried to identify the host country nationals that were in this country—some of them had some students here—and invited them to come to the training program and talk to the volunteers, be available if they could be available, or visit if they couldn’t be available for a length of time.  We were scrambling all over the place for expertise: who had been to this country?  Who had studied in this country?  Who knew the language?  Somalia didn’t have a written language; we found a professor at NYU who had made tapes.  I could tell you a lot of stories.  There was a couple in Madison, I want to say Zilberg or Zilborg, it began with a Z, both of whom had been in the Ivory Coast. And we actually trained the first group for the Ivory Coast at Madison because they were here.  And we would do that.  Where there were two or three faculty members who knew something about the country, that would tilt us to go to that institution.  Columbia Teachers College and Harvard both had some activities in Nigeria in education and we trained teachers for Nigeria at those institutions.  
BT: 	So in a way you were really a seat-of-the-pants organization; you would go wherever you saw the opportunity.
JK: 	Yeah. There were attempts to get political favors, you know, “How about a training program in my district” kind of thing.  I resisted that completely at the beginning.  And gradually the university training programs were phased out three or four years later when we had overseas staff and overseas people in place and you could send people over and a previous volunteer could show them the job, for that matter.  Things were more institutionalized.  But at the beginning, all the training and the logistics were contracted for with the universities.  You weren’t invited to Washington; you were invited to a university.  And the university was expected in writing to welcome you and feed you and board you and teach you and get some of the psychology people to help in the assessment and screening.  The whole thing was done by university contracts.
00:53:35
BT: 	You eventually became director of train—talk about your own…
JK: 	Well, everybody was a consultant at first.  And Lawrence Dennis wanted me to be his deputy—deputy associate director for Peace Corps Volunteers.  He brought in a faculty colleague that he knew, Robert Iverson, who was a professor at Syracuse, I believe, and had been at Penn State, and told him he would be director of division of training of Peace Corps.  None of those divisions was created until we had legislation.  He did that without Shriver’s approval, but it probably helped him in recruiting him to come down as a consultant.  He was a very confident person, now deceased, as is Dennis.  The first training program for India was at Ohio State, and I asked Shriver to come to the training program with me fairly near the beginning.  He was willing to lend himself to doing things like that.  In fact, I traveled with him in speechmaking and promotion of recruitment in the early days, too.  We would go out together.  So I brought him to Ohio State, introduced him to the president and some of the faculty members in the training program, presented him to volunteers in training.  He made a speech.  We spent two or three days together.  When I get back to Washington, he called me in and said he thought I should be the director of training.  And I said I would make Iverson my deputy, which I did.  But Shriver is the one that said when we’re ready to create titles and create levels and all of that, which I guess the bill was passed in September.
BT: 	Enabling legislation.
JK: 	So I became the first director of the division of training.  I guess the bureaucratic language, I was called director of training, Peace Corps Volunteer training, but the actual bureaucratic title was Chief, Division of Peace Corps Volunteer Training.  I guess that allowed me to get the rank that I had.
BT: 	Now you eventually built up a sizeable staff, did you not?
JK: 	Yeah. Well, that next summer I had twenty-one training officers.
BT: 	Where did you essentially get them from?
JK: 	Well, it was a combination of people being enamored of helping the Peace Corps and my recruiting people.  Let’s see, we had to start a—well, let’s see.  Bill Craig was the Dean of Men at Stanford and was very interested in the Peace Corps idea.  He visited with me and indicated he would be willing to try to take a leave.  Joe Murphy, now deceased, who later became chancellor of the City University of New York, and was president of Queens before that, Peace Corps representative in Ethiopia before that, he was an instructor at Brandeis.  I went through the faculty listing and the only one I could think of that was the type that I could get to just pick up and go to be a Peace Corps type was Joe Murphy.  He just finished his PhD.  And I called him and asked him if he would like to work for the Peace Corps and be a training officer with me.  He said he’d love it.  He came down; he had a wife and kids.  He came down and went overseas a couple of times for me.  He was great and he had a tremendous career.  He got killed in an accident in Ethiopia a couple of years ago.  But he regarded me as his mentor and kind of the protégé became president after his Peace Corps and overseas experience at Queens and CUNY, and later became chancellor at CUNY for a number of years.  I would spot people in the training program that got along or resonated well with volunteers, and as the kind of person that would pick up and go at a moment’s notice and so on.  They type of person I needed: flexible.  And I would offer them to come for six months or a year or for as long as they could get a leave and so on.  There were three or four people from the government: one had been with Project Hope and had been with the Navy before that, was in the Navy in World War II.  The ship hope and so on. I offered him the job.  There were some people in Washington with the National Association, or American Association of Colleges, and so on, that wanted to be a part of the Peace Corps.  And I offered them jobs.  I had a variety of people around the country—California, New Mexico—so it was a combination of my recruiting people plus people coming in the door and leaving a résumé and saying they’d love to help, and my picking some of those people.
BT: 	And the common denominator among all of them was sort of the reason you came, you were interested in the Peace Corps, and the reason the students came: their sense of optimism.
JK:	 It was a tremendous opportunity to do good.  And it’s hard to explain to people today the context of the times.  The Cold War was almost a hot war.  We were vying with communism all around the world.  The Soviet Union was our foe and was spending millions of dollars on propaganda.  When I went to Somalia, for example, the Soviets were building a hospital in Somalia on the Gulf of Aden, and…
00:1:00:52 End of Side
Tape 10/Side 1

01:00:53

BT:	And the Chinese, you said, were sending English…
JK:	The Chinese were sending English-language magazines about China life to officials and teachers in Somalia.  If you look at the map, you see Yemen across the Gulf, the Gulf of Aden, and I forget the name of the ocean on the other side of Somalia.  We were vying in various countries with Marxist philosophy for these new governments.  Africa, some of the African countries were starting off with one-party rule; some were Marxist; some of the shaky governments were being pressured not to be cooperative with America and so on.  The context of the time, though, the Ugly American idea, there were lots of people negative about America—including some of our own intellectuals.  It was a time at which there was an expression of guilt over affluence and the discovery of poverty.  Race relations in America were not what they are today; there was still segregation in many of the states.  Kennedy had expressed an idealism after rather a quiet Eisenhower eight years to get America moving again and have a space program and change the image of America—“do for your country” and so on.  In terms of the Cold War, there is a movie out now called Thirteen Days about the Cuban missile crisis.  I was scheduled to go to Africa with Sergeant Shriver in October of 1962 to visit the first volunteers in the field in East Africa for three weeks, three or four weeks.  Our trip was put on hold because of the Cuban missile crisis.  We thought there was going to be nuclear war, and we were told we were on hold, not going right now.  When we got the word that the trip was on in late October, we knew that the Defense Department at least thought the danger had passed.  So in those times it was very different.  This was before you got the Vietnam War with the four assassinations—three of them in the sixties.  And there were a lot of young people that wanted to do something.  And there were a lot of people like me that wanted to make a better world and wanted to help young people develop a better world.  I regarded the Peace Corps as most beneficial to America by giving young, idealistic, able Americans an experience that they would take into teaching, law, government work, whatever they were going to do; it would make for much greater understanding of who we are and what the world is than if they didn’t have that experience.  And I thought it was great that the government could provide the channel for that opportunity.  
There were some religious groups that had small volunteer programs trying to do similar things—provide a channel for religious vocations.  Some of them were of a missionary nature, but they were medical or nursing and so on.  This was something that seemed to fit with the Kennedy spirit.  It wasn’t for everybody; I never thought of it as a mass program.  It had to be, by definition, fairly small in order for it to work.  It couldn’t be like a military program in which you send over thousands of people somewhere and then leave.  The whole transaction was to leave host country nationals capable of carrying on what you had done, not to leave like a technical assistance program, build a dam and then go home.  So there were people such as myself—adults as well as young people—who responded to this.
01:06:13
BT: 	I think you mentioned last time that you thought perhaps the people—the volunteers—who went over there got as much or more out of it as the people whom they were serving.
JK: 	Well as I said, the real beneficiaries, I always felt, were Americans and America.  You never really understand your own culture until you see another one; your own values unless you end up rationalizing them or defending them.  
01:06:45
JK:	I can remember some of the training programs that were going to go to Moslem countries, having some exercises with some people I brought in, young women, graduates of Smith College or Radcliffe, being tongue-tied when pressed to defend the morality of riding a bike or going in shorts—arguments they were going to get in a Moslem country.  And saying that’s immoral and having you claim that you didn’t think it was, and why, and having great difficulty doing that because you never, you just assume that everything you do is natural.  And confronting another culture is very developmental.
01:07:42
BT: 	I remember—well, I should point out that this interview is taking place four days after President Bush—George W. Bush—gave his inaugural address.  And preceding that on C-SPAN and some of the other stations they had previous inaugural addresses of different presidents.  And one of them that I saw was Kennedy; I hadn’t seen his inaugural address in a long time.  And the spirit that he projected in that speech was so similar to what you’re talking about here.
JK: 	That was the context of the Peace Corps, and why some wonderful people volunteered and regarded it as a great adventure and a great opportunity and a way to serve, especially as an alternative to military service.
BT: 	“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” could almost be the Peace Corps’ motto.  That first group went over there: how did that go, generally speaking?
01:08:31
JK: 	Well there were problems.  I remember in the middle of the training program at Texas-El Paso someone from the host country returning from Tanganyika told us the kind of geology that they needed was hard rock and El Paso had soft rock or something.  There were things like that that we ran into.  But on the whole it went pretty well.  We didn’t really have a way to evaluate it quickly.  We could tell you the strong points and weak points in the training programs and how to do it better the next time and so on.
BT: 	Did you make changes that second year, then?
JK: 	Yes.
BT: 	Talk about some of the major changes you made in the training program.
JK: 	Well we had more training officers assigned to monitor the programs to stay with them and so on.  We had the Peace Corps representative who was going to be the staff head in the country come to the training program for a period of time.  We finally convinced faculty members that it wasn’t necessary to think in terms of someone getting an A on an exam in order to be judged competent to be a Peace Corps volunteer, or adequate to be a Peace Corps volunteer.  Language training: most people could work in English, but we wanted them to have language training so they could communicate.  And creating fast-track language training with dialogues—“How do you get here?  What is this?”—we could teach the kind of communication without learning the language the way you typically study the language in the college; getting people to be more flexible about that.  Providing cross-cultural experiences: we would bring people to Indian reservations for a week.  Puerto Rico was a big part of a lot of the training program.  Drop people off several days, tell them they had to make friends and communicate.  Train one group of community development people in Spanish Harlem in New York with the Columbia School of Social Work faculty leading the training.  The New York Times wrote an editorial about how terrible things were and the mayor got furious that the Peace Corps was using New York City to train people to go into the slums and so on.  But we tried to find substitutes for cross-cultural experiences as best we could.  And I just think we knew a little bit more by the second summer.  I trained about two hundred volunteers in the Washington, D.C. area, creating a kind of consortium with Georgetown University, the University of Maryland, George Washington; they did different things.  
01:12:45
JK:	And I got the President to agree to say farewell to them when they finished the training program and I brought about two hundred of them over to the White House, in the back of the White House, the Rose Garden area.  He spoke to them.  It was a very touching time.
BT: 	Did Kennedy refer to the Peace Corps frequently in those times?
JK: 	Yes.  Of course his brother-in-law was running it.
BT: 	Right.
JK: 	Yes, I think he was probably surprised at how well it was going and the response he got to it from young people.  But he did refer to it a lot and he spoke about the honor of serving your country.  We did that with his own staff as well.  There was rough, tough politics, but underneath it all there was this idealism.  They weren’t doing this as a job or because they needed the money; Shriver was serving without pay.  It was service and it felt good.  Many of us had been in the war, many of us in combat.  Shriver had been a submariner; Kennedy you know about.
BT: 	PT 109.
JK: 	A number of the people had been war veterans who thought making peace was a wonderful idea, especially in the context of the times.  We were trying to say that our way was better than the Soviet way: America was a more noble enterprise than the Soviet Union.  And that’s part of what we thought we were doing.
01:14:52
BT: 	And as you said that your training staff grew and you changed the training program a little bit, you also got several more students or volunteers involved that second year, did you not?  Weren’t you up to…
JK: 	Well I dug out an old report I sent to Shriver at the end of the summer in ’62: forty-three programs were trained this summer; thirty-six universities; more than twenty-five hundred Peace Corps volunteers; thirty-three different countries; twenty-one training officers; approximately fourteen hundred faculty members were engaged in the training effort at the universities; thirty different languages were taught.  Yeah, it was a vastly different enterprise.
BT: 	Enterprise is an appropriate word, too.
01:15:40
JK: 	That fall Shriver invited me to go to East Africa and North Africa to see what we needed to do.
BT: 	Now this was the trip that was delayed by the Cuban missile crisis?
JK: 	Right.
BT: 	Talk a little bit about that trip, would you please?
JK: 	Well, my wife wasn’t too happy about my going. 
BT: 	Before you go on, did you really think that—what were people saying about the actual chances for nuclear war at that point?
JK: 	Well all I knew was what was coming out of the White House.  I watched the speeches Kennedy gave on television warning about.  I remember breaking down crying in front of my children because I always felt that we fought that last war and won it, and that was the end of war.  But the idea of a World War Three or a nuclear war was terrifying.
BT: 	And you had seen Hiroshima.
JK: 	Right. So it was a very difficult, tense kind of time. And when I got the word that the trip was on hold—it wasn’t being delayed, it was just that it may be off—I was getting ready to go; that was a heart-stopping kind of message that our trip is on hold and we’re not leaving the country.
BT: 	I bet it was.
JK: 	The next night Kennedy was on TV saying we may have a nuclear war.  So there was great relief when they said we’re going a few days later.
BT: 	I bet.
JK: 	But I wasn’t in close touch with the White House during that period; I didn’t know anybody.  Well, we went, let’s see; we went to New York from Baltimore—took a flight to Athens—Cairo—and landed in, let’s see, I’m trying to remember where we went first.
01:18:12
BT: 	You went to Tanganyika first.
JK: 	I guess we landed at Dar es Salaam then.  And we visited in Tanganyika—now Tanzania—Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tunisia.  We visited almost all the volunteers in the field, observed many of them in their work setting.  Some of it was in the bush; some of it was in villages; some of it was in the capital cities.  In Tanganyika there were geologists, surveyors, some mechanics, some nurses.  Some of the people in the road-building projects complained about the inefficiency of the government and the change in ministers and some of the things that had been promised weren’t there and so on.  I remember after one particular gripe session, Shriver saying, “If things weren’t so screwed up here they wouldn’t have asked for you to come and help.” 
BT: 	Wonderful.
JK: 	I think one of the more difficult, poignant bits of feedback were from some of the nurses.  Tanganyika had Africanized pretty much the whole country and gotten rid of all the colonials and expatriates and their medical hospitals and clinics.  And they were barren in terms of medicine and antibiotics and so on.  It was hard for the nurses, who had been trained in American nursing schools and hospitals, to accept the fact that people were dying that didn’t have to die if they just had the right things.  It was hard to accept that the value of kicking out all the colonials was worth it.  We knew that we had to build more into the training program to understand the reality of that and help them cope with that kind of thing.  Those were the kinds of things.  
01:21:11
JK:	We had to go through Kenya each time we—Ethiopia and Somalia were enemies, you couldn’t fly over.  In Ethiopia, the language of the country in the primary, first four grades was Amharic which is basically a Semitic language.  And then if you want to continue on and go on to school through eighth grade or high school, the language of instruction was English.  I had discovered in the training programs for Ethiopia, we doubled, or enabled the doubling of the secondary school population of Ethiopia in the first three years of the Peace Corps by providing over two hundred teachers.  We wanted to teach some Amharic.  I remembered nobody knew anyone that knew Amharic.  I remembered a refugee, a World War II German refugee scholar, an expert in Semitic languages who had taught at Brandeis.  And I used to refer to him as “Poor” Wolf Leslau because he didn’t have tenure and he would offer a Ugaritic I, and Aramaic I, or 101, and nobody would sign up.  And there were plenty of Hebrew scholars and there was no way he was going to get tenure as a Hebrew scholar.  I heard that he had been let go and gone to California and that he was teaching Hebrew part-time to bar mitzvah students and rabbinical students and that he was also teaching part-time at UCLA.  Some ten years had elapsed since I knew Poor Old Leslau.  And I contacted people at UCLA and they told me he was in Ethiopia.  The emperor had commissioned him to do the definitive dictionary of the Amharic language and update it and so on.  But he had some PhD students at UCLA that could help and he was going back and forth between California and Addis Ababa.  When I got to Ethiopia I had a luncheon with the dean and a couple, the president and chancellor of the Heile Selasse University—you wouldn’t call it that anymore after the coup.
BT: 	No, I’m sure not.
JK: 	And I told them I knew Wolf Leslau, and they treated me like I was a king.  A couple of them had studied with him.
BT: 	Oh really?
01:24:41
JK: 	Yeah. So you run into unusual Poor Wolf Leslau, was the honored scholar of Ethiopia.  I remember visiting in one school, there were children sitting barefoot around a table with an adult reading out in unison out of a book, and they each had a copy.  The teacher had not gone beyond the sixth grade.  I remember Shriver saying to me, “And you want to give them two years of training to be teachers, a Harvard B.A. is not good enough?  Look at this!”  He disabused me of apologizing for the short training program.  I looked at the book—I joined the group and sat down with them—they were reading from The Vicar of Wakefield.  I asked the adult who was leading the reading why they were reading The Vicar of Wakefield in their bare feet on a dirt floor in Ethiopia.  And he said that was the only book they had eight copies of.  I remember I wrote a letter to Fred Heckinger, who was then the education editor of the New York Times, and he did a Sunday column on my letter.  And we started a drive for books.  We’d send over thousands of books that were donated.
BT: 	That’s great.
JK:	 I remember giving a speech in Massachusetts about ten years ago.  Paul Tsongas was the head of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, and he had been a volunteer in Ethiopia in the first group.
BT: 	Really?  I didn’t know that.
JK: 	I had heard that, so I went up to him—I was the keynote speaker and he was the luncheon speaker—I went up to him and said, “I probably met you once before in Ethiopia when I visited all the volunteers with Shriver.”  He said, “We were the only place in Ethiopia that you didn’t get to.”  He was furious; he said he never forgave me for that!  But we visited almost all the volunteers.  We brought some to us, but we also visited the work sites.  So we traveled around.  In that time, Eritrea was part of Ethiopia.  We were in both Asmara, which is the capital of Eritrea, and Addis.  We had to fly into Addis before dark—there were no landing lights.  And one time Shriver and I went off in a single-engine plane to visit some volunteers and I kept saying, “Come on, we’ve got to leave, we’ve got to fly back.  It’s a forty-five minute flight and it’s going to be dark; the sun’s going down!”  The pilot was getting anxious.  So we saw the emperor at a holiday parade on the anniversary of freedom, I guess, or his inauguration or coronation; I forget what the occasion was.  We went to Somalia, both the north and the south.  I wondered why we were there; we were basically teaching English.  I remember visiting one school; I asked the headmaster what the students would do if they finished secondary school.  He was puzzled; he said, “I suppose they would either go in the army or work for the government.”  There was nothing in the country, basically nomadic people.  I asked him where the science kit—we had put together a science kit, a foot locker with a Bunsen burner, beakers, test tubes, various ingredients that you could use in teaching elementary chemistry in a secondary school—and I asked, I didn’t see it in the classroom, so I asked him if he had received one.  And he said, oh yes, he was very proud; he unlocked a padlock on the closet door, opened the door, and showed me the foot locker.  And I said, “Aren’t you using it?”  And he said they would break these things.  
01:30:03
JK:	So it was quite a challenge for the volunteers –
BT: 	Yeah, I’ll bet
JK:	—adapting to that kind of thing.  Somalia is a Moslem country and some of the women volunteers had some problems.  I wondered as we sort of camel-caravanned going across the land, these people had no written form for their language in Somalia.  They had to learn Arabic.  The Italians had conquered them and they had to learn Italian.  We were teaching them English.  They were basically living in squalor; they really needed clean drinking water and some sanitation and so on.  But that was the program, and eventually I guess we were driven out of Somalia; I assume we were.  But you couldn’t pick and choose.  Let’s see; Somalia, Tanganyika…
BT: 	Ethiopia and Tunisia.
JK:	 Tunisia was in North Africa.  We had a variety of programs there, including physical education teachers and coaches that wanted to enter national competitions.  I often wondered about the Colosseum in Rome and the desire by some of the countries—African countries and Asian countries—to have athletic facilities built when they needed so many other things. 
01:33:09 End of Side
Tape 10/Side 2
01:32:18	
BT: 	One of the ways you develop patriotism and identification is through sports.
JK:	 Is through sports competition and entering your pride and joy athletes into international competition.  So we had some people who were asked to teach physical education and coach in secondary school.  I forget what all the different tasks were, but there was some mechanical and road-building, various other things.  Tunisia was the least morale of that visit to those four or five countries because programs were somewhat ill-defined and the government hadn’t come through with providing counterparts to participate and so on.  That was one of the problems in the first couple of years in the Peace Corps: programs were requested that were quite vague.  When the volunteers got to the country, they said, “We should have done this and should have done that in preparing them we should have trained them differently.”  And we had to learn the hard way that newly developing countries with changing government ministries and so on couldn’t often define clearly what you would do. 
Now one of our—aside from teaching, which we did a lot of—one of the principal areas of volunteers was called community development.  And that was very ill-defined; it was helping to organize people to build safe drinking water or latrines or a health clinic or some local industry, petition a government for redress, whatever.  Some of it was a little political and quite controversial because real community development is organizing.  So we had rural development and urban development and so on.  I remember once a request for urban community development in Brasilia, the new capital city of Brazil.  And I said I can’t believe this; it is the model new city just being completed.  Out of nothing they built this magnificent new city.  How could you have a need for urban community development there?  They said, well, all the people who were brought there to do the work, the construction, and they all created these little hovels outside the city to live in while they built the city, and they don’t want to leave.  So those were the kinds of situations.  Now train some volunteers to go in and help them.  The government didn’t know what to do; they thought maybe the Peace Corps could help.  There were lots of ill-defined projects.  On the whole, however, the morale was good and Peace Corps volunteers were proud of their service.  
01:35:55
JK:	And I started the beginnings of getting universities that had trained volunteers to consider offering graduate fellowships and academic credits and so on for the service and to get people to come back and go into urban school teaching and social work and government work and so on.  And many of them did that.  So for the next twenty years, certainly, during the poverty programs—the end of poverty programs and stuff like that—into the seventies and eighties, a lot of inner-city schools and social agencies were staffed by people who had been Peace Corps volunteers. 
01:36:46
BT: 	Some of them still are, actually; the Peace Corps is still going on, of course. Now you returned from Africa with Sargent Shriver, that would be…
JK: 	The end of November of ’62.
BT: 	The end of November of ’62.  He met with you and asked you if you would become the Peace Corps representative.
JK: 	Well he did that on the squawk box.
BT: 	Oh, tell me about, let’s talk about the squawk box for a second.
JK: 	Well, he had a communication device installed.  It was a big status symbol because there were only about seven or eight of us in the Peace Corps staff where he wanted to have this device on your desk so he could communicate with you at any time.  And I was so honored I had this device on my desk.  We called it the squawk box because a loud squawk would go off to alert you that he was turning it on, and then he would say, “Joe, I have your memo and such, it’s OK with me if you want to do that, but be sure you tell Bill Moyers,” or whatever.  And then it would go off or he’d wait a minute and see if you wanted to say anything.  It didn’t matter who was in your office; I sometimes had universities, diplomats, ambassadors, and so on, and it would blast out, “I don’t like this damn thing that I heard about.  When are we going to get that straightened out?”  One day, let’s see, I guess it would be late spring or June or something of ’63, the squawk box went off and he said, “Joe, I’d like you to think about becoming our Peace Corps representative in Thailand.  You probably are going to be able to do it with training now and maybe it would be a good thing for you.  I’d like to have you go there.”  And I said, “I need to think about that, Sarge.  I’ll be back in touch with you; let me think about it.”  And I knew I couldn’t go; my wife would not think of going and I did not want to put my kids through that.  I wasn’t interested in being in a foreign-service kind of role; I was interested in education.  And I knew that when the Peace Corps experience was up, as volunteers were starting to come home after two years and many of them wanted to work in the Peace Corps, Shriver made clear to us this was not a career.  And I made clear it was not a career.  I wanted to go back to a campus.  So Bill Moyers assured me, and I don’t know where I put that memo—a beautiful two-page memo about what I meant to the Peace Corps and how highly Shriver thought of me—I thought maybe he had someone in mind that he wanted to put in that role or whatever.  And he assured me not.  But I took that as a way of knowing that this was temporary and I wanted to get back to higher education, and maybe the time was coming now that I had been there two and a half years and so on.  So I left in the fall of ’63, September of ’63.  
01:40:33
JK:	But my daughter was going into her senior year in high school and I had moved her several times and decided that I wanted to wait until she finished high school.  So I took a job with the American Council on Education, actually as their advisor on student affairs.  I was considered, you know, an advocate of young people and so on, dean of students-types.  I was asked to go to other universities, but I didn’t want to leave.  Let’s see, they offered me a Chief of Student Affairs post at Washington University in St. Louis and there were others that were interested in me.  But I made clear to my family that I wouldn’t leave until my daughter finished high school.  So when UW-Madison came to me I said I wouldn’t be available until June of ’65, and they were looking for someone in ’64.  But they kept it open for me because they wanted me.  But I left and I wrote some stuff for the American Council on Education on students and student services.  I put together a national conference on the student in higher education.  
01:42:03
JK:	And obviously I was in Washington when Kennedy was assassinated.  And Shriver invited me and my wife to pay our respects by going to the White House, visiting the casket.  We went to some of the ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial, saw the Eternal Flame and all of that in Arlington.  It was hard to believe.
BT: 	Well I could draw an X on the spot—I mean, a lot of people say these kinds of things—I could draw an X on the spot I was standing in high school.  I was a senior when I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, or shot at first—we didn’t know if he was killed.
JK: 	Did you watch any of that on television?
BT: 	I watched it.
JK: 	Remember they would show the diplomatic corps, the ambassadors, and the Cabinet people would drive up to the White House?  The Marine Guard would click their heels, open the door, and take the car away like valet parking.  Then they would go in, and they would come out and they would bring them their car.  It went on.  I did that for a whole day, and then about four o’clock in the afternoon the phone rang—my wife and I were watching, kind of crying half of the time—he said Shriver thought you and your wife might like to come pay your last respects.  And we went and drove up; the Marines took our car, just as we had been watching.
BT: 	Wow, that’s amazing.
JK: 	It was tremendous.
BT: 	I’ll never forget the image of the riderless horse going down Pennsylvania Avenue, I guess it must have been, on the television.  I’ll never forget that.  How did that—now you were still obviously in close contact with Bill Moyers—how did that—and Sergeant Shriver, for that matter—how did that affect the Peace Corps?  That must have been just devastating.
JK: 	Well it was, and Shriver really ran the funeral for Jackie and at the end of thirty days had a memorial service at Lincoln Memorial that Shriver ran.  We went to that, too.  We all had candles at dusk and you could see the Eternal Flame over the bridge at Arlington, and so on.  Well it was devastating.  Moyers was like Johnson’s son; he immediately was called to the White House to be his spokesman or press officer and so on.  So he immediately left.  And the whole idea of the Peace Corps was shaken.  At first, you know, people thought of it as a conspiracy: maybe the Communists did it, maybe Castro did it, you know, all kinds of things.  
Then my people in the White House that I knew were starting to peel off: Ted Sorenson left a few months, well, not too long after.  And we were invited to—LBJ gave a farewell kind of reception for him at the ceremonial room in the State Department.  The Cabinet was there and a whole bunch of important people, some of the Supreme Court justices.  Sorenson spoke briefly.  We were honored to be there and to get in a receiving line with Johnson and so on.  And then when Mike Feldman was leaving—he stayed on for almost a year—when he was leaving he had us come over to the White House, go to lunch as a kind of farewell.  He gave a little party for us when we were leaving, actually, but at his home.  But it was a kind of peeling off because the Kennedy—Johnson, I used to go up to Johnson at cocktail parties and befriend him because he was off in a corner somewhere and the Kennedy crowd was not particularly friendly with him socially.  I think he felt a little awkward with that.  As Vice President he was chair of the Peace Corps Advisory Council, so whenever we’d have a Peace Corps Advisory Council, which was three or four times a year at least, I was expected to go talk about training and so on.  And LBJ would preside in the way that Hubert Humphrey did.  So I had met him several times.  As Johnson took over with his people, I remember—I won’t say who called me—but one of the top White House aides of Kennedy called me and said, “Tell me about this Bill Moyers guy.  He’s taking on tremendous responsibilities over here.  Is he capable of doing this and doing that?  He’s not a lawyer, he’s not a this, not a that.  He’s a minister.”  There was a gradual—it took probably a year—peeling off of the Kennedy people.  I didn’t lose my contacts with the White House until the Nixon administration.  I knew some of the people around Humphrey and around LBJ, including Moyers.  I stayed in touch with Moyers.  I still hear from him once in a while.  But it was a different era.
01:48:38
BT: 	As Ted Sorenson and Mike Feldman and some of the others started peeling off, did you feel that the Peace Corps was on firm enough ground to continue at that point?  Were you concerned about the future, let me put it differently?
JK: 	I was not of the opinion that it would end, but I was fearful that the spirit of it would change and that some of the people that were staying with the Peace Corps, particularly in the program area, had a vested interest in it being more of a technical-assistance type program than an educational-human relations type program.  Because they really weren’t’ educators: they were foreign-aid types in the program division, and that’s what was needed to negotiate with other governments for these programs.  So they tended to be out of the foreign aid milieu rather than out of education.  I was considered an educator in my role and I worried about that maybe eroding.  And, of course, the assassination changed the mood of the country.
BT: 	It sure did; boy it did.
JK: 	I thought Nixon would end it, actually.  And he in some ways tried to bury it by putting it in a new unit in the government—I forget what it was called—but it took Vista and Retired Executives Service Organization and Peace Corps and so on and put it, I forget what it was called, into a new unit.  I was, let’s see; who put me on?  I guess LBJ put me on the Peace Corps National Advisory Council.  When Nixon came into office I was sent a form letter on how to resign from the National Peace Corps Advisory Council, which I did.  And then I got a thank you for my service.  But there was a total turnover by then.  And we were into the Vietnam War and the young, idealistic students were more into the protest movement than the Peace Corps.  I lost touch.  I’ve not gone back.  Mary Routh saw to it that I got an invitation to the fortieth event at the Union on March 2nd, a dinner dance or something.  I declined.  At this stage of my life I don’t wallow in the past.  I’m proud of what I did but I don’t need any recognition for it.  But it’s probably different today than it was.  We created it; I didn’t really institutionalize it.
BT: 	Well it’s interesting in your career: first in Omaha, where you were involved with the first Anti-Defamation League headquarters there; and then at Brandeis, it was only in its third or fourth year; and then the Peace Corps, where you were in at the very beginnings of it; that you have had three different experiences in your life where you are really at the front end of something that’s very important.  
01:48:38
BT:	Could you, as a final question, could you just sum up if you could your experience—what the Peace Corps has meant to you in your experiences with the Peace Corps?
JK: 	Well I was always idealistic about higher education as an instrument for the development of young people, their talents, and their character.  And I was an advocate of giving young people responsibility and investing in them.  I saw the Peace Corps experience as a way of interacting with the best of our youth who wanted to make a better world and to grow and develop in their understanding and commitments without any great personal reward of a monetary nature or a career nature as a result.  Being a part of that, and interacting with those people—both the staff people that came on board in the early months and the kind of young people that I met in both the training programs, I visited almost all the training programs at least once during the training, usually to speak at the close, and to see them in the field in Africa—was a most rewarding experience.  I’m glad I did it.
01:54:20
BT: 	Could I ask you one other question?  It just came to me as you were talking.  You brought this experience with you to Madison when you came here.  How did that impact on your job here, on you and your job performance here in Madison?  I don’t even know if that’s a fair question, if you can answer it.
JK: 	I was a very altruistic Dean of Student Affairs, challenging my staff and all the student services people to honor the students and to have faith in them and so on.  I was an advocate of students being on faculty committees, doing away with supervised living requirements and the like.  I was not prepared for the nihilistic, revolutionary few who took advantage of the anti-war sentiments by trying to radicalize and, in many ways, to deny the legitimacy of the university: of required courses, of grades, of faculty determining the rewards system.  I was accommodating, probably too liberal, maybe helped to escalate the protests because I tried to be reasonable and to accommodate the most radical leaders who really didn’t want to settle things.  They wanted to overthrow the authority of the state and the government, including the university.  And that was their agenda, and they brought along a lot of well-meaning young people because the times were such that you could do that.  There was such revulsion about, you know, the Vietnam War, including by me.  I always felt that I was quoted in Look magazine in 1964 or 5, I always felt that student deferments had a very dysfunctional effect: that the university became a haven, a sanctuary, from the draft.  A lot of people were probably here who didn’t want to be and didn’t want to do the tasks the faculty expected them to do, and didn’t want to be graded.  And the country could fight a war with people who were not wealthy enough, or middle-class enough, or educated enough to have that sanctuary.  And so there were almost no congressmen’s sons in the war, and no executives’ son in the war.  And if you want to talk about communism, that’s kind of a Marxist view of what happens in society when the poor are exploited and the privileged are excused from military service.  I don’t think we would have had that war if there had been universal conscription.
BT: 	Interesting.  Well that’s a long way from the Peace Corps, it seems; not that many years, but just a long way away.  Thank you very much for consenting to do this interview, I appreciate.
JK: 	Thank you for wanting to hear about it.
BT:	End of interview.
01:58:09
End of Tape 10/Side 2
End of Oral History #60