Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Clearly, the Kennedy brothers at times overshadowed Shriver. Bobby and Ted, in particular, were slow to take him seriously, the legacy both of his long courtship of their sister Eunice (which they found touching, if bathetic) and of his starry-eyed idealism (which led them to call him the family “Boy Scout”).

  Shriver’s relationship with Bobby was especially complicated. “Bobby always spat on Sarge,” recalled Charlie Peters, who, after working with Bobby during Jack’s campaign for president, went to work for Shriver at the Peace Corps. “His people considered Sarge weak, a nonplayer.… That was what he had bought into by marrying Eunice.” Relations with Bobby became even more strained when Shriver stayed on after President Kennedy’s assassination to take command of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Shriver was often caught in the crossfire between the Kennedy and Johnson camps; with one foot in each camp, he often was the crossfire, a (mostly) unwilling weapon in the war between the two.

  But to see Shriver purely as a victim of his association with the Kennedy family is to oversimplify grossly what was in fact a complex and often mutually rewarding relationship. Forgone election campaigns notwithstanding, his eminent career in public life after 1960 could not have been achieved absent his association with the Kennedy family. Moreover, the obvious respect that the hard-to-please Joseph P. Kennedy had for Shriver’s abilities was eventually shared by Jack. Over the years, in fact, Shriver became a rock of the Kennedy family. Jacqueline Kennedy picked Shriver to organize her assassinated husband’s funeral. Indeed, although the family’s support for him was sometimes uneven, he was their stalwart supporter through everything, bailing them out of crises and unsavory predicaments without judgment or complaint.

  Some have seen Shriver’s association with the Kennedy family as a kind of Faustian bargain. Perhaps, but only to a point: The balance sheet is long on both sides. What he gained by hitching his fate to the Kennedys may well have been greater than what he lost by doing so.

  Today, the heady idealism of the early 1960s, of Jack Kennedy’s New Frontier, seems like ancient history. The cynicism that infected public life in the late 1960s and deepened after the Watergate scandal in 1974 has metastasized, as other scandals have continued to undermine our confidence in the major institutions of our society—government, organized religion, the corporate sector. Yet it was not so long ago that men like Kennedy and Shriver convinced the American people that anything was possible: We could put a man on the moon, defeat communism, end poverty, achieve peace in our time.

  Throughout his life, Shriver has been a powerful magnet to talented, creative, idealistic, iconoclastic personalities. In this, Shriver was like Jack Kennedy. Shriver’s style was very different from the president’s, yet the two men shared a great gift: the ability to expand the horizons of the possible, to change our sense of what we can accomplish as individuals and as a nation. In ushering in the New Frontier, President Kennedy helped the United States change its conception of itself, giving its citizens a sense of a grander, more hopeful, more idealistic future. In part it was Shriver’s ability to instill this same idealism and hopefulness in those he encountered that enabled him to fit so neatly into the New Frontier, and that helped make the Peace Corps its most representative illustration.

  Not long ago a former colleague of Shriver’s from the War on Poverty, Colman McCarthy, wrote an article about him for the National Catholic Reporter. Shriver, McCarthy wrote, “is a man of grace and goodness whose life of service has arguably touched more lives than any living American.” Shriver can “look back on four decades of public service and a record of successful innovation unmatched by any contemporary leader in or out of government. The list of programs he started, defended and expanded, and which remain in place as necessary and productive while seven presidents have come and gone, is long.”

  Yet beyond the concrete legacy represented by the policies and programs he started is the joy and optimism he instilled in a whole generation. “What Sarge has always had is the ability not to be deterred by the enormity of the task,” recalled Edgar May, one of his colleagues from the War on Poverty. “Nothing was impossible. And I think that was the hallmark of those days. We really believed that we were changing this country. And we did change it. Did we change it all in one fell swoop? Did we fix all the problems? Did we fix even half of the problems? The answer is no, we didn’t, but we sure as hell changed people’s lives.”

  In the winter of 1997, Sargent Shriver, whom I had never met, called me out of the blue one day and told me he was looking for someone to ghostwrite his autobiography. For years, he said, his family had been pressuring him to do this for his grandchildren and their descendants, as well as for the historical record. Now that he was eighty-one years old he figured he had better get down to work on the project. “Why me?” I asked him. I was twenty-seven years old at the time, working as an editor for American Prospect, a small political magazine.

  Shriver explained that he specifically wanted someone young, someone whose generational perspective could balance his own. And, he continued, he wanted to write something that would be forward looking, something that would be of value to his grandchildren’s generation in working toward achieving peace in the world.

  In February 1997 I flew down from Boston to the headquarters of the Special Olympics, in Washington, DC, where Shriver was then serving as chairman of the board. He kept me waiting in the reception area, sitting under pictures of all of Joseph P. Kennedy’s children (Joe Jr., Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Jack, Bobby, Pat, Jean, and Ted), for more than an hour. I would later learn this was standard practice for Shriver. When he came out to introduce himself he was apologetic and warm, and we went on to spend several hours eating lunch and talking in a conference room.

  As I had noted in our phone conversation, he seemed much less interested in talking about the events of his life than about his vision for the future. Also, he kept summoning other people to the conference room to talk to me about him while he was out of the room. He seemed to have little interest in talking about himself or in sitting down to talk about his life. At one point, I looked on awkwardly as Shriver and his son Timothy, who had recently taken over as president and CEO of the Special Olympics, shouted at each other. “Daddy,” Timothy said, “if you’re going to do this book, you have to focus on it. You can’t have other people do it for you.”

  I flew back to Boston and the following weekend wrote Shriver a long letter, explaining that it seemed to me he wasn’t really committed to writing an autobiography. “If you are to write something worthwhile,” I suggested, “you need to figure out exactly what it is you want to write, and for what audience you are writing it, and what your rationale for writing is.”

  He wrote back to me a few days later, telling me that he had shared my letter with members of his family and that they agreed I was right: He needed to think some more about what kind of book he wanted to write and about whether, in fact, he really wanted to put in the time and introspection necessary to produce a good autobiography.

  I assumed that was the last I would hear from him. Based on my limited interaction with the man, I thought that Shriver seemed too temperamentally unsuited to the processes that go into autobiographical writing and thinking, and too strongly oriented toward the future rather than the past, to commit himself to the project.

  To my surprise, six months later he called me again. “I’ve decided to go forward with it,” he told me, “and I’ve decided I’d like you to work with me on it.” My circumstances had changed, however. I had just taken over as executive editor at the American Prospect, and I didn’t feel I could take on an additional job. When I explained this to him, he said, “Well, why don’t you just come down to Hyannis Port this weekend and help me get started. Just talk to me a little bit about how I might approach this.”

  I went down the first weekend in August 1997, intending to spend the weekend. Five weeks later, I had spent much of August at the Shrivers’ house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, an
d several hours of each day tape recording interviews with Sargent Shriver. (Much of the rest of each day I would spend on the telephone with my office, trying to put out a magazine from afar.) When I left after Labor Day, I had accumulated some sixty hours of interview tape. Somehow, without ever accepting a job—and without ever being paid a cent—I had been “hired” to be the ghostwriter of Sargent Shriver’s autobiography.

  I spent parts of 1998 and 1999 doing many additional interviews with Shriver and his friends and former colleagues and composing a proposal for a Shriver autobiography, to be written by me in his voice. Beginning in the summer of 2000, I took a leave of absence from my job and spent nearly six months engaged in full-time research at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; and the Chicago Historical Society in Illinois. What I found in these places—and especially among the Shriver papers at the Kennedy Library, to which no other scholar had ever been granted access—was a treasure trove of material. Not only did I find the full (and heretofore partly secret) histories of the founding of the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty, but also considerable documentary evidence of Shriver’s complex relationship with the Kennedy family.

  Complications arose. There was plenty of interesting and historically relevant material here—but it was material that, in its richness of detail, would be hard to fit into a conventional autobiography. Also, Shriver’s incorrigible habit of deflecting credit for his accomplishments to other people made composing a historically credible autobiography very difficult. As my intuition had told me from the start, Shriver had little interest in writing an autobiography or memoir, properly speaking, but was more interested in building “a vision for the future,” as he put it.

  William Josephson, a Peace Corps colleague of Shriver’s, proposed to me that perhaps the material I had unearthed would be better suited for a biography than an autobiography. Shriver expressed his enthusiasm for this idea in the summer of 2000 and officially signed off on my writing an “authorized” biography. (Mr. Josephson has served as Shriver’s designated representative for purposes of this book.)

  “Authorized,” in this case, meant that I had unvarnished access to all Shriver materials at the JFK Library, at the Special Olympics, and at the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation as well as to other partially closed collections at the JFK Library. It has also meant that, when I’ve approached Shriver’s old friends and former colleagues for interviews, most of them have been eager to talk to me. It does not mean, however, that members of Shriver’s family, or the extended Kennedy family, necessarily agreee with everything I have written. I have relied heavily on Shriver materials and on conversations with the subject (who has himself read and commented on multiple drafts of this book), as well as on hundreds of other corroborating accounts, but the interpretations and judgments contained herein are my own; there are places where other people (including members of the Kennedy and Shriver families) with different perspectives disagree with them.

  Early in 2003 Shriver was diagnosed with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. (For this biography, I haven’t used anything from conversations with Shriver conducted after December 2000 unless what he said could be corroborated by additional sources.) By the spring of 2003, as his memory deterioration accelerated and as my work on his biography progressed, a strange kind of alchemic transfer took place; I became, in effect, his external hard drive. Many of the memories, stories, and facts that had once been in his head were gone and had by now been downloaded into my head, or into the book. To capture, and to render accurately, the memories and the life story of a great man and an important historical figure before they dissipate is daunting to say the least. I hope I have served him justice.

  PART ONE

  Youth (1915–1945)

  CHAPTER ONE

  States’ Rights, Religious Freedom, and Local Self-Government

  If you drive out Route 27 north from the suburbs of Washington, DC, toward southern Pennsylvania, it is possible—if you ignore the occasional eruption of housing developments and commercial sprawl—to imagine the Maryland of 1915. Rolling farmland begins at the road’s edge and extends to the horizon in all directions. Churches of traditional denominations abound. The architecture of many of the farmhouses, sturdy and square, bespeaks the simple values of an earlier time. And the flags—about every third house flying the Stars and Stripes, and about every fourth flying the yellow Maryland state emblem—reveal the distinctive commingling of American patriotism and state pride unique to the southern border states. These are the values and the architecture and the landscape that formed Sargent Shriver.

  Shriver came into this world at a historic time: 1915. The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution were being harnessed and consolidated. The Ford Motor Company had just implemented mass production. Manufacturers were just beginning to use electric power in their factories. The structure of the atom was being discovered. The first X-rays and rocket ships had just been tested; the first machine guns were about to be. Tarzan of the Apes had recently fallen from the bestseller list. The silent film era was in full blossom, providing a new form of popular entertainment. Ragtime was hot; jazz was just beginning to be. The New Republic magazine, championing the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt, had just been launched. The Baltimore Orioles, of baseball’s International League, had just sold Babe Ruth and three other players to the Boston Red Sox for $20,000. In Brookline, Massachusetts, Joseph and Rose Kennedy had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary; Joe’s exploits as a banking prodigy were being covered in the Boston papers; and their son Joe Jr. had just been born.

  Most important, of course, the Great War had broken out in Europe, inaugurating the modern era in a torrent of bloodshed. Most Americans, although they supported the Allied powers, still considered the war to be only a distant concern. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president. A German submarine had sunk the Lusitania, an American passenger ship, in May, but Wilson was avowing American neutrality. “There is such a thing as being too proud to fight,” Wilson said. But a countervailing interventionist sentiment was growing. As the death toll in Europe rose into the tens and then hundreds of thousands, former president Theodore Roosevelt—an occasional visitor to the Shriver household in Maryland—was preaching that “our country should not shirk its duty to mankind” by failing to get involved in the war. In 1915, however, the Shrivers agreed with Wilson: Steeped in the lore of their immigrant ancestors, they felt that the clash of the European powers vindicated their forebears who had emigrated to America to escape endless European wars.

  The first Shrivers—or Schreibers, as they were then called—to come to the New World were a family of noble descent hailing from the southeastern region of Germany, along the Rhine River. Weary of the European wars that had devastated the area, and mesmerized by shipping-company advertisements touting the verdant promise of North America, Andrew and Anna Margareta Schreiber and their four children set off across the Atlantic in 1721. Atlantic crossings in that era could be harrowing; often many weeks long, they involved churning seas that produced wretched seasickness; storms that sank ships; cramped quarters; and rampant disease. But the Schreibers were hardy and fortunate; arriving safely in Philadelphia, they walked several miles along the Schuykill River, their scant possessions in hand, to the village of Goshenhappen, one of the first German settlements on American shores. There they set themselves up as tanners and lived peacefully among the local Native American tribes.

  The Shriver bloodline’s powerful aversion to the affairs of Europe was strengthened when Andrew Schreiber’s grandson David Shriver married Rebecca Ferree in 1761. Rebecca was the great-granddaughter of Mary Ferree, a leader of the Huguenots, the French Protestants who had fled France to escape the persecutory policies of Louis XIV. (In 1685 Louis had revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had previously granted political rights and freedom of worship to Protestants in Catholic France.)

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bsp; David and Rebecca Shriver moved across the southern border of Pennsylvania into Frederick County, Maryland. On the banks of Little Pipe Creek, David Shriver built a home and cleared land around the house to build a mill. The couple enjoyed a biblical fecundity: they had 8 children, 64 grandchildren, and at least 265 great-grandchildren. (When David’s grandson William Shriver and his wife had their thirteenth child in the mid-nineteenth century, William joked that he wanted to name it “Enough.”) By 1790 the first US Census listed fifty Shrivers as heads of families.

  For David Shriver, as for his descendants, America represented the promise of freedom from religious and political tyranny, and in the 1770s he emphatically declared himself a Whig in opposition to the British monarchy. On November 8, 1774, he was among those selected to help form the government agreed upon by the First Continental Congress. In 1776 he was elected to Maryland’s Constitutional Convention, in Annapolis, where he helped draft Maryland’s Declaration of Rights (which served as a model for the Declaration of Independence) and became a signatory to the colony’s first constitution. Growing up, Sargent Shriver and his cousins, taught to revere David Shriver’s bold, independent spirit, would visit the state house in Annapolis where David’s name was engraved on the wall.

  In 1797, as George Washington served out the final weeks of his second term in office, David Shriver’s sons Andrew and David Jr. bought 400 acres of land near their father’s home on Little Pipe Creek. Together, they built a new brick mill, which they called the “Union Mills,” in honor of the “union their partnership represented.” Growing up, when Sargent Shriver spent his summers in the town of Union Mills, the first thing he would see outside his window at dawn each day was horse-drawn wagons driving past the mill built by Andrew and David.