By Bill Moyers, former Deputy Director, the Peace Corps

Excerpt from his memoir: To Touch the World: The Peace Corps Experience (Washington, D.C.: Peace Corps, 1995), pp. 152-3.

Of the private man John Kennedy I knew little. I saw him rarely. Once, when the 1960 campaign was over and he was ending a post-election visit to the LBJ Ranch, he pulled me over into a corner to urge me to abandon my plans for graduate work at the University of Texas and to come to Washington as part of the New Frontier. I told him that I had already signed up to teach at a Baptist school in Texas while pursuing my doctorate. Anyway, I said, “You’re going to have to call on the whole faculty at Harvard. You don’t need a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.” In mock surprise he said, “Didn’t you know that the first president of Harvard was a Baptist? You’ll be right at home.”

And so I was.

So I remember John Kennedy not so much for what he was or what he wasn't but for what he empowered in me. We all edit history to give some form to the puzzle of our lives, and I cherish the memory of him for awakening me to a different story for myself. He placed my life in a larger narrative than I could ever have written. One test of a leader is knowing, as John Stuart Mill put it, that the “worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.” Preserving civilization is the work not of some miracle-working, superhuman personality but of each one of us. The best leaders don’t expect us just to pay our taxes and abdicate, they sign us up for civic duty and insist we sharpen our skills as citizens . . .

Public figures either make us feel virtuous about retreating into the snuggeries of self or they challenge us to act beyond our obvious capacities. America is always up for grabs, can always go either way. The same culture that produced the Ku Klux Klan, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Jonestown massacre also produced Martin Luther King, Archibald MacLeish, and the Marshall Plan.

A desperate and alienated young man told me in 1970, after riots had torn his campus and town: “I’m just as good as I am bad. I think all of us are. But nobody’s speaking to the good in me.” In his public voice John Kennedy spoke to my generation about service and sharing; he called us to careers of discovery through lives open to others. There was music in this discovery. It was for us not a trumpet but a bell sounding in countless individual hearts, a clear note that said: 'You matter. You signify. You can make a difference.' Romantic? Perhaps. But we were not then so indifferent toward romance.