Harris Wofford: Blue Bomb Pamphlets, the Peace Corps, and a 1991 Upset

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Harris Wofford was born in New York City in 1926, and at 11 he traveled the world for six months with his grandmother in 1937, spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, walking through Shanghai after its capture by the Japanese army, watching Mussolini announce Italy's exit from the League of Nations, and discovering Gandhi in India. As a teenager he built a national student group promoting world government, and a magazine predicted he would be president. After Army Air Forces service and the University of Chicago, he spent eight months in India with his wife Clare studying Gandhi's methods, became the first white male student at Howard Law School, finished law at Yale in 1954, and became a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.

On John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign, Wofford and Sargent Shriver urged Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King after her husband's arrest in Georgia, then spread the story through Black churches. He served as Kennedy's special assistant for civil rights, helped build the Peace Corps, marched at Selma in 1965, led Bryn Mawr College, and was arrested at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Appointed to the Senate at 65 after Senator John Heinz died in a 1991 air crash, he came back from 40 points down to beat former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh by 10 points on a health care message, then lost to Rick Santorum in 1994. At 90 he married Matthew Charlton, and he died in 2019 at 92.

• About two million pamphlets on light blue paper, known as the blue bomb, reached Black congregations the Sunday before the 1960 election.
• Martin Luther King Sr. switched his endorsement from Richard Nixon to Kennedy after the call.
• Lee Iacocca turned down the Pennsylvania Senate appointment before it went to Wofford.
• James Carville and Paul Begala built his 1991 campaign around the line that if criminals have a right to a lawyer, working people should have a right to a doctor.
• He ran AmeriCorps from 1995 to 2001 and introduced Barack Obama before his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race.