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:
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)