Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  In the spring of 1934, the Experiment was still in its germinal stages, and Watt and his associates were recruiting American students who they thought would represent the United States well. The first groups of students to go overseas with the Experiment were required to have some background in the German language and to pay a $360 fee. In the spring of 1934, however, Sargent Shriver had neither any training in German nor, certainly, $360. But that, said the woman now sitting across from him in Nelson Hume’s office, didn’t matter. Based on his performance at the SSSIC, she said, Shriver was exactly the sort of boy they were looking for. Her foundation, which had helped launch the Experiment, would pay his fee. And the German requirement would be waived—he would just have to pick up as much German as he could on the ten-day passage across the Atlantic.

  Shriver was thrilled at the opportunity. So a few days after his graduation from Canterbury, Shriver set sail from New York with a group of eighteen other young men and women. Dr. Elizabeth Zorb, a young professor of German from Vassar College who had traveled extensively abroad, was the group’s director, and each day she led her charges through several hours of intensive German instruction. Shriver spent the summer living with a host family in Backnang, in the southeast corner of Germany, just north of Stuttgart.

  Shriver’s summer in Germany had a powerful formative effect on him. It exposed him to a new language, to a culture older than American history, and to a way of life different from his own. As William Peters wrote in his 1957 history of the Experiment in International Living, “The summer made a tremendous impression on [Shriver], gave him, in essence, a new view of the world, and sent him back to school … with new goals and a deeper understanding of the profits of scholarship.” He would head to Yale that fall, filled with the spirit of international cooperation and global fellowship.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Yale Man

  Back home in the United States in the fall of 1934, Shriver began college at Yale University. During his years at Canterbury, Sarge had variously considered Yale, Princeton, and the University of Maryland, but he ultimately decided on Yale because, at least in Canterbury’s Connecticut-centric universe, that institution was considered to be simply the best. (Canterbury sent more graduates to Yale each year than to any other college.) There was, too, an ineffable set of personal characteristics associated with a “Yale Man” in those days; Shriver had read the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in whose taxonomy of Ivy League men, Princeton’s and Yale’s stood far above Harvard’s. So in September, just back from his first summer in Germany, Shriver drove with his mother to New Haven, where he and four of his Canterbury classmates were to begin their college careers.

  Having been a very big man on a very small campus at prep school, Shriver felt lost in the vaster landscape of a university. “It seems as though I have been here a long time although it is only a week,” he wrote home to his parents after arriving. “I still feel like a fish out of water, and most of all I miss the intimacy of Canterbury. I fear that it is going to take me some time to catch on to the college method of learning.”

  But Shriver did well in his classes, and he dove into a broad panoply of activities. Before his freshman year was out, he had joined the Elizabethan Club, a literary society; Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity; the St. Thomas More Society, a Catholic organization in which Shriver served as secretary; and the freshman baseball team, for whom he played second base. He also began systematically reading through the complete works of Thomas Aquinas, which he had discovered in the Yale library.

  To outward appearances he was thriving, but Shriver continued to find himself plagued by self-doubt. At Canterbury, he had been one of the best at just about everything: the best baseball player, a top student, the most accomplished debater, the captain of the football team, the editor of the school paper, the headmaster’s favorite. At Yale, he was no longer the best at anything: There were better ballplayers, better debaters—and dozens of better students. This provided a bracing dose of humility to a young man who, in the years since he had set up the Maryland Military Club as an elementary school student, had automatically become a leader wherever he went.

  As a freshman, Shriver also “heeled” for the Yale Daily News, the oldest college daily in the country. Freshmen seeking to become staff writers for the Daily News would join as cub reporters under the supervision of senior editors, and they would receive points in categories like writing ability, initiative, and dependability. The top point-getters would become members of the junior editorial board for the remainder of their freshman year and then join the senior board in their sophomore year. Shriver was named to the junior board in his first semester at Yale; in his sophomore year he was voted Daily News chairman. This was a position of great prestige on campus, equivalent to being captain of the football team or president of the class. The job also paid him several hundred dollars per year, helping to alleviate the strain of paying his way through college.

  Money troubles were a recurring theme throughout his undergraduate and law school years. He was constantly in debt to the school’s treasurer, struggling to make payments through a combination of scholarships, his father’s meager earnings, gifts from rich Catholic friends, and money generated through jobs in the summer and the school year.

  Worry about money was a constant refrain in letters home between 1934 and 1940. Expressions of concern for his parents’ financial situation alternated with requests for money from them. “If by any chance you all are worried about these bills of mine up here, you can forget them,” he wrote late in his freshman year. “What with the money I expect to make this summer and advances on my ‘News’ salary, if necessary, I can easily meet all of my bills myself.… If things turn out correctly, I should be able to contribute about $800 toward my maintenance next year.” When his parents lacked the money to pay their rent, Sarge would send them what little he had. The constant worry about finances drove Sarge to wax philosophical. “Money means so awfully, awfully little to me” in comparison with higher values, he wrote to his mother after she had lamented that she and Robert could not provide him with more money for his education. My generation, Shriver wrote, is “tired of seeing the most honorable people we know, people like you & Dad, worn down by an inhuman and impossible struggle.”

  Two related facts exacerbated Shriver’s vexed relationship to money. His family, like many affluent middle-class banking families who saw their net worth evaporate in the crash, had to struggle to retain their upper-middle-class existence and identity and social connections but without upper-middle-class money. Plenty of Americans (sharecroppers in the South, farmers in the dustbowl) were in circumstances far more dire, but the Shrivers nonetheless had to struggle mightily to pay rent, put food on the table, and put their sons through college. More than that, they struggled with what their financial decline in the world implied for their social standing.

  Life at Canterbury and at Yale was relatively insulated from the effects of the Depression. For although the families of some of Shriver’s friends were hurt by the Depression, many more hailed from high enough in the economic strata to be spared the hardships visited upon the rest of the country. As a scholarship student, living within fairly straitened financial limits, Shriver was, among his friends, somewhat of an unusual case. To keep up with them, he often found himself living beyond his means.

  This compounded his peculiar relationship to money and class. His background was the Maryland Catholic aristocracy; his education was upper class; his friends were upper class—many of them extremely wealthy. And Shriver himself—with his fine clothes, skillful squash game, and friends in high places—lived a very upper-class existence: Ivy League education; weekends at extravagant house parties in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, or Long Island; European tours; escort at debutante balls. One weekend at Yale, he idly expressed an interest in playing golf but lamented that with all the work he had to do he hadn’t the time to spare to get to a course. No sooner had he mentioned this than his friend
Nick Frauchot proposed that they take his private plane and fly out to the links for a round—which they did.

  Clearly, this was not a lifestyle of great hardship. Yet to sustain life in this high style required a combination of hard work (at all the various jobs he worked to generate income); uncomfortable reliance on the generosity of his rich friends; the carrying of debt; continuous negotiation with his parents about what bills should be paid first from the scant funds available; and constant anxiety about money.

  This worry fueled Shriver’s ambition to make a financial success of himself, so that he might lift himself and his parents above the wearying stress about how to pay the next month’s rent or laundry bill. Whereas many of his friends were ambitious in their own way, wanting to make something of themselves in the world, their easier relationship to money allowed them more insouciant college careers: When they graduated, opportunity would simply await them. Shriver felt constantly driven to create his own opportunities. This clearly worried his mother. As he began his final semester of college he wrote to her, “You seem to feel sometimes, if not always, that I’ve turned into a self-contained, success-mad youngster. It’s only that I’ve got a dream that hard work & application may give us” a place in the country, where the whole Shriver family could relax and be together.

  Before his sophomore year, it looked for a time as though Shriver might have to withdraw from Yale because he could not afford it. “I must tell you,” Yale treasurer George Day wrote to Sarge, “how much it means to all of us to have you make these payments at your first opportunity.… I shall hope with you that the award of the Samuel R. Betts fellowship of $1000 to you for this coming year, together with such additional funds as may come to you from the Yale Daily News and from your vacation earnings will enable you to carry on successfully your work here at Yale.”

  Back in New Haven in the autumn of 1935, Shriver moved to Pierson, one of Yale’s residential colleges, where he inhabited Suite 1457, part of a block of rooms across two entry halls, with his friends Ed Bailly, Donald Keefe, Tom Thatcher, John Woolsey, and Richard Day. With their friend Burton Maclean, the group made up the social epicenter of the Yale class of 1938. Shriver’s suite in Pierson became a lively ongoing salon, where the problems of the world were discussed (and putatively solved). Hilda and Robert often sent the latest issue of Commonweal for Shriver and his friends to dissect.

  In a letter to his parents later that year, Shriver described one of Yale’s peculiar social rituals.

  Tap Day was the outstanding event on yesterday’s program. (Tap Day is the name given to the afternoon on which Senior Societies select their members from the Junior class.) All of the Juniors who think they have a chance stand around one of the Elm trees in Branford courtyard. While they are standing thus, huddled like wind-beaten sheep in a herd, the various fortunates of the Senior class, representing the societies that are tapping, lurk around, wandering in and out, always seeming to search for one particular person. Sometimes these members will walk around & around for as long as twenty minutes. Then suddenly, as if seized by divine inspiration, they will issue forth from behind someone, reach high into the air, and whack some poor, unsuspecting Junior a terrific blow on the shoulder, all the while spitting out the sonorous, “Go to your room.”

  The Junior decides immediately whether to cast his social lot as a Yale man with the society the tapper represents. If he does not, he merely stands still; if he does he sets off running to his own room where he is told when he may next meet the brotherhood en masse. The whole proceedings start exactly at five and finish exactly at six, the bells in Harkness Tower being used as starting and finishing guns. While the custom is exciting, it must be nerve-wracking for the Juniors & tragic for those who do not get what they wish or nothing at all. Essentially it is a rather barbaric custom but one that has its compensation. From what I understand, the three leading societies, Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, and Wolf’s Head, are the three wealthiest corporations in Connecticut.

  The following spring, as a junior, Shriver himself endured this “barbaric custom.” He was tapped by Scroll and Key, who would pay his senior year tuition.

  In January of his sophomore year, Shriver ascended to the senior board of the Yale Daily News, which provided him a regular outlet for expressing his political views. “We begin work on the twentieth,” he wrote his parents, “and from then on I’ll be writing edits at least once a week. Prepare for the call to arms!” Shriver’s ascension to the chairmanship of the Daily News the following January was reported in the New York Times, alongside a handsome picture of the college junior. “Robert S. Shriver, Jr., Takes Over Yale News” the Times headline declared.

  It was a tradition at the News that each successive editorial board would begin its regime with a modest, one-column “Opening Editorial” saluting the previous board and quietly promising to expand on past goals. Shriver’s first editorial—on January 25, 1937—was neither modest nor quiet: two full columns long, it boldly declared “in categorical terms” what would be the News’s “mental point-of-view” over the coming year. The only quiet note was a prefatory epigraph to his parents: “To Mother and Dad, whose constant interest and loving guidance alone have made this editorial possible. From their loving son, Sargent.” Beyond that, everything was declamatory.

  After briskly complimenting his predecessors for their work in “consolidating” many changes that had begun to be put into effect in earlier years, Shriver moved on to state his board’s aims. “We shall be opinionated in the finest sense of that much despised word,” he declared, and then defined the five categories by which the editorial board under his leadership would identify itself. Those categories are revealing.

  “First, therefore, we are Christians,” he began. “We wish to go on record as having no more preference for Godless Communism than for the adoration of the gods of the twentieth century, the saviors of humanity and preservers of culture, Hitler, Mussolini, and their ilk. We oppose their authoritarian or totalitarian states in any form.” Second, he wrote, we are “democratists:—By that we assert our belief that democracy is the only order of society where even the possibility of free thought exists.” Third, “in education we are Aristotelians,” by which he meant that he opposed any efforts to roll back the more stringent academic requirements imposed by Yale’s president.

  Fourth, Shriver wrote, “we are Americans. The tradition of a government directly responsible to its people, the people’s conviction that they in turn are responsible one to another as well as to their Maker, the realization that our standard of living is and will be the result of our productive powers—these are the qualities of America most worthy of our continued preservation.”

  And finally, “Fifth and last we are optimists:—In other words, we believe that things can be accomplished; that those who have ideals and are willing to work for them can often attain their ambitions; in short, that the world is not too much with us but by sincere and untiring effort can be made a better place to live in.”

  “There is a delight in accepting responsibility in a world of men who shun it,” Shriver concluded. Shriver was barely twenty years old when he wrote these words—but his character had been formed at an early age. A Christian, a Democratist, an Aristotelian, an American, and an optimist: Shriver was ostensibly writing of his editorial board’s point of view when he chose these terms, but the constellation of categorizations is pure Shriver, right down to the boldly declamatory tone.

  THE NAZI MENACE

  Donald Watt, the director of the Experiment in International Living, had been impressed with Shriver when he met the young Catholic on his visits to Germany in 1934, and so in 1936 he invited Sarge to visit Germany again, this time as an “assistant leader” of a group of Experimenters. Since being an assistant leader meant having his way paid, plus a small stipend, Shriver happily signed on.

  Although his first trip to Germany had gained him valuable experience, it was—in the context of the second trip—an experience
of a blessedly innocent kind. In January 1933, sixteen months before Shriver was first to set foot on German soil, Adolf Hitler had become Germany’s chancellor. When Shriver had lived in Backnang in the summer of 1934, the Nazi Party’s reach did not yet extend all over the country and had not penetrated fully to the individual family level. Thus Shriver could spend a whole summer happily oblivious to Hitler’s growing impact on the country.

  The difference two years made was striking. Indeed, as the world began to perceive that Hitler was a menace, many critics tried to argue Donald Watt into suspending the Experiment’s programs in Germany. But Watt declined to bow to this pressure, telling his critics: “If your real interest is in peace, you do not turn your back on the first person you meet who disagrees with you. If you want to make peace, start to create understanding where your misunderstanding is greatest.”

  Shriver’s group in 1936 consisted of nine college students, plus himself and Professor Zorb. Zorb had also recruited a friend from the University of Bonn to help with the teaching. Dr. Willy Kramp, twenty-seven years old that summer, met the students at the port in Cuxhaven, on the northwestern coast of Germany, and accompanied them on the train to Hamburg. Kramp took the group sightseeing in Hamburg, but Shriver’s attention was riveted on all the men in uniform. In 1934 Shriver had seen the occasional Nazi swastika or picture of Hitler; now they were everywhere. Every boy under eighteen wore a Nazi armband; half of the adult men Shriver saw did, too. Parades marched continuously through the streets, with soldiers goose-stepping in ramrod-straight formation. Labor brigades of young men marched to work with picks and shovels. With Kramp’s assistance, Shriver was soon able to distinguish the SS from the SA, and the SA from the Hitler Youth. Kramp became one of Shriver’s two principal guides through the snarled thickets of German politics that summer.