All Members of the Yarmolinsky Family, especially Adam Sally Ellis and his son, Toby Yarmolinsky.
Members of the Shriver Center, Board of Directors in attendance.
Bob Embry, Shriver Center Board Member and President of the Abell Foundation.
President of the University of Maryland Baltimore County – Freeman Hrabowski
Provost of UMBC, Arthur Johnson
Distinguished Faculty and Staff from the Shriver Center, and from the UMBC Campus.
Way back in 1961, yes, thirty-nine years ago, Jack Kennedy who had recently become President of the United States, almost literally, forced me to come to Washington to start a new program which would send young Americans abroad to work, humbly and quietly, for the benefit of people in foreign countries.
President Kennedy called me in Chicago where I was then living with my wife and three children. I was blissfully happy. But he told me he needed me in Washington! After the Presidential campaign and all the work connected with it, I was glad to be back at home in Chicago. I had no desire to be in Washington.
But President Kennedy insisted. Repeatedly, he said that he had promised to start this new Program which would send young Americans abroad. He repeatedly stated that he needed me to start that program. Finally, he said, “Sarge, nearly everybody tells me that this new program is going to be a failure. But, in the election campaign I promised to start it. I need you to start it because, truthfully, if it is a terrible failure it will be much easier for me to fire a relative than a political friend”.
So, that’s why I came to Washington! I had never worked in Washington on any kind of a job there. I didn’t know beans about working for the Government. So, when I finally arrived, I got a room in the Mayflower Hotel, started telephoning friends, asking them to come to that hotel and help me start the new Program Kennedy wanted.
Among the first to show up for work in this new enterprise was Adam Yarmolinsky.
I did not know Adam. I did not know about his spectacular academic career. But he showed up, self-motivated, at the temporary office of the embryonic “Peace Corps”. We (all five of us) were located on the second floor of an unoccupied space formerly occupied by a business concern directly across the street from the Hotel Mayflower. Yes, he showed up, voluntarily. And he never left!
What did he do? He did everything that none of us could do! He wrote everything we needed. He composed paragraph after paragraph. He recommended people to help us, people whom we had never heard of. He was available 24 hours, night and day, and ran everything superbly. He became immediately a creative power in the thinking, in the planning, in the organization, and the financing problems of this fledgling, unprecedented creation originated by President Kennedy.
Adam also became one of my personal friends. I lived many hours with him in all kinds of differing situations. I admired him from the first days when we came together to create the new Governmental initiative, the “Peace Corps”. So, I knew him man-to-man, face-to-face, from the early days of 1961 until the latter days of his life.
From the very first days until the last of our friendship, I was always deeply impressed by the sheer brilliance of his mind. He was surely one of the most thoughtful and helpful men in the United States government from the earliest days of the Kennedy Administration. But, the brilliance of his mind was matched by his modesty. He always worked well with everyone engaged in new creations during the Kennedy and Johnson regimes. His perseverance was exceptional. He listened carefully to everyone and had an immense rectitude of spirit. He worked incredibly long hours and his perseverance, night and day, in serving our Government, in Washington, was an example of the spirit and commitment of the highest officials, and the most imaginative ones in the Kennedy Government in the 1960s. Adam was also a man of great modesty when he worked as the top adviser to Bob McNamara at the very time when our capacities and strengths as a military power were increased till they transcended everything which had gone before and established a basis for everything which has come since then.
He was truly reliable, totally committed to the service of our country, a man admired by all who were lucky enough to work with him or for him in his days with the “Peace Corps” and in his years with the Defense Department, and during his illustrious career as Provost and then distinguished Regents Professor of Public Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Adam was Provost of UMBC when the Shriver Center was conceived! Adam worked tirelessly to help us establish a new and innovative Center, one which would “engage the resources of higher education to finding creative solutions to some of the most troublesome social problems of our time”.
Adam had the unique perspective of having worked both in the formation of public policy with the United States Government and in a University as a Professor and Provost. So, his contributions to the Shriver Center were critical. After the Center was established, he served as the Chair of the Faculty Committee, and as an ex officio member of the Center’s National Advisory Board where we all benefitted from his wisdom and insights. So, Adam’s spirit lives on in the Center and in all who work there.
Yes, Adam Varmolinsky was almost a unique American. His brilliance of mind, his extraordinary knowledge of history, and, especially the tragic years of European history when Adolph Hitler ran wild, gave him expert personal knowledge of our nation and our laws and ideals compared to those of the vicious and depraved world of Adolph Hitler! His Father and Mother were both gifted and original thinkers, loyal to our country, and knowledgeable about events all over the world. Few are the men or women who in any way surpassed Adam in his work, in his intellectual ability, and in his modesty.
I am sure Adam is receiving incredible rewards in Heaven these days for his honesty, his integrity, his compassionate respect for the poor and the needy, and for his contributions to the successful works of our nation in the 1950s,’60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s!
Impeccable, industrious, talented, and yes, modest, Adam was a human being loved by all who had the privilege to know him well. I was lucky to be one of those human beings.
