It was not solely the King call that accounted for the margin of victory, of course, even among African American voters. But the inroads Kennedy had made among those voters since he had set up the Civil Rights Division under Shriver were impressive. Before the Democratic convention in July, Kennedy had been less popular among blacks than all the Democratic hopefuls, including even the Southerner Lyndon Johnson. On election day, three months later, he won more than 70 percent of the black vote. The call to Mrs. King was the coup de grâce that solidified the Negro vote for Kennedy and secured him the election.
THE SEEDS OF THE PEACE CORPS
If Shriver’s greatest impact on the election of his brother-in-law was through the telephone call placed to Mrs. King from that airport motel, the greatest impact the campaign was ultimately to have on Shriver was through a speech Jack Kennedy gave in Ann Arbor, Michigan, five days before Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrest.
On the evening of October 13, Jack Kennedy flew from New York City, where he had just participated in his final debate with Richard Nixon, to Ann Arbor, where he was scheduled to address some students at the University of Michigan. But his flight was delayed, and he didn’t arrive until 2:00 a.m., so when he staggered bleary-eyed off the plane he assumed his speech had been canceled. Upon arrival on campus, however, Kennedy was stunned to find an audience of more than 10,000 waiting for him and chanting his name as he climbed the steps of the student union.
Taken aback by this show of support, the candidate began extemporizing in an attempt to match the students’ ardor. Picking up on the theme he had established in his New Frontier speech at the Democratic convention, Kennedy appealed to their youthful idealism, asking them whether they would be willing to serve their country. “How many of you,” he challenged them, “would be willing to spend your days working”—as teachers, doctors, and engineers—“in Ghana?” The audience roared its response and Kennedy continued. “On your willingness not merely to serve one or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether we as a free society can compete” in the cold war world. The audience was “wildly responsive,” and as Kennedy headed off to bed after the speech he told his aide Dave Powers that he thought that “he had hit a winning number.”
A few years later, Shriver would write, “No one is sure why Kennedy raised the question in the middle of the night at the University of Michigan.” Some of Kennedy’s aides later reflected that it was a response to an assertion Nixon had made in the debate earlier in the evening, in which he called Democrats the “war party” (Democrats Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman had presided, respectively, over the American entry into the two World Wars and the launch of the Korean War), and that this call to international service was an attempt to respond to the charge. Another possibility was that Kennedy had remembered that the university’s International Studies Department was where Samuel Hayes taught; Hayes was the author of a report, given to Kennedy a month earlier, that made the case for an American volunteer program in the third world.
Whatever the genesis of Kennedy’s inspiration that night, this was one of those times when a man and an idea and a historical moment come into alignment. The idea for an international volunteer service had been floating around for decades, at least since William James had called for a service program that produced for young men “the moral equivalent of war,” and there was even a pending bill (sponsored by Hubert Humphrey) in Congress calling for such a thing. But it was at this moment at Ann Arbor that the spirit that animated the Peace Corps truly began to gather and build.
Kennedy’s speech got little notice, since it occurred after newspaper reporters had filed their stories, but he could see from the reaction of the students that—in speaking not just to the students’ needs but to their aspirations—he was onto something.
The students took what he said seriously. Two weeks after the speech, Kennedy received a letter from a newly formed student group calling itself “Americans Committed to World Responsibility.” In their letter, the students requested that Kennedy, if elected, establish an international service program—and they included a petition of a thousand names of people who would sign up.
On November 2, one week before election day, Kennedy developed this idea into a campaign issue and gave it a name. The occasion was a speech at San Francisco’s Cow Palace auditorium; the scheduled topic, how to maintain peace and America’s global stature through smart foreign policy. Before an audience of 40,000, Kennedy began by criticizing the US foreign service and its “ill-chosen, ill-equipped, and ill-briefed” ambassadors, noting that 70 percent of new foreign service officers could speak no language besides English and that many American diplomats could not communicate with the citizens of the countries to which they were posted. The Soviets, he warned, were doing a better job endearing themselves to the developing world, sending emissaries abroad to teach the world technical skills while also propagandizing about communism. There were now more Soviets providing technical assistance to developing countries in Asia than there were Americans. The same would soon be true of Africa. “We have to do better,” Kennedy said. It was a matter of both moral value and cold war necessity.
“There is enough know-how and enough knowledgeable people to help [developing] nations help themselves,” Kennedy said. “I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a ‘Peace Corps’ of talented young men willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years as an alternative to peace-time selective service—well-qualified through vigorous standards; well-trained in the language, skills, and customs they will need to know.” This would be a volunteer service, Kennedy said, not a draft, and he concluded that “our young men and women, dedicated to freedom, are fully capable of overcoming the efforts of Mr. Khrushchev’s missionaries who are dedicated to undermining that freedom.”
The next morning a front-page New York Times headline declared, “Kennedy Favors US ‘Peace Corps’ to Work Abroad.” The idea now had a name, and it had become an official part of the Kennedy campaign. It would be a while yet before it would be brought to fruition—and it would change and gain nuance as it developed—but the idea was now a part of the political conversation, and Kennedy himself alluded to it several more times over the next week, including the day before the election. America, he said, “needs ‘a Peace Corps’ of young men and women who will be willing to spend two or three years of their lives as teachers and nurses, working in different countries … spreading the cause of freedom.”
Shriver read the newspaper accounts of the Cow Palace speech. It spoke to his own concerns about the Soviets’ quest for global Communist domination. It spoke equally strongly to his convictions about the value of cross-cultural exposure for young people. But Shriver was preoccupied with campaigning in the Midwest and getting the word out about the King phone call. For the moment, the man who would midwife the Peace Corps into existence paid it little heed.
When election day, November 8, arrived, the far-flung members of the Kennedy operation returned from their disparate locations, converging on their home base at Hyannis Port. Shriver stopped off in Chicago, to vote at his polling place on 2441 North Clark Street, before flying to Cape Cod. As he watched the early election results on television from Jack’s house, he was despondent. “I can still vividly recall the dejection I felt when the early returns from Illinois and other places began to come in,” he would say forty years later. “Bobby came in from the lawn, where he had been throwing a football around with Teddy. ‘We’re being clobbered,’ Bobby said, after glancing at the television. He was right; things didn’t look good. Oh, God, I thought, we’ve lost my home state. Jack’s lost Illinois, I thought, and it’s my fault.” Finding the prospect of defeat unbearable, Shriver crept off to bed. He recalled,
I climbed into bed, glancing at the radio on the bedside table, knowing I should turn it on and listen to the fin
al results but unable to bear doing so. I stretched out on top of the covers, without even taking my clothes off. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been more depressed. I must have drifted off sometime after midnight, because I awoke to an insistent knocking on my door. “What is it?” I yelled. “Sarge,” someone yelled back, “you’re wanted in Jack’s house.”
Well, this was it, I thought. Jack had lost. With heavy tread, I made my way across the lawn. A few dozen family members and close aides were watching the television—and cheering! The newscasters were projecting a Kennedy victory! We all clapped each other on the back exuberantly, and drank boisterous toasts.
Thrilled by the victory, Shriver didn’t take the time to contemplate the effect his brother-in-law’s election would have on his own life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Talent Hunt
After a day of celebration and press appearances, the Kennedy inner circle met at 10:30 a.m. on November 10 at Bobby Kennedy’s house to get down to the business of preparing for the presidency. Present were Shriver, Ted Sorensen, Bobby Kennedy, Pierre Salinger, Larry O’Brien, Joe Kennedy, and, of course, the president-elect. When Jack walked in, everyone assembled rose to stand, in instinctive tribute to his newly exalted status.
There were only seventy days until the inauguration in January, hardly enough time, it seemed, to fill seventy-five senior cabinet and executive branch posts, name hundreds of other people to positions in the administration, reshape the Democratic National Committee, develop a legislative agenda, draft a budget, and plan the inauguration itself, among hundreds of other sundry tasks. Thus Jack got right down to the business of assigning interregnum roles to people. He named O’Donnell his aide for administration and appointments, Salinger his chief press aide, and Sorensen his top aide for policy and programs. Clark Clifford, a prominent Washington lawyer and a Stuart Symington supporter who had served as an adviser to Harry Truman, was made special counsel to the president. At this point, no specific role was assigned to Bobby, but it was obvious he would be a central part of interregnum planning.
Kennedy came to Shriver almost last. “Sarge,” he said, “I want you to help me put the cabinet together. We’ve got to find the most dedicated, bright, tough-minded, experienced guys in the country. You know, we have to get somebody to develop the budget right away because we’ve got hardly two months to come up with a new one for next year. So we need someone to head up the Bureau of the Budget. And then we need to fill in the most important positions: secretary of defense, state, justice, and all the others. I want you to find these people for me.”
Why did Kennedy pick Shriver for this important task? Several factors determined Kennedy’s decision. First, he had seen Shriver in action on the campaign trail and had been impressed by his unflagging enthusiasm, even in the face of setbacks and hardships. “Though people were sometimes ruffled by Shriver’s courtesy and easy amiability into dismissing him as something of a Boy Scout,” Arthur Schlesinger has written of Shriver’s assignment to this task, “the President-elect had confidence in his energy and imagination—a confidence Shriver had justified in the campaign and justified again now.” Second, Jack had come to see why his father respected Shriver’s judgment so much: Most of the important decisions Shriver had made during the campaign had worked to Jack’s benefit. Third, an important component of Shriver’s judgment was evidently his eye for talent. The people he had brought into the campaign, or whom he moved from the periphery of the campaign toward the center—people like Harris Wofford, Adam Yarmolinsky, Marjorie Lawson, Louis Martin, and scores of others—had worked out well and impressed the president-elect. Fourth, although Shriver had at times been kept apart from the campaign’s central decision-making process, that had never seemed to bother him—he just went off and did the jobs he was assigned to do. This suggested to Kennedy that Shriver could work on his own initiative and wouldn’t require management. Finally, Shriver was “the most outgoing member of the immediate circle, who was thought to have the widest range of acquaintanceship.” Who else counted Negro blues singers and Catholic bishops, professional athletes and corporate executives, janitors and Supreme Court justices among his friends?
Walking over to the Ambassador’s house after the long meeting at Bobby’s house had ended, Shriver started to feel intimidated by his assignment. “I had never worked at the higher levels of federal government. I was not a professor of public administration. I had never made a budget for myself, let alone for the United States government. ‘My God!’ I said to myself, ‘where do I even start if I need to find someone to be in charge of the Bureau of the Budget.’ So I called up McGeorge Bundy, an old friend of mine who was a Harvard dean, and asked him to have breakfast with me the very next day at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.” As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for some ten years at Harvard, Shriver recalled, “Bundy had been running a ‘talent hunt’ of his own, searching for the most imaginative intellectuals in the world. He knew the names and numbers of all the ‘first team’ academics everywhere.” Shriver asked Bundy to start compiling a list of all the people he knew in academia or public life or business who he thought might be well-suited for a position in the Kennedy administration. The Talent Hunt had begun.
As soon as breakfast was finished, Shriver got on the phone to Harris Wofford and told him it was time to spring into action once more. “If you thought you were going on vacation,” Shriver told him, “enjoy it quickly—between now and Sunday. Monday morning we go to work.” “Jack has asked me to organize a talent search for the top jobs,” he told Wofford. “The cabinet, regulatory agencies, ambassadors, everything. We’re going to comb the universities and professions, the civil rights movement, business, labor, foundations, and everywhere, to find the brightest and best people possible.”
Telling Wofford to round up Louis Martin and Adam Yarmolinsky—whose cerebral brilliance as head of the campaign’s Urban Affairs Section had greatly impressed him—Shriver scheduled a meeting for first thing Monday morning at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. In the few days before then, they were to learn everything they could about how previous cabinet transitions and recruitments had worked.
Kennedy wanted to avoid the executive breakdowns and partisan rancor that had complicated the transfers of power between Hoover and Roosevelt in 1932 and between Truman and Eisenhower twenty years later. This meant, as he told Shriver, that he wanted to make his major cabinet selections without excessive concern for partisan affiliation—what mattered more than politics was temperament and, especially, talent.
Shriver set himself, Wofford, Martin, and Yarmolinsky and their assistants up in a suite of rooms in the Mayflower, and within a few hours of their initial meeting on November 14, they had begun the work of calling around for recommendations from their network of contacts. As Wofford noted, “Shriver knew the kind of man Kennedy wanted. More accurately, since Kennedy worked well with and respected a wide range of types, Shriver knew the kind not wanted: the too ideological, too earnest, too emotional, and too talkative—and the dull.” “One of the things we had to keep in the forefront of our minds,” Shriver recalled, “was that what we thought of a [candidate] wasn’t as important as what Jack might think of him. Especially where the higher posts were concerned, our chief job was to find men and women we had reason to believe could work harmoniously with the president-to-be.” Shriver instructed his staff not to worry about whether a given candidate was actually likely to be available. “I was to go after the best people we could find without regard to availability,” Yarmolinsky recalled, “and we would worry about that when we came to it.” Shriver told reporters at the time that he didn’t even ask candidates their party affiliation. He was more concerned with age, he said, seeking appointees between thirty and fifty years old, “because we are trying to strengthen the country and the party for the long pull, five to fifteen years.”
Eventually, the Talent Hunt procured an office, in a corner of the Democratic National Committee headquarters
at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street, where Shriver had maintained an office during the campaign. Shriver concentrated on combing the business community; Wofford, the academic and political science communities; and Yarmolinsky, the law schools and foundations. They shared an office suite with Larry O’Brien and Ralph Dungan, who were heading up the Political Patronage Section of the executive staffing operation. It was the job of Dungan and O’Brien to see to it that important campaign workers, contributors, and supporters who sought jobs in the Kennedy administration were rewarded with them. “In a sense,” as Arthur Schlesinger put it, “the Shriver group began with the positions and looked for people qualified to fill them, and the O’Brien group began with the people and looked for positions they were qualified to fill.” This inevitably led to what the parties involved called “a state of friendly competition.”
Generally, Shriver found the people he wanted rather than the other way around. Indeed, it was a guiding principle of the Talent Hunt that Plato had gotten it right in his Republic: Those most suited for public office don’t seek it. Thus Shriver worked his networks relentlessly—friends, family, business associates, political connections, civil rights colleagues, college and law school classmates, old professors, navy buddies—and solicited their input and asked them to ask their friends for their input. As a Chicago American reporter visiting Shriver’s office wrote, the atmosphere was less one of political patronage than “that surrounding the choice of a dean for a law school.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 24