Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Shriver’s other guide was Herr Schrimpf, the father of the host family he stayed with in Weimar. Mr. Schrimpf was a Social Democrat who had at one time been active in Weimar politics but had been forced into quiescence by the rise of National Socialism. The Schrimpfs sensed that the end of freedom was coming fast. They cut the family paintings out of their frames, rolled them up, and inserted them behind the bricks of the chimney—they didn’t want their most prized possessions to be seized by the Nazis. At night, in his room on the second floor of the Schrimpfs’ house, Shriver would listen to the soldiers goose-stepping past on the street below and shudder at what the sound forebode for Germany.

  Two other experiences crystallized Shriver’s sense of the sickness in the German soul that summer. In Weimar, Shriver attended Mass every Sunday at the local Catholic parish. There, he took note of something he had also seen two summers earlier in the Catholic Church near Backnang: the almost complete absence in the congregation of men between the ages of thirty and fifty. When he saw a memorial with a long list of names at the back of the church, he understood why: The Great War of 1914–1918 had decimated an entire generation of European men. Surely, he thought, Germany would never be so foolhardy as to subject its population to such mortal devastation again.

  In 1936, however, as compared with two summers earlier, there were very few people of any age or gender at Mass. A comment by one of the parishioners confirmed his fear. The parishioner sidled up to Shriver after the service and said in a hushed tone, “Thank you for coming to Mass this morning.”

  “I always attend Mass on Sundays,” Shriver said.

  The parishioner pulled him aside, away from the hearing of the congregation. “You don’t understand. Many of our parishioners are now afraid to go to church. Members of the congregation who are too ‘enthusiastic’ about the Catholic religion get picked up by the Nazis. Last week, two local priests were taken away to a camp.”

  Shriver didn’t know exactly what a “camp” was, but the basic meaning of what the man had told him was clear. Catholics were being persecuted, along with Jews and Communists, for what they believed.

  Once, on an afternoon drive, the Schrimpfs’ automobile rolled past what looked like a big farmhouse, partly concealed behind a tall, yellow stucco wall. Shriver asked what was behind the wall.

  “That is Buchenwald, a work camp,” said Schrimpf.

  “Slow down, so we can see it,” said Shriver.

  “I don’t dare,” said Schrimpf, accelerating ahead.

  Rounding a corner, they passed the front gate. Nazi soldiers with guns stood on either side of it. Through the gate, Shriver could for a moment see up to the big house. “Can’t we please stop by the gate and look in?” he asked.

  “It is not good to show curiosity about such things,” said Schrimpf. But he agreed to drive past the camp again in the other direction. “This time,” according to William Peters’s account, “as they neared the gate, a group of perhaps fifty men in denim work clothes, their shaved heads bare to the sun, marched four abreast, guarded by soldiers. As the car passed, the men turned from the road into the open gate.”

  The image of those men seared itself into Shriver’s consciousness. He would never forget their shaved heads, how they marched four abreast, not permitted to look to the left or the right, only straight ahead.

  “Who are they?” he asked Schrimpf, gesturing toward the men.

  “Those are political prisoners,” Schrimpf replied, “people who did not agree with Herr Hitler and were not careful enough about who knew it.”

  As Buchenwald faded into the distance behind them, Shriver lapsed into silence. There was nothing to say. This was thousands of miles away from his happy-go-lucky life at Yale, but it felt a lot farther away than that. He had grown to love the German countryside, love the German people, in his two summers abroad—but he was of the growing conviction that the United States, if it knew what was good for it, would keep a prudent distance from the affairs of Europe.

  Back in New Haven in the fall, when Shriver thought of the summer just past, his first memory was always of his host father, Herr Schrimpf, peering anxiously out from the back porch into the yard behind, scanning for Nazi spies. “There were two worlds in Germany that summer,” William Peters wrote. “The unhealthy world of repression, uniforms and suspicion and the healthy world of green forests, German songs, and Goethe. Shriver was never quite able to reconcile the two in his mind.”

  INNOCENCE LOST

  The summer of 1937 once again saw Shriver heading off to Europe, this time as a crew member on a cruise liner, where his primary responsibility consisted of keeping wealthy vacationers happy on their travels through the Mediterranean. Shriver was accompanied on this trip by his friend Greg Smith, who with his brother Gerard had been a few years ahead of Shriver both at Canterbury and at Yale. Shriver had enjoyed spending weekends with the Smith brothers at the lavish Long Island estate of their father, John Thomas Smith, who was the general counsel for General Motors and a fixture of New York’s Catholic society. Over the next six weeks Sarge and Greg enjoyed a grand tour of southeastern Europe: Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Asia Minor.

  In the Mediterranean, swaddled in the luxury of the Odyssey, Shriver perceived the specter of authoritarianism and war to be at a greater remove than it had been the previous summer in Weimar. Even in southern Europe, however, signs of the gathering storm would at times cloud the horizon: the German fleet off the coast of Portugal; the rebel Spanish airplane, manned by three men carrying conspicuous machine guns that circled the Odyssey as it approached Gibraltar; the houses nestled against the Rock of Gibraltar, “armed to every last inch … threatened by the German and Italian occupation of the African Pillar of Hercules,” as Shriver wrote to his parents; Mussolini, Il Duce himself, recent conqueror of Ethiopia, speaking from Palermo over the radio while the Florentines gathered around cafés where “public radios blare forth the leader’s words.”

  But these small harbingers did not disturb Shriver’s relaxed equanimity. Only the usual angst over money clouded his mood. “I’m afraid I’ll have to have some money in Rome,” he wrote his parents. “I have about $85 in Lira & no American money.… Laundry and pressing has made inroads I never anticipated; so, if possible, I wish you could send me something in Rome. But please don’t worry about it! For if you can’t manage it comfortably I can probably borrow some from Gregory & I can pay him back in the fall.”

  In the end, Smith subsidized most of Shriver’s expenses. “Gregory is doing all in his power to make everything financially easy for me,” Sarge wrote to his parents. “I’m going to pay him a lump sum covering the whole business & being no more than I should have spent had I traveled as cheaply as possible. He goes where he wishes & I pay what I can, & he takes care of the remainder. Isn’t that generous of him? So don’t worry about me: I’m in good company!”

  Eleanor Hoguet had also gotten free passage across the Atlantic by serving on a different steamship as a librarian that summer and was traveling in Italy with her brother Joe.

  Greg and Sarge arrived in Florence on August 16. Joe and Eleanor arrived the following day. On the evening of August 17, Sarge and Eleanor met privately for dinner. They had been courting more or less continuously for five years now. Eleanor had had other boyfriends over that period, but Sarge was, for almost all of that time, her “number one beau.” Shriver, too, had entertained numerous admiring girlfriends over the years, but Eleanor was first in his heart. Over the years Sarge and Eleanor had expressed great affection for one another, but they had never had sexual relations.

  Sargent Shriver, indeed, had never had sexual intercourse, nor would he until a relationship had been blessed by the sacrament of marriage. His devout Catholicism would not permit it. Although not sanctimonious in his conviction, Shriver had never wavered in his belief that sex outside of marriage was sinful; this was what he believed on the night of August 17, 1937, in Florence.

  Sarge and Eleanor had dinner at a F
lorentine restaurant, recounting their European travels, exchanging news and gossip about mutual friends from the States, and talking about politics. But Sarge could tell something was amiss. When he walked Eleanor back to the apartment where she was staying, he asked her if anything was bothering her.

  Eleanor was always a little shy, but she was also direct and courageous and when confronted with this question, as Shriver recalled, she looked him in the eye and conceded that something was wrong. She explained that being out of the convent in France and traveling around Europe with her brother had made her feel free and different somehow, more adventurous. She had met an American soldier, she told him, and had briefly fallen in love with him. Her relationship with the soldier was now ended—but before it had, she said, they had slept together.

  Sarge felt as though he had been punched in the stomach. Stoically, without (he hoped) betraying how miserable he felt, he thanked her for telling him, told her that he still cared for her a great deal, and that he would see her tomorrow. He said good night and then exited briskly, closing the door behind him. Once in the hallway he ran to the balustrade and vomited out onto the street below, his convulsing gut a direct register of the emotional trauma he felt. His respect for Eleanor never wavered. Nor, in some sense, did his deep, abiding affection for her. But something in him changed that night and he knew that he would never marry her.

  Greg and Sargent and the Hoguets spent five more days together in Florence before Greg and Sargent headed to Rome. During this time Shriver maintained a jaunty front; inside, however, he felt a great sense of loss, and he prayed for succor. (“I seem to have recouped some of my lost ability to pray,” he wrote home on August 22, “and you can be sure St. Peter and St. Paul will get the works from me” in Rome.)

  Sarge and Eleanor remained close friends. Their families, too, remained close, and Shriver concealed from even his closest friends how that evening in Florence had caused a rending of something within him. But one day Eleanor’s mother came over to the Shrivers’ apartment and asked Sargent to take a walk with her in Central Park. “Sarge,” he recalls her saying to him, “you’ve been going out with my daughter for quite a long while now. Are you interested in marrying her?”

  He knew what Mrs. Hoguet was driving at. In the 1930s the socially appropriate course of action for a woman of Eleanor’s background was to marry soon after completing her education, if not before. Although Shriver’s parents had fallen on hard times during the Depression, the Hoguets considered them a good Catholic family, and they perceived Sarge to be a young man with good prospects. They would have been very happy to have him marry their daughter. But if he wasn’t going to marry Eleanor, Mrs. Hoguet implied, he should make that clear so she could marry somebody else.

  Shriver responded that he had been interested in marrying Eleanor but that something had come up which now made it unlikely he would ever propose. Mrs. Hoguet received the news with a look of stern disapproval, but then she thanked him for his candor and went home. Eleanor—who had been told by her father that she had one year to marry upon graduating from Manhattanville College if she did not want to get a job—began entertaining other suitors more seriously, even as Sarge continued to hang somewhat diffidently around. In the winter of 1941, after spending time in the hospital recovering from an operation for phlebitis, Eleanor announced her engagement to Paul DeGive, a young banker who had starred as a hockey goalie at Harvard. Paul and Eleanor were married in October 1941—Ensign Sargent Shriver, US Navy, was in attendance—and in 2001 they celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary. The night before her wedding, Eleanor regretfully burned all her letters from Sarge. But for years thereafter, Shriver and Eleanor continued to correspond fondly, in the manner of long-ago paramours and longtime friends.

  In the fall of 1937 Shriver returned to New Haven to conclude his final year as a Yale undergraduate. Early that semester, still greatly shaken by his meeting with Eleanor in Florence, he wrote an affecting note to his parents.

  You will never know till you’re in Heaven what you’ve meant to me, both of you. I can’t ever tell you how much courage you’ve given me when I needed it most, how your example has been & is today the strength that keeps me moving forward. At times, when I have been lonely, yes, in Europe & at Yale, when I’ve felt there was no one standing with me and things were difficult … my thoughts have gone out to you & my knowledge of what you are. When I’ve felt that between God & me there was one great mighty space … then in those times you have been with me, guiding me, encouraging me, leading me right. You have never been physically with me at such a time, & it’s impossible that a parent could be. But always when the cards were down & the pressure was on, when there was no escape and facts had to be faced, then the memory of your [model] lives was everything to me. God & his saints, though it may be sacrilegious to say it, were nothing to me in comparison to the positive, tangible example of true & righteous & happy living that you have given me.

  As always, Shriver turned to his faith for consolation, spending much of his time working with Father T. Lawrason Riggs, the Catholic chaplain at Yale, to build the membership of the St. Thomas More Society. Like Shriver’s father a Protestant convert, Riggs came from an old Maryland banking family who were friendly with the Shrivers. Heavyset and heavy-drinking, Riggs was a man of many talents—he was, among other things, a philosopher, a theologian, a singer, a writer, a wit, and a dramatist (in 1914, he had co-written a musical with Cole Porter). He was also, through access to his family’s banking fortune, a man of considerable means. He used his money to buy a stately home in New Haven, which—because Yale had no Catholic chapel or student center when Shriver enrolled in the mid-1930s—served as the gathering place for the university’s Catholic students. Riggs hosted regular Bible discussion sessions, and he would say Mass and hear confessions in his private chapel. Beginning in his junior year, Shriver spent as much time as he could at the home of this colorful, orotund priest.

  Together, Shriver and Riggs established an annual ecumenical congress at Yale that would bring Catholics and Protestants together (along with the few Jews around) to discuss religious issues and to make common cause against what they perceived as the spread of secularism on campus and in the world at large.

  As a result of Shriver’s recruitment drive for the More Society in 1937, club membership doubled to 155 undergraduates, becoming (as Sarge wrote to his parents) “the largest Catholic Club in Yale history.” For Shriver, the highlight of the More Society’s activities in 1938 was the invitation to his heroine, Dorothy Day, the great Catholic social activist, for a Communion breakfast. Day’s passion for social justice helped inspire much of the political, social, and religious work Shriver would do in the 1950s and 1960s.

  As he finished his last set of final exams in May, Shriver wrote to his parents, “That ends little Sarge’s undergraduate days, & on Friday he’s going to pack books & rugs & clean up.” Shriver’s enjoyment of the final weeks of his undergraduate career was marred by concern for his father, who had suffered a heart attack and been admitted to Doctor’s Hospital on the East River, where he remained for some time.

  LAW SCHOOL

  Upon graduation from college in June 1938—with a degree cum laude in English literature—Shriver’s plan had been to enroll in Yale Law School the following autumn. But neither Shriver nor his parents had any money at all; law school, therefore, was out of the question. Through his college classmate Mac Muir Jr., whose father was the editor-in-chief of Newsweek magazine, Sarge approached that publication about getting an editorial job. He planned to live at home and supplement his family’s income.

  But when Greg and Gerard Smith learned about this, they told their father, John Thomas Smith, who called Shriver and asked him to come to Smith’s Manhattan office for a talk. When Shriver arrived in Smith’s office, Smith said that he had heard Shriver had decided not to attend law school. “If you could pay for law school, would you go?” Shriver recalled Smith asking. When Shriver said
that he would, Smith declared that he would pay for whatever tuition and living expenses were not covered by scholarships and other funds.

  Barely a week later Shriver was back in New Haven, readying himself to begin his first year of law school. It was too late for him to obtain a room on campus, so he and a classmate named Hart Spiegel, who was also enrolling late, rented a small apartment in downtown New Haven, just above a barbershop and a cheap diner. All year long, Shriver and Spiegel inhaled the aroma of grilling meat and aftershave as they studied the statutes.

  If Shriver had had reason to be intimidated in his first year of college, he had even more reason to be intimidated in his first year of law school. Yale Law School’s class of 1941 included a remarkable, perhaps unique, array of talent. Yale Law ’41 produced, among others, Sargent Shriver; Gerald Ford, who would serve as House minority leader, vice president, and president of the United States; Cyrus Vance, who would serve as deputy director of defense under President Lyndon Johnson and as secretary of state under President Carter; Walter Lord, who would become a best-selling writer, the author of A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic; Peter Dominick, who would become a senator from Colorado; Raymond Shafer, who would serve as the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania; William Scranton, who would become governor of Pennsylvania; Stanley Resor, who would serve as secretary of the army under LBJ; Richardson Dilworth, who would become president of the Rockefeller Foundation; and Potter Stewart and Byron “Whizzer” White, who would both become Supreme Court justices.