It was 2:00 a.m. on October 14, 1960. Ten thousand students were waiting in front of the student union building at the University of Michigan. As the weary candidate climbed the steps, the audience began chanting his name.

Senator John F. Kennedy had just flown in from New York, straight from a television debate with Vice President Richard Nixon. He spoke to the students off the cuff, delivering a speech that in just a few sentences would launch the Peace Corps. "How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?"

Nobody knows why Kennedy picked that moment, in the middle of the night on a college campus in the Midwest, to float the idea of the Peace Corps. But the effect was electric. The vision was that by learning to serve, a new generation would learn to lead. They would return from the field as stronger people, better not just from learning how to apply their talents, but from having learned much more about themselves and their place in the world. "There is not enough money in all America to relieve the misery of the underdeveloped world in a giant and endless soup kitchen," Kennedy later declared. "But there is enough know-how and knowledgeable people to help those nations help themselves."

In August of 1961, the first Peace Corps volunteers stepped onto the tarmac in Accra, Ghana. By the end of 1963, 7,300 volunteers were working in more than 40 countries; by 1966, the ranks had swelled to more than 15,000 in about 60 countries. And that, alas, was the peak. Under the pall of the war in Vietnam, the movement shrank.