In the end, Shriver arrived at perhaps the only workable solution to his conundrum. He vigorously and publicly opposed the war, helping to found the America First Committee. And at the same time—in a seemingly paradoxical move for an anti-interventionist—he enlisted in the Naval Reserve.
Reading through the New York Times in the Yale library one day in the early spring of 1940, Shriver had seen a small notice about a US Navy program called the V-7—for “volunteeers, seventh class”—designed to attract would-be officers into the armed forces. The V-7 program was aimed at college and graduate students, who would spend their summers being trained on navy ships while completing their education during the academic years. The very afternoon he read the advertisement, Shriver went down to the New Haven Navy Office and volunteered.
Shriver spent the summer of 1940 on the USS Arkansas, a World War I–era battleship. The Arkansas spent most of the summer in New York’s harbor, rarely venturing more than a few dozen miles out to sea or up or down the eastern seaboard. Anchored in the Hudson River near 125th Street, Shriver and his fellow V-7 volunteers went through a battery of training courses from the career officers and enlisted men, learning about naval history and about guns.
Navy life was at first a difficult adjustment. The living conditions on the Arkansas were spartan. In the navy, unlike at Yale, Shriver’s place in the hierarchy was inscribed in his role—and as an apprentice seaman in the Naval Reserve, that role was lowly. “There is nothing lower than I was that summer,” Shriver has said. Although he was mostly ashore or in the harbor, he felt figuratively at sea. He didn’t know how anything worked and had to rely on his superiors to tell him what to do. He felt he was barely getting by, “just skimming through by the barest of margins,” as he wrote his parents the following fall.
But Shriver slowly acquired not only the technical knowledge needed to do his job, but a knowledge of navy culture. The navy, he soon learned, wasn’t all that different from Canterbury School: all male and highly structured about dress, punctuality, and comportment. Both environments fostered a great camaraderie. By the end of the summer he was growing to enjoy navy life.
And yet, returning to Yale in the fall, Shriver threw himself once again into active protest against American involvement in the war. Among his isolationist and noninterventionist friends, his military service made him a curiosity—and also gave him a certain credibility in debates against the interventionists. There were Anglophiles among his classmates who wanted the United States to give money, arms, and active military assistance to aid their beloved England; yet they themselves had not volunteered to fight. Shriver, in contrast, had declared himself willing to fight in a war in which he hoped his military would have no part.
In September 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged between England and Germany, Shriver arrived in New Haven for his final year of law school. “Dearest Mother & Dad,” he wrote,
Well tomorrow begins my seventh year in Yale University, & I realize, after talking to some of the freshmen & faculty members, just how fortunate I am. I wonder how many fellows entering Yale in the next few years, or maybe more, will be able to spend 7 uninterrupted years at Yale. Even fellows starting a professional education this year say they have little hope of finishing it regularly, in three or four years. They make me all the more thankful that I shall have my LL.B in June.
If law school had seemed stimulating but futile during his second year, it seemed even more futile now as the war spread. In late September, Germany, Italy, and Japan had formed the Axis alliance; in September and October, Mussolini invaded Egypt and Greece; and by late June the war had taken its most dramatic turn, as Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the assault on Russia.
Throughout the fall of 1940, Shriver’s attention was fixed decidedly less on his studies than on preventing American entry into the war. The debate about intervention swirled all around Shriver and his peers through their second and third years of law school. And though he considered and reconsidered his decision, it was with firm conviction that Shriver now joined his friend and law school classmate Bob Stuart in founding America First.
In the fall of 1940, R. Douglas Stuart Jr., the son of a vice president at the Quaker Oats Company in Chicago, was an idealistic New Dealer who ardently believed that by staying out of the war, the United States could help Europe achieve an acceptable peace settlement quickly. Stuart, who had studied international relations as a Princeton undergraduate, believed strongly that “the U.S. had gained nothing and lost a great deal through participation in World War I” and that “what turned out to be World War II was simply a renewal of the same nationalistic struggles [that had caused World War I].”
It was natural that Shriver and Stuart should become close friends. Both were handsome and charismatic, and Stuart, like Shriver, had spent a summer before law school traveling through Europe, attaining a touch of cosmopolitanism as well as learning firsthand about the mortal costs of the First World War. In 1939 Shriver joined the new student group Stuart organized to discuss the war and means of resisting American participation in it. As early as November 1939, just a few months removed from his harrowing escape from the Continent on the Ile de France, Shriver wrote a letter with Stuart to Charles Lindbergh, who was already an outspoken opponent of American involvement in the war, asking him to speak to their group. The letter was signed not only by Bob Stuart and himself, but also by Potter Stewart, Windham Gary, and Millard Brown, all members of Stuart’s group. (Lindbergh did not respond.)
During the summer of 1940, while Shriver endured his concentrated military training on the Arkansas, Stuart was in the Midwest, where isolationist sentiment ran high. Using his father’s business connections and his own considerable charm to round up business leaders and politicians, Stuart was attempting to found a national, anti-interventionist organization. His first important recruit was Gen. Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company and a liberal Republican who had voted twice for Roosevelt and supported the New Deal. Wood had grown increasingly concerned about FDR’s apparent drift toward intervention, and he agreed to become national chairman of the organization that Stuart was now calling America First. Stuart, only twenty-four years old, became the national director.
Stuart finally met Lindbergh in July in Chicago, where the aviator was in town to address 40,000 spectators at the Keep America Out of War Rally in Soldier Field along Lake Michigan. Stuart (like Shriver) had been an admirer of Colonel Lindbergh from childhood, when Lindbergh had become the first man to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. After dining with Lindbergh following the rally, Stuart recorded that he found the famous man “a most attractive guy and a very clear thinker,” as well as “a sincere and courageous American who has the habit of sticking his neck out.” But Lindbergh’s conservatism made Stuart uncomfortable, and he worried about what would happen to his fledgling organization if it became publicly linked with the aviator. This led to a disagreement between Stuart and General Wood about whether or not to bring Lindbergh formally on to the America First national committee. Wood wanted Lindbergh to succeed him as national chairman, and Stuart preferred to keep the aviator at arm’s length. Lindbergh finally did join the committee in April 1941 and became its most popular speaker.
The America First national committee formally announced itself on September 4, 1940, and began a national advertising campaign against intervention the following month. The committee’s basic view was that America should build an impregnable defense and then retreat inside it. “American democracy,” the America First founding document declared, “can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war.”
In the fall, Lindbergh came to Yale. Kingman Brewster Jr., Shriver’s successor as chairman of the Yale Daily News (and years later the university’s president) organized the meeting, and on the evening of October 30, Shriver crowded into a packed auditorium in Woolsey Hall to hear Lindbergh speak for thirty-three minutes. The aviator got an enthusiastic response.
Yet Shriver had also determined that what Lindbergh (or anyone else) said was irrelevant: US involvement in the war was inevitable—and sooner rather than later. He ceased active participation in the America First organization, although he stayed in close contact with Stuart throughout his final year at Yale.
Posterity has looked unkindly on America First. America Firsters quickly became associated in the public mind with the head-in-the-sand isolationism of the Ohio senator Robert Taft, the North Dakota senator Gerald Nye, and the Chicago newspaper magnate William McCormick. Joe Kennedy Sr., then FDR’s ambassador to England, was in the fall of 1940 locked in a tense battle with the president; Kennedy could see that Roosevelt’s policies were stealthily laying the groundwork for greater American involvement and eventually military participation in the war, and he was convinced that was wrong. Roosevelt managed to cajole his ambassador into silence until after the 1940 presidential election, but Kennedy—a greatly reviled figure in some circles as the years went on—also became guilty by his association with the isolationist cause, and the America Firsters became guilty by association with him.
The harshest accusations leveled at America First charged it with being anti-Semitic or with harboring pro-German sympathies. It is true that some among America First’s prominent figureheads (most notably Lindbergh) were demonstrated to have had anti-Semitic tendencies that may well have contributed to their noninterventionist conviction. Moreover, the truly isolationist stances of, for instance, Colonel McCormick and Senators Nye and Taft fed into the public impression that the America Firsters were blindly anti-European.
But simpleminded isolationism was not what motivated Shriver and the other Yale law students who launched America First. Rather it was the conviction that America’s interests—namely, not sending its boys to be killed in another of Europe’s endless wars—were not to be served by involvement. Yes, American intervention had helped bring closure to the First World War. But what had that produced? Another world war, not even twenty-five years later, which was shaping up to be every bit as bad as the first. What was more, America First’s position was until December 1941 supported by most Americans. As late as August 1941, 74 percent of Americans favored staying out of war; a month later, 68 percent still did, even if that meant a German victory over England and Russia.
Shriver’s enthusiastic contribution to the America First Committee’s founding was born above all of his belief that staying out of the war was not only the most prudent course for America’s interests but that it was also the best way of achieving peace in Europe. Although he recognized the evil of Hitler, Shriver believed a negotiated peace settlement, brokered by the United States, was the best way to stop the slaughter quickly and to protect and possibly restore what remained of the Continental democracies.
Later, when he had become a public figure of some renown, Shriver would occasionally receive letters, usually angry ones, asking why he had associated with such an ignominious group as America First. In a typical response, writing back to a man who decried Shriver’s “guilt” by association with Lindbergh and company, Shriver explained his thinking. “Yes, I did belong to AMERICA FIRST,” he wrote.
I joined it because I believed at the time we could better help to secure a just settlement of the war in Europe by staying out of it. History proved that my judgment was wrong, neither for the first time nor the last. None of the people I knew in the organization expressed any views within my hearing that were either pro-German or anti-Semitic. I can see how people with such views might have supported AMERICA FIRST just as people with pro-Russian or Communist views might have supported an interventionist organization at that time. I am a little surprised, however, at your willingness to assume that I am “guilty,” on the basis you describe in your letter. The idea that guilt is personal and the presumption of innocence are two of the most fundamental ideas that distinguish our society from totalitarian societies.
“I wanted to spare American lives,” Shriver told a journalist in 1964, by way of explaining his association with America First. “If that’s an ignoble motive then I’m perfectly willing to be convicted.”
Shriver’s final months at law school were an afterthought, his attentions riveted on events overseas. By the spring of 1941 Shriver, although still opposed to American intervention, was resigned to it. He reported to the Arkansas the day after his final exam. As his classmates marched beneath Yale’s Gothic spires to collect their diplomas, Sargent Shriver was aboard a US battleship.
CHAPTER FOUR
War
After finishing the bar exam on the third Friday in September 1941, Shriver donned his ensign’s stripes and reported for active duty the following Monday. He had hoped for an assignment to the USS Juneau, a destroyer, but was assigned instead to desk duty in the Third Naval District, which extended along the eastern seaboard from Cape Hatteras, off North Carolina, to Nova Scotia, above the northernmost tip of Maine. Trapped in a small office in lower Manhattan, where the ten-story US Naval Building at 90 Church Street housed the Third Naval District Headquarters, Shriver was frustrated. He would much rather have been at sea, living aboard a ship. Instead, he spent his days shuffling paperwork at a desk.
As a newly commissioned ensign, Shriver was the lowest officer on the totem pole and thus was often relegated to weekend duty on watch at District Headquarters, with responsibility for monitoring the radio dispatches. In the unlikely event of an attack on American shores, it would fall to him to sound General Quarters, the alarm calling everyone to battle stations.
Through the autumn of 1941 Shriver endured a cloying mixture of boredom and nervous anticipation. Mostly, he was waiting: waiting not only to see what happened in the war, trying to determine when the United States would finally be compelled to join the conflict, but also waiting to learn whether he had passed the bar exam. Waiting drove him crazy, especially since there wasn’t anything concrete he could do—so he sat at his government-issue desk and stewed, as he watched the country’s nerves fray.
One Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Shriver awoke in his cot at the District Naval Headquarters and, after breakfast and Mass, was installed at his desk by nine o’clock, prepared to endure another tedious day of waiting. At one o’clock, he switched the radio dial to WHN, which was broadcasting the New York Giants football game from the Polo Grounds.
Just after 2:22 p.m., with the Giants leading the Brooklyn Dodgers 14–0 in the fourth quarter, the Mutual Broadcasting System announcer Len Sterling abruptly interrupted the game to read a brief AP bulletin: “Flash: Washington—White House says Japs attack Pearl Harbor.”
Shriver sat bolt upright in his chair. His first thought was that he had misheard. His second thought was of Halloween 1938, when Orson Welles had inadvertently pitched America into a panic with his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, with its realistic simulation of a news broadcast announcing a Martian invasion. Could this Pearl Harbor bombing bulletin be simply another hoax, albeit a cruel and ill-timed one?
Unsure of what to do—not knowing whether to trust his own ears—Shriver picked up the phone and called the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where his brother Herbert was stationed as a junior naval officer. “Herbert,” Sarge recalls saying when he got his brother on the phone. “Have you got the radio on?” Herbert said he did not. “Well turn it on, goddamnit,” Sarge shouted, “turn it on! The Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor!” Herbert confirmed that he was hearing the same reports over his radio set.
With some trepidation, Shriver sounded General Quarters. In 1941 there was no Internet, no satellite communications, no CNN, no network television news—no way of knowing quickly or reliably what was going on 6,000 miles away. So when Shriver flipped the switch that sounded the alarm all up and down the East Coast, sending switchboard operators aflutter trying to reach officers at their weekend country homes, or on golf courses, or at family dinners, he was initiating the first communication that most of these men were to receive regarding the attack. Moreover, when
they heard the General Quarters alarm, most of them had no way of knowing why it was being sounded. Thus, within minutes of the sounding of General Quarters, Shriver’s telephone was ringing off the hook. “Shriver!” went the typical refrain. “What the hell is going on here? You better have a damn good reason for interrupting my Sunday afternoon.”
He did. Bewildered officers, from ensigns up to admirals, began flowing into headquarters. Within twenty minutes of sounding General Quarters, Shriver was relieved of his duty as officer-on-call for the Third Naval District by a captain and was dispatched to comb through the building to make sure that all non-navy personnel were evacuated.
By the next day, the tragedy of Sunday’s events had become clearer. The Japanese air force had crippled the US battle fleet in Pearl Harbor, killing nearly 2,500 American sailors. America’s Pacific Fleet had been effectively destroyed. On December 8, President Roosevelt made his famous radio announcement: “Yesterday, December 7th, was a date which will live in infamy.” America, scarcely two decades removed from involvement in the last world conflict, was once again at war.
For a while it looked to Shriver as though he would be assigned to military intelligence. This was a dreadful prospect—it meant more desk duty. The thought of being confined to an office, analyzing Japanese ship movements or studying German submarines while his peers were sailing off to the Pacific to fight, left Shriver feeling impotent. So he put in a request to be assigned to a ship—and was assigned to the USS South Dakota, a battleship still under construction in a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey.
Even though Camden was only a few dozen miles south of New York City, Shriver knew that it might be some time before he saw his family again, so he stopped in for a final visit at their apartment on the East Side, to say good-bye, collect a few belongings, and look at his mail. In a world made topsy-turvy by war, he opened a letter that under different circumstances might have set him to rejoicing, but which now he tossed aside, noting only briefly how insignificant it seemed: He had passed the bar exam and been admitted to the New York Bar. Despite sometimes daunting financial obstacles, Sargent Shriver had become a lawyer. For the moment, however, he didn’t think of himself as such; he was an ensign, US Navy, and it was as an officer that he bid farewell to his family. It was the last time he was to see his father alive.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 10