Shriver was eager to meet her. “Here I was,” he recalled, “a measly assistant editor, a war veteran, sure, but a poor one without money or status to recommend me, especially by Kennedy standards.” But he brazenly inserted himself into her conversation. “Never had I met a woman so intelligent, so sure of herself, so well versed on so wide a range of topics,” Shriver recalled. “We ranged from domestic politics to world affairs to religion to her experiences abroad to interest in the problems of juvenile delinquency. I was dazzled by her intellect and seriousness. I left the Hoguets in a daze.”
A few days later Eunice accepted Sarge’s invitation to 5:30 p.m. tea at the Plaza Hotel, followed by a dinner party and dancing. But when he tried to kiss her goodnight she responded diffidently; in a letter to her a few years later, he would recall “that memorable evening outside the Plaza Hotel when I first kissed you only to find you picking morning glories out of the window box behind me.” Shriver was smitten, but he tried to deny himself any illusions. He recalled,
Eunice Kennedy had far more on her mind than the affections of some hotshot junior editor. And I don’t just mean she had other men. She was too busy working on the problems of the mentally retarded, helping her father with various projects, attending to the germinal political career of her brother Jack, appearing at dozens of society functions each week, and working with the Catholic Church on a host of charitable efforts. In the scope of all she had going on in her life, I was a matter of small concern.
One morning not long after his date with Eunice, the phone rang in Shriver’s office at Newsweek. He picked up the receiver and heard, as he recalled, “Shriver—This is Joe Kennedy. I’m staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Can you meet me here tomorrow morning, at eight o’clock, for breakfast?” Sarge said he could and before he could ask why. Kennedy had hung up. Joe Kennedy! What could he be calling about? Shriver wondered. Have I done something to offend his daughter?
The next morning he reported promptly at eight to Kennedy’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where breakfast had already been laid out. Kennedy didn’t waste time with small talk. “The force of his personality imposed itself on me immediately,” Shriver recalled. “He was not a terribly large man, but he had a very self-confident physical bearing and the strongest blue eyes that had ever looked at me.” Kennedy’s company, Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, was by now a sprawling operation that included interests in the filmmaking, liquor distribution, and real estate industries, among others. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Although he was fifty-eight years old, the Kennedy patriarch looked younger, trim and fit and highly attuned to everything around him. Shriver recalled the conversation as follows.
“Sit down,” Kennedy said. Shriver sat. “My daughter tells me you’re an editor.”
Shriver said he was.
“The reason I’ve brought you here today is I’ve got these papers.” He handed Shriver a manuscript. “These are all by or about my son Joe Jr. Large parts of it are his letters and diaries. It’s about what we did when we were over in England, and about what he did” in Spain in 1944, during the civil war there. Shriver riffled through the pages while Kennedy spoke. “Some people have encouraged me to publish these papers as a book. Will you take a hard look at them and give me your honest opinion about whether they should be published?” Kennedy asked. Shriver said he would. “Good,” Kennedy said. “Then let’s eat.”
Shriver had met the Ambassador’s son, Joe Kennedy Jr., several times at parties in New York City and at the Long Island estate of Shriver’s patron, John Thomas Smith, before the war. When the war was over, Shriver learned that young Joe had died in a crash when test-flying a plane over Belgium in 1944. He also knew through the grapevine that Joe Sr. had been devastated by the loss; the Kennedys were a close-knit family, and the father had clearly had high aspirations for his eldest son.
Shriver was flattered that Mr. Kennedy had selected him to pass judgment on his son’s papers. But he was baffled, too. Why, Shriver wondered, had Kennedy chosen him? He was an editor, yes, but a relatively junior one. Surely Joe Kennedy, with the connections and the influence he possessed, could have gotten someone more senior and experienced to read the papers. Shriver wondered if Mr. Kennedy was testing him.
Shriver spent the next several days reading Joe Jr.'s papers. “It was clear from reading the papers how much affection the whole Kennedy family had for Joe Jr.,” Shriver recalled, “and there were parts of the book that were quite interesting.” But the manuscript was not, he concluded, something he thought the public would want to read.
Mr. Kennedy had called and arranged for a second breakfast to discuss his son’s work. “Sorry, Mr. Kennedy,” Shriver said bravely upon joining Eunice’s father again for breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria, “but in my opinion these are not suitable for publication.” Shriver braced himself for a withering tirade.
But Kennedy, after fixing him for a long moment with his piercing blue eyes, broke into a rueful grin and said, “I didn’t think so. Thank you for your opinion. Now let’s eat.” For the next hour and a half, Kennedy asked Shriver questions about his job at Newsweek, about what he had done at Winthrop, Stimson, about his experiences in the war. When they were through, Shriver thanked Kennedy for breakfast and headed for his Newsweek office, believing that would be the last he heard from the famous businessman.
But a week later he answered the phone at his office to find Mr. Kennedy on the line again. “Shriver,” he remembers Kennedy saying to him. “I’d like to offer you a job at Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises.” Sarge was stunned. “You’re young but you’re smart,” Kennedy continued. “I could use someone like you to help me out.” Shriver thanked him for the offer and said he would think about it.
A job offer from the famous—the infamous—Joe Kennedy. What was Shriver to make of this? On the one hand, he was honored: Kennedy was known to be a harsh judge of talent, and to have been deemed worthy of a personal job offer from him seemed to Shriver a mark of some accomplishment. On the other hand, Kennedy had a bad reputation in many circles. Some said Kennedy was brilliant; others, however, said he was unscrupulous.
Shriver called around to people he knew and respected, to get their opinion of Kennedy and their advice on whether he should go to work for the man. One of the first people he spoke to was Eleanor Hoguet’s father. Robert Hoguet was still head of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank; he was also a shrewd investor in his own right and relatively wealthy. And yet he was an old-line French Catholic of the sort who might be threatened by or resentful of Kennedy’s vigorous Irish-Catholic strivings. Hoguet’s wisdom would be meaningful. “For Christ’s sake, Sarge,” Shriver remembers Hoguet telling him, “definitely work for Kennedy. You’d be a fool not to take this opportunity. He’s one of the smartest guys ever to operate on Wall Street. You’ll learn a lot from him.”
But the next person Shriver talked to was Raymond Moley, a Columbia professor and one of FDR’s early brain trusters, who had gone on to become a famous political commentator and Newsweek editor. Shriver respected him greatly and considered him a staunch ally. Shriver also knew that Moley had been for a time Joe Kennedy’s closest friend and source of information inside the Roosevelt administration. His advice would mean as much as Hoguet’s. “Joe Kennedy?” Moley said when Sarge inquired about him, “Don’t go anywhere near the bastard. Don’t you know what a complete son-of-a-bitch the guy is? He’ll eat you alive. Don’t take that job.”
Shriver asked more people their opinions of Mr. Kennedy, hoping to find some kind of consensus. He was disappointed—people’s opinions broke down almost evenly along opposing lines. Either they worshiped and admired Joe Kennedy or they feared and despised him. This was intriguing. How could different people’s feelings about one man be so drastically different—and yet always so strong?
By now, Shriver had also run afoul of Newsweek’s management by seeking to organize a union, and he was being threatened with a transfer to the magazine’s Toledo office.
“I went over things in my mind,” Shriver recalled. “I’m not getting very far here with Newsweek, I thought to myself, and my bosses don’t think as highly of my talents as I do. On the other hand, working for Kennedy could be awful.” What tipped the balance, according to Shriver, was Eunice. “In the back of my mind I knew that working for Joe would provide me an opportunity to get close to Eunice.” It’s likely that Joe Kennedy was thinking the same thing in reverse; that is, Kennedy must have known Shriver was seeing his daughter on occasion, so it’s possible—given how Kennedy stage-managed his children’s lives—that while he was officially offering the young man a job, what he was really doing was inspecting him for the position of son-in-law.
Shriver gave notice at Newsweek and went to work as an associate at Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises. Meanwhile he continued to court the boss’s daughter, who remained polite but distracted in returning her suitor’s affections.
At the end of 1946, after just a few months at JPK Enterprises in Manhattan, Joe Kennedy made Shriver another offer. “I’ve just bought this building out in Chicago,” Kennedy told him, “and I need someone to go out there and watch out for my interests. I’d like you to be my representative out at that building.” Shriver knew that the building to which Kennedy was referring was not just any building—it was the Merchandise Mart, the largest piece of real estate in the world, 4 million square feet, with room for more than 30,000 people to work inside it. Shriver was incredulous.
“Look,” Kennedy said, as Shriver recalled. “I know you don’t know anything about the real estate business. But I want you to be my eyes and ears out there, keep me abreast of what’s going on. And I want you to bring in tenants to the building. Fill her up so I can earn some rental income.”
Once again, Shriver canvassed his friends and advisers—and once again got starkly contrasting recommendations. Some businessmen who respected Kennedy thought it was a tremendous opportunity—how many thirty-one-year-olds were given the chance to be second in command at a multimillion-dollar enterprise? Others continued to advise him against it. It’s a deal with the devil, they told him. Shriver’s law school classmate Bob Stuart had grown up in Chicago. He recalls giving the following advice: “Sarge, I think you’ll enjoy Chicago, but remember, when you make a commitment to the Kennedy family you probably are pretty well committed for a long time.” Stuart, although he had gotten some money from Joe Kennedy when he founded America First, warned that “the Kennedy family was not particularly highly regarded.” A letter from his old headmaster at Canterbury chilled Shriver by implying that in signing on with Joe Kennedy, he had forsaken God for Mammon. “Thanks for your letter,” Hume wrote to him in December 1946,
in which you tell me you have given up your job with News Week and intend to go to Chicago to work for Joe Kennedy. Be sure that I wish you every success. However, I see you go with a certain feeling of disappointment.… I am not sure whether, however successful you may be, your success can be measured by any other terms than those of the amount of money you can make. Forgive me for saying this so bluntly, but if my saying so keeps your eye on what really is the main objective and doesn’t let other things get in the way of making a right use of the talents and the opportunities that come to you, then it won’t matter if the statement is a little blunt, provided you understand it is made in a spirit of great interest in you.
In the end, the lure of working for Kennedy was too attractive to resist. Here was a world-famous financier giving Shriver major responsibility for turning a giant, multimillion-dollar piece of property from a money loser into a profit maker. And, perhaps sensing the financial burden that weighed on a young man responsible for supporting his mother, Kennedy also offered him an apartment to stay in, rent free, in Chicago—Kennedy’s own residence in the Ambassador East Hotel.
Two days after accepting the position, Shriver was on the New York Central Express, the overnight train to Chicago. He walked over to the Merchandise Mart, on the north bank of the Chicago River between Wells and Orleans streets. At first glance, the building looked unimpressive. Gazing upward, he could count only eighteen stories, or twenty-five, including its towers. That was nothing compared with New York skyscrapers. But then he began to walk around the building. “Pretty soon,” Shriver recalled, “I realized I had walked two blocks and was still in front of the same building. It was enormous, about two-and-a-half football fields long.”
The Merchandise Mart had been originally constructed in 1930, at a cost of $30 million, by Marshall Field and Company, to house its offices and a collection of household furnishing wholesalers. It was, the Field company advertised, to be not only the world’s largest building but “the Colossus of Market Places.” In Chicago, which was known as the Great Central Market, buyers and sellers from around the country could find everything they needed, not just in one city, but in one building.
But the building opened for business just as the Depression took hold; for a time, it looked as though the giant building might forever be merely a monument to the grandiose expectations of the late 1920s. The Mart’s prospects had improved considerably by the end of the war, but Marshall Field valued the company on its books at only $21 million, $9 million less than the original construction cost. Although selling the building meant Marshall Field would take a loss, more than one-third of the office space was occupied by federal and state government agencies paying low rents, so the company decided it was better to sell the building as a tax write-off than to wait for the building to become profitable.
In 1934, when Joe Kennedy had joined the Roosevelt administration as head of the SEC, he had given up speculative investments. As both a matter of propriety and in the interests of securing his family’s future, he had put his money into more cautious, low-yield investments. Beginning in the early 1940s, however, he had begun to branch out into real estate—it was, some said, his attempt to distract himself from the pain of Joe Jr.'s death—and moved quickly in and out of several properties in midtown Manhattan, making enormous profits. The financial pages marveled at his canniness and bravery; using his holding company the Park Agency, he would leverage himself heavily, often borrowing more than 90 percent of the capital he needed. In July 1945, he expanded his sights beyond Manhattan and bought the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company building in Albany, New York, for a reputed $1.8 million.
That was just an appetizer. Two weeks later, in what BusinessWeek called a “thumping bargain,” Kennedy bought the Merchandise Mart for $13 million, all but $500,000 of it borrowed. Still, when he bought the building, some real estate experts were convinced that Kennedy “had become the owner of the world’s largest white elephant.” But Kennedy was shrewd. Before closing the sale, he made sure that the low-rent federal tenants would be moving out when their leases expired. Kennedy intended to fill the space left behind by the government agencies with higher-paying private tenants. This was a substantial challenge: The Merchandise Mart had 93 acres of leasing space, with 6.5 miles of plate-glass display windows and more than 6 miles of interior corridors. So the new owner launched a big promotional campaign and hired Sargent Shriver to help bring it to fruition.
Upon arrival in Chicago, Shriver found himself part of the triumvirate running the building under the distant but watchful eye of Joe Kennedy. Shriver’s office was next to Wallace Ollman’s, the Mart’s general manager. Ollman was tall and thin, and although he at times seemed reserved, he had a way of speaking that commanded attention. He and Shriver got along well. The third man in the triumvirate was the Mart’s advertising director, Tom King. Shriver’s job as assistant general manager of the building was partly administrative, but his real strength, as Kennedy had anticipated, proved to be sales, and he found himself soon after his arrival as the de facto vice president in charge of bringing companies into the building. During his twelve years at the Mart, Shriver succeeded in attracting such blue-chip tenants as NBC, Eastern Air Lines, Western Electric, Field Enterprises, and Quaker Oats.
Through Kennedy’s pre
science, Ollman’s managerial acumen, and Shriver’s salesmanship—with some help from Chicago’s postwar resurgence as an economic epicenter—the Mart was a phenomenally successful investment. By 1955 the annual revenue generated by rental income alone was more than Kennedy’s initial $13 million investment. The building became the cornerstone of the Kennedy family fortune: In 1947 Joe Kennedy established a trust dividing ownership of the Mart among family members; more than forty years later the Kennedy family sold the building to a realty company in a deal—partly brokered by Sargent Shriver—that yielded $625 million for the surviving heirs.
Shriver had never been to Chicago before being sent there for his new job, but several Illinois-based friends eagerly absorbed him into their social circles. Bob Stuart, Shriver’s old law school classmate and cofounder of America First, was living in the area with his wife and working as a junior executive in his father’s company, Quaker Oats. Lloyd Bowers was another old friend from way back; he had gone to elementary school with Shriver at the Browning School in New York. Bowers was on his way to a successful career in business, and his wife, Frances “Faffy” Bowers, hailed from an old Illinois family whose great wealth had been somewhat diminished by the Depression. Through the Bowerses, Shriver became acquainted with Bill Blair, who became one of his best friends in Chicago. William McCormack Blair was a member of the Chicago McCormacks, one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in the city. Blair had been a founding member of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, America First’s most prominent opposite number. But Blair and Shriver were both bachelors and shared a love of tennis. Because Blair’s family had an indoor tennis court on their estate, Shriver ended up spending many weekends at the Blair mansion, engaging in marathon tennis sessions punctuated by vigorous political arguments.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 14