Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Because Shriver would not countenance discussion of lowering selection standards, this meant the Peace Corps would have to launch a more aggressive recruitment program. The recruitment drive began in the spring in the Midwest and then moved on to California, which had proved the most fertile ground during the first two years of the program, producing 14 percent of all the volunteers. There was a debate at 806 Connecticut over how big and how public the recruitment campaign should be. Everyone recognized the need to generate more applications, but some of Shriver’s deputies feared that a campaign that was too aggressive would make the Peace Corps seem desperate; they thought it inappropriate to resort to a Madison Avenue–style advertising pitch to draw volunteers. Shriver disagreed: The bigger and louder the campaign was, he believed, the more effective it would be.

  Thus the first week of October 1963 saw the Peace Corps descend on the Golden State en masse. “Blitz recruiting,” the Peace Corps called it: Fifty staff members, led by Shriver himself, marched across the state, making speeches and setting up recruiting stations at forty-four colleges. Shriver gave eight convocation addresses at universities, and four speeches to civic associations, in four days. The assault yielded more than 2,500 applications and ultimately an estimated 1,000 volunteers, helping it climb toward its goal of 13,000 by the beginning of 1964.

  This rapid expansion made some Republican lawmakers nervous. Congressman Passman snarled angrily in the Peace Corps’ direction. As a November vote on a $102 million Peace Corps appropriation neared, several other members of Congress made a joint statement accusing the program of being “a burgeoning bureaucracy.” Pointing out that the Peace Corps budget had nearly doubled in a year, the representatives argued for a more modest growth rate and warned against its becoming “perverted” into an “enthusiastic crusade.” Shriver, confident that the president would use his bully pulpit to back up the appropriation if necessary, cheerfully responded that of course it was an enthusiastic crusade and that the additional money was necessary if the program were to expand deeper into Africa and Latin America, where it was sorely needed.

  As long as President Kennedy was still popular, it would be hard for Passman and others to get much political traction from trying to bring down the Peace Corps. In November 1963, as the recruitment drive continued, no one had any reason to think that Shriver would not continue to enjoy Kennedy’s indefinite support for the remainder of his first term and for what looked highly likely to be a second term as well.

  Shriver often joked that it would be easier for Kennedy to fire a family member than a political friend, but the truth was that Shriver’s relationship with the president made him and his program in some sense untouchable. Both Kennedy and Shriver knew this. After the Peace Corps was up and running, Kennedy did whatever Shriver asked: made public appearances with volunteers, wrote letters, lobbied Congress. Shriver, in turn, cultivated the relationship, not by playing the in-law card (since that had backfired in the fight over independence from AID), but through a nonstop public relations campaign directed at the White House. Every week, Shriver would send Kennedy at least one official memo summarizing Peace Corps activities, and many times he would supplement it with one or more personal letters. Although there was clearly an element of self-promotion in this stream of material Shriver sent to Kennedy, his main goal was to deepen Kennedy’s relationship with the program itself and to keep him from having to worry about it. Evidently the strategy worked. “Sarge is really on the ball,” the president told an aide after reading one of Shriver’s memos.

  The situation was ideal, from Kennedy’s perspective. The Peace Corps was, as Harris Wofford put it, the president’s “special baby, and in a sense the first offspring of the New Frontier.” Yet (to extend the metaphor) Kennedy never had to worry about childcare. “How are Sarge’s kids doing?” the president would ask Ken Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, whenever Galbraith visited Washington. “They paddled their own canoe,” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, said of Peace Corps management. This left Kennedy free to focus on the crisis of the moment, whether in Havana, Moscow, or Berlin.

  Shriver’s privileged access to the president was not without its anxieties. He had learned in 1961 the folly of trying to use Eunice to get to her brother. And Shriver could be sensitive about his relationship to the Kennedy family. Once, when a reporter asked Shriver whether he had benefited unduly from this relationship, Shriver bristled. “[Being brother-in-law to the president is] a fact of life, why think about it at all? I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.” But on balance, as Peter Braestrup, who covered the Peace Corps for the New York Times, later recalled, Shriver’s relationship to Kennedy was “essential” to the start of the Peace Corps. Because Shriver was the president’s brother-in-law, members of Congress and federal government administrators “couldn’t lean on him as if he had just been another guy”; Shriver “scared” the bureaucrats. Fred Dutton, a presidential adviser, said that people in the federal bureaucracy were always aware that the Peace Corps was Kennedy’s “favorite child.” For better and for worse, behind Shriver always loomed the shadow of the president. Shriver took this for granted and assumed that as long as he headed the Peace Corps, it would always be the case.

  The success of the California recruiting blitz was followed in late November by a more modest recruiting trip to colleges in Pittsburgh. Shriver flew into the city on Wednesday, November 20, and over the next two days he made speeches at three universities, gave radio and television interviews, and held a press conference. The mayor officially declared it “Peace Corps Week in Pittsburgh.” Reporters from radio station KDKA, which Shriver had first heard when it broadcast balloting results from the 1924 Democratic Convention into his Maryland living room, followed him around.

  Flying home to Washington on the morning of November 22, 1963, Shriver had every reason to think about how lucky he was. The recruiting drive was going well. The Peace Corps was more successful than anyone could have imagined two years earlier; it had grown faster than any peacetime agency in history; and it was the program President Kennedy felt proudest of. It was also the program with which people, both at home and abroad, most identified Kennedy. Several months earlier, in July, Time had put Shriver on its cover under the headline, “The Peace Corps: A US Ideal Abroad.” The Peace Corps, the article said, is “the single greatest success the Kennedy Administration has produced.” In March the New York Times columnist James Reston had written, “Of all the agencies of the federal government, only the Peace Corps has surpassed the hopes and claims of the Kennedy Administration.” The Peace Corps, Reston continued, “stands above the rest as the only thing new and vigorous that has managed to avoid the pessimism of intractable problems.” Shriver, it seemed, had found his calling. “I have the best damned job in Government,” he told Time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tragedy

  That same day—Friday, November 22—Eunice Shriver, who was six months pregnant, had an appointment with her obstetrician. Afterward, on a whim, she decided to bring her four-year-old son, Timmy, to Peace Corps headquarters to see if her husband, who had just flown in from Pittsburgh that morning, might have time for lunch. The three Shrivers were sitting quietly in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette when an urgent call came through for Sarge from his assistant, Mary Ann Orlando. Sarge excused himself and took the call, assuming a problem had come up at the office.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this way,” Orlando said, “but the president has been shot; they don’t know whether he is alive.”

  Returning to the table, he told Eunice, “Something’s happened to Jack.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “He’s been shot,” Sarge said.

  “Will he be all right?” she asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sarge said.

  Eunice closed her eyes for a moment, then said, “There have been so many crises in his life; he’ll pull through.”

  They ordered lunch. Eu
nice was just finishing her soup when a second telephone call came through: Jack was in critical condition.

  Shriver’s first concern was for his pregnant wife (how would she endure the death of a third sibling?), and he thought perhaps he should escort her home to Maryland. Outside the restaurant, Sarge recalled, Eunice quavered for a moment and he held out his arm to steady her. Then she set her jaw—she was visibly struggling to contain her emotions. “But nothing can overcome Eunice,” Shriver would say later, because of the depth of her religious faith. Within a minute she was barking orders, telling her husband that he was needed at the Peace Corps and that she felt she ought to get to the White House soon, to meet with Bobby Kennedy.

  Sarge and Eunice hurried across Lafayette Park to Shriver’s office, where Eunice called Bobby for an update. “It doesn’t look good,” Bobby told her. A Peace Corps staffer brought in a wire flash, saying that the president was dead. Sarge embraced Eunice and proposed that all present say a prayer for Jack’s soul. Sarge and Eunice, along with Joe English and a Peace Corps public affairs officer, knelt around Sarge’s desk, and over and over again they intoned in unison “Hail Mary, full of grace” until they were interrupted by a knock on the door—someone from the press office bringing another sheaf of wire reports from Dallas.

  Standing up after they had all finished praying, Shriver resumed worrying about what effect the shock of the news would have on his wife and unborn son. English, who was a doctor, had the same concern. “Now, listen, Eunice,” English said, “we’re all going to have responsibilities here but you’ve got the biggest one of all—responsibility for two. My suggestion is that we should get you out of here and send you up to be with your mother in Hyannis Port.” Shriver agreed and pressed Eunice to go to the Cape. She reluctantly agreed but insisted on going to the White House first, to consult with Bobby. Worried about their children, the Shrivers sent Timmy home in the care of Mary Ann Orlando, who was instructed to pick Bobby and Maria up at their schools on the way.

  Shriver called a brief meeting of the senior Peace Corps staff. About a dozen people gathered in his office, many of them in tears, everyone looking ill. Shriver declared that the Peace Corps would continue to run as normally as possible. He also decided that his office would send out a wire bulletin to all Peace Corps representatives and volunteers in the field, reporting what had just happened in Dallas and reassuring everyone that the program would not be affected. “We didn’t want Americans in the field hearing about the death of the president from unreliable sources,” Shriver recalled. “We also didn’t want volunteers to worry that the Peace Corps had died with the president.”

  Out in the streets, bedlam had erupted. The bells of St. John’s Church, just north of Lafayette Park, were tolling incessantly. Motorists, as William Manchester reported in Death of a President, were “going berserk,” ignoring traffic laws and swerving as though drunk from lane to lane, sometimes abandoning their cars in the middle of the road. But the Shrivers and English, in a White House car procured by Mary Ann Orlando, managed to navigate around Lafayette Park to the White House. In his urgency to get there, Shriver insisted that the driver head for the nearest gate, on the northwest side of the White House, by driving the wrong way down West Executive Avenue. As the secret serviceman on duty at the northwest gate, his nerves already on edge, saw a car careening toward him the wrong way down the avenue, he drew his machine gun and prepared to open fire. (For all he knew, this was step two of a coup attempt in which step one had been the assassination in Dallas.) As everyone else in the car took cover, Shriver leaned his head out of the car and waved. English thought Shriver would be shot dead. But at the last minute the guard recognized him and waved the driver through. They parked on the south grounds of the White House.

  Once inside, the Shrivers found not Bobby but Teddy Kennedy, who had been elected a first-term senator the previous fall. The Shrivers conferred with Ted and all three agreed that he would take Eunice to Hyannis Port, so that she could be there to console her mother. It was also decided that Ted would break the news of the president’s death to Joe Kennedy, who had suffered a debilitating stroke several years earlier. English, meanwhile, still concerned for Eunice and the baby she was carrying, went to the White House medical office to get some mild sedatives. He gave Ted the pills in an envelope and explained that he should give them to his sister on the plane, to keep her from getting hysterical. Three days later, at President Kennedy’s funeral, Ted would return the envelope to English with the pills still in it. “Right medicine, Doc,” Ted would say then. “Wrong girl.”

  Before leaving for Cape Cod, Eunice talked to Bobby, making plans and establishing a new chain of command within the family: She was the eldest surviving child, but Bobby, the eldest male, would call the shots. The three Kennedys—Bobby, Ted, and Eunice—divided up the family responsibilities. Bobby would officially represent the Kennedy family and would meet and escort the president’s widow, Jackie, over the next few days. Ted and Eunice would fly to Hyannis Port to be with their parents. And Shriver was to stay at the White House and begin to make all the funeral arrangements. “I’ll get Jackie back to the White House,” Bobby told Shriver. “But you take it from there.” As Shriver would later recall, Jackie Kennedy also independently conveyed through a phone call to the White House that she wanted him in charge of funeral planning and of management of the press. “Twenty minutes after walking into the White House, I was in charge of everything.”

  Why did Jackie pick Shriver to run the funeral? Partly it was a straightforward matter of running down the line of Kennedy family succession: Jack was dead; Bobby would be taking care of Jackie; Ted was going to Hyannis Port; and Joe, the patriarch, was at home on Cape Cod, incapacitated by a stroke. Among the in-laws, Shriver had the virtue of already being physically present in the White House.

  But if this helps explain why Bobby and Ted were willing to put Shriver in charge, it doesn’t fully explain Jackie’s explicit request that Shriver take responsibility for the arrangements, rather than, say, a close family friend like Lem Billings or Bill Walton, or an aide like Ted Sorensen, Dick Reardon, or Kenny O’Donnell. Shriver, some thirty years after the event, reflected that Jackie had several reasons for entrusting matters to him. First, everyone associated with the Kennedy administration knew that Shriver was an effective leader; his performance during the 1960 campaign, and especially as director of the Peace Corps, had demonstrated that clearly. And his obvious skill at handling Congress and the press suggested that he was good at managing public relations, something that was important to Jackie even in her shock-stricken condition; she cared deeply about how Jack’s memory would be preserved by history, and she felt it important that the proper image of his administration be conveyed by the funeral.

  But Jackie Kennedy and Sarge Shriver also shared the experience of being in-laws in the Kennedy family—and the two of them, more than any of the other in-laws, had a knack for striking a balance between independence from and submersion in the Kennedy family. Jackie and Sarge, numerous observers have noted, were two of the kindest and warmest people in the extended Kennedy clan. They were also the two Kennedy family members with the greatest sense of style, and they preserved their distinctive styles even amid the powerful Kennedy culture, which dictated a style of its own. (Both were descended, too, from aristocratic Continental Catholic families of the sort that historically had seen Irish Catholics like the Kennedys as socially inferior.) And yet each of the two, for whatever independence they maintained, was clearly loyal to the Kennedy family. Shriver, Jackie instinctively would have recognized, would know how to strike the right tone in the memorial planning—how to make it a Kennedy family funeral without its being exclusively a Kennedy funeral. Jack, his wife believed, belonged also to God and to the American voters who had elected him. Shriver was independent enough to recognize this, while also being deeply enough connected to the family to make sure their concerns were properly honored. He may have been the only person capable
of doing all this adroitly, without faltering under the pressure.

  At 2:40 p.m., the television networks confirmed for America that President Kennedy was dead. Twenty minutes later, after seeing Ted and Eunice off from the helicopter pad, Shriver began walking back up the lawn to the White House. As he did so Jack McNally, one of Kennedy’s staff assistants, walked up to Shriver and suggested he come over to McNally’s office where some former Kennedy aides had gathered to discuss what to do next. Shriver declined. Bobby Kennedy had deputized him to be the Kennedy family’s representative at the White House until the slain president’s body arrived. This responsibility, Shriver felt, demanded that he set up his own command post. “I’ll use Ralph’s office,” he said, referring to Kennedy’s special assistant Ralph Dungan. Shriver may also have sensed the ineffectuality of the East Wing gathering in McNally’s office. Incapacitated by shock and grief, many of Kennedy’s aides stood mutely gaping at the television. Anyone could see that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything.

  So Shriver took charge. He commandeered Dungan’s office, and over the next few hours he issued commands like a drill sergeant, making arrangements for much of what would take place in the time between Friday afternoon and Monday, when the president would be memorialized and buried. European observers at the funeral on Monday marveled: How could such an elaborate state funeral have been put together so quickly? The duke of Norfolk, who had worked on Winston’s Churchill’s funeral, was in awe: “Three days—how?” The answer, as William Manchester wrote, “lay partly in America’s national temperament, partly in the fiber of the men who gathered around Shriver and Ralph Dungan that Friday afternoon.”