This momentarily silenced O’Donnell, but other liberals in the Kennedy coalition threatened a convention floor flight to block Johnson’s nomination. Voices were raised; Michigan governor Mennen Williams almost came to blows with LBJ supporters, who had by now arrived in the Kennedy suite. Shriver watched all this and remained tight-lipped, on the fence about Johnson himself. In his memoir, O’Donnell reported that when he talked to Shriver about the LBJ nomination, Shriver told him he “was feeling as terrible as I was.”
But Shriver was quietly reconsidering. Wofford recalls,
During a lull around midday, Shriver took me over to the window and asked, “What do you really think [about Johnson as running mate]? Is it as bad an idea as we’re saying it is?” I said I had been arguing back and forth with myself and about an hour ago had decided I was for it. Not only might it mean carrying Texas, it might break the Southern monolith against civil rights and bring the South back into the mainstream of politics. I recalled Roy Wilkins’ prediction that Johnson would do more for civil rights than any other politician.
“You bastard!” Shriver said. “That’s about the way I come out, but I was keeping it to myself, doing my duty by all our friends and breaking my back to get them all in to see Kennedy and stop it.” We laughed, in mutual relief, and agreed that anyway Kennedy needed to hear and deal directly with the opposition.
Even as Shriver was coming around to see the virtues of Johnson for the ticket, Bobby continued to seethe in another corner of the suite. What exactly Bobby did next has been disputed for decades, but it seems he went down to Johnson’s suite to tell the Senate majority leader that because a floor fight over his nomination looked inevitable, he would have to settle instead for an appointment to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee instead. The Johnson people were appalled, and Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and a Johnson supporter, called Jack to complain about Bobby’s visit. Don’t worry about it, Graham reported Jack had told him. “Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what is happening.”
The whole truth of what transpired among Jack, Bobby, and LBJ that day may never fully be known, but in his 1997 book Mutual Contempt Jeff Shesol pieced together all the documentary evidence and concluded that Jack had dispatched Bobby to Johnson’s suite, wanting “only to determine LBJ’s state of mind and to make a final choice shortly thereafter; but found, to his discomfort, he had inadvertently committed himself to a running mate he was not certain he wanted, a running mate who might inspire a revolt by liberals and labor. JFK was trapped.”
However it happened, the fateful pairing was made, with profound implications for Jack, for Bobby, for Johnson—and for Shriver, who would spend much of the next eight years caught between Bobby and LBJ.
Until the formal announcement of Johnson’s selection was made, liberals and labor leaders continued to lobby Shriver to do something to block Johnson. In the end, after Johnson had appeased Northern liberals (and aggrieved some Southern conservatives) by giving his word that he would support the Democrats’ strong civil rights plank (which had been drafted by Chester Bowles), Johnson was nominated by acclamation, and the following day Shriver watched with the crowd of 80,000 at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Jack made his acceptance speech, declaring the dawn of a “New Frontier.” The New Frontier, Kennedy said, “sums up not what I intend to offer the American people but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook; it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.” It conveyed a sense of new hope that would dawn with the sixties—“the old era is ending,” he said, “the old ways will not do.”
“YOU CAN CRY. YOU’RE A SHRIVER”
Shriver was to play a highly visible and important role—perhaps the key role—in the campaign over the next four months, but from the beginning he was not part of Kennedy’s innermost circle. This is interesting for what it says about his distinctive role in the family. The Kennedy siblings were notoriously competitive with one another (if also unfailingly loyal to one another when dealing with the outside world), and this competitiveness extended to in-laws as well. Joan (Teddy’s wife), Jacqueline (Jack’s wife), and to a lesser extent Ethel (Bobby’s wife) were all at various times subjected to genial hazing by Jean, Pat, and Eunice, which, however good-natured, established clearly who were the insiders and who were the outsiders in the family. Similarly, the intense filial bonds linking Jack and Teddy and Bobby were never fully extended to Sarge, Peter Lawford (Pat’s husband), or Stephen Smith (Jean’s husband).
Where one stood in the family before 1961, particularly as an in-law, had much to do with how one stood with the Ambassador. Jackie, for instance, although intimidated and put off at first by all the loud, brazen Kennedy siblings and by the occasionally domineering patriarch, eventually earned Joe Sr.'s respect and the two became quite close. After that, she was a more integral part of the family. Shriver, of course, had always been well thought of by Mr. Kennedy. From their first meeting, Joe’s keen eye had identified in the young navy veteran a talent and intelligence that he thought might be put to good use by JPK Enterprises. That he trusted Shriver not only with his daughter but also with the management of his largest investment holding, the Merchandise Mart, speaks volumes about what he thought about his Chicago-based son-in-law. Moreover, the father’s trust in Shriver sent a message to the Kennedy brothers: No matter how much they had laughed at Sarge’s lovesick pursuit of their sister, they understood that he was a formidable personality, someone worthy of their trust and respect.
Yet for all the faith in Sarge’s abilities that Joe Kennedy had, he also perceived that Shriver lacked the hard-edged ruthlessness that he himself possessed and that his sons, particularly Bobby, were capable of displaying. Shriver was, as Theodore White observed in his account of the 1960 election, the kindest and gentlest of the extended Kennedy family, and over the years that observation and others like it have been made many times by close family observers. (Once, at Hyannis Port, one of Shriver’s young sons fell and hurt himself and burst into tears. Looking on, Bobby Kennedy said, “Kennedys don’t cry!” Shriver picked up his son and said, “That’s okay, you can cry. You’re a Shriver.”) Within the family, Shriver’s gentleness was often taken as weakness.
Shriver genially participated in the family competitions—on the football field, on the tennis court, in sailboats, at the dinner table. For the most part, however, he shunned the mortal-stakes intensity that possessed his wife’s family.
While Shriver greatly admired Jack and felt warmly toward Teddy, his relationship with Bobby was respectful but cool—a harbinger of the chilliness that would waft between them when politics got in the way after 1963. But as a devoted husband to Eunice and a dutiful acolyte to Joe, willing to defer his own political ambitions for the good of the family, there was no gainsaying Shriver’s family loyalty. In short, he was a Kennedy extended-family member in good standing.
But as Eunice’s younger sisters married, bringing new male in-laws into the circle, the family dynamics changed subtly. Joe had qualms about Peter Lawford, both because he was an actor and because he was only a convert to Catholicism, when Pat married him in 1954. Thus Shriver retained pride of place in his father-in-law’s eyes. But when Stephen Smith, the wealthy business executive from a distinguished Irish immigrant family, married Jean in 1956, Shriver for the first time had to share his claim to being the favorite son-in-law. Smith, Joe Kennedy recognized, had that hard-boiled inner core, that cutthroat toughness that Shriver lacked. This subtly changed Shriver’s position in the family, moving him ever so slightly from the center toward the periphery. According to a pair of Kennedy family biographers, Jack also gravitated to Smith, who was “ ‘cool,’ to use one of Jack’s favorite words, a study in hard surfaces. Unlike Shriver, he also came from a moneyed background and could afford to behave more independently. He thus became the ‘inside brother-in-law,’ leaving the ‘outside’ role to Sarge.”
Although
it took him farther from the decision-making core, Shriver was content to assume the outside role. It suited him. Whereas Smith was cool and hard-edged, Shriver was warm and gregarious. Smith was more bottom-line minded, good with numbers, and more the calculating strategist; Shriver was good with people, a charismatic public face for the family. In some ways, the two in-laws were like oil and water. But they were both dedicated to the Kennedy family, and they coexisted, for the most part, without rancor within it. The Smiths, the Shrivers, Ted and Joan Kennedy, Jack and Jackie, and the Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy by now all had houses within five minutes of one another in Hyannis Port, a symbolic geographic bond that established them all, whatever their internal tensions, as part of the same family enterprise.
Shriver’s relationship with some of Jack’s top advisers also kept him away from the inner circle. “Jack and Bobby had a couple of guys working for them, Ted Sorensen and Mike Feldman,” Shriver recalled. “Both of them were very smart. But these guys, you might say, weren’t wildly enthusiastic about me.” Both Sorensen and Feldman were speechwriters and very close to Jack, and Shriver felt they viewed him as somewhat of a naïf, because both of them had DC political experience and had worked on Capitol Hill, while Shriver—his brief tenure in the Justice Department notwithstanding—had not. They were skeptical of his wanton enthusiasm for everyone and everything, and they had picked up from Bobby Kennedy a concern for Shriver’s politics, which seemed at once too liberal (for one thing, he had been a critic of Joe McCarthy, whereas most of the Kennedy family was still firmly in his corner) and too Catholic-inflected. “Bobby always spat on Sarge,” said Charlie Peters, who, after working with Bobby during the campaign, went to work for Shriver at the Peace Corps. “His people considered Sarge weak, a nonplayer.… That was what he had bought into by marrying Eunice.” As noted, when Harris Wofford signed onto the campaign in 1960, Ted Sorensen had told him that Shriver “was viewed by the family as ‘the house Communist’—too liberal, unduly idealistic, a Boy Scout.”
If Sorensen and Feldman, along with the cerebral former federal investigator Richard Goodwin and an array of Harvard academics like John Kenneth Galbraith and Archibald Cox, stocked Jack Kennedy’s intellectual armory, members of the “Irish Mafia” (Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, plus Dave Powers and others) supplied his political arsenal. Both of these groups viewed Shriver as a starry-eyed idealist. The Irish Mafia, in particular, found his exuberance grating and his idealism naive. According to Adam Yarmolinsky, a longtime Shriver aide, O’Brien, O’Donnell, and company “interpreted [Shriver’s] cheerfulness as weakness and his independence as showboating. They suspected him of too much self-promotion; they didn’t think he had supreme loyalty to [Jack], though he did.”
None of this covert hostility, according to Ralph Dungan, a top Kennedy aide, “was very significant in terms of how effective Sarge was; I don’t think it really impeded him in his work. It may have been annoyance from time to time, but never, I would say, very substantial. Sarge was such an inner-directed guy that none of this ever bothered him. He danced to his own drummer.”
THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION
Shriver was given several key responsibilities during the campaign. One of them was being the Illinois campaign chair. Illinois was a crucial state; many political observers predicted that the state could spell the difference in the election. And Shriver’s great popularity in and around Chicago, as well as his extensive connections to both civil rights and business leaders in the region, played into his being given the assignment. But in truth he was “in charge” of the Illinois campaign only nominally: Everyone knew that Dick Daley pulled all the political strings in Chicago.
Shriver’s assignment to the Civil Rights Division was far more important. As noted, Shriver’s work on the “Negro vote” had begun before the convention. But after Lyndon Johnson became the vice presidential nominee, Shriver’s work became that much more urgent—the selection of a Southern senator, especially one perceived to be an antiliberal rube, was seen as a betrayal by Northern white liberals and blacks alike.
In 1960 Democratic preoccupation with black voters was a relatively new phenomenon. Persistent Jim Crow laws that made it hard for blacks in the South to get to the polls had tended to make the black vote far less significant electorally than it ought to have been. Moreover, for the first four decades after the Civil War, blacks had voted heavily Republican; the GOP was “the party of Lincoln.” Finally, many blacks, victims of segregation into impoverished schools, were illiterate and ill-informed; they didn’t know enough to vote or consider it worth their while to do so. Thus for decades the few available black votes seemed hardly worth pursuing—especially in the South, where any position calculated to appeal to blacks would surely alienate a larger number of whites.
Outside of the South, anyway, that had begun to change with the New Deal, which brought jobs, strong unions, social security, public assistance, unemployment insurance, and other aspects of the social safety net to black voters. FDR became a political hero to many of them; the Democratic Party began to look more appealing. More important, the great migration northward during the middle years of the century allowed blacks to throw off the yoke of Jim Crow oppression and freely exercise their right to vote. And as they thronged into industrial cities in the North, they were absorbed by Democratic political machines. In Chicago, for instance, Congressman William Dawson, himself a former Georgia Republican who had switched parties during the New Deal, shepherded thousands of fellow blacks onto the Democratic rolls. After 1948, when Harry Truman squeaked past Thomas Dewey on the strength of less than 50,000 votes in key states like Illinois and Ohio, it was evident to Democratic leaders that the party’s electoral success in national elections would depend on the votes from Northern industrial cities, whose demographic coloration was laced heavily with black.
In the twelve years since 1948, as the electoral significance of the Negro vote had become more obvious, black leaders discovered they had newfound political leverage. By threatening to withhold their votes in the North, Negro leaders in the industrial Northeast and Midwest realized, they could exact promises from white Democratic aspirants on behalf of Negroes in the South. White politicians like Jack Kennedy, in turn, had to play a delicate balancing game, promising to deliver civil rights legislation to black leaders without alienating the segregationist white Democrats of the Solid South.
Shriver’s responsibility was therefore an awesome one. Since the Kennedys had yet to turn to civil rights as a passionate policy concern, it remained a distinct challenge to assuage the truculent black leaders who accused the Kennedy family of indifference to the Negro plight.
In the Civil Rights Division, Harris Wofford continued as civil rights coordinator, and William Dawson, as head of the Minorities Division of the DNC, was named chairman. Frank Reeves, who was well connected with local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) all across the country, was assigned to travel with Kennedy. Marjorie Lawson, the civil rights attorney who had worked with Shriver during the West Virginia primary, was to focus on working with local black Democratic organizations state by state.
Shriver enticed Franklin Williams, a former NAACP lawyer, to leave his job as assistant attorney general of California to spearhead the project of registering black voters. This was a crucial task. Proportionally fewer blacks than whites, by a significant margin, were registered to vote; blacks voted disproportionately Democratic; thus it was unequivocally in Kennedy’s interest that as many blacks as possible get registered. The problem was, such registration efforts could be expensive, and the Democratic Party had only limited funds available to spend. Under Williams’s direction, the registration drive was set up through black churches. This made the project officially nonpartisan, which in turn meant that it could be financed by tax-exempt contributions from individuals and foundations, rather than from scarce political funds.
After Shriver and Wofford, the most important me
mber of the civil rights team was Louis Martin, the publisher of a chain of black newspapers. Shriver had become acquainted with him through his work on the Catholic Interracial Council. Martin didn’t suffer fools, and he could be acerbic. In 1960 he had just returned to the country from a year in Nigeria, where he had been setting up newspapers and radio stations. He refused to come out for Kennedy at the convention in Los Angeles, saying, “I’m just back from Africa and I don’t know anything.” But Martin felt warmly toward Shriver, and after Kennedy won the nomination he agreed to join the campaign. His first task was to design and place advertising in black publications.
Martin’s second order of business, undertaken at Shriver’s behest, was to induce the flamboyant Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell to support the Kennedy campaign. The iconoclastic Powell had initially supported Lyndon Johnson for the nomination, one of the few Northern blacks to do so, but Martin—with the help of a campaign contribution authorized by Stephen Smith—prevailed upon Powell to campaign for Jack. Powell subsequently barnstormed the country, traveling with an enlarged copy of the deed to Richard Nixon’s house, which contained a covenant signed by Nixon prohibiting the sale or lease of the property to Negroes or Jews.
Congressman Dawson was, in his crusty way, as iconoclastic as Powell. He had been born in the backwoods of Georgia and made his way north during the early years of the Great Migration. Dawson was a loyal Democrat and an essential cog in Dick Daley’s political machine, and he commanded enormous power and respect among Chicago’s black population. But Dawson was no wild-eyed civil rights activist. His first loyalty was to the Cook County machine, which he thought was more important than some abstract cause. Moreover, he still retained ties to his Georgia roots and had cultivated longstanding relationships with powerful Southern party leaders, which he was reluctant to jeopardize. He wanted Kennedy to win and saw the Civil Rights Division’s task as simply getting out the black vote on behalf of the Democratic slate—and he didn’t see how white interlopers like Shriver would help him do that. Nor, really, did he even see the purpose of giving the division an aggressive name like “civil rights”—couldn’t Shriver see that would just antagonize Southern Democrats, whose support Jack sorely needed? “Let’s not use words that offend our good Southern friends, like ‘civil rights,’ ” Dawson said at one meeting.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 22