Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  In 1948 this group coalesced around the gubernatorial campaign of Adlai Stevenson, an Illinois Democrat. Blair permanently switched party affiliations to become one of Stevenson’s top aides-de-camp. Shriver would have joined Stevenson’s staff as a part-time paid staffer if Mr. Kennedy had not snuffed the idea. “My political life is temporarily shattered,” Shriver wrote to Eunice in October 1948. “The Democratic candidate for governor, Adlai Stevenson, through his local staff, offered me a job writing speeches and propaganda, but your Dad said nix.”

  By 1947 Shriver was beginning to establish himself as a man about town. For a few months he had a serious girlfriend, Helena Carter, a beautiful B-movie actress from New York, who briefly edged out Eunice as the primary object of his affections. He had a regular table in the Ambassador East Pump Room—Table 1, which was Joe Kennedy’s when he was in town—where Chicago’s celebrities came to see and be seen.

  “I was having a great time,” Shriver recalled. “I was squiring the most beautiful ladies around town. I had season tickets for the White Sox baseball team. I hobnobbed with the Chicago elite at the Pump Room.” Life in Chicago began to look as though it held real promise. But just as he was beginning to feel settled in Chicago, he was told to leave.

  “Sarge,” said Mr. Kennedy, “I need you to go to Washington to help Eunice.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eunice

  In 1947 Eunice Kennedy was an astonishingly accomplished and well-traveled young woman. The fifth child of Joe and Rose, Eunice had from early childhood set herself apart from her siblings. With the exception of Rosemary, the eldest daughter, who had been born with behavioral and developmental problems and later underwent a partial lobotomy in an attempt to “cure” her, all the Kennedy girls were sharp, worldly, and bright. Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, and Jean were eight years apart from oldest (Kathleen) to youngest (Jean). Amid this tight-knit group, Eunice and Kathleen were distinct, Kathleen as the most socially effervescent, Eunice as the smartest. Eunice also displayed a commitment to religion and to public service that went beyond what the other members of this very public-spirited family showed.

  Eunice worshiped her father and inherited from him many of his distinctive traits: an acute intelligence; a savvy political sense; a total lack of patience; an unwillingness to suffer fools gladly; and an almost superhuman willpower that gave her the ability to set goals and achieve them, no matter who or what stood in her way. All these qualities were leavened in her by a devout religiousness that exceeded her father’s, and by a physical frailty that often left her incapacitated.

  The brother to whom Eunice was closest in both age and friendship—Jack—was also the brother she most resembled in her combination of political intelligence and weak physical health. They both had an uncanny ability to size up a political situation instantly, and they endured the same litany of medical ailments, including back problems, legions of stomach problems, and Addison’s disease. Eunice’s chronic stomach problems left her consistently underweight, leading her family to call her “Puny Eunie.”

  As war broke out in Europe in the fall of 1939, Eunice returned to the United States, where she began her undergraduate education at Manhattanville College in New York. She did not particularly enjoy the two years she spent there. One reason for her unhappiness at Manhattanville was the suffering of her older sister Rosemary. By the fall of 1941, Rosie’s behavior had begun to seem uncontrollable. She kept escaping from the convent where she was in school. Despite her stunted emotional and intellectual development, Rosemary had grown up to be a physically attractive young woman. Her parents feared she would fall prey to “pregnancy, disease, and disgrace” at the hands of some predatory young man. Meanwhile, magazines were lauding the effects of an experimental new medical technique called “psycho-surgery”—in other words, a partial lobotomy. “The doctors told my father it was a good idea” for Rosemary, Eunice recalled. The operation was not a success. Rosemary “regressed into an infantlike state, mumbling a few words, sitting for hours staring at the walls, only traces left of the young woman she had been, still with those flashes of rage.”

  Desolate over the fate of her elder sister, Eunice had transferred in January 1942 to Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, where it was hoped that the temperate climate would warm her soul. It didn’t. She studied—and played—with her characteristic intensity, but she did not enjoy herself, especially now that the war was on.

  After graduation, Eunice returned east to the family estate at Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. But any emotional respite was short-lived. On the second Sunday in August 1944, Joe and Rose, along with their children Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Pat, Jean, and Eunice (Kathleen was in England with her husband, and Rosemary was in an institution) learned that Joe Jr. had died in a plane crash. Eunice, now twenty-four, dealt with her grief by throwing herself into unrelenting motion, “as if by sheer will and frenetic activity she could remake the family lives. Tennis. Golf. Touch football. Charades. Game after game. Challenge after challenge. Competition after competition.”

  She also threw herself into the world of politics and public policy. Through her father’s connections, she got a job at the State Department in Washington, where she worked on issues having to do with returning prisoners of war from Germany. And in 1946, after the war was over, she moved with Jean and Pat into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, where Jack had just declared his candidacy for Massachusetts’s Eleventh Congressional District.

  In some ways, Eunice took more naturally to politics than her brother. She loved the intellectual challenge of campaigning, loved the competitiveness of it. Many observers, both inside the family and outside of it, have commented that had she been born a generation later, she (not Jack) would have ultimately been the presidential candidate. As her father memorably put it, “If that girl had been born with balls she would have been one hell of a politician.” Jack’s friend George Smathers, a congressman from Florida, put it more delicately in 1976: “Of all the kids in the family, Eunice was far and away the strongest minded. Sort of the leader of the clan. Very tough when she wanted to be. Eunice would have loved to be the one the father picked to run in the Eleventh Congressional District in ’46. If she’d been a little older, and if it had been today, when a lot of women are running for office, I suspect the history of the Kennedy clan would have been quite different.”

  On July 18, 1946, Jack Kennedy stunned many observers by winning his Democratic primary and then coasting to victory in November in the heavily Democratic Eleventh District. The astonishing run of Kennedy family electoral success had begun.

  Jack moved to a three-story townhouse on Thirty-first Street in Georgetown. Eunice was spending a lot of time in New York, where she was doing social work in the Harlem ghetto. But she wanted to be at the center of the action, and that was in Washington with Jack.

  In 1945, as the war ended, the US crime rate soared to record levels and then continued to rise in successive years. By 1947, according to the Justice Department, out of a population of less than 150 million there were 7 million criminals. And of those 7 million, half were under twenty-one years of age. Confronted with what was becoming known as the “crisis of juvenile delinquency,” Harry Truman’s attorney general Tom Clark had formed the Attorney General’s Panel on the Juvenile Problem. Over the course of 1946, the panel had hosted two large conferences for representatives from community service organizations. Now Clark wanted the panel to become permanent.

  Eunice’s work on Jack’s campaign and in Harlem had attracted some attention, and just after Christmas 1946, Joe Kennedy got a letter in Palm Beach from Clark, asking if Eunice might come to work in the Justice Department, as head of the new Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. It was an enormous responsibility to offer a twenty-five-year-old woman. “I think that someone with her training and background,” Attorney General Clark wrote of Eunice, “would do wonders in keeping this worthwhile work” on juvenile delinquency going.

  As a result of her work in
Harlem, Eunice had grown passionate about the problem of juvenile delinquency, and she accepted Clark’s offer. So in January 1947 Eunice joined her brother, his legislative assistant, and their longtime housekeeper Margaret Ambrose in Jack’s Georgetown townhouse and began her job as executive secretary for the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. “Substantial efforts must be made to keep adolescents from quitting school at fourteen or fifteen and to give them a chance to learn a trade or develop special skills,” she announced to reporters as she began her job. Strikingly tall and skinny, with the high cheekbones of a film starlet, the new Justice Department employee arrived in Washington “in a burst of publicity surpassing even the attention received by her older brother, who, after all, was merely another new member of the House.”

  But Eunice was not well organized; the size of her new task soon overwhelmed her, as Jack reported to their father. So Mr. Kennedy sent for his new assistant manager at the Merchandise Mart. “You’re a lawyer,” Shriver remembers Kennedy telling him. “She’s in the Justice Department. Go down and help her.”

  In 1947 there were two things Shriver particularly wanted: to advance in the world by impressing his boss, and to woo Eunice Kennedy. So when Mr. Kennedy commanded him to “help Eunice,” it seemed his stars were aligned—doing his boss’s bidding meant spending time with the object of his affections.

  The situation posed formidable challenges. In 1947 it could not have been easy for an ambitious young man to have a woman for a superior—especially if the young man hoped to marry her. Although Shriver was now technically an employee of the federal government, there was not yet money in the Justice Department budget to pay his salary. So he earned a nominal government salary of one dollar while Joe Kennedy continued to pay his regular salary. This reinforced the strangeness of Shriver’s position: working under Eunice Kennedy, and also courting her, while being paid by her father.

  Both Sarge and Eunice were frustrated by the glacial pace of government bureaucracy. Inflamed with enthusiasm for addressing the problems of juvenile delinquency, they formulated grandiose plans for fixing them. But to make anything actually happen proved extremely hard. There were forms to fill out, red tape to negotiate, approvals to seek. For two young strivers accustomed to getting things accomplished fast, this was infuriating.

  Charles Bartlett, the political columnist who became a close friend to Jack Kennedy, said it was clear that “Sarge was in love with Eunice” from the day Shriver reported for duty at the Justice Department: “Eunice was not so sure that she was romantically interested in Sarge, but she was not fickle in her demands. She worked with him all day calling out his name again and again—'sarge … Sarge … Sarge …’—in an overwrought voice that was less a request than a command.… She thought nothing of calling his apartment in the middle of the night, considering Sarge the best available cure for her insomnia.”

  While Eunice lived with her brother in the fancy Georgetown townhouse, Shriver took up residence in much more modest quarters, sharing a bedroom in the bachelor’s residence of his college friends Merle Thorpe and Walter Ridder, who had a small house on N Street Northwest. “He and Eunice saw a lot of each other,” Ridder recalled some years later, and it was clear to him that Shriver was in love. But her late-night phone calls—which inevitably woke Ridder up, since he shared Sarge’s bedroom—suggested the interest was mutual. “She was thinking about him. She wasn’t well at the time. She was having trouble sleeping. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, want someone to talk to, and give Sarge a ring. I can remember him jabbering away with her at three or even four o’clock in the morning.”

  Shriver spent a great deal of time at the Kennedy townhouse. He liked Jack Kennedy and was impressed by his intelligence and charisma—indeed, at times he had a hard time believing that the poised, charming, and self-possessed man who presided over the Georgetown salon was the same person who had seemed so out of his depth at Canterbury School, not much more than ten years earlier. Jack liked Shriver well enough, too, and treated him with respect because he knew how highly his father thought of Sarge. But Jack and his younger brother Bobby had trouble taking Sarge entirely seriously: being Eunice’s deputy, as well as her most ardent suitor, made Shriver appear to the Kennedy brothers to be almost an appendage to their sister, rather than an individual in his own right. Pat Kennedy, for her part, initially found Sarge to be an insufferable flirt, incorrigibly charming and unserious in his approach to life. “If you think you can change Sargent Shriver, Eunice,” she told her sister, “you must be out of your mind!”

  Jack frequently entertained his fellow congressmen, and Shriver enjoyed meeting these politicians from all over the country. He met only one he didn’t like. On one evening, Kennedy invited a group of his fellow freshmen congressmen to the house for dinner. It was a large crowd, and some of the guests who couldn’t fit at the large dining-room tables spilled over onto small, outlying tables. As Shriver recalled,

  I ended up alone at a table with this freshman Republican from California I’d never met before. It was the oddest experience: I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on this guy. I couldn’t pin down what his opinions on anything were. He bobbed and weaved, like a cowardly boxer. Half the time, it seemed he was barely paying attention to me. He’d be looking over my shoulder at the other tables, as though he were trying to eavesdrop, trying to figure out what the other congressmen were saying. It’s rare that someone makes as strong an impression on you as this guy did on me. But I came away thinking that he was smart, crafty, and a scheming conniver, more interested in establishing his position with Jack and other luminaries than in anything I was saying.

  Such was Shriver’s first encounter with Richard M. Nixon.

  Eunice liked Sarge well enough and appreciated the help he provided at the Justice Department, but she remained for the most part indifferent to his feelings for her. She was too preoccupied with work. Although they did see each other socially, and even, toward the end of their time in Washington, would indulge in an illicit office-hours kiss (“Remember how you would let me,” Sarge wrote to Eunice in a letter a year later, “chase you around the Justice Department office, letting me kiss all the lipstick off your face just before you were to see the Attorney General?”), Eunice was more passionate about her job than about Shriver. To him, of course, this only demonstrated how virtuous she was, and therefore how worthy of his affections, and served to fuel his desire. “Government girls should stick at their jobs four years and then get married,” Eunice told a newspaper reporter. “As for me, I’m sure all my sisters will be married long before I am!”

  On June 19, 1948, after less than a year on the job, Eunice and Shriver jointly resigned from the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. The official reason for the resignation was, as Eunice told the press, “I finished the job I had to do.” Attorney General Clark accepted her resignation with “exceeding regret” and insisted that there was no “story-behind-the-story” to the resignation. And—the sudden death of her sister Kathleen in a plane crash on May 13, 1948, notwithstanding—there wasn’t any single precipitating event that caused her to leave. But her pent-up frustration over her inability to have a faster impact on juvenile delinquency had boiled over. She felt restless and wanted to go abroad. She planned in August to sail for England and to travel from there to France, Spain, and Italy. After that she planned to return to the United States to study social work.

  Less-driven people might have been quite satisfied with what Kennedy and Shriver accomplished. Building on the attorney general’s work, they assembled an impressive continuing committee headed by G. Howland Shaw, a former assistant secretary of state, and including Hubert Humphrey, the liberal young mayor of Minneapolis, among many others. They established an organizational structure and a budget for the committee. And, in convening dozens of local conferences and a few major national ones, they helped establish a constructive approach to reducing juvenile delinquency.

  They also developed a model for social a
ction that both of them would employ later in life when they were entrusted with much larger responsibilities. Kernels of ideas that animated the War on Poverty two decades later, for instance, are evident in the prospectus that Shriver and Kennedy wrote for the committee in the summer of 1947. They thought big; unlike traditional bureaucrats, they thought in terms ungoverned by normal institutional constraints. The attack on juvenile delinquency was to be multipronged and “not limited to formal agencies.” (Here is evidence of Sarge’s lifelong aversion to the strictures of “formal agencies.”) “The attack on delinquency cannot be piece-meal,” they wrote, but rather must be a coordinated assault that drew together the work of juvenile courts, local police departments, recreation and parks programs, guidance centers, probation officers, social case workers, parents, social scientists, and volunteers. The prospectus stated that the attack on delinquency should be made “by the people themselves, in their own communities, striking at their own local problems.” This emphasis on “joint community action” anticipates the core ideas of both the Peace Corps and elements of the War on Poverty, particularly its Community Action Programs. The notion did not originate with Shriver, but his emphasis on local empowerment of impoverished groups constitutes one of his most revolutionary ideas.

  The time Shriver spent with Eunice in Washington convinced him that she was the woman he wanted to marry. But while Eunice respected his abilities and was flattered by his attentions, his constant, insistent presence could be cloying. Marry him? She didn’t know about that. For the moment she had too many other things to think about. When she left Washington in the early summer of 1948 and then sailed for Europe a few weeks later, Sarge was just one of the many things on her mind.