Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Kennedy’s cabinet was, as Sorensen commented, “nonpolitical and bipartisan to an extent unusual for Democratic presidents in particular.” Out of a dozen members it included only four men who had previously sought public office and only four men—one of them his brother—who had supported Kennedy before the early primaries. Kennedy wanted a “ministry of talent,” and his cabinet was decidedly not a patronage reservoir.

  The “remarkably high quality” of Kennedy’s appointees, Sorensen wrote, was a reflection of the Talent Hunt, whose “vast card file of candidate evaluations was both less systematic and more sensible than some news stories reported.”

  [Kennedy’s] search succeeded. The men he picked were for the most part men who thought his thoughts, spoke his language, and put their country and Kennedy ahead of any other concern. They were scrupulously honest; not even a suspicion of scandal ever tainted the Kennedy Cabinet. They were, like him, dedicated but unemotional, young but experienced, articulate but soft-spoken.… All spoke with the same low-keyed restraint that marked their chief, yet all shared his deep conviction that they could change America’s drift.

  At a seminar on the JFK legacy held in 1984, Shriver recalled that Kennedy’s natural magnetism had made the work of the Talent Hunt much easier. Government was not yet “the enemy” it became under Carter and Reagan, the perceived “capital of an evil empire of bureaucrats and dunces and incompetents.” The president-elect’s “example and leadership” was a spur to both Republicans and Democrats. “If you believed in America’s destiny, the efficiency of democracy, this was truly a glorious time to be alive,” Shriver said, reflecting the idealism and the optimism—and not a little of the hubris—of 1960.

  By late December, the Talent Hunt began to wind down. J. Edward Day’s appointment as postmaster general, on December 17, marked the completion of the cabinet. After filling another 200 or so subcabinet positions, Shriver turned his files over to the White House, where they became the province of John Macy, the incoming chair of the Civil Service Commission, and Ralph Dungan, who continued to draw on the Talent Hunt’s research in filling positions over the next three years. But the “casting” of the Kennedy administration, as the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory called the Talent Hunt (with Shriver as “casting director”), was largely complete.

  As inauguration day approached, Shriver and Wofford joked that they had done such a good job filling slots there were no good ones remaining in the Kennedy administration for themselves. “One by one the people we most respected, often at our initiative, were being appointed to key posts, and the relatively few jobs that interested either of us were being filled,” Wofford recalled.

  Wofford, for his part, hoped for a presidential appointment not only for himself, but for Shriver, who he thought was a good influence on Kennedy. “Shriver was hardly Eleanor Roosevelt,” Wofford has written, “but I could see why he was considered the ‘house liberal,’ or worse, by some of those around Kennedy. He seemed close to the president, if not to some of his aides, and could speak up to him, when necessary; I thought Kennedy would do well to have Shriver near at hand, and hoped he would be appointed to the White House staff.” The Talent Hunt had forced Wofford to spend many long hours with Shriver; often traveling and spending the night with him in hotels, the idealistic young civil rights lawyer had grown increasingly admiring of this Kennedy brother-in-law. Shriver would, Wofford recalled,

  regularly read in his bed long after midnight, turning from the endless memos of the talent search to something philosophical, religious, or literary. Stirred by a passage in Saul Bellow or a verse in a poem, he would read it aloud, and a conversation would spring up until sleep put it out.…

  Not many outside his family saw this side of Shriver. Superficially he gave the impression that one was not virtuous unless exhausted by work, but those who worked and traveled with him discovered that meditation and philosophical thought were never far from the surface. His pace was too fast, though his enthusiasm and good humor generated energy and excitement in those he didn’t wear out. Yet just as you would think he will never stand still and listen, he would ask a penetrating question opening new lines of thought and action. He persistently tested where a course was right or wrong by measures of both principle and practicality.

  Shriver, however, had surprisingly little interest in remaining in Washington. Certain positions intrigued Shriver, but he was eager to return to Chicago. He had put his life there on hold, and he wanted to return to thinking about his own political future in Illinois. Also, he was worried about Eunice’s health. Although he knew she could not be made to sit still any better than he could, he thought some rest, and some distance from the rest of the Kennedys, might do her some good.

  But he underestimated her indomitable will to action, her need to be where things were happening. And he underestimated, too, how strongly he had proven himself in the president-elect’s eyes in managing the Talent Hunt. Jack now saw, if he hadn’t before, why his father had relied so heavily on Sarge for so many things. And he wasn’t about to let him return to private life in Chicago.

  PART THREE

  The Peace Corps (1961–1963)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Towering Task

  Inauguration day dawned crisp and cold and clear. A winter storm the night before, one of the heaviest in the city’s memory, had blanketed the capital in eight inches of snow, making the roads untraversable. Cars were stuck in snowdrifts at every intersection. Only the work of the US Army, which had provided hundreds of truckloads of men with shovels and flamethrowers to labor through the night, ensured that the roads were clear for the inauguration.

  Eunice and Sarge Shriver, like the other members of the Kennedy family and its inner circle, had spent the previous day and night going from event to event, concluding the evening at the pre-inaugural concert at the Armory, where Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra had assembled a parade of celebrity performers. Eunice had recovered from the exhaustion that had landed her in the hospital in mid-November, but earlier in the week she had sprained her ankle rushing to catch a plane and had to rely on a cane to help her limp through all the inaugural events.

  Now they stood in the cold on the East Plaza of the Capitol with fourteen other Kennedys, President Eisenhower, former president Truman, Vice President Nixon, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and a host of other officials, waiting for the mantle of power to pass to Jack. John F. Kennedy was about to become the leader of the free world.

  On this day, January 20, 1961, the Peace Corps did not exist. It remained to be seen whether the idea Kennedy had expressed (“We need young men and women to spend two or three years abroad spreading the cause of freedom”) in Ann Arbor and San Francisco in the waning days of the campaign would be brought to fruition and turned into a real program, or whether it would be forgotten, a forever-unrealized campaign promise. In all the hours spent helping to fill hundreds of positions, the Talent Hunt group had devoted not a moment’s thought to the Peace Corps—this despite the fact that Kennedy “received more letters from people offering to work in, or to volunteer for, the nonexistent Peace Corps than for all the existing programs of the United States government put together.” This volume of interest might have suggested that starting a “Peace Corps”—whatever such an entity might turn out to be—was in order, but Kennedy gave Shriver and his associates no indication that he had plans to follow through on this campaign idea anytime soon. Besides, the Talent Hunt people had enough positions to worry about in existing agencies to concern themselves with filling jobs in a merely potential one.

  But although the Peace Corps had yet to be given shape or form, the underlying spirit that would animate it was very much present on inauguration day. “Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Kennedy’s inaugural address began. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure
the survival and success of liberty.”

  “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” he said a few moments later, “we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” And, building to the most famous words of his oration: “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out.… And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

  Kennedy was speaking, of course, not only to Americans but to the world—and especially to Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, to whom he wished to send the message that the United States would remain an unyielding adversary in the cold war struggle. But in Kennedy’s address lay the spirit of sacrifice and willingness to serve that would be the essence of the Peace Corps. President Kennedy may or may not have been thinking explicitly of the Peace Corps when he spoke these words—more likely not—but he captured the spirit of the age when he uttered them, and it was this same spirit that would be so successfully harnessed by the soon-to-be born agency.

  Both the Peace Corps and the New Frontier were products of a specific generation. When Kennedy, the youngest man to be elected president, began his address by invoking “a new generation of Americans,” he was implicitly bidding farewell to the fustiness, not just of President Eisenhower himself (who at age seventy-one was the oldest elected president) and his administration, but also to the Eisenhower generation, which had presided over the postwar years of the 1950s.

  Kennedy’s was not just any generation. It was, as the president declaimed in his address, a generation whose identity had been forged in the crucible of war and its aftermath. This generation, which had helped to vanquish the totalitarian and imperialist regimes of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Tojo’s Japan, had also lifted America to global pre-eminence. America now confronted a new enemy in the totalitarian communism of the Soviet Union. But Kennedy’s generation shared the conviction—garnered through victory in a hard-fought war—that the world might yield to its efforts. Hard work and the American spirit, this generation concluded, could produce peace and progress. “We were arrogant in a funny kind of way,” recalled Bill Haddad, one of Shriver’s top aides during the Peace Corps’ founding era. “We were guys of the forties who thought there was nothing we, or America, couldn’t do.”

  Part of this optimism sprang from the idealism of youth. The members of Kennedy’s generation were in their early forties or younger (Shriver was forty-five)—not yet middle-aged. The energy of the New Frontier was inseparable from its youthfulness. “The difference between the outgoing Eisenhower and the incoming Kennedy,” one observer said in 1961, “was the difference between a slow march and a jig. Washington is crackling, rocking, jumping. It is a kite zigging in the breeze.” And although the attitudes and beliefs of the Kennedy-Shriver generation were not monolithic, the men of this era shared the common bond of war, which (the social science data suggest) lent them a stronger sense of patriotism, a greater sense of the importance of American values and of the duty to serve these values. It was partly to this sense that Kennedy spoke in his inaugural address. “The 16 million young men who had gone to war in the 1940s were taking over from the generals and the admirals,” the political scientist Richard Reeves has written, “and this was their new adventure. They could finish the job of remaking the world in America’s image.” The men of the Kennedy administration were the “junior officers of the Second World War finally come to power,” as the wife of Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s advisers, described them. A generation of young men who had returned from war only to find themselves adrift (as Shriver had for a time), waiting their turn behind the Eisenhower generation, now rallied behind their compatriot Kennedy, who was promising them an outlet for all their pent-up energy and frustrated idealism.

  As a product of the 1960s, the Peace Corps is apt to be associated with starry-eyed hippies and the crunchier aspects of the counterculture. Yet the founding fathers of the Peace Corps, from Kennedy and Shriver on down, were almost all World War II veterans. And to understand the Peace Corps—its animating impulses and its phenomenal early success—one does best to consider it as the product of the camaraderie and values of the World War II generation.

  After the inaugural ceremony, following a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel arranged by Joe Kennedy, some members of the family traveled in a chartered tour bus to the White House, where they were to wait for the formal arrival of the new president. They swarmed through the building, looking at the furniture, marveling at the trappings of power. Eunice went upstairs with Jack’s friend Lem Billings to look at the Lincoln Bedroom, where they bounced on the bed and laughed giddily as they photographed each other spread out on the counterpane. At one point, Eunice looked up and said, “You know what this reminds me of? That scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett’s colored servants move into Tara with her after the war. I feel like the old mammy who takes a look around and then says, ‘Man, we’s rich now.’ ”

  The next day, after the inaugural ball, the Shrivers flew home to Chicago. Sarge had had discussions with Jack and others about positions in the various executive departments, including State, Justice, and Health, Education, and Welfare, but so far none of them had come to anything. He had also heard his name mentioned as a possible member of the White House staff, but he wasn’t interested. He just couldn’t see himself fitting in with either the “Irish Mafia” (Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Dave Powers) or the “eggheads” (Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger), who made up the president’s inner circle of advisers. Both the O’Donnell and Sorensen groups viewed him, Shriver knew, as too much of an “independent operator.”

  But the Shrivers had been back in Chicago for only a few hours when the phone rang. It was the president. After talking to Eunice for a few minutes, Jack asked to speak to Sarge. When he got on the phone, Jack asked him if he would head a task force that would study the feasibility of starting a program like the Peace Corps. In the years since then, Shriver has frequently joked that the reason Jack asked him to lead the task force—and later the Peace Corps itself—was that everyone knew the program would be a disaster and that when the day of reckoning arrived “it would be easier to fire a relative than a friend.”

  During the interregnum and the early days of his administration, Kennedy had set up several task forces for the purpose of exploring various policy initiatives. The Peace Corps seemed tailor-made for such a task force. On the one hand, in the months since his Ann Arbor and Cow Palace speeches, interest in the Peace Corps had grown. Not only had Shriver, in his role as talent hunter, been besieged with inquiries regarding employment at the Peace Corps, but 25,000 people had also written to the president, asking about it. A week after the election, a Washington Post editorial urged Kennedy not to allow the Peace Corps to become merely a forgotten campaign promise. A week before the inauguration, a New York Times article said that the Peace Corps was “something that is in the spirit of this democratic country, a forward-looking thing, and it is heartening that so many of our young people are responding with vigor and eagerness to it.” A Gallup Poll conducted near the time of the inauguration found that 71 percent of Americans were in favor of establishing the Peace Corps.

  But despite the breadth of support for the program, resistance was strong in certain quarters. During the campaign, Nixon had attacked the idea as nothing more than a haven for prospective draft dodgers, calling the program “inherently dangerous.” Nixon and his supporters took to deriding the Peace Corps as a “kiddie corps.” Eisenhower called it “a juvenile experiment.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Who but the very young themselves can really believe that an Africa aflame with violence will have its fires quen
ched because some Harvard boy or Vassar girl lives in a mud hut and speaks Swahili?” Conservative members of Congress said they would never appropriate money for such a program.

  The strength of this opposition caused Kennedy to want to proceed cautiously. He declined to announce definitively during the interregnum period what he had in mind for a “Peace Corps” and deferred launching even an exploratory task force until after the inauguration. The extent of what he did before calling Shriver was to ask Max Millikan, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had advised Kennedy on economics and the third world, to write a report on how such a program might work. “Have Max take on the responsibility of working up a Peace Corps idea into something I could implement,” Kennedy wrote to Walt Rostow in the weeks after the election. But he also told Rostow that what he had in mind was something small and experimental, nothing that might cause young Americans to get involved in some sensitive foreign policy area overseas that would result in his looking like a naive young president.

  Rostow contacted his MIT colleague Millikan, and Millikan wrote a long memorandum called “An International Youth Service,” in which he supported the idea of a “youth service,” but only very tentatively. “We simply do not know a great deal about how to make a program of this kind work,” Millikan wrote. On January 9 Kennedy released Millikan’s report to the public and proposed the creation of an International Youth Service Agency “on a limited pilot basis.” The agency would fall under the auspices of US foreign assistance and would be strictly “experimental.” No more than a few hundred young people would participate for the first few years, and “there should be no pressure to achieve greater volume until there is sufficient evidence and background study to give some confidence that expanded numbers can be wisely used.”