“Whizzer” White joined Shriver’s class late in the first semester, having spent the early part of the fall playing pro football for the Detroit Lions. Sarge and his friend Bob Stuart, seeing White’s prowess on the football team and finding him to be a very agreeable fellow, took it upon themselves to help White adjust to the rigors of law school life and to assist him with his academic work. White politely submitted to what Shriver and Stuart thought were patient and helpful explanations of the common law. But when the first semester’s marks came out, White was at the top of the class—and Shriver and Stuart were struggling along in the bottom third. From that point on, Stuart and Shriver sought out White for academic assistance, not the other way around.
The class’s other future Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart, initially had trouble keeping up academically with his peers. Situated between Bob Stuart and Sarge Shriver in the alphabetical seating arrangements in class, Stewart grew frustrated when Shriver and Stuart scored higher than he did on some of the first-year exams. Resolving to do better, Stewart decided his problem was that he looked less “judicial” than his friends. He set out to rectify this by going to Woolworth’s and buying a pair of ten-cent eyeglasses he deemed professorial in appearance, which he would then wave around for effect while talking during class. This seemed to produce the desired outcome. By the end of the second year, he was at the top of the class with Whizzer White.
Law school was an academic shock to Shriver. After years of garnering honors grades despite exerting only modest academic effort amid his myriad other activities, Shriver found himself working harder than ever but having less to show for it. He nearly failed Contracts his first semester. He was unaccustomed to struggling in this way. “I’ve been riding so high for so long,” he wrote to his parents upon receiving his first set of marks, “that my ego was given a good jolt, which I presume was good for me spiritually but not too pleasant.… I suppose the real reason for my disappointment was … that everyone expected me to do 75 or better [in Contracts, where he got a 63]. If no one expects anything of you, I think it is easier to take a licking. When everyone wonders ‘what happened to Shriver’ it burns one’s ego.” He briefly contemplated dropping out of school. “I do feel I should do much better than I have. Certainly if I don’t, I’ll think twice before returning next year. Too much remains to be done in other ways; to clutter up the world with another dull lawyer would be almost anti-social!”
In 1939 he gained his initial exposure to the firsthand practice of law. “I am doing Legal Aid work here in New Haven & tomorrow appear with my first client at 9:30 in the City Attorney’s office for a hearing!” he wrote to his parents. “It’s a family squabble (hurrah for domestic relations) & I am giving advice on it. Me, the old family man with years of experience in human affairs! My poor client. It should be fun, however, for me, provided the client does not lose her birthright in the process.” Shriver surely couldn’t have predicted, at the time, that he would put his Legal Aid experience to work thirty-five years later, when he founded Legal Services for the Poor as part of the War on Poverty under Lyndon Johnson.
FRANCE BEFORE THE WAR
In June 1939 Europe was buzzing with diplomatic negotiations, trying to avert the outbreak of military action. Hitler’s armies had entered Czechoslovakia in March, and Mussolini had invaded Albania in April. Donald Watt, of the Experiment in International Living, began making alternative arrangements for European students to be brought to Goddard College in Vermont, where they would live in a camp setting with American youth. But by the end of June, tensions in Europe seemed to be easing, so Watt decided to send American groups to Europe after all. The leader of one of the groups traveling to France, on his third Experiment trip, was Sargent Shriver.
Entrusted with the care of younger American college men and women, Shriver set off from New York, via Boston, on the French ocean liner De Grasse in early July. It arrived in a week’s time in France, where the Experimenters met up with families for their home stays in the southern part of the country. Shriver stayed with Mme Batut, a professor of mathematics at a nearby lycée in Montaubau, just north of Toulouse, not far from the Spanish border. Mme Batut put him to work teaching English to her students.
Life in the South of France was extremely pleasant, but portents of the conflict to come lurked beneath the surface of daily life, sometimes erupting unpleasantly into view. For instance, when Shriver asked his hostess about “the mail planes” he saw flying overhead, she revealed that they were, as he wrote to his parents, “pursuit and observation squadrons out of Toulouse. Nightly they patrol the sky guarding against a possible raid of German and Italian bombers from Spain or even from Italy! The sensation is not at all pleasant. To sit in one’s parlor & hear the drone of those monsters overhead constantly reminding one of the proximity of enemies is eerie & for the inhabitants an impossible condition in which to live.”
In a long letter to his family on July 19, Shriver recounted some of what he had learned from a conversation with Mme Batut about the French state of mind toward a possible conflict. Mme Batut, he wrote,
shares the universal fear of German aggrandizement directed at France & attempting to vassalize the country. Most of the French I’ve met are convinced the Germans wish to fight, & discussion of the truth of that fact is impossible. Of course, I’m still fond enough of the Germans to realize that the ordinary German has no more desire to fight than the ordinary Frenchman. The difference lies in the leaders. But the French hereabouts refuse to believe that. They are convinced that even the rank-and-file German is out for blood.… Mme. Batut’s son, 30 years old, is an official of some importance in the war department, & he says France is about ready. Everyone in Paris has a place in the country assigned to them for refuge in case of attack by air or in the case of invasion. The productive capacities are now so organized that everything being done in Paris may be transferred to identical plants & facilities 100 miles south of the capital. People with country homes have been assigned the numbers & the exact persons now living in Paris whom they will be required to harbor in case of war. Paris itself is completely undermined with bomb-cellars, etc, & even the little faubourg shops have gas masks on display in the windows. Frankly it’s ghastly & seems to me to be a situation which civilized people cannot countenance for a long time. Everyone agrees it is absurd, impossible, & necessary.
Shriver also noted that young French men were declining to marry, for fear of subjecting their would-be wives to excessive anxiety during wartime. This reluctance to wed had shrunk the French birth rate to such a distressingly low level that the French government was urging citizens to get married and have children. “God knows,” Shriver wrote, “the world is in a queer condition when it is impossible for men to work, to marry, & therefore, in the final analysis, to live. I really feel Europe must be entering a period of disorganization, disorder, & decay. The next 20 to 50 years will disclose a history that would startle the most ruthless & pessimistic today.”
Despite the ominous forebodings surrounding them, Shriver’s American group embarked with thirteen French counterparts on an extended bicycle tour of the South of France. The first few weeks of the trip passed peacefully; the war retreated to the edge of Shriver’s consciousness. Camping throughout the lush French countryside was, Shriver wrote to his parents, “a great life.” In mid-August, his French students returned home as planned, leaving Shriver with thirteen fewer young people to be responsible for.
Beginning in late August, however, Shriver observed that there seemed to be fewer people on the road. A few days later Shriver noticed that the local families he would see working in front of their farmhouses seemed to consist of women only; all the men seemed to have vanished. Alarmed, he asked a woman where all the men had gone. “Haven’t you heard?” Shriver recalled her saying. “They’ve gone to join the army. The first call was the day before yesterday. The second call went out today.”
Although Shriver wasn’t supposed to return to Paris with h
is students for several days yet, he decided they would be wise to return to Experiment headquarters in the city and get a fuller picture of what the situation was. When Shriver and his charges arrived in Paris by train late in the evening of August 29, the City of Lights was dark. Many restaurants were closed. Those buildings that had lights on seemed to have them partially covered, so the illumination was dimmed. The Experiment’s Paris office was located in a rented private home on the West Bank. It, too, looked dark. Shriver knocked softly on the door and, getting no response, banged louder. Finally, it opened slowly and a face peered around it. “Open the door,” Sarge said. “It’s Shriver.”
The door swung open and an Experiment administrator barked, “God-damnit, Shriver, where the hell have you been? Do you know how many cables from worried parents the home office has received?!” While Shriver and his group had happily cycled through the vineyards, the American papers had been full of the news that Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact on August 23, and that as Germany rattled its saber at Poland, more French reservists had been called up. The Experiment’s main office in Putney, Vermont, had been inundated with telegrams from parents (including Shriver’s) demanding to know where their sons and daughters were.
Booking passage home for the Experimenters was not easy. The news of impending war had generated a stampede of American tourists to ships bound for the United States. Fortunately, the Experiment’s French liaison was able to secure berths on the Ile de France, which was scheduled to depart from the port of Le Havre, northeast of Paris, on the following afternoon, September 1.
Shriver awoke early the next morning to a commotion of agitated French voices. Listening, he learned that at 4:45 that morning, Hitler’s tanks had crossed the Polish border into Danzig; the German air force was streaking toward Warsaw.
Shriver roused his charges and shepherded them to the train station, where they were packed like cattle in among the thousands of other people desperate to escape the Continent. After arriving safely at the port of Le Havre and boarding the Ile de France, the Experimenters waited tensely to depart. A passage from a group log reported:
The pier was crowded with people frantically trying to get last minute space on our boat, and we began to realize just how fortunate we were. We boarded the Ile de France.… Supposed to have sailed at 2 p.m., we were all pretty tense at dinner. Still in the harbor and not knowing when we would sail. The strain was not at all alleviated by the fact that we began our series of black-outs that night with nothing but blue lights for illumination. It was so hot in our cabins that a lot of Experimenters found it more bearable to sleep on deck. We spent Saturday in Havre, not knowing if and when it would sail, until late in the afternoon when a notice was posted saying that the boat would sail in a short while—which it did at 4:30. Passengers practically went mad—it was such a relief to know that we were actually going to start out for home.… We had another black-out that night plus a terrific electric storm; it was a frightful night.
The Experimenters were not yet home free. A few hours after the Ile de France set sail, the SS Athenia, a British ocean liner, was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat. The ship went down just offshore of England, so most of the 200 Americans aboard were saved; 28 of them, however, died in the initial explosion. Word of the sinking was quickly transmitted to the Ile de France, just 200 miles to the south. Shriver and the other sleepless passengers worried that a German torpedo or mine might bring the end at any moment. (At the same time, ashore in England, the Athenia’s surviving Americans were being interviewed by the twenty-two-year-old son of the US ambassador to Britain, Shriver’s old Canterbury schoolmate Jack Kennedy.) With war officially declared, and a passenger ship just sunk, the Experimenters aboard the Ile de France were naturally convinced that the Germans were out to destroy all ships in the North Atlantic.
The first few days aboard the Ile were harrowing. News reports of the war crackled in over the ship’s radio. The Nazis were taking Warsaw. Shriver was afraid not just for his own life but also for the lives of the students with whose well-being he had been entrusted. Finally, one crisp September afternoon, the Ile sounded its horn: the skyline of New York was in sight. Shriver and his fellow Experimenters were safely home.
Shriver’s four years of experience as a participant in the Experiment in International Living had, initially, an apparently contrary effect. For the first and only time in his life, he became a dedicated isolationist. It was not that he believed cultural exchange between countries was bad (in fact he believed the opposite) or that he thought the United States should withdraw from world affairs forever; it was simply that what he had seen in Germany in 1936 and in France in 1939 had frightened and revolted him. Shriver knew that European wars had prompted his ancestors’ emigration to America; he knew through his visits to Catholic churches throughout Europe the devastation visited on the combatants of the First World War; and thus he was firmly convinced that the United States should keep its nose out of any wars across the Atlantic.
But the longer-term effect of his experience abroad between 1934 and 1939 was to instill in him an unshakable belief that the more that citizens of different nations or cultures could be induced to interact with one another, the less likely they would be to go to war with one another.
As fate would have it, Shriver would find himself in a position some two decades later to draw directly on his experiences with the Experiment in International Living. In its can-do idealism, its emphasis on cross-national communication, its careful screening of participants, its respect for foreign cultures, and its ultimate aspirations, the Experiment bears a striking thematic resemblance to the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps, like the Experiment, was animated above all by a quest for world peace through intercultural cooperation. It is no wonder that, when ordered to set up the Peace Corps by President Kennedy in 1961, one of Shriver’s earliest calls was to Gordon Boyce, Donald Watt’s successor as director of the Experiment in International Living.
AMERICA FIRST
Convinced that the United States should keep an ocean’s distance from Continental affairs, Shriver returned to law school in the fall of 1939 and watched developments across the Atlantic from afar. He wrote to his parents, “the news from Europe is most depressing. Certainly one can hardly help feeling the times are out of joint.”
On April 9, 1940, the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark, and a month later blitzed Belgium, Holland, and France, the Dutch surrendering on May 15. Two days later, Shriver, who was preparing for law school exams, wrote a letter to his parents. “The news from Europe this evening is so appalling in many ways that I knew you would be troubled, & I hope this short letter will help you to realize that at least here we have some degree of protection and safety. This is a night when one wants to hold tightly to some one’s hand & feel sure that everything is not in chaos. I hope that you feel that I am close by when this arrives, & that we four at least have unity and confidence.”
As the Germans reached the English Channel on May 20, and Belgium appeared likely to fall imminently, Shriver lamented how meaningless and theoretical his law school work seemed to be. On May 26 he wrote, “I have only one week before exams—so the recurrent pressure is again here. In the midst of all that’s taking place in the big, wide world our problems are not absorbing—I wish we could cease all the theorizing that is necessary here & get down to handling one real case where human beings are involved. School is stimulating but seems futile very often these days.” As he finished his exams in mid-June, the Germans entered Paris.
To divert themselves, Shriver and Mac Muir traveled to Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, for a sailing race, and then to Tom Thatcher’s estate at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, for a weekend house party, where the drinking and carousing lasted for four days straight.
If this bout of libertinism for Shriver and his friends had a quality of urgency, it was because the drumbeat of war was growing louder. In Washington, the debates between the interventionists an
d the isolationists were intensifying. Political commentators, Congress, and FDR’s administration were all divided among themselves over whether and how much to help England with money, materiel, and military support in its war with Germany.
In the spring and summer of 1940, Sarge felt profoundly divided. On the one hand, he felt the tug of his ancestry strongly. The earliest Shrivers had fled to America precisely to avoid these endless Continental wars and then had fought to throw off the yoke of Europe. Why, then, violate the spirit on which America was built by re-engaging with wars not of the nation’s concern? Europe was always fighting and always would be. He was also familiar with the tragic legacy of the Great War of 1914–1918. There was no reason to think that a second world war would be any less devastating.
On the other hand, however, was a competing set of considerations. Shriver’s summers in Germany had exposed him to Hitler and the Nazis—his first experience with pure evil. He had seen the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He had also seen how the fascism of Mussolini was strangling Italy. If these men, these noxious regimes, were not worth fighting against, was anything?
The tug of his ancestry, Shriver came to see, pulled him in two directions. Yes, his forebears had sought to flee European wars—but they had also fought for what they believed in. Shrivers had fought for the country during the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. His parents had helped raise money for the American cause during the First World War, and he had imbibed from them the Wilsonian impulse toward noble interventions in foreign affairs. Was it not a Shriver’s patriotic duty to do battle and risk death if circumstances called for it? War heroes had been venerated in Sarge’s family from the time he was a young boy, and a small part of him—maybe even not so small—craved that veneration for himself.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 9