Warren W. Wiggins, 84, the major architect and organizer of the Peace Corps who wrote the basic philosophical document that shaped its mission, died of atypical Parkinson's syndrome April 13 at his home in Haymarket.

In 1961, Mr. Wiggins, who became one of the top leaders of the high-profile agency in its earliest years, was an unknown foreign policy adviser whose brief paper, "The Towering Task," landed in the lap of the Peace Corps' first director, R. Sargent Shriver, just as he was trying to figure out how to turn President John F. Kennedy's campaign promise into a working federal department.

The response to it became legendary in the agency as "the midnight ride of Warren Wiggins." Shriver, burrowing through correspondence shortly after midnight on Feb. 6, 1961, was electrified by the treatise, which urged the agency to act boldly. A small agency was more likely to fail because its projects would not be consequential enough, Mr. Wiggins wrote. Using specific examples, with a proposed staff size and budget, Mr. Wiggins suggested that Kennedy act through an executive order for the quickest start.

Shriver fired off a telegram at 3 a.m., directing Mr. Wiggins to appear later that morning at the Mayflower Hotel, where he had his office. When Mr. Wiggins appeared, he was astonished to find that his exposition had been mimeographed and distributed to Shriver's task force. According to the 1994 work "A History of National Service in America," Shriver ordered everyone to read the paper, then said it came closer to expressing his views than anything he had seen. "Shriver from the beginning saw him as someone who had the spirit of moving big and fast," former senator Harris Wofford (D-Pa.), who was there, said in an interview. "The Peace Corps, small and symbolic, might be good public relations, but a Peace Corps that was large and had a major impact on problems in other countries could transform the economic development of the world."

As associate director of program development for the Peace Corps, Mr. Wiggins was at a White House meeting when Kennedy's aides decided that the fledgling agency should report through the established foreign policy bureaucracy. Mr. Wiggins, alarmed, fired off a cable to Shriver, who was overseas. Mr. Wiggins then asked Bill Moyers, deputy director of the Peace Corps, to take a copy of the cable to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and argue the political benefits of an independent Peace Corps. Johnson agreed, addressed the matter with Kennedy, and the decision was reversed.

Mr. Wiggins later served as deputy director of the Peace Corps. He left in 1967 to form TransCentury, a private firm that ran a job center in Anacostia and a remedial education program in New York.  The company closed in 1995, and Mr. Wiggins devoted himself to poetry, sketching and tending his garden, growing persimmons and many vegetables.

"I think he embodied the watchwords that were once given to me: We must be more inventive if we're going to do our duty," Wofford said. "He was ever inventive. He was putting his mind to problems. Warren was not somebody to rest content with falling short. He was ever ready for the quantum leap."

Patricia Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer, April 15, 2007