Early Life, Education, and Peace Corps Service
Blackwill was born August 8, 1939, in Kellogg, Idaho. and grew up in Kansas. "From my boyhood on the Great Plains, I brought back east more than 30 years ago the values of Kansas and its people: honesty, candor, compassion, hard work, a dogged stamina in the face of challenge and adversity, a sense of humor, a recognition of one's own limitations, and a deep and abiding love of country," Blackwill said in June 2001 at his Senate confirmation hearings to become ambassador to India. Blackwill earned a B.A. from Wichita State University.
Blackwill served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi from 1964 to 1966. While in the Peace Corps Blackwill served with writer Paul Theroux who Blackwill later described as "the glorious American writer who was my friend in the Peace Corps in Africa more than thirty years ago." In an interview with Rediff News on June 27, 2006 Blackwill was asked if he was still in contact with Theroux and replied "Not recently. But I just finished reading his new novel, Blinding Light. It is terrific."
Read more about this topic: Robert Blackwill
Famous quotes containing the words early, peace, corps and/or service:
“I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me;
let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.”
—Sy Miller (20th century)
“The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility—and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying ... it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)