August 9, 1962 on the South Lawn of the White House where President John F. Kennedy delivered remarks to new Peace Corps Volunteers.
In accepting the presidential nomination, John Kennedy promised “invention, innovation, imagination, decision.” Thirty-nine days after taking office, he established the Peace Corps by executive order and began to keep that promise.
The Peace Corps began for me when a call came from Millie Jeffrey, a Democratic National Committee member and active colleague in the Kennedy campaign’s Civil Rights Section (where I was deputy to Sargent Shriver). With great excitement, she told me about Kennedy’s extemporaneous talk she had heard at 2 a.m., October 14, 1960 to thousands of students, faculty, and town people waiting for him in front of the University of Michigan’s Student Union. Challenging the students, he had asked them if they were ready to spend years serving in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Stirred by his question, Michigan students, including Millie’s daughter, had taken around a petition saying yes, they were ready – nearly one thousand had signed.
Now the students wanted to present it personally to Kennedy. Millie asked me to help arrange their doing so. The first staff man she had called showed little interest, but when she finally reached Ted Sorensen, he liked the idea and arranged the meeting. When the President learned of the petition, before seeing it, he told Ted Sorensen to start drafting a major speech proposing a Peace Corps. He gave that talk to many thousands at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on November 2, 1960. Almost everywhere Kennedy went in the last week of the campaign, he was asked about the Peace Corps. In his election eve broadcast he included the promise of a Peace Corps.
Fonte: White House