Service charge: If Clinton wants to make national service work, he's got to think big and cheap.

• Author: Hayden, Tom
• Position: President Bill Clinton

The most nostalgic link between the Clinton era and the Kennedy administration for me is the rebirth of the early Peace Corps idealism in the promise of a National Service Corps. But between the promise and the deed often falls a shadow. Will President Clinton's call to national service .promote a new generation of genuine social idealism, or wither as the Peace Corps has?

During the Clinton inaugural I visited a burned-out building in Washington, a ruined residue of the rioting after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder in 1968. There, on a January day 25 years later, hundreds of young people were cleaning, painting, and restoring the building to become a youth policy and action center. Their high-flying exuberance echoed the ethos of the early sixties. Dropping by to bless the event were Eli Segal, the new president's national service director, and Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, who was present at the creation of the Peace Corps.

So was I. The first public speech I ever gave, 20 double-spaced pages in length, advocated the Peace Corps concept. The occasion was an Ann Arbor meeting of "Americans for World Responsibility," whose student founders were lobbying then-can&date John E Kennedy to endorse the cause. As students, we wanted to overthrow all forms of bureaucratic paternalism, and break "out of apathy," in the phrase of the time. Moved by the example of southern students who were fighting segregation, we wanted to extend the same spirit to combatting poverty and hunger around the world.

Later, in October 1960, while a hard rain was falling on Ann Arbor, I stood a few feet from Kennedy on the Michigan Union steps as he pledged to create the Peace Corps. We were shocked and elated. The impossible had happened. We couldn't vote, but a presidential candidate had listened to our call. It was a turning point in politicizing the sixties generation.

In the years that followed, service in the Peace Corps had an important influence on those who spent two or more years among the world's poor. Those volunteers returned to the U.S. with a greater sense of social responsibility-and while abroad nursing, teaching, healing, and building, they clearly communicated to others the example of service and caring.

As the Vietnam War expanded, however, the Peace Corps became a target of cynicism among many student activists, myself included. Sending young Americans abroad to serve humanitarian ends while the U.S. government was bombing and invading Vietnam was too great a contradiction. Many Peace Corps volunteers were protesting the war and questioning the often-corrupt regimes of the countries in which they served. We called for Peace Corps service to be considered a form of conscientious objection, so that members could "build, not bum." But to no avail.

During the Nixon years, the Peace Corps continued to wither. Nixon preferred...