I am using my weekly Letter From the Editor print column today to honor the memory of a great Pennsylvanian.
That would be former U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford.
Wofford, a key aide to President Kennedy who helped Sargent Shriver establish the Peace Corps, was appointed to fill the Senate seat created by the tragic death of Sen. John Heinz in a helicopter crash over the Main Line. He then stunned former Republican Gov. Dick Thornburgh in the special election. But he was upended by Republican Rick Santorum in the next election.
How good were Wofford's political instincts. In the 1960 presidential campaign, he urged John F. Kennedy to reach out to Coretta Scott King, the wife of civil rights activist the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who at the time was jailed in Georgia.
The Kennedy people were leery of making the move, thinking it could them with the southern vote.
Wofford and others prevailed, Kennedy reached out to Mrs. King, and she and her husband never forgot it. A pamphlet with King hailing JFK as a "decent man" was widely distributed in the black community across the south. It was that black vote that is credited with winning the South for Kennedy.
My meeting with Wofford would come decades later, and again involved a young Democrat who was hoping to be president.
It's in my Letter From the Editor.
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