Shriver became a board member of the new national group, and in 1963, the NCCIJ was represented as one of the ten co-chairs of the 1963 March on Washington at which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic “I Have A Dream” speech. That same year, at an event at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Shriver presented King with the Chicago CIC’s John F. Kennedy Award for improving race relations.
Working always within the context of the Catholic Church, the CIC was never truly an institutional part of the civil rights movement. Still, it can be fairly said that the CIC in the 1950s played a key role in incubating future civil rights activists and in priming the black and Catholic populations of Chicago for the social upheavals that were to come. More important—according to Lloyd Davis and other interested contemporary observers—it took someone like Shriver to influence Cardinal Stritch and the other cardinals not only to integrate the Church itself but also to prepare it for an institutional role in achieving the civil rights victories of Montgomery and Selma, Alabama.
In 1958, as a tribute to his hard work on behalf of improved race relations, the council presented Shriver with the James J. Hoey Award for Interracial Justice, which each year rewarded “a white or Negro Catholic who has done effective work against ending racial bigotry.” In June 1961, after Shriver had moved to Washington to work in the Kennedy administration, Mayor Daley hosted a “Salute to Sargent Shriver” dinner at the Conrad Hilton Hotel to recognize his work on race relations. Thousands of Chicagoans turned out to fete him. Vice President Lyndon Johnson sent a telegram, paying tribute to Shriver’s work in race relations. “I congratulate the city of Chicago for paying tribute to him,” Johnson said. “Sarge is to Chicago what Jack Kennedy is to Boston.”
CHAPTER TEN
Chicago Politics
By 1955 Shriver had established himself as a man to watch in Illinois politics. Gossip columns called him a “hot prospect” to be the Democratic nominee for governor. In October 1955, the Chicago American reported that the thirty-nine-year-old Shriver “looms as a ‘dark horse’ candidate for governor in the Democratic primary next April,” a good “compromise candidate” who might be able to unseat William Stratton, the Republican who had succeeded Adlai Stevenson in Springfield. By 1958 Charles Cleveland, political editor of the Chicago Daily News, was reporting that Shriver was a “winter book” favorite to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Illinois in 1960, “unless Mayor Daley should decide to go for the governorship himself.” Shriver’s friend Harris Wofford would later recall attending a school board dinner in 1959 at which “almost everyone at my table predicted that Shriver would someday be governor. Several who had worked with him closely said he was the most imaginative, effective, and humane executive they had ever known.” “To tell you the truth,” one of them told Wofford, “he’s my real choice for president.”
Shriver felt the tug of his political potential keenly. He read the newspaper columns touting his candidacy. He heard the whisperings in the Daley machine casting him as the mayor’s favorite. And he listened to his friends urging him to throw his hat into one ring or another. “As I have often told you,” Lloyd Bowers wrote to him, “I know of no one that I would more happily support for office.” But Shriver was ambivalent, unsure of how the Kennedy family would regard his choosing a political course that was independent of the family’s plans for Jack.
THE 1956 CONVENTION
The 1956 Democratic National Convention was to be held in Chicago. As the event approached, there was growing speculation in the newspapers that first-term senator Jack Kennedy was a potential vice presidential nominee. At first, most people—including the senator himself—dismissed this as idle chatter. As August drew nearer, however, Jack found himself seduced by the possibility: He began quietly promoting his candidacy behind the scenes. In July, Shriver sent Jack a telegram quoting a Chicago Sun-Times article in which the Democratic front-runner Adlai Stevenson said his current top choices for running mates were Humphrey and Kennedy. The Sun-Times editorialized in favor of Kennedy, seeking to allay concerns about his youth and inexperience by recalling that FDR had been a year younger than Kennedy when he was nominated for the vice presidency on the James Cox ticket in 1920.
Because of his close relationship to Adlai Stevenson, Shriver was dispatched to make the case for Kennedy to the former Illinois governor and to gather intelligence regarding the governor’s current thinking on the matter of a vice presidential selection. Sitting with Stevenson on a plane going to Chicago from California, where Stevenson had just beaten Estes Kefauver in the decisive primary, Shriver asked him if he had given any thought to a running mate. Stevenson said that he had not yet settled on a short list of candidates. After Shriver outlined what he thought his brother-in-law could bring to the ticket, Stevenson responded by bluntly asking about Kennedy’s physical health and about how the Kennedy family would feel about Jack’s running. Shriver told him he thought they would be in favor.
Stevenson then brought up Kennedy’s Catholicism. Earlier in 1956 Kennedy had dispatched Ted Sorensen to research voting records to see how a Catholic candidate would affect the Democratic ticket’s chances against Eisenhower. Sorensen had drawn up a detailed analysis purporting to demonstrate that a Catholic running mate would decidedly help a Protestant presidential candidate. Bristling with statistics, the report argued that enough Catholic immigrant offspring had reached voting age to have a decisive impact in the big states where urban immigrants were concentrated.
Such predictions of demographics and politics, Stevenson said, were at best an “educated guess.” “It is not the political advantage of the vice presidential choice that is crucial,” he told Shriver, “but the needs of the United States—who [can] best perform the duties of the job.” And then he said something that startled Shriver. “I hope the convention will give a good deal of deliberation to the vice-presidential question.”
Shriver wondered what that meant. Was Stevenson not planning to pick his own running mate? Stevenson went on to say that “Kennedy, with his clean, ‘all-American boy’ appearance and TV personality, would be a splendid contrast to Nixon and his heavy, thick looks.” Shriver brightened at this, but Stevenson went on to say (as Shriver reported to Joe Kennedy) that perhaps Humphrey could “ ‘give Nixon hell’ better.” It was a confusing, mixed message.
When Shriver reported back to the Kennedy camp, however, it was enough to keep attention fixed on the possibility of Jack’s winning the nomination, and Jack’s operatives continued to campaign discreetly among receptive members of Congress, governors, and national party leaders. Later, Stevenson told a journalist that “I had a personal fondness for Jack and I admired him, and I told his father that. Then, of course, Jack’s sister Eunice and her husband, Sarge Shriver, are good friends of mine. There was also our concern for the Catholic vote, which we had lost in 1952. Yes, we had thought seriously about Jack as a vice-presidential candidate.”
Joe Kennedy, vacationing on the French Riviera, was adamantly opposed to Jack’s joining the Democratic ticket. The Ambassador worried that Adlai Stevenson, running as the Democratic presidential nominee for the second time, would be trounced by President Eisenhower and that Jack could see his own reputation tarnished by association with such a defeat. Worse, Joe worried, Stevenson’s defeat might be blamed on Kennedy’s Catholicism. Joe also implied that Jack had yet to earn his spurs.
In response, Jack asked Shriver to write a memo to his father recounting Sarge’s conversation with Stevenson. Governor Stevenson, Shriver wrote to Mr. Kennedy, had been assured that “you were 100 percent behind Jack, that you gave him and his campaign everything you had even if perchance you might disagree with the basic wisdom of the decision Jack might make.” In other words: If you appear ambivalent about supporting your son for vice president now, you risk embarrassing both Jack and Stevenson.
By the time the convention opened on August 13, Kefauver appeared to be the clear vice presidential front-runner, with Humphrey the obvious second
choice. And if the conservative Southern Democrats wanted a less liberal alternative, there was always Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Jack Kennedy—only partway through his first Senate term—looked to be a long shot.
Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy (who had been married in 1953, several months after the Shrivers) arrived in Chicago on Sunday, August 12. Jack checked into the Conrad Hilton Hotel, not far from the International Amphitheater where the convention was to be held. Jackie was seven months pregnant, so to keep her distance from the action she moved into the Shrivers’ apartment on Lake View Avenue, along with Jean Kennedy and Bobby’s wife, Ethel.
Eunice and Adeline Keane, the wife of an alderman from Chicago’s Thirty-first Ward, were appointed heads of the convention’s Entertainment Committee. “In less than half a decade,” the Chicago Daily News reported, “Eunice had become so much a part of Chicago life that she could be chosen for such a highly visible task, seeming like a real Chicagoan and not an interloper from the East.” Eunice, for her part, was all in favor of her brother joining Stevenson on the Democratic ticket. “We think that public office is a natural field for him and that he’d be terrific as vice president,” she told a reporter a week before the convention. When asked about her own husband’s political future, she took the official Kennedy family line, which subordinated Sarge’s career to Jack’s. “I’m perfectly satisfied leaving him remain president of Chicago’s Board of Education,” she said, making it sound as though Sarge had no choice in the matter.
Stevenson caught everyone by surprise when (as he had suggested to Shriver that he might) he announced that he was throwing the choice of vice presidential nominee to the convention. Apparently, Stevenson personally preferred Humphrey, but he was loathe to alienate Kefauver and other hopefuls, whose help he would need to defeat Eisenhower. The vote would be the next day—meaning candidates had only twelve hours to campaign.
The extended Kennedy family sprang into action, prowling the convention floor trawling for delegates and then, forgoing sleep, going from hotel room to hotel room all night, trying to add to Jack’s tally for the next day. Only Jackie remained at the Shrivers’ apartment that night. “When I got to Jack’s hotel room,” Shriver recalled in an interview some years later, “there were Jack and Bobby and Eunice and Jean and Teddy and it looked like a family conference up at the Cape instead of a political meeting, except there were Ted Sorensen and [Connecticut’s powerful political boss John] Bailey and a few others. There was Bobby with a yellow pad in his hand, writing down the states and the delegates, and Jack would say, ‘I think I can get four or five of those delegates,’ or something like that. It was all pretty amateurish.”
Amateurish but effective: Kennedy won 304 votes on the first ballot the next day, second only to Kefauver, whose 483½ votes were not enough to secure a majority. On the second ballot, both New York and Texas switched their votes to Kennedy. He needed only 33½ more votes to become the nominee.
But Kefauver held firm on the third ballot, and some of the Southern delegations began drifting back to him from Kennedy. Shriver ran back out onto the convention floor, where it became evident to him that Jack had peaked on the second ballot; momentum had turned against him. Shriver then returned to the Stock Yard Inn in time to find Jack putting on his suit. He put his arm around his brother-in-law and delivered the bad news. Sure enough, when the results of the third ballot were announced on television, Kennedy had not gained. Kennedy turned to Sorensen and Shriver and said, “Let’s go.”
Kennedy walked to the podium to thunderous applause and made a gracious speech in which he moved that Kefauver be nominated by acclamation. And then he left the convention and two days later flew off to France to recuperate with his father on the Riviera. “Don’t feel sorry for young Jack Kennedy,” the Boston Herald editorialized. “Despite his defeat … he probably rates as the one real victor of the entire convention.”
Several weeks later, the Kennedys gathered at Hyannis Port for Thanksgiving. The primary topic of discussion was Jack’s political future. Eunice was the most ambitious on behalf of her brother—perhaps even more ambitious than Joe. “Eunice was ambitious as hell, and bright, and dogged,” George Smathers recalled. “She encouraged Jack, in my judgment, more than Rose did, I think as much as Joe.” There was little question that Jack would run for president in 1960.
THE KENNEDY FOUNDATION
Meanwhile, Eunice was growing worried that while the Kennedy men were all focusing on Jack’s career, the philanthropic organization her father had founded in memory of his deceased eldest son was being neglected. She hated to see the public service potential of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation squandered. So she approached her father. “Daddy,” she said, “I’d like to do something for the foundation. I’d like to see if I could help get it a kind of focus.” He said that sounded fine and asked her what kind of focus she had in mind. “Well, you know I’d like to go out and really find out what the big need is.” The Ambassador approved.
Sarge and Eunice traveled around the country for several weeks, calling on everyone they could think of on philanthropic boards and charitable foundations, asking experts what they thought America’s most pressing social needs were. They spoke to journalists and academics, social workers and politicians, anyone they thought could provide guidance.
Ultimately, Eunice decided that mental retardation should be the foundation’s driving cause. This was not, she has always insisted—legions of Kennedy biographers’ assertions to the contrary—because of her sister Rosemary. According to the oft-repeated story, the family’s experience with Rosemary had left Eunice with a searing feeling of guilt that she felt driven to assuage by throwing herself into work with the mentally retarded. In truth, although having a “special sister,” as Eunice says, may have sensitized her to the plight of the mentally handicapped, the real motivation for her years of toil in this field was her sense that, based on her experiences in various other areas of social work, no one was doing anything significant to help these people—at least 5 million of them in the United States alone in the late 1950s. “I originally wanted to be a sociologist,” she says, “and when I did graduate work at the University of Chicago [in the early 1950s], I went to work with the underprivileged and I saw that people who were handicapped were, in my judgment, very badly treated. It was not because of my sister. It was just that I had noticed that in all of my work when I saw people who were ‘slow,’ no one seemed to be doing anything for them.”
To Eunice, this was a travesty, one she thought might be rectified somewhat by the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. Sarge wasn’t sure he agreed with her that this was the most burning problem of the time, nor was he convinced that all the money and time in the world could necessarily ease the plight of the retarded or improve their lot in life. At the time, he shared with most Americans the sense that the congenitally retarded were a lost cause, structurally limited in how much they could develop or accomplish in life. But clearly Eunice thought she could accomplish something for the retarded, even if no one else did, and that was enough for Sarge.
Together, the Shrivers crisscrossed the country, interviewing anyone who knew anything about the mentally retarded. Because they had several million dollars a year to dole out for research that the foundation deemed worthy, scientists and university presidents received them eagerly. Eunice and Sarge hired a team of academic consultants and dragged them around the country looking for the best research sites. In the end, they recommended establishing programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins University. No one knew it at the time, but the Shrivers had just planted the seeds of both Head Start and the Special Olympics.
SHRIVER FOR GOVERNOR?
As the 1960 election cycle approached, Shriver once again saw his name bandied around as a serious gubernatorial prospect. In 1957, after he had traveled to Springfield to lobby for increased funding for the Chicago public schools, the newspapers reported
that he had launched himself into contention to succeed Governor Stratton. “In a round of handshaking sessions with lawmakers who comprise the statewide backbone of the Democratic party, Shriver unknowingly set off a favorable chain reaction for himself.… Said one Senator, ‘This fellow Shriver is a natural, a combination of Jimmy Stewart’s handsomeness and suave winning ways and the sincere statesmanship of a finished politician.’ ” The reporter concluded that Shriver was “being quietly boomed as Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1960.”
Although Shriver never formally declared his intention to run for office, he was turning the possibility over in his mind. He knew he could count on Adlai Stevenson and many of his top aides and political advisers to support him. And his relationship with Mayor Daley, whose power was steadily increasing, put him in good stead with the all-important Cook County Democratic machine. But Shriver knew that Jack Kennedy planned to make a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960; he might therefore be better off lying low until 1964 and running for governor then.
A Kennedy presidential campaign posed at least three potential problems for a Shriver gubernatorial campaign. First, there was the religion question. As Shriver well knew, there had never been a Catholic president or vice president. Although the country manifested considerably more religious tolerance in the late 1950s than it had in the early 1920s, it remained a real question whether a Catholic could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 19