CHAPTER SEVEN
The Long Courtship
In the summer of 1948 Shriver returned to Chicago to resume work at the Merchandise Mart. In some ways, it felt liberating to be back, working with businessmen and entrepreneurs rather than bureaucrats and policymakers. As he wrote to Eunice in September, “I was just so happy to be rid of that Washington mess that I’ve selfishly put the whole thing behind me—a closed chapter.”
Many of Shriver’s friends from this time remember him as carefree and content, but his letters to Eunice tell a different story. In one he writes, “This weekend it is Bill Blair’s place—open & indoor tennis courts, swimming pools, gay young things, Sat. night party, etc. But despite it all, darling, I think only of you & want only you.”
In another, from December 1948, he wrote, “In the middle of a dinner party I’m suddenly, horribly, & painfully alone.… Last night at the Rendezvous I was alone, on the dance floor even there I’m alone. Tonight it’s Sylvia Whitehouse; tomorrow a big dinner party at the St. Regis for Willa & Herbert [Shriver]; tomorrow night back to a party for Kathy MacMahon. And on every one of those nights I laugh and dance and probably flirt & suddenly & piercingly & all over again & all over & through me I’ll be alone. Oh! how I would that you loved me!”
But as she traveled through Europe with her sister Jean, Eunice remained frustratingly, if affectionately, aloof. Hardened by the deaths of two siblings and accustomed by the constant presence of her physical ailments to enduring suffering, Eunice had developed a tough inner core that Shriver found profoundly attractive. “You who don’t cry,” Shriver wrote to her, “you who never feel deserted, you who never need the devoted love & help of a friend, a lover, a saint—you, adorable one, I want! I want no clinging vine, no flattering helpless creature; for it is your courage & strength, precious, that make you a desirable creature to comfort in an hour of tribulation.”
Lending Shriver’s peculiar set of circumstances—working for the father, living in the father’s apartment, while pining for the daughter—an even stronger Oedipal tinge was the stationery on which Shriver wrote many of his letters to Eunice: Using black pen, he would cross out the “Joseph P. Kennedy” across the top of the letterhead.
THE BOSS’S DAUGHTER
Although Sarge’s declarations of love seemed not to have much effect on Eunice, his work at the Merchandise Mart continued to impress her father, an irony that both pleased and frustrated Shriver. “Your Dad has been here for several days,” he wrote to Eunice in London, “& I’m proud as punch of the confidence he appears to put in me; I’ve an awful lot to learn, I know that; but he seems to think I’m worth telling things to. And he even tells me some things he doesn’t tell everyone else! For my money that’s terrific. Now if you’d do the same, my heaven would already have arrived here on earth!”
By Thanksgiving of 1948, Eunice and Jean had returned to New York from their European travels. When it came to seem a real possibility that Eunice might move permanently to Chicago—might she finally succumb to his constant marriage proposals?—Shriver began to worry more about the relative disparity in family wealth. Shriver felt he could not expect the wealthy Kennedy heiress to accept a marriage proposal unless he could support her on his own. “I should have known,” he wrote Eunice, “that our Lord would someday let me meet a girl like you who is worth every penny I’ve ever earned or could ever earn, & I should have saved my money just to be able to give it all to her.” “Incidentally,” he wrote in another letter, “did your mother say she waited for your Father because he had no dough, but that consideration did not apply to you and me? I hope she hasn’t any illusions on that score! Your Pop hasn’t, I’m sure, because I’ve gone out of my way to see to it he knows the facts.”
Shriver was also anxious to establish himself as a man of accomplishment. Middle age was now visible in the distance—he was thirty-three—and he felt he had yet to make his mark on the world. Some of his friends had become men of means, and others were rising through the ranks of their professional universes. Eunice’s brother Jack—who was a year younger than Shriver—was already in his second term in Congress. Too much of the previous twelve years, Shriver felt, had been spent in fruitless pursuit of will-o-the-wisps, or in unproductive activities that yielded him no real world advancement. “I’m a way behind time,” he wrote Eunice, “in starting to get something done with my life, first because I spent 3 years after college going to law school, 5 more in the Navy, 10 months at Newsweek, & finally 1½ years with you in Washington.” Although he didn’t necessarily regret any of these things, he said, the time he had spent doing them meant he now “should stick close to my knitting.”
Eunice remained consumed by her commitment to public service. She was still interested in the problem of juvenile delinquency, particularly among women, so in 1950 she traveled to Alderson, West Virginia, to live on the grounds of the Federal Penitentiary for Women for two months. Shriver once said, “I used to say that I’m the only guy I know who went and courted a woman at a federal penitentiary.”
In 1950 Eunice moved into an apartment at the Ambassador East in Chicago with Jean, just upstairs from Shriver, and took a job as a social worker at the House of the Good Shepherd, where she worked with wayward teenage girls, trying to rehabilitate them and help them return to mainstream society. Meanwhile, she enrolled in the social work program at the University of Chicago. Shriver was naturally thrilled to have her living in the same city—and in the same building—with him. But though they continued to see each other with some regularity, Shriver began to resign himself to the likelihood that she would never consent to marry him. “After going out with her on and off for several years, and wanting to marry her for much of that time, I had pretty much given up hope,” Shriver recalled. “I don’t think she had anything against me; I just think she was working on so many projects at once, and her family was so consuming, she just didn’t have the time to focus on whether she even wanted to marry at some point. But after a while I began to doubt she would ever have the time. So I tried to write off the possibility of ever marrying her.” Meanwhile, Eunice was romantically linked to (the soon-to-be-infamous) Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, but she eventually passed him on to her sister Pat. Eunice also introduced Pat to the actor Peter Lawford, whom Pat eventually married.
During this time when Sarge and Eunice’s romance cooled, their intellectual partnership solidified and grew. Shriver toned down the ardent desperation of his letters; their correspondence became less passionate, but more substantive. Eunice wrote to him from the Alderson penitentiary asking him for advice, and he wrote back with ideas for programs she could start there. He wrote letters to church organizations and government agencies on her behalf and put her in contact with relevant Merchandise Mart business connections, with whom he thought the prison might be able to set up arrangements for teaching the inmates job skills. When she moved to Chicago and began work at the House of the Good Shepherd, he regularly accompanied her to the home for wayward girls on Grace Street and gave her ideas for programs. Eunice had already developed a great respect for his intellect and judgment based on their experience in the Justice Department; now, she found she was becoming dependent on him for these qualities.
KENNEDY VERSUS LODGE
One night in the winter of 1952 the phone rang at the Kennedy sisters’ apartment in the Ambassador East. It was Jack calling. He had decided to run for the Senate and he wanted their help.
As early as 1949, after he won reelection to his Eleventh District congressional seat, it had been almost a foregone conclusion that Jack Kennedy would run for higher office. Ever since Joe Jr. had been killed seven years earlier, Joe Sr. had placed all his own stymied presidential ambitions—which he had previously reposed on Joe Jr.—onto Jack. Joe Kennedy would not be satisfied until Jack was elected president. And although in 1952 it looked unlikely that this would ever happen—Jack was nothing but a diffident backbencher, one who hardly looked old enough to be in the House o
f Representatives—Joe Kennedy would not let his son remain content to be a mere congressman.
In 1952 the respected Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who hailed from a Brahmin family that had been prominent for years in New England politics, was up for reelection. Jack coveted the opportunity to run against him—in part because beating Lodge would establish Kennedy as a political player to be reckoned with, but also in part because it would be sweet revenge for the Kennedy family, and indeed for the entire Irish immigrant population: Thirty-six years earlier, in 1916, a time when animosity between Irish Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Protestants ran high, Lodge’s grandfather had beaten out Jack’s grandfather, Honey Fitz, for the same Senate seat in a bitter campaign. The prospect of historical redress was delicious to the Kennedy family.
Jack sprang into action, beginning to build the “Kennedy machine” that would drive his presidential campaign eight years hence. It included all the Kennedy brothers and sisters (except Rosemary); Bobby Kennedy’s Harvard friend Kenny O’Donnell; Larry O’Brien, a local Irishman and Jack’s contemporary, who had deep political connections all over the state; and Jim Landis, a twenty-year veteran of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, a longtime New Dealer, and a friend of Joe’s. At the machine’s center was not the candidate but rather the candidate’s father.
After Joe Kennedy’s volatile temper threatened to derail the campaign, Bobby Kennedy reluctantly took on the role of official campaign manager. But Joe remained the engine of the operation, running things with his brain trust from behind the scenes. Kennedy allowed only those people he trusted completely into the brain trust. And along with Landis, O’Brien, and O’Donnell, that brain trust included Sargent Shriver.
In some ways, Shriver was the odd man out among the Kennedy brain trusters. There were the local operatives—like Frank Morrissey, Tony Galluccio, and Joseph DeGuglielmo—who knew the Massachusetts political scene up and down. There was the young Irish crowd, sometimes called (with either affection or derision, depending on who was doing the talking) the “Irish Mafia”—who were closest to Jack. And there were the Jim Landis types, with backgrounds in academia or Democratic presidential administrations.
But if Shriver lacked the combination of qualities that would have placed him neatly in one of these categories, he did have traits that placed him at the center of the campaign: intelligence, energy, and above all the confidence of Mr. Kennedy. So much so, in fact, that when Shriver moved to Boston in the summer of 1952, he took up residence in the Ambassador’s apartment at 84 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill, just down the road from the state house and around the corner from Jack’s headquarters at 122 Bowdoin Street. The Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy had separate bedrooms, as was the custom in some Catholic families; Shriver’s bedroom lay right in between them. Indeed, living in Mr. Kennedy’s apartment in Chicago, and working for him, and living next to him in Boston, Shriver seemed almost to have become the Ambassador’s adopted son; for Shriver, whose mother had been widowed a decade earlier, this was like gaining a father.
Of course, Kennedy never granted Shriver pride of place before his biological sons, and there was often something instrumental in the way he used Shriver, demanding that he shelve his own political ambitions in deference to Jack’s. But Shriver’s adoption of Kennedy as a father figure was instrumental in its way, too. In the late 1940s, Shriver had told the Hoguets he intended to apprentice himself to a top businessman, as a way of advancing himself in the world.
Sharing an apartment with the Ambassador and his wife, Rose, allowed him for the first time to become well-acquainted with Eunice’s mother, with whom he soon developed a special relationship. He, like many people, was charmed by her warmth and style. Rose, in turn, sympathized with his plight in courting a woman (Eunice) from a more affluent, higher-status family: Her husband had faced similar circumstances in courting her forty years earlier. This endeared Sarge to her. Also, Rose, along with Eunice, was the most devoutly Catholic member of her family and she recognized a similar devoutness in Sarge.
The odds against a Kennedy victory looked long. Lodge had been a prominent fixture of Massachusetts politics for twenty years and had convincingly beaten three of the state’s most popular Irish politicians, including the notorious James Michael Curley, whom he had outpolled by nearly 150,000 votes when Lodge first ran for the Senate at the tender age of thirty-four.
As Shriver studied Lodge’s record, he became increasingly worried that it would be hard to make a distinction between the candidates that would play in Jack’s favor, especially among liberal voters. When Shriver told the Ambassador this, Joe decided on a two-pronged strategy: Jack would move left on the issues in an effort to secure the liberal vote, while Joe would try to turn conservatives embittered by the scuttling of Ohio senator Robert Taft’s presidential candidacy (which the moderate Lodge had helped to derail) against the incumbent. Republicans were scarce enough in the Bay State that Lodge depended on the votes of crossover Democrats to gain electoral victory. The thinking in the Kennedy campaign was that if they could prevail upon the Democratic presidential candidate to campaign for Jack, and to emphasize the young congressman’s liberal bona fides, it would be greatly to Jack’s advantage.
Here, Shriver’s ties to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, proved useful. (Shriver’s close friend Bill Blair was by now Governor Stevenson’s top aide and constant companion, and his friend Newt Minow was serving as Stevenson’s campaign manager.) Adlai himself liked Sarge and thought highly of his abilities. Thus when Governor Stevenson was about to pass through Massachusetts on a campaign swing, he called Shriver at Joe Kennedy’s apartment and asked him for a list of things he should and should not do while in the Northeast. Shriver responded with a memo suggesting that the Illinois governor point out Jack Kennedy’s support for some of the more liberal policies in President Truman’s “Fair Deal.” He also asked that Stevenson refrain from attacking Joe McCarthy—who had dated both Eunice and Pat and remained a close friend of the Ambassador’s—on the logic that the stronger Jack appeared on communism and domestic subversives, the more it would hurt Lodge among the Republicans angry at his dismissal of the staunchly anti-Communist Taft. “Up here this anti-communist business is a good thing to emphasize,” Shriver wrote.
Stevenson heeded Shriver’s advice, and on the weekend he passed through New England, giving a noontime speech in Springfield, he praised John Kennedy as “my type of guy” and emphasized Kennedy’s strong anti-Communist stance. Following a suggestion from Shriver, Stevenson also pointed out that it was Kennedy, and not Eisenhower’s running mate Richard Nixon, who had obtained the first citation of a Communist labor leader for perjury. Stevenson’s carefully modulated endorsement seemed to have the desired effect: On election day, Kennedy won large swathes of both conservative Taft supporters and liberal Stevenson supporters.
Shriver’s role in the campaign, although significant, was probably less determinative than Eunice’s. Eunice, Jean, Pat, and their mother, Rose, along with Bobby’s young wife, Ethel, hosted teas throughout the state, which turned out female voters in droves. A quip making the rounds of Massachusetts political operatives was that the combined effect of Jack’s rakish good looks and the Kennedy women’s prosletyzing made every old woman want to be his mother and every young woman dream of being his mistress. Eunice was the most aggressive campaigner. Campaigning at a furious pace several hours a day, she urged Democratic Party regulars “to get out the vote” for her brother. “John F. Kennedy has dedicated his life for the benefit of the people,” she said.
In the end, Eisenhower defeated Stevenson in a Republican landslide that reverberated across the country. In Massachusetts, the general outpolled the Illinois governor by 210,000 votes, and the Democratic governor lost to a Republican challenger by more than 14,000. But bucking the day’s trends, the young upstart Kennedy won 51 percent of the vote for the Senate seat, beating Lodge by 70,000 votes. “At last,” Rose said exuberantly, “the Fitzger
alds have evened the score with the Lodges.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marriage
In November 1952 Shriver had just turned thirty-seven years old. Although he had contemporaries (Jack Kennedy among them) who, like him, were still bachelors, he was reaching an age at which his unmarried status made him seem, if not quite disreputable, then a bit rakish. Most of his close friends in Chicago were either married or in the priesthood. His older brother, Herbert, was married and living in New York City. As Sarge’s mother never tired of reminding him, it was high time for him to marry.
But whom to wed? Shriver was at once a romantic and a pragmatist in his approach to women and marriage; he was also, of course, a Catholic. The romantic in him would not allow him to marry but for love. His parents’ relationship loomed as a worthy ideal: a partnership based on mutual affection, admiration, respect, and trust. But the pragmatist in him was attuned to other qualities in women: their wealth, their social status, their willingness to support him in his career. He was no longer truly a young man, but he still thought of himself as a Young Man of Promise. He had large, if not clearly articulated, ambitions for himself; the choice of a wife, he knew, could help or impede those ambitions. Finally, any woman he married would have to be a good Catholic.
Tall, athletic, confident, handsome—he now looked like the movie star William Holden in his prime. Every Catholic mother—or so it seemed—wanted to set Sarge up with her daughter. Among the myriad beauties he went out with, several seemed to be serious wifely prospects. One of these was a young former model who had transplanted herself from New York to Chicago when she was hired by Mr. Kennedy to work at the Merchandise Mart. The circumstances of Shriver’s relationship with this woman were somewhat peculiar. As he recalled, “She was blonde, with a tall, curvaceous figure, and she was very sophisticated. She worked part-time at the Merchandise Mart and spent the rest of her time modeling. Mr. Kennedy always had an appreciation for female beauty, and I don’t doubt that his decision to hire this woman had something to do with hers.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 16