This summer I am traveling around Nepal with a group of eight leaders from a village named Namje in eastern Nepal who are exploring what has happened to their country in the name of development. They are being led by Rajeev Goyal, an Indian-American who was a Peace Corps volunteer...

When I flew into Kathmandu in a Royal Airlines DC-3 in September of 1964, the old plane wheezed its way across the mountains and into the verdant high valley. I was a member of the fourth group of Peace Corps Volunteers to the mystical mountain kingdom. Nepal had been kept...

Often debates in the House of Representatives are little more than ideological diatribes before a largely empty assembly. Thursday, the House was galvanized by a powerful debate set up when Rep. Cliff Stearns of northern Florida put forth an amendment to strip the Peace Corps of the $450 million in...

Senator Patrick Leahy has done much to advance American democracy. When it comes to issues of civil liberties or governmental abuse, he has been there standing stalwart and often alone. That is something that all 195,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers and all Americans concerned with their country's role in the...

Early this evening Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut gave what will probably prove the most important speech in the history of the Peace Corps since that late October night in 1960 when Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy introduced the idea of a volunteers serving in the developing world. Dodd's Senate...

At its highest level, politics is not the art of the possible. It is the alchemy that turns the impossible into the possible. If you've ever seen or experienced that transcendent level of politics, it changes you forever.

I saw and felt that late yesterday sitting in my living room...

I was the next-to-the-last speaker Saturday at a rally in Washington to build a bold new Peace Corps. Rajeev Goyal, the Morepeacecorps.org national organizer, and I had decided to do this rally only nine days before. It would have been a formidable new task even if we have done nothing...

Your moment has come. On Saturday afternoon June 13th at 2 PM, you will be standing with the crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. You will be there at 14th St and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW because you believe in an America that reaches out to the rest of the...

Dear Congresswoman Lowey:

On June 18th you will have an opportunity to change the course of history.

You are an astute, principled politician who for years has voted for what is right and true, not what is always popular. Time and again you have seen your judgment vindicated by...

The bold new Peace Corps was born today in room 2172 in the Rayburn House Office Building. It took place as members of the House of Representatives were marking up the Foreign Affairs Authorization Bill authored by Committee Chairman Rep. Howard Berman. For almost every item, the California Democrat kept...

On a cold inauguration afternoon, hundreds of former volunteers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying flags from the 139 countries in which the Peace Corps has served. It was a powerful moment as they saw confirmed that they were part of a 195,000 strong army of former volunteers who embodied President...

Last weekend I attended a fundraiser at New York University Law School raising money for Krisiko Asha (Hope for Agriculture). In terms of the philanthropic world, the evening was microscopic in purpose, serving to advance sixteen tiny villages in the remote hills of Nepal, a small, poor Asian country. The...

For close to half a century the Peace Corps has suffered from a surfeit of easy admiration. President after president has praised the agency, vowed to expand its size or influence, and then left it largely alone, moving on to what were considered more crucial matters. Barack Obama is just...

In some of the great houses in Palm Beach and the penthouses of Manhattan's East Side, wealthy Americans are sleeping fitfully, their nights haunted by fear of exposure. In the Bush years, the IRS became so lax in its enforcement that cheating became routine and hidden Swiss bank accounts almost...

When I listened to President Obama's powerful address before Congress, I kept waiting for him to talk about his pledge to double the size of the Peace Corps. But he said nothing. The president is a brilliant man with an extraordinary sense of detail. His omission was clearly a willful...

Last week I was doing an interview with Tim Malloy of WPTV, the NBC affiliate in West Palm Beach. We were standing outside the Classic Bookshop in Palm Beach which has a big display of my new book, Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of...

The Palm Beach Daily News is one of the most powerful small papers in America. The paper has a vendetta against me because of what I wrote about Society Editor Shannon Donnelly in my new book, Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach....

Has President-elect Barack Obama committed his first betrayal? Has he turned away from his most exalted ideals in an act of such spiritual malfeasance that it will condemn his administration?

Some observers cite the fact that the stimulus package contains money for AmeriCorps but nothing for the Peace Corps...

Whatever cell he sits in, whatever corridor he walks though, and from whatever direction and whatever means, Bernard Madoff must live the rest of his life knowing that at any moment he may die.

If someone kills Bernard Madoff, it may be some job figuring out who it was....

I thought that New Year's Eve in Palm Beach would be different this year, but I had no idea how different.

My evening was to begin with a cocktail party at the home of Dick and Susan Nernberg, friends of mine from Pittsburgh. They live in an exquisite apartment above...