“Relax, Shriver. The war will last a while. Sooner or later there will be plenty of action for everyone. For now, you will report to the USS S-40.”
When Shriver continued to protest, the commander erupted. “Shriver!” he yelled. “You have been assigned to San Diego! That is where you will go!”
How ignominious, Shriver thought to himself. While the battle for freedom was being fought in the Pacific, he would be stuck off the coast of San Diego running training expeditions. Walking back to the barracks, it occurred to him once again that someone must have conspired against him. “Someone didn’t want to see me back in battle in the South Pacific,” he recalled thinking. “And there was only one person that someone might be.” Knowing how resourceful his mother could be, Shriver convinced himself that Hilda had, out of concern for her son’s welfare, decided to stymie his attempt to return to battle and had called on her family connections to get him relegated to noncombat duty.
In truth, Shriver was likely projecting his own fears about returning to the Pacific onto his mother; exorcising himself of anxiety in this way made it easier to maintain the brave, even bloodthirsty, swagger that he maintained in front of his fellow officers. He dashed off a withering letter to his mother and was embarrassed, a week or so later, to receive her response. She had played no role, she insisted convincingly, in his assignment to San Diego; moreover, she pointed out archly, he ought to be old enough now to learn to accept things as they came.
Chastened, Shriver reported to S-boat duty in San Diego, still mentally cursing the bad luck that had made him late to report at Mare Island. Within ten months, however, it appeared that his luck had hardly been bad: Each of the submarines to which he had hoped he might be assigned had been sunk. All six of the New London classmates who had traveled with him to San Francisco had been killed. “God must want me to do something I haven’t done yet,” Shriver recalled thinking at the time.
The longed-for assignment to the Pacific came a year later, in January 1945, when Shriver was assigned to the USS Sandlance, a recently commissioned submarine, as a gunnery and torpedo officer. On March 13, 1945, the Sandlance cruised from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, and on April 10 it traveled to the waters off Japan. There, it sank a Japanese freighter and spent nights cruising secretly along the coasts off Honshu and Hokkaido, trying to gather intelligence for what was looking like the increasingly inevitable land invasion of Japan. After dark, the Sandlance would surface quietly, 3 or 4 miles off the coast, to refill its oxygen tanks, recharge its electrical batteries, and conduct reconnaissance. Many nights, Shriver would be the senior officer above decks, walking along the top of the submarine with two other crewmen. Gazing off toward land through his binoculars, he could see the lights of mountain villages, and he would watch freight trains chugging up and down the coastal railways in the darkness. Most of Japan was blacked out at night, to make it harder for American bombers to see their targets. It was an eerie, discomfiting experience. Standing in the dark in the vastness of the Pacific, Shriver couldn’t help but feel a strange yearning to be ashore in one of those villages, or in the compartment of one of those trains, sharing some tea or sake. He was, he realized, perceiving the humanity of his enemy. Or maybe it was just that the loneliness of the sea induced a craving for warmth wherever he could find it.
On June 6, as the Allies were securing victory in Europe, the Sandlance put in at Midway Island and readied itself for what was to be its final war patrol. But just days before the Sandlance was to depart again for Japanese waters, the last mail call brought a letter to Shriver that ordered him to report for duty back in New London. Shriver was astonished. He went to the submarine commander, Malcolm Garrison, and demanded to know why he was being transferred. Garrison said he didn’t know.
“Well, then, can’t you wire the commander of the Pacific Submarine Fleet and ask him why I’m being removed from the sub?” Shriver asked.
“Save your breath,” Shriver remembered Garrison telling him. “This is the navy. Submarine skippers don’t ask admirals for explanations.”
Shriver angrily crated up his gear and shipped it to New London, then caught the next plane to the United States. When the plane made a refueling stopover at Pearl Harbor, he got off the plane and stalked into the personnel office at submarine headquarters. The personnel officer on duty recognized him.
“What the hell are you doing here, Shriver?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be at sea!” “That’s exactly right,” declared Shriver as he threw his orders on the desk. “So explain this.”
After looking at Shriver’s orders and then rummaging around in the office files, the personnel officer determined what had happened. It turned out that there were in fact two Shrivers in the Pacific submarine fleet: Sarge and an officer who had spent the last two years on an escort vessel along the coast of Australia. The orders Sarge received had been meant for the man off Australia. Sarge was told he could rejoin the Sandlance next time it docked in Pearl Harbor. So he settled in to wait for his comrades, hoping it wouldn’t be too long before he could rejoin them.
THE BOMB
The summer of 1945 wore on. The war in Europe wound down. But although American airplanes were bombarding Tokyo nightly, the Japanese appeared willing to fight to the last man. A land invasion—sure to be as bloody and grueling as anything US soldiers had ever undertaken—looked inevitable. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was predicting that the United States would lose 50,000 soldiers simply establishing the beachhead. Secretary of War Henry Stimson would later write he had been informed that the land invasion of Japan “might be expected to cause over a million casualties to American forces alone.”
As the projected invasion became imminent, the navy sent Shriver into training to become a submarine air control officer. The plan was for Shriver to surface in a submarine off the coast of Japan and lead small groups of soldiers ashore by raft at night. These advance soldiers—six or seven men in a group—would then climb to higher ground in the mountainous regions and set up reconnaissance posts, from which they would broadcast intelligence reports: troop movements, what the topography and vegetation looked like, whether there were bombable targets available, and where the effective beachheads for Allied troops were. The goal for these advance teams was to provide as much information to the invading American soldiers as possible, without giving away their own location in the mountains.
The assignment was likely to be, Shriver knew, a suicide mission. “All of us in the submarine corps who were given these orders thought it was a death assignment,” he recalled. “We used to talk amongst ourselves that the chances of our coming back alive were about one in a hundred. If they sent twenty teams of four to five guys each at 3-mile intervals along the coast—well, it seemed to me impossible that the Japanese would not be able to find us. I figured this was it. If I didn’t get killed, it would be remarkable.”
Although no one in Shriver’s invasion team looked forward to the assignment, they did feel honored to have been chosen. “Since we couldn’t tell anyone outside of the navy,” about the top-secret mission, Shriver said, “we made ourselves feel better by talking about what hot rocks we were to be selected to be first onto the islands. We knew we had been chosen for our physical and psychological toughness, and our skills.”
For six weeks, Shriver underwent intensive training. He and his fellow team members practiced night landings and knife fighting, learned secret codes for radio transmissions, and ran up and down Hawaiian mountains. In August, as his training moved toward completion and he prepared to head once again to Japan, he endured a recurring nightmare about being captured and tortured by the Japanese.
Thus when Shriver woke up one morning to the news that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of Japanese, his first emotion was elation. Three days later, when the second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki, killing many thousands more, he felt the same thing. “All I could do was rejoice,” Shriver recalled. “It was a purely sel
fish reaction.” On August 13, the Japanese surrendered.
Shriver and his would-be invasion-force colleagues were overcome with relief. No more bloodletting. No suicide mission. No torture at the hands of the enemy. “I was still in the training camp,” Shriver recalled. “You couldn’t have had a group of people more excited and relieved than” him and his fellow submarine air control trainees. The barracks and officers’ quarters were abuzz with jubilant conversation: When are you going home? Have you talked to your mother and father? Have you called your girlfriend?
Shriver, as a full lieutenant who had seen plenty of combat and been in the armed forces since 1940, was one of the men eligible for earliest release from active duty, and on September 2, 1945, he was detached from the 102nd Submarine Division. Every waking moment he would bask in the feeling of not being at war, of not being about to be killed. He prayed to God and gave thanks for being spared, and he promised to make the most of his remaining years on earth.
For Shriver, who had been raised on the nobility of war—on the justness of the American Revolution, on the tragic grandeur of the Lost Cause in the Civil War, on the heroism of the myriad Shriver soldiers through history—the actual experience of combat had begun to change his view. As his joy at being spared the invasion of Japan receded, it began to be replaced by chagrin at his own rejoicing. The power of atomic weaponry had caused the moral universe to shift on its axis.
Shriver never doubted the justness of the American cause in World War II. But the horror of combat, of seeing carnage up close, solidified his conviction that war was not a noble calling but rather something assiduously to be avoided. The battle for freedom had been won—but the lives of more than 400,000 American servicemen had been lost. “The war had a profound effect on me,” Shriver once said. “I gained a greater understanding of what Jesus Christ had done in trying to spare us war.”
It had been only about four years since he had left the ivied quadrangles of Yale, but Shriver felt considerably older, wiser, and more humble than he had in the spring of 1941. And although his natural ebullience could not be suppressed for long, the young war hero—now on the cusp of his thirties—returned to civilian life with his tragic sense deepened. His faith, however, remained strong.
PART TWO
The Chicago Years (1945–1960)
CHAPTER FIVE
Joseph P. Kennedy
Sarge returned to New York in time for Christmas in 1945, moved into the spare bedroom in his mother’s place at 151 East Eighty-third Street, and began work at the law firm of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts. He hated it. After serving on a submarine during combat, where every decision could have literal life-or-death consequences, working on minor corporate legal problems as a junior associate seemed absurdly trivial. Shriver would not have chosen to return to war under any circumstances. But the contrast between what he had done between 1941 and 1945, on the one hand, and what he was doing now, on the other, was so stark it left him feeling discombobulated. Many returning servicemen were enduring the same trials; war heroes, thrilled to be victorious, reveling in the very mundanity of everyday life during peacetime, were at the same time confused about who they were and what their postwar role was.
Shriver’s natural restlessness compounded the problem. He couldn’t abide sitting still for long. He needed action and challenges. And he needed creative energy to be flowing around him. Winthrop, Stimson was one of the most respected firms on Wall Street. But the way to advance at a firm like Winthrop, Stimson was to keep your nose to the grindstone, working diligently and patiently toward achieving partnership. Shriver was by nature neither quiet nor patient, and he couldn’t bear sitting at a desk all day. “I’m bored,” he told his mother. Wasn’t there more to life than wrestling with tax problems?
Around this time, an assistant editor’s position opened up at Newsweek magazine. Sarge learned about it from his Yale roommate, Mac Muir, whose father, Malcolm, was now the magazine’s publisher. Shriver was well qualified for the job—not only had he edited the Yale Daily News but he had also reported articles for Time magazine in the late 1930s—so Mac’s father hired him. His position was special assistant to Muir himself, and his unofficial role was “idea man,” tasked with coming up with story ideas and ways to improve the magazine. But Shriver’s fertile mind produced ideas faster than the magazine’s institutional structure was equipped to digest them. He was dismayed when his ideas languished on Muir’s desk or got bowdlerized in committee meetings.
Shriver exorcised his frustrations by maintaining a vigorous social life. In 1946 the frosty early winds of the cold war had already begun to blow, but for the most part life still felt like one long victory party. “As a decorated veteran,” Shriver said, “I could go to the 21 Club and always get a plum table. I’d wear my medals and go from party to party, the Plaza, the St. Regis, the Waldorf-Astoria, dancing late into the evening.”
Many unmarried servicemen returned from the war and threw themselves into torrid romances, a sizable number of which resulted in rash, ill-advised marriages. Whether by luck or by discernment, Shriver avoided this fate. Partly it was that he had so many female admirers—why should he limit himself to the company of just one woman when so many of them were clamoring for his attention? But Shriver was also very particular about the qualities he sought in a wife. He wanted her to be beautiful, of course, but more important than that he was looking for someone who was intelligent and driven, someone with a personality strong enough that she wouldn’t constantly be shrinking in his considerable presence. And he wanted a wife who was as devoutly Catholic as he was. (Some of Shriver’s friends say that he also wanted a wife who had money.) This constellation of qualities was rare enough to prevent him from meeting the unhappy marital fate of many of his peers.
Although Eleanor Hoguet DeGive, Shriver’s longtime paramour, was now married, he remained friendly with her and her large extended family, and he regularly attended parties at the lavish Hoguet mansion at 47 East Ninety-second Street. At one of these parties, in 1946, Shriver recalled,
there was this breathtakingly beautiful woman, surrounded by a bouquet of men, all appearing to clamor for her conversational attention. Her beauty was not an ordinary one; it was starker, more austere. Her dress didn’t look as expensive or fashionable as the ones the other girls were wearing. But she conveyed a magnificent sense of complete self-possession. As she held forth on some subject or another, the men and women around her stood rapt. I was intrigued.
Shriver walked over to join the woman’s colloquy. “She was talking about politics and foreign affairs and describing her experience at the Court of St. James, in England, where her father had been ambassador during the war,” Shriver said. “Aha,’ I thought to myself: ‘So this is Eunice Kennedy.’ ”
Eunice Mary Kennedy. Shriver had never met her before, but he had met members of her family over the years, and he certainly knew her family by its growing reputation. He had gone to school with Jack at Canterbury, and he had become well acquainted with Eunice’s older sister, the effervescent Kathleen, whose best friend through the 1930s had been Eleanor Hoguet. Jack Kennedy, no longer the sallow little runt Shriver had known at Canterbury, had become a war hero. After the war Jack had gone to San Francisco as a journalist to cover the founding meeting of the United Nations. Now, like Shriver, bored with journalism, he was exploring a career in politics and contemplating a run for Congress in Massachusetts’s Eleventh District.
The Kennedy with the most outsized reputation was still the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. The son of Patrick Kennedy, a Boston barkeep, and the son-in-law of the colorful John Francis Fitzgerald, widely known as “Honey” Fitz, the first native-born Irish Catholic to be elected mayor of Brahmin-dominated Boston, Joe Kennedy had in his way outdone both of them. Rising through the ranks of the Boston banking industry, he went on to make a fortune in finance and the movie industry. During the Depression, when most financial speculators were wiped out, Kennedy shrewdly shorted
the market and got richer. This not only solidified his reputation as a shrewd financier and investor, but it also contributed to his reputation as a shady operator. This reputation, in turn, led to FDR’s inspired decision to install Kennedy as founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934: Kennedy, President Roosevelt figured correctly, knew all the illicit speculators’ tricks and therefore would be able to spot malfeasance in the markets before anyone else could. After a successful term in that post from 1934 to 1935, Kennedy had been rewarded by being appointed head of the United States Maritime Commission and subsequently with a posting to the Court of St. James, as ambassador to England, where he served from 1937 to 1940.
In England the large Kennedy brood had become darlings of the society pages; their comings and goings were chronicled as though they were American royalty. As the drums of war beat ever louder in Europe, Kennedy had kept his name in the American papers by boldly declaring that the United States should stay out of the war. Kennedy supported Chamberlain’s compromise at Munich and argued that the United States should simply make its peace with Germany and let it have the run of Europe. As damning as this position seems in retrospect, Kennedy’s motivations were not malignant: Like Shriver, he was familiar with the damage and the death toll that the Great War had wreaked on Europe, and he did not want American soldiers—and particularly his own sons, Joe, Jack, Bobby, and Teddy—getting killed for somebody else’s business. Kennedy’s stance against the US involvement in the war through 1939 and 1940 had endeared him to Shriver and the founders of America First at Yale.
Eunice Kennedy had an imposing reputation in her own right. Shriver had known of her existence for years—she had gone to the Noroton School of the Sacred Heart just after Eleanor Hoguet and Kathleen Kennedy had left there, and Eunice had followed Eleanor by a few years at Manhattanville College. During the war, she would appear on both British and American society pages with the rest of her family, and she was often seen around New York society on the arms of dukes, industrialists, and celebrities.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 13