Several of Shriver’s friends from the time say it was clear to them what Mr. Kennedy’s gambit was. He wanted this woman to stay in Chicago so that he could visit her when he traveled to the Midwest. But since he spent much of the year elsewhere, he wanted to make sure the woman was kept happily occupied when he was not around. Kennedy introduced Shriver to the young woman and suggested he chaperone her around town. Kennedy calculated—correctly—that Shriver’s charm would ensure she had a good time and that his impeccable Catholic morals would preserve her virtue.
But what Kennedy didn’t figure on, Shriver’s friends say, was the woman’s falling in love with Sarge. She made clear to him that she would like to marry him. He replied that he liked her very much but could never marry her because she was not Catholic—a factor which, Shriver’s friends say, Joe Kennedy may have counted on as a final safeguard against Shriver’s stealing her away.
There were other women that Shriver’s friends speculated he might marry (Ann Wharton, a young widow, was one of them; Devon Meade, an attractive young socialite, was another), but the only other woman of any significance in Shriver’s life remained, as ever, Eunice. It had been nearly seven years since he had first met her, and two years since he had more or less forced himself to stop hoping she would consent to marry him. His friends believed it more likely he would marry Devon Meade or the model than Eunice.
One night in early 1953, after Sarge and Eunice had been out for dinner together with some friends, Eunice asked him as they parted ways in the lobby of the Ambassador East if she might join him for Mass in the morning. So, as Shriver recalled,
I met her in the hotel lobby the next morning and we walked to Mass together. We sat through Mass and when it was over she said, “Sarge, will you join me at the side altar over there?” She was pointing over to the left where there was an altar to the Blessed Mother. Eunice has a tremendous devotion to Mary, so I assumed she just wanted to say some special prayers. We walked up to the altar, and knelt down side by side, on the barrier in front of the statue. She said a prayer. Then she turned to me.
“Sargent Shriver,” she said, “I think I’d like to marry you.”
I nearly fell off the altar rail. After five years of wanting to marry her, and then giving up hope, and then for her, in effect, to propose to me! “Eunice,” I said, “that’s the best news I’ve ever had.”
That evening, as he recalled, Shriver went to the apartment of the model and told her that he was going to marry Eunice. The next day, she moved back to New York.
Shriver’s next order of business was to call Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy: He wanted to obtain their blessing before making the engagement official. This was a project that caused Shriver considerable anxiety, largely because he was sensitive to the fact that he and his family were far less wealthy than the Kennedys. He also knew that even were they to bless the marriage, hitching himself to such a rich and increasingly famous family would raise some eyebrows. As a journalist stated the situation in 1964, Shriver “realized, as he will tell you now, that the day of the Alger-boy hero has gone, that people no longer look with unreserved admiration on the struggling young man who ups and weds the Boss’s daughter.” This didn’t deter him.
Joe and Rose’s enthusiasm about the engagement was so strong it got Shriver to wondering if maybe they had been hoping for such an outcome all along. Had his seven years as an employee of JPK Enterprises really been a prolonged audition for son-in-law? A less charitable interpretation, proposed by some of Shriver’s old friends from Chicago, is that when it became clear the fashion model Shriver was chaperoning on Kennedy’s behalf had fallen in love with Sarge, the Ambassador became irritated. Worrying that Eunice would lose her opportunity to marry Shriver, the Ambassador told his thirty-one-year-old daughter that it was high time she got married. For the family’s sake, he said, it was time for her to tie the knot. Joe Kennedy was asked about his role in instigating the marriage many times in the years before his death in 1969, and he always maintained that although he thought highly of Sarge, he had never consciously played matchmaker. Eunice says that her father always made clear his high regard for Sarge, but he never pressured her to marry him. “I don’t know what made me decide to marry him” after all that time, she says. “I guess I must have been in love. I did take my time, didn’t I? Seven years is a long time.”
Several of Shriver’s friends have said that Joe Kennedy asked Father Ted Hesburgh, the soon-to-be president of Notre Dame, to impress on Eunice the importance of marrying. But Hesburgh credits Shriver’s persistence for breaking down Eunice’s resistance to marriage. “He was relentless,” Father Hesburgh recalled. “Eventually, Eunice turned away from other attractions—not other men, but all her other activities.”
“Sarge is one of the very, very few people who could have married into the Kennedys and survived,” Hesburgh says. “The family tends to attract people who are hangers-on or who are looking for shared glory. Sarge kept his independence, which is not easy to do, since they tended to subjugate people.”
Some of Sarge’s friends were not happy to hear he was marrying into the Kennedy family. They were reluctant to lose Sarge, since he was such a vibrant part of their lives in Chicago, and they felt they would inevitably see less of him once he was engulfed by the Kennedys. “We thought he was sort of giving up a little of himself,” says one of these friends. “It was hard for us to see him go. I mean, the Kennedys led a very different life than most of us did. And so we felt that Sarge had sort of given up on himself a little in order to join this.” Bob Stuart recalled, “Sarge would have emerged to something very much in the limelight even if he hadn’t met the Kennedys. With his family background in Maryland and his pizzazz with people, I think Sarge could have been a political figure in his own right in Maryland or Illinois. There’s no question he’s extremely happy in his marriage. It’s the best marriage in the Kennedy family. But it was a tragedy for Sarge in a lot of ways because of what he had to give up.”
The wedding, held Saturday, May 23, 1953, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, was an extravaganza. Seventeen hundred invited guests attended. Traffic on Fifth Avenue was halted for the length of the ceremony. No mere priest could officiate at such a wedding: Francis Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York, celebrated the Mass assisted by three bishops, four monsignors, and nine priests. The pope himself sent an apostolic blessing from Rome.
The guest list, as the Boston Globe reported, was “a directory of Who’s Who in the nation,” including senators, governors, mayors, bishops, Supreme Court justices, Irish Catholic political operatives, actors and actresses, movie moguls, socialites, foreign diplomats, and the managers of the 21 Club. “Why, everyone’s here except Rin Tin Tin,” someone remarked at the reception. The New York society pages called it “the $100,000 wedding.” The Kennedy family issued a press release describing the affair as “one of the most important and colorful weddings ever held in America.”
For the reception, Joe Kennedy had reserved the Starlight Roof Room and the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, which could accommodate all 1,700 wedding guests plus a few hundred additional revelers who couldn’t be crammed into St. Patrick’s. It was a lavish affair. The wedding ended in the late morning, and eight hours of dining and dancing to a fifteen-piece orchestra ensued. The eight-tiered wedding cake was taller than Eunice; she had to stand on a chair to cut the first piece.
To some in the Shriver party, the reception was a somewhat controversial affair: They felt there was “too much Kennedy, not enough Shriver” in the event. Part of this was caused by Eunice’s Oedipal wedding toast: “I looked all my life for someone like my father, and Sarge came the closest.” As toast after toast referred to Eunice and the Kennedy family with nary a mention of Sarge or the Shrivers, Burton Maclean, a Yale classmate of Shriver’s who had become a Protestant minister, was finally moved to stand up and say, “Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy. Enough already. Let’s talk about Sarge!” The Shriver tables cheered
and the Kennedy tables laughed. But when somebody decided to sing “Maryland, My Maryland” to honor Sarge’s family, the Kennedys interrupted by singing “Marilyn, My Marilyn,” referring to Marilyn Monroe, and “the Shrivers were appalled.”
Sarge himself, buoyed by champagne and love, was oblivious to all this. He was marrying the woman he loved—his seven-year courtship had been rewarded. To Sarge, it was a glorious thing to be marrying a Kennedy. He knew it would be a wild ride, and he looked forward to a marvelous adventure.
Not that marrying into the Kennedy clan didn’t give him occasional misgivings. Shriver had planned an elaborate month-long honeymoon in Spain, Portugal, and France, so the next evening found the Shrivers in a marine terminal at the edge of Manhattan, boarding the plane that would take them to Europe. “Ten minutes before the plane was scheduled to take off,” Shriver recalled, “who should come ambling down the aisle but young Teddy Kennedy.” “Goddamn,” Shriver thought to himself, “will I ever be able to get away from these Kennedys? Had Joe sent his son to spy on me on my honeymoon?”
Eunice was thrilled to see her little brother, but Sarge was annoyed. “Jesus, Teddy,” Shriver recalled saying to him, “what the hell are you doing here?” Teddy told a story about how he had fallen in love with a Portguese-French actress whom he had met at a show in New York. Her troupe was touring Europe and would be performing for a few nights in Lisbon. “And—what a coincidence—he was to be staying at the very same hotel in Portugal we were!” Shriver was dismayed. “ ‘I knew it,’ I thought to myself. ‘He’s spying for Joe.’ ”
Teddy’s story turned out to be true, and once he had reunited with his actress in Lisbon, Sarge and Eunice never heard from him again. But the experience caused Shriver to reflect on what he had just entered into.
It was an important lesson for me about the Kennedys—they’re everywhere. For better or for worse, they were impossible to get away from—and when I married Eunice I was marrying the whole clan. I would always have to share her. Over the years, I’ve come to count this as a blessing, not a burden, but it took some time to figure out how I could be an independent agent separate from the Kennedy family after working for the father and marrying the daughter.
CHAPTER NINE
Religion and Civil Rights
After the honeymoon, Eunice and Sarge returned to Chicago, and they didn’t waste much time before starting a family. At 5:00 p.m. on April 28, 1954, just eleven months after his parents had married, Robert Sargent Shriver III was born. The following year, on November 6, Bobby was joined by a sister, Maria Owings Shriver. Three additional sons—Timothy Perry, Mark Kennedy, and Anthony Paul—would be born over the next ten years.
The Shrivers were a stunning couple, famous for the parties they threw; their comings and goings were regularly chronicled in the city’s society page columns. Shriver still made the rounds of parties at the Marshall Fields’ estate, tennis at Bill Blair’s house, and weekends with the Minows and the Bowers in the northern part of the state. The difference now was that he and Eunice were a unit. Eunice was a formidable presence; she was such a force of nature that Shriver’s friends at first assimilated her into their group only partially and reluctantly.
Eunice was never one to trim her sails to fit into a particular milieu. This sometimes had dramatic consequences. One night at a dinner party in the late 1950s, Lloyd Bowers, who was seated at a table with his wife and Marshall and Kay Field, stood up and gave some toasts. In one of them he toasted Sarge, whom he said would be the next governor of Illinois—if only Jack Kennedy weren’t running for president. Eunice, seated at another table, angrily launched a full glass of champagne across the room at Lloyd. She missed and drenched Kay Field’s green satin dress. The hurled glass would become a staple of Eunice’s arsenal: Several years later, when Jack was president, someone had the temerity to predict that Barry Goldwater would win Illinois in 1964; Eunice responded by emptying a glass of water in the prognosticator’s face.
Eunice always did things her own way. At parties at their apartment, Eunice would sometimes suddenly vanish from the living room. When the guests moved to the dining room for supper, they would find Eunice sitting by herself, almost done with her dinner of boiled chicken and mashed potatoes. When she was tired, she would go to bed—even if the party had just started. She would simply disappear up to her bedroom, leaving Sarge to entertain the guests until the party wound down. In at least one instance, her guests caught her trying to slip upstairs and importuned her to stay awhile longer. “Okay,” Eunice said, “but only if we can play blind man’s bluff.” (This was not an unusual request—parlor games were standard fare at Shriver events.) “I’ll start,” Eunice said, and after the guests had shut their eyes, she led them on a Conga line that danced through the apartment. “Open your eyes,” Eunice shouted, and everyone did so, just in time to see the elevator doors closing before it would carry them down to the lobby. “Good night,” they could hear Eunice saying. “Thanks for coming.”
Eunice could be prickly, difficult, even rude, and her relentless competitiveness in everything she did endeared her to some and appalled others. She proved an easy target for the growing chorus of Kennedy bashers. But in a family of public servants, she was the most public minded of them all. After marrying Sarge, Eunice continued to supervise the rehabilitation of delinquent girls at the House of the Good Shepherd, and she would often invite the wayward young women into her home. The presence of these juvenile offenders scandalized some of the neighbors in the Shrivers’ Gold Coast apartment building. Sarge, too, was disconcerted by their presence. “Many nights I’d be sitting there reading the paper or poring over work from the office, and the doorbell would ring,” he recalled. “I’d go to the door and there would be a woman with a suitcase and a plaintive look on her face. ‘Uh-oh,’ I’d think, ‘another one of Eunice’s girls.’ ”
THE CATHOLIC INTERRACIAL COUNCIL
By the mid-1950s, Shriver was directly involved in many of the burning racial issues of the era: housing discrimination, hospital discrimination, and especially school integration.
One day, Shriver’s assistant Mary Ann Orlando was sitting in her office in the Merchandise Mart when a man rushed breathlessly into her office. “You should have known better,” the man shouted at her. “You should not have let him come!”
“What are you talking about?” Orlando asked.
The man explained, rather huffily, that Orlando’s boss was at that very moment in the act of perpetrating a grave faux pas: He was dining at the Merchants & Manufacturers Club, the Merchandise Mart’s exclusive private dining club—with a Negro! “What,” the man demanded, “do you propose we do about this?”
Orlando looked back at the man fiercely and asked him, “Do you know who Mr. Shriver’s Negro guest is?” The man didn’t. “It’s Ralph Bunche,” she told him, the Nobel laureate famous for his diplomatic work with the State Department and the United Nations over the previous decade. This flummoxed the man; it would not reflect well on the M&M Club to throw a Nobel Peace Prize–winner out on his ear. Orlando grinned inwardly, suspecting that Shriver had known taking Bunche to the M&M Club would have a discomfiting effect on the guardians of the club’s racial purity—but would leave them helpless to do anything about it.
Until about a half century after the Civil War, racial problems were seen to afflict primarily the South. In 1940, 77 percent of the black population still lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. But over the middle decades of the century more than 6 million African Americans would move from South to North. As the development of mechanized cotton pickers after World War II reduced the number of available sharecropper jobs in the South, stories of a more racially tolerant North trickled down to black families suffering under Jim Crow laws. Together these forces—one pulling, one pushing—produced a thick black stream flowing northward. And although the stream had tributaries that trickled into Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and other places, it flowed most strongly to Chicago. As Shriver put
it in 1959, “In Chicago … there are today approximately 800,000 Negroes, which is almost 25 percent of the population, more than any southern city. No, there can be no doubt that the Negro is on the move from the South to the North, both East and West.”
Chicago’s South Side had become the “capital of black America.” Joe Louis, heavyweight boxing champion and the most famous black man in America, lived there. So did Mahalia Jackson, the best-known black singer. So did William Dawson, the only black member of Congress. The South Side featured nationally known black institutions like the Defender newspaper, the Regal Theater, and the Savoy Ballroom, and it had a sizable population of middle- and lower-middle-class black residents. But it also had the highest concentration of slums in the city.
The flow of black migrants to Chicago was testament to the opportunities the city afforded, but the size of the influx—at one point in the 1950s there were 2,200 black people moving there every week—sorely taxed the region’s ability to assimilate them. Samuel Cardinal Stritch, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, surveyed the scene at the Illinois Central railroad station, with its hundreds of new arrivals from the South sitting in the waiting room with all their worldly belongings beside them, and he could see that “race relations were inevitably going to become not just an issue but the issue in the North.”
Although its primary legislative achievements were a decade away, the civil rights movement was gaining national momentum by the mid-1950s. The landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling “separate but equal” schools for different races unconstitutional, was handed down in 1954, and the Montgomery bus boycotts began in 1955. Progressive reformers in government, and liberal activists and lawyers out of it, labored to reduce segregation and discrimination.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 17