Dialogue and International Service: An Interview with Senator Harris Wofford

For their capstone project, the 2009-2010 Fellows compiled a journal of reflections from people who have been involved with Buxton. Throughout the summer, we will be sharing some of these reflections on our blog. The following is an excerpt from Rizwaan Akhtar’s interview with Senator Harris Wofford.

Senator Harris Wofford served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WWII and was an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement, both to Dr. Martin Luther King and as an advisor in the Kennedy Administration. Instrumental to the formation of the Peace Corps, Wofford served as its associate director and as the Peace Corps Special Representative to Africa. He also held the position of U.S. Senator from 1991-1995 and led Bryn Mawr College as its President.

Rizwaan Akhtar (RA): Describe your work today, and what you’re involved with these days.

Senator Harris Wofford (HW):Today, I am trying to make sense of my eight decades of adventures on this small planet and finish my memoir. I am also helping to organize and launch an international coalition effort which will probably be called “Service World.” It is the equivalent to the international service and volunteering of Ted Kennedy’s, “Serve America Act,” and will involve a coalition of several hundred organizations, universities, and individuals. McCain and Obama were original cosponsors when they were still campaigning. It was a quantum leap in domestic service, authorizing AmeriCorps to go from 75,000 a year to 250, 000.

It’s going to be something very large and significant in our life at home here, and we want to see the same kind of leap in volunteering and service such as Peace Corps. Obama said he wants the government to try for 100,000 a year, which would make, after a decade, one million people who had first-hand experience in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

RA: In your experience, does public and international service play an important role in fighting problems such as terrorism by uniting people?

HW: Yes. Terrorism is a reflection of the lack of world institutions, including world institutions that bring people together in common work. After being connected with the Case Foundation, I admired the work being done by Doug Holladay and the Buxton Initiative in focusing on dialogue. I think this is also a time when young people in college talk a lot about sex and politics, and yet there’s still a slump in religion being something that they want to talk about.

I think that we need people to talk together to understand the high and low points of various religions and their relevance to our problems. I believe that beyond more dialogue is the need for young people to serve and live together. The liveliest kind of dialogue is not just dialogue, but intense service together.

RA: What were some events that instilled your passion for interaction and understanding among different cultures and faiths?

HW: Ever since I was really young, I was fascinated with the Muslim world. I traveled around the world for six months with my grandmother and spent several weeks in Palestine and Egypt. Palestine was a protectorate under the British then and under the sultan of Turkey before World War I. I came back from that trip very interested in the Arab world and then served in Africa in the Peace Corps, as a representative of Africa. South of the Sahara, the phenomenon of Islam was growing throughout the East Africa and West Africa, where the plurality of people became identified as Muslim.

A country that had an extraordinary impact on me was India. India, after partition, was the second largest Muslim country in the world. We crossed India by rail from Bombay, where we saw Gandhi walking in the streets, then through Calcutta and the Ganges. Before long, about ten years later, I began a fellowship with my wife in the first year we were married to spend a year studying Gandhi. I began studying his trail because he was killed before we got there. And so we went to India in the first year of partition and then spent about a month in Pakistan.

RA: You attended an event at Buxton with two young people from Israel and Palestine who were working together to rally their communities. Can you reflect on why that meant so much to you – to see young people in Israel and Palestine work together?

HW: My ties to Israel and Palestine began with a fellowship trip to look at the Jewish colonization of Palestine, which started before there was a state of Israel. There was no government power then, just the power of Jews in the Diaspora, providing money and producing shekels in the shekel pots to support the return to Palestine. This was to benefit particularly Jews who had been caught in the Holocaust and survived.

I spent a summer working on a kibbutz, or cooperative farm, where I saw the relationship between Israeli Jews and Israeli Muslims. The great Jewish philosopher, theologian, and writer, Martin Buber, was also working in Israel. In the last chapter of his book, Paths in Utopia, he discusses a Jewish society of brotherhood among Christians. He said that this community, based on cooperative institutions, was plowed under by the vicious circle of the Arab-Jewish struggle.

[Buber] also said, “A great idea can arise again when idea and fate meet in a creative hour.” When my wife and I met Buber, in 1963, shortly after Kennedy was killed, I quoted Kennedy… and [Buber] asked, ‘Now many years later, do you see a creative hour coming?’ My wife, who is much more of a realist, said, ‘Well from what I’ve seen and heard from this trip, I say it’s going to be a long, long time coming before that idea rises again.’ Buber turned to me and said, ‘You’re a romantic. I hope you know how lucky you are to be married to a realist.’ And then he turned to my wife, and said, ‘And you dear friend, you are right. The times when idea and fate meet are the creative hour, they are a long time coming. But they do come, and I hope if one comes in your time, your realism will not make you miss it.’

It’s an old subject, to state it mildly, the state of relationship between Arabs and Jews and Christians in the Holy Land, as it was called when I was growing up.

RA: What do you think is the most effective way to build bridges among groups that are in conflict with each other?

HW: President Clinton put tremendous emphasis in starting a national dialogue on race, with distinguished black historians, and spreading it around the country. I didn’t oppose it by itself, it seemed a good thing, but, I did say to President Clinton that from my own point of view, more importantly than sitting around a table and dialoguing or reading something really stirring about a text, actually working together on race would have more power. In my case, it was national service that would bring Blacks and Whites and Hispanics together through intense service for at least a year to have more impact. I come to that with plenty of bias in favor of that specific approach. I said afterward that I really wished that Clinton had put even more emphasis on the national service together.

RA: What would be an ideal vision for thinking of a way to end violence and misrepresentations of faith communities?

HW: I would say that if you look at the last part of President Obama’s speech in Cairo, where he pointed to the great value of serving together to end malaria, aids, spread literacy, and improve women’s education. Certainly in Africa and the Middle East, women’s education is far behind the education of men. Creating opportunities for them and well constructed plans to work together on those problems, to me, would be the most powerful game-changer or investment.