Timberlawn also became the weekend headquarters of the Peace Corps. At the Peace Corps there weren’t weekends as such. Edgar May, who worked briefly at the Peace Corps before becoming inspector general for the Office of Economic Opportunity, recalled an illustrative episode. “One time it was eleven o’clock on Friday night and someone walked by and asked my secretary what day it was and she said, ‘Friday—only two more working days.’ ”
Shriver realized he had to make some concession to family life—his own if not his employees’. Once ensconced at Timberlawn, he realized that family time and work time could be combined for the Peace Corps upper management. Thus most weekends would find Shriver and his deputies bivouacked around a table inside the house while their wives and children frolicked on the grounds. It was like a giant summer camp for everyone: There would be round-robin tennis tournaments on the Timberlawn court; relay races in the pool; ongoing games of hide-and-seek, cops-and-robbers, kickball, and football on the lawn. There was a stable full of horses, offering rides to the children. The Shrivers’ dogs—as many as sixteen of them at one point—would run among the guests. Late in the afternoon, Shriver would open the bar. The day would usually end with the families reuniting at the house from the far corners of the estate, ready for the evening barbecue and predinner swim.
The spirit of these Timberlawn weekends was much like the spirit of the Peace Corps generally: constant motion and barely controlled chaos, all hell breaking loose, with Shriver presiding and infecting the proceedings with his energetic good cheer.
CAMP SHRIVER
Meanwhile, Eunice remained obsessed with the plight of the mentally retarded. “I have seen sights that will haunt me my whole life,” Eunice would write in 1964, referring to her early visits to institutions for the retarded. “If I had not seen them myself, I would never have believed that such conditions could exist in modern America … adults and children … in barrack-like wards, their unwashed clothes and blankets in rags.”
During the chaotic first months of the Peace Corps’ existence, Sarge somehow found the time to help Eunice continue to expand the Kennedy Foundation’s involvement in the field of mental retardation. “Behind all Eunice’s efforts,” one author has observed,
stood Sarge, an omnipresent advisor, sitting in on meetings, making phone calls on his wife’s behalf, providing an emotional ballast to his often overwrought wife. As a political couple, the Shrivers were sometimes compared with Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike the Roosevelts with their separate agendas and constituencies, the Shrivers were ideologically and politically bonded, and had an emotional closeness that the Roosevelts had lost early in their marriage.
Earlier, on November 9, 1959, while meeting with a team of researchers in Baltimore who were hoping to receive Kennedy Foundation money to start a mental retardation program at Johns Hopkins University, the Shrivers were introduced to Robert Cooke, a forty-year-old professor of pediatrics at the university. “Of all the academics who clustered about the Shrivers,” the medical historian Edwin Shorter has written, “Cooke has perhaps been most their match in terms of force of personality and style. A man of movie-star looks and dean’s-corridor grooming, he projected the Kennedy image of fast-lane dynamism. As someone with first-class intelligence and strong moral convictions, he could hold his own in any after-dinner debate at Timberlawn.”
What interested the Shrivers about Cooke, however, was not his “Kennedy style” but his expertise in the field of mental retardation. Cooke and his wife were the parents of two severely retarded children, and as a result in 1956 Cooke had turned his research attentions toward the subject. By the time of his meeting with the Shrivers in 1959, he was established as a leading expert in the field. Sarge and Eunice were greatly impressed by him, and they brought Cooke onto a scientific advisory council the foundation was establishing; before long he had become the family’s most trusted adviser on all health-related matters. This led to multiple responsibilities within the Kennedy family: Eunice dispatched him to give health care ideas to her brother during his presidential campaign; after the 1960 election, Cooke became a member of the president-elect’s health care transition team. He also became the Shriver family’s pediatrician. After 1964 Cooke would also be integrally involved in many of the programs started by Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity, playing a key role in the founding of Head Start. From 1960 Cooke was Eunice’s right-hand man on mental retardation issues.
In 1961, as her brother ascended to the highest office in the land, Eunice saw a singular opportunity: As the sister of the president, she would have his ear. She made a conscious decision to use this access to help advance her chosen cause. Eunice urged her brother to start a new institute exclusively dedicated to research into children’s health issues, with a special focus on mental retardation. According to Shorter, “Eunice, needling her brother for the new institute … sliced through normally fearsome bureaucratic opposition. She quickly acquired the authority to give orders to White House adviser Mike Feldman, who in turn gave orders to Wilbur Cohen,” who was the assistant cabinet secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare charged with attending to the department’s youth-related policies. “Let’s give Eunice whatever she wants so I can get her off the phone and get on with the business of the government,” the president would say jokingly to Bobby Kennedy. Her persistence paid off; legislation providing funding for the institute was passed and then signed into law by the president.
But Eunice wasn’t done. Even as she was lobbying for the establishment of the Institute for Child Health and Human Development, Eunice and Bob Cooke were also pressing the White House to hold a national conference on the mentally retarded, to generate publicity for the issue. On October 11, 1961, two weeks after he signed the Peace Corps Act, President Kennedy announced the formation of a national panel to study mental retardation. “We as a nation,” he said, “have for too long postponed an intensive search for solutions to the problems of the mentally retarded. That failure should be corrected.”
Officially listed as only a consultant to the panel, Eunice was in reality its de facto leader and driving force, “the prime mover” as one panel member observed. Leonard Mayo, the panel’s official director, once had a phone conversation with Sarge in which he explained, “Well, Mr. Shriver, I want you to know one thing.… [Eunice] may be a consultant on paper, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s the chairman of the board.”
“Well,” Sarge replied. “I see I don’t have to draw any pictures for you.”
Eunice persuaded Jack to appoint Dr. Stafford Warren, a vice chancellor for health services at UCLA, as special assistant to the president for programs in mental retardation. “In theory,” Shorter wrote, “Warren and his staff were responsible for jockeying the panel’s many recommendations through the federal government. In practice, it was the Shrivers who retained the oversight and gave Warren and his people their marching orders.”
In effect, Sarge and Eunice Shriver had put themselves in charge of a small section of the federal bureaucracy—but without having any official authority vesting them with the power to do so. “In retrospect,” Shorter said, “it is actually quite breathtaking to see a major agency of the federal government captured in this manner by outsiders.… It was as though the Department of Defense had been captured by Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy.” Even more than Sarge, Eunice tended to blind herself to the obstacles standing between her and her public interest goals. Red tape, conventional protocol, historical precedent—none of these could be allowed to stand in the way of helping the mentally retarded. She would not allow a little thing such as not having an official position in the federal government stop her from running a government agency. She would give orders to Mike Feldman at the White House; Feldman would give orders to Wilbur Cohen at HEW; and Cohen would execute them.
Once, when Cohen walked into the Oval Office, the president greeted him by saying, “Hello, Wilbur. Has my sister been giving you trouble again?”
“How did you know?” asked the stunned Cohen.
“I know my sister,” Kennedy said.
If Eunice “hadn’t nagged the hell out of Sarge Shriver and her brother,” Cohen recalled, “there wouldn’t be a mental retardation program.” If Eunice ever wanted something, the president would say, “For God’s sake, Wilbur and everybody else, do it! Get her off my back!”
While the panel on mental retardation was still doing its work during 1961 and 1962, Eunice told Leonard Mayo that she would like to contribute to the panel’s research and recommendations on physical education. From the start, Eunice had wanted the panel to make recommendations that would be of immediate practical use to the parents of the mentally retarded. She wasn’t aware of any research on, or opportunities for, physical activity for the retarded. Eunice herself had been an athlete all her life—and, like all the Kennedys, a hypercompetitive one—and felt she had derived enjoyment and health from her participation in sports. But she knew from her experience with the mentally retarded that they tended to be physically unfit, often overweight. Was this physical unfitness directly related to their disability—or was it simply a result of no one’s providing opportunities for exercise to the mentally disabled? Eunice didn’t know. She did recall, however, that her sister Rosemary, despite her mental infirmities, was able to “swim, sail, and play ball” and that Rosemary’s ability to participate in sports kept her from feeling isolated from the family.
Eunice began to research the issue for the panel. She consulted with Sarge and then started phoning the roster of experts they had met with over the preceding three years, asking them what they knew about programs to promote (or research that had studied) physical activity by the mentally retarded. To her dismay, there was almost nothing. “It was really pitiful, the lack of programs,” she recalled later.
She decided to take matters into her own hands. In the spring of 1962, she inaugurated “Camp Shriver.” If Timberlawn had been a scene of joyful chaos before, Camp Shriver ratcheted the chaos to a new level. Scores of mentally handicapped children were bused in from local institutions. Dozens of inmates from a local prison—most of them African American—would be bused in to serve as counselors. Teenagers from local Catholic high schools descended on the estate as volunteers. And then all of them—the mentally retarded, the prisoners, the teenage volunteers, plus the Shriver children and their friends—would frolic around the grounds.
Coming home from work, Sarge would find bedlam—Timberlawn overrun by mentally retarded children and their camp counselors. There were retarded children in the pool getting swimming lessons. Children on trampolines. Children by the stable getting horseback-riding lessons. Children in the woods learning how to climb a rope. Children on the court, learning to play tennis. Children on the “confidence course,” a series of exercise stations that Eunice had persuaded the District of Columbia’s Recreation Department to set up on the Timberlawn grounds. Children in one corner of the lawn learning soccer from a volunteer recruited from the British Embassy. Children in another corner of the lawn learning South Asian dance from a volunteer recruited from the Philippine Embassy. Some children were even being induced to compete against one another, in swimming and running races. In the middle of everything, usually right in the center of the fray, would be Eunice. “When I’d come home from the office, there’s my wife in the pool, holding this mentally retarded child in the water to see if it’s possible for that child to swim.” This was craziness, Sarge thought. Everyone knew that the most humane thing to do with the mentally retarded was to send them to an institution where they would be cared for and kept out of the way of normal society. Shriver had learned a lot in his travels around the country on behalf of the Kennedy Foundation, but nothing he had seen had suggested to him that having a bunch of mentally retarded kids running loose around your home was a good thing for anyone involved. Shriver’s skepticism increased when he came home one night to discover that camp counselors had raided his liquor cabinet, denuding it of thousands of dollars worth of imported wine.
The notion that the mentally retarded might actually engage profitably in athletic competition had theretofore been unimaginable. But there they all were, Sarge saw, running around and obviously having a good time. His own children would be playing among them “as if it were the most normal thing in the world.” Slowly, his skepticism lifted.
It helped that he trusted his wife’s judgment implicitly, because although Eunice hired some experts early on—for instance, she hired Sandy Eiler, a former Olympic swimmer from Canada, to run the camp—many employees of Camp Shriver were novices. Most of these counselors had never met a mentally retarded person. “We had no idea of what it would be like,” said one. “To tell the truth, all of us were a little afraid.”
In 1962 mental retardation still carried a powerful social stigma. Retarded children were kept hidden by their parents or sent quietly away to dismal institutions that were often little more than warehouses for the disabled. Having a retarded child was shameful. Even the Kennedys themselves had kept Rosemary’s situation a secret—she was still being cared for by nuns in Wisconsin. (Eunice would go public with the secret later that year.) Most healthy people had had little or no contact with the retarded. A businessman who visited the camp asked Eunice, “Aren’t you afraid to work around the retarded? Won’t they go berserk?”
To the extent that the shame of retardation has now been lifted, this is to an astonishing degree the result of the work of one woman and the camps she started at Timberlawn in the spring of 1962. After 1962 Eunice used the example of Camp Shriver—which continued to be held every summer—to proselytize about the value of physical activity and competition for the retarded, and she used the Kennedy Foundation’s money to subsidize similar camps for the retarded in other venues. In 1963 the Kennedy Foundation supported eleven day camps for the mentally retarded in several locations around the country; by 1969, when the program gave way to the Special Olympics, the foundation was supporting thirty-two camps—serving 10,000 children—across the country.
“COMPLETE AND TOTAL ANARCHY”
With Camp Shriver during the week, all-day Peace Corps meetings on weekends, and parties all the time, the scene at Timberlawn was one of wild and unrelenting activity. “It was chaos, really,” Bobby Shriver recalled. “Complete and total anarchy.”
“There were at least a hundred people at our house every weekend,” Maria Shriver says. “Baseball games, barbecues, relay races, touch football games, and meetings, lots of meetings. The house was always full of people with ideas. And Daddy was kind of the hub of all of that.”
All the Shriver family projects tended to blend together in joyful chaos at Timberlawn. As Maria Shriver recalls, “You would have retarded people running around with White House people who are running around with Peace Corps volunteers who are running around with Head Start people who are running around with political people.”
The three eldest Shriver children all vividly recall a large retarded girl named Moofa, who always wore a football helmet to keep her from hurting herself when she would bang her head violently against walls and trees. Bobby, Maria, and Timothy were all afraid of her. “My mother, in her wisdom, never really explained to any of us what all this was about,” Maria recalled. “Her whole thing was ‘Everybody’s normal, everybody’s the same.’ So you would wake up in the morning and people would be banging their heads into the trees and running around and screaming, and nobody really bothered to tell us children what was going on. You had to figure it out on your own.”
“Half the time,” Maria recalled, Timberlawn would be filled with “the most brilliant minds of the country. And then the other half of the time it would be filled by people banging their heads into the trees. There would be a hundred Peace Corps volunteers and a hundred retarded children there at the same time. Or you would have Bob McNamara and Lyndon Johnson and Moofa, all there together! I look back at it sometimes and I think to myself, ‘I can’t believe
I survived that.’ ”
The unifying strand tying these disparate groups together, Maria says, was the idealism and hopefulness. “Almost everyone who visited Timberlawn in the 1960s,” she recalled, “believed they were helping to change the world.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bigger, Better, Faster
By early 1962 the Peace Corps was well into its honeymoon period. Shriver and Moyers had conquered Congress. The organization had weathered the dropped-postcard incident. Favorable press coverage of volunteers in the field had begun appearing regularly in daily newspapers and in weekly and monthly magazines. The Peace Corps had taken on a lustrous glow. For President Kennedy, it was a political bonanza: He needed to attend to it little if at all, yet it was generating political capital for him domestically as well as goodwill toward his administration abroad.
At this point it might have seemed prudent to slow the pace of growth, to allow time for Peace Corps headquarters to catch up administratively, and to permit more careful evaluation of the overseas volunteer programs that were already under way. But it was not in Shriver’s nature to slow down. Bigger, faster, better were his watchwords. This meant getting more and more volunteers into more and more countries as soon as possible. He gave a hint of the scale of his ambition for his program when, at a meeting with the Bureau of the Budget in the spring of 1962, he said he wanted to get 10,000 volunteers in the field as quickly as possible—because from that level he would be better able to evaluate whether the Peace Corps could get to 50,000 or 100,000 volunteers working around the world by 1964.
Growth generated more growth. As countries welcomed volunteers and began to sing the Peace Corps’ praises, other countries decided that they, too, would like to invite volunteers. Shriver was now a national celebrity; fawning articles about him were appearing regularly in magazines and newspapers. When he spoke at the University of California at Berkeley he was greeted by a five-minute standing ovation and with the announcement that Berkeley would be offering its students a “Peace Corps Minor,” a special program meant to prepare them for volunteer service abroad. Overall, 1962 was a year of “wild and uncontrolled growth” for the Peace Corps—the number of countries hosting volunteers expanded from nine to thirty-seven.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 35