Excerpted From Sargent Shriver’s Address to Bellarmine College
BELLARMINE, KY | APRIL 8, 1964
Just before he died he wrote a letter home to his parents, and, they subsequently sent a quotation from it to me in Washington. In that letter David said to his parents:
“If it should. come to it, I’d rather give my life trying to help these people, than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”
That quotation exemplifies the war for freedom and for the improvement of man. David Crozier died in a crash which also took the life of another Peace Corps Volunteer, Lawrence Radley from. Chicago. They were the first two Peace Corps Volunteers to die in Peace Corps service. Crozier was a Baptist from Missouri. Radley was a Jewish boy from Chicago. They died, working without pay, for a Catholic country in South America. That fact exemplifies the Peace Corps and the war for freedom and for man.
Ten months later, in Washington, the Selection Division of the Peace Corps sent a little piece of white paper up to my desk, and it told me that David Crozier’s sister had volunteered for the Peace Corps, and. was going into training for service-abroad. I thought of her parents. I know them plain, God–fearing Americans, who had already given a son voluntarily without any draft, and were now giving another child for freedom and for mankind.