On this day, however, although Shriver could dimly sense the growing animosity between RFK and LBJ, he was still completely consumed with the funeral planning.
Once again, he took up residence in Ralph Dungan’s office. Many other people were there making decisions along with him, such as Angie Duke, Dungan, Taz Shepard, and Colonel Miller, but Shriver was—as Dungan put it—the “one iron man.” “Except for occasional brief absences he sat hour after hour in front of the desk with a yellow pad in his lap, making meticulous notes and firing off orders.”
Jacqueline Kennedy had requested that for the funeral procession on Monday, the streets be lined with soldiers from the US armed forces, saluting their slain commander. So at one point during the day, Shriver gathered highranking military officers in Dungan’s office and began telling them what they needed to do to ensure that the funeral procession was as Jackie wanted it. Most of these men were more accustomed to giving orders than receiving them and were clearly not happy to be ordered around. At least several of them, not knowing who Shriver was, wondered where a mere “sergeant” got the temerity to be issuing commands to admirals and generals.
Shriver explained that there was to be a large military presence, with soldiers lining the streets and air force planes flying overhead. The officers objected: planes would scare the military horses that will be on the ground, they said. Shriver continued, saying he wanted a force of several thousand officers and enlisted men on the ground along the procession route, to give the event a real martial atmosphere. Again, the generals objected, saying that marshaling so many soldiers for a purely ceremonial function was impractical; besides, the generals said, it wasn’t clear there were that many nondeployed soldiers even available. The meeting went on like this, with Shriver making requests and the officers rejecting them or offering weak compromise proposals.
Earlier in the day, Moyers had asked to be informed any time Shriver ran into any problems or resistance in his funeral planning. Joe English, watching Shriver grow frustrated at being repeatedly stymied by the military men, decided this was one of those times. He quietly slipped out of Dungan’s office and retrieved Moyers from a meeting with cabinet members in the West Wing. After English explained the situation, Moyers went back into the meeting and whispered in Robert McNamara’s ear. The defense secretary nodded, stood up, and then walked down the hall to Dungan’s office.
Seeing McNamara, the generals fell silent. Shriver was sitting in Dungan’s chair, facing the military men across the desk. McNamara sat down on the arm of Shriver’s chair, and put his arm around the man who had brought him into the Kennedy administration. “I hear there’s some difficulty here,” he said to the generals. One of them responded, describing Shriver’s requests and explaining why they were impractical. McNamara said: “If this man says he wants 500 soldiers, you get 500 soldiers. If he says he wants 5,000 soldiers, you get 5,000 soldiers. And if he says he wants 50,000 soldiers, then you call out the reserves and you get 50,000.” When it was clear that McNamara’s order of absolute obeisance to Shriver’s commands had been fully understood, the secretary of defense went back down the hall to rejoin his meeting.
After another brief night’s sleep and a quick visit with his children, Shriver was back in Dungan’s office early Sunday morning, joined now by Cardinal Cushing and Bishop Philip Hannan, frantically trying to finalize details for the next two days. After a break for morning Mass, Shriver returned to Dungan’s office to resume planning. Several minutes later, the phone rang. As Dick Goodwin recalled, Shriver picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, and then said, “Somebody just shot Oswald.” All over America, the reaction to this news was pandemonium. In Dungan’s office, no one said anything. As Goodwin recalled, “We went on with our business.”
Scarcely an hour later, it was time for the president’s casket to be transferred to the Capitol Rotunda for the afternoon ceremony there. Official protocol required two rows of a military honor guard to stand along the steps on the east side of the Capitol, to salute the coffin as it passed by. Shriver introduced a variation on this tradition. He replaced uniformed soldiers with the thirty-six presidential aides who had been closest to the president, “a muster of New Frontiersmen.”
On Sunday afternoon Rose Kennedy, along with Ted, Eunice, and others from Hyannis Port, arrived at the White House. Rose appeared stoic and composed as she was led upstairs to embrace Jackie. But when Shriver escorted Rose to the Lincoln Bedroom where she was to sleep, she broke down. Only three years earlier, Eunice had been jumping up and down on the bed, giddy at her family’s political good fortune. Now, seeing that same Lincoln bed, Rose burst into tears and fell crying into the arms of her son-in-law. “It just seems so incredible,” she sobbed, “Jack being struck down at the peak of his career and my husband Joe in a wheelchair.”
“Grandma, you’ve had the book thrown at you,” Shriver said. “Rosemary, young Joe, Kick, Mr. Kennedy—and now this.”
“But think of Jackie!” Rose said. “I had my nine children. She’s so young, and now she doesn’t even have a home.”
Shriver responded that he was amazed at how well both Rose and Jackie were holding up.
“What do people expect you to do?” Rose said. “You can’t just weep in a corner.”
When Eunice and her sisters arrived in the Lincoln Bedroom, Shriver left them to attend to the next matter: finalizing the details of the funeral Mass. A meeting was scheduled that evening with Cardinal Cushing at the home of Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle, on Warren Street, north of Georgetown near American University. Shriver drove over with Ted Sorensen.
Shriver and Sorensen had a common goal: to get the cardinal and the archbishop to sign on to the Kennedys’ plans for the funeral the next day. “Your Eminence,” Shriver said to Cushing, “this is how the family would like it done,” and he gestured to Sorensen to make his presentation. Sorensen made several proposals—such as secular music and Kennedy quotes sprinkled throughout the service—that violated Church rules for Mass. Shriver suspected that the suggestions would be unacceptable, but he was for the moment too tired to interrupt.
When Sorensen finished speaking, there was a long silence. Then Cushing said, “I’ll do anything in the world for Jacqueline Kennedy, but I can’t change the text of that Mass. I have to read it exactly as it is in that book on the altar.”
Here Shriver spoke up. “Jackie wants a Low Mass,” he said.
Cushing said that was fine. Sorensen said that Jackie wanted the service to be as simple as possible. Cushing said that they would bury Jack “like a Jesuit” (meaning with a Low Mass) but again insisted “we have to do it according to the book.”
This bargaining continued back and forth for two hours or so, with Sorensen and Shriver negotiating each element of the service with the cardinal. Sorensen sought as many concessions to the family’s wishes as the Church officials would grant; Shriver, too, wanted to see Jackie’s demands met, but his fundamental feeling of obeisance to the Church hierarchy complicated his negotiating position. Outwardly, he always sought the maximum the Church would grant; inwardly, he felt conflicted about imposing demands on a cardinal, whose authority he had always been taught to respect. At one point during the evening’s negotiations the phone rang. It was Ethel, calling to say that Bobby wanted Communion offered at the service. Shriver was in favor of this, but the prelates were hesitant: With thousands expected to be in attendance, Communion could take all day. Shriver agreed to a compromise in which only the extended Kennedy family would take Communion. Finally, sometime after midnight, it seemed that all the important issues had been resolved. Shriver and Sorensen drove back to the White House to make sure that all the final arrangements were in order.
Monday morning, after a third consecutive night of scarcely an hour’s rest at home, Shriver was back at the White House, serving as host to all the many heads of state who had flown in from around the world. As Peace Corps director, he was already friendly with many, particularly those from d
eveloping countries in Africa and South America. Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, remarked to all those within hearing that Ethiopia had no need to build a physical monument to the memory of Kennedy; the American president would always be remembered through the work of the Peace Corps in East Africa. This set off a torrent of praise for the Peace Corps, as each leader of a country hosting Peace Corps volunteers strove to outdo the last in his effusiveness for the program.
The day’s plan—dictated by Jackie—called for a procession on foot from the Capitol Rotunda to St. Matthew’s Church, near Dupont Circle, a distance of several miles. Almost everyone had advised Jackie against the march: It would be a logistical nightmare, they said, as well as a security hazard; also, infirm heads of state would have a hard time on foot. But Jackie was adamant; others could drive if they chose, but she insisted on walking. Which meant of course that her family—and President Johnson, who could hardly choose the safety of an armored limousine if the Kennedy family had not—would have to walk, too.
As the hour of the march from the Capitol approached, the Secret Service, the FBI, and various foreign intelligence agencies were all growing increasingly anxious. There was still concern that some kind of conspiracy or coup attempt against the government was in the works. Behind the scenes, the FBI director urged Shriver to call off the march. Shriver erupted. “That’s just ridiculous,” he said. “We’re all concerned. You don’t have to be the Director of the FBI to know it’s going to be dangerous—even the White House doorman knows that.” He went on, accusing the FBI director of simply trying to cover himself, so that in case something did actually happen, he could say, “I told you so.”
At the Capitol Rotunda, Jackie, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy knelt together in prayer by the dead president’s casket. About eleven o’clock the procession set off for St. Matthew’s. Jackie led the way. At first Bobby held her hand but she soon broke away and pulled ahead of him, the whole legion of Kennedys following behind. Shriver walked directly behind her, alongside Stephen Smith. Behind them were Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, followed by a car carrying young Caroline and John Kennedy. And then came the ranks of foreign leaders who had begun by walking in orderly rows but who had soon broken apart into a formless mass, as taller dignitaries walked faster than shorter ones, and younger ones faster than older ones. They overtook and then surrounded all Jack’s sisters, including Eunice, who was clad in a formal black maternity dress.
The television networks all covered the funeral procession live. Some of Shriver’s friends later remarked to him that the TV cameras rarely picked him up, although he was directly behind Jackie. His friends asked him if he had consciously sought to stay out of the spotlight. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. “It just happened that way, and it was perfectly proper. After all I wasn’t there to be seen. I was there to do whatever I could to help the family.” But newspaper photographers captured him well, still standing tall and upright despite three long days of sleeplessness and sadness. He looks grim-faced yet handsome and well coiffed despite all the frantic preparations he had commanded.
Monday, the day of the funeral, was also John F. Kennedy Jr.'s third birthday, and a small party had been planned for 7:00 p.m. at the White House. But Eunice was exhausted, and Shriver was concerned that she had been through more stress and activity than was healthy for a woman in the sixth month of a pregnancy. He felt near collapse himself. Besides, Sarge and Eunice had seen their own children for no more than an hour or two since the assassination. They stumbled out of the White House about 6:00 p.m. and headed home to Timberlawn. Shriver took the crucifix that had lain on Jack’s casket and, with great sadness, returned it to its place on the wall above his bed.
PART FOUR
The War on Poverty (1964–1968)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Shriver for Vice President
There was no time for mourning. At noon on the day after the funeral, Shriver gathered his executive staff at 806 Connecticut Avenue for their regular meeting and with heavy heart tried to reassure them that Lyndon Johnson would be as avid a supporter of the Peace Corps as President Kennedy had been. He told the story of how Lyndon Johnson, through Bill Moyers’s intervention, had preserved the program’s independence, keeping it from being absorbed into AID. Without Johnson’s intervention, Shriver explained, there would have been no Peace Corps. Trying to lift people’s spirits, Shriver closed the meeting by saying, “I just don’t see any cloud on the horizon as far as the Peace Corps is concerned. Let’s double our efforts to make the Peace Corps twice as good as before.”
In the following days Shriver was preoccupied with steadying the shaken staff and volunteers of the Peace Corps; many felt as though they had lost a family member and wanted to return home. Newspaper articles in the weeks after JFK’s death said that Shriver was considering running for governor of Illinois and reported speculation that the Peace Corps would die if its director left. Shriver sent a series of cables out to Peace Corps representatives around the world, asking them to reassure the volunteers that the program would continue to operate as before and that their work was now more important than ever. Johnson asked Shriver to convey a direct message to the volunteers. “I know these days have been especially hard for those like you who are far away and separated from your countrymen,” Johnson said. “In one respect, however, you are very fortunate. Across the length of our nation people are asking, ‘What can I do?’ You have already chosen to strive in an enterprise that was as close as any I know to President Kennedy’s heart.”
Shriver refused to allow Peace Corps recruitment efforts to slacken, and he traveled to New York, Puerto Rico, and the American Southwest to recruit Spanish-speaking students for programs in Latin America. Some students were struck by how much Shriver resembled the late president in his mannerisms and spirit. “For a while there I forgot it was someone else talking about Kennedy’s programs and thought it was the president himself,” one Columbia University student told the New York Herald Tribune. “You feel a little better after an experience like that.”
For many young Americans, Shriver and the Peace Corps became for a time the bearers of the New Frontier torch. The Peace Corps was seen as the essence of JFK, and Shriver did what he could to make the program’s image reflect that perception. After a brief recruiting trip to New York City in early December, where Shriver gave eleven convocation addresses in three days, the Peace Corps received a record number of applications. Meanwhile, former congressional opponents of the Peace Corps spoke out eloquently about how they had changed their minds and become heartfelt supporters of it. The agency’s 1964 appropriations request cruised easily through the Senate.
Even as Shriver poured his energy into steadying and enlarging the Peace Corps in the tense weeks after the assassination, he wondered what Lyndon Johnson had in mind for him. He remembered that conversation in the Executive Office Building on the day after the assassination, when the new president had told him that he was now in a position to do something that would reflect the high regard he had for Shriver. And in a letter of December 2, Johnson had written, “I need you—and I need the services of the splendid group that was knitted together under your leadership—even more than they were needed by the man whom I have succeeded.” Shriver knew that Johnson was transmitting similar sentiments to many former Kennedy advisers, but he believed Johnson to be sincere. He let Johnson know again that he was available to help him in any way he could. And to try to smooth relations between the Kennedys and LBJ—as well as to make sure it was understood that he was not blindly loyal to the Kennedy family—Shriver gave the new president a full briefing on all the complaints Bobby Kennedy had made about Lyndon Johnson’s behavior in the hours and days after the asassination: for instance, that Johnson had made Jackie Kennedy wait on the ground in Air Force One in Texas while he got sworn in as president, and that he had been too eager to move Jack’s possessions out of the Oval Office.
In the days leading up to the assassination in
November, Shriver had been finalizing his plans for a Peace Corps trip to the Middle East and central Asia. After November 22 those plans had been put on hold. But as affairs slowly returned to normal in late December, Shriver submitted his itinerary to the president for approval, as protocol demanded. Johnson signed off on the trip, but not before asking Shriver to deliver personal messages to the foreign leaders he would be meeting, assuring them that policies begun under President Kennedy would be continued under President Johnson.
Over Christmas, while the Shriver family was visiting Eunice’s parents at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, President Johnson called from his Texas ranch. “I hear you’re going to Israel,” the president said when Shriver got on the phone. Shriver said he was. Johnson told him that Pope Paul VI was planning a visit to that country at the same time, making a three-day visit to Christian shrines there. “I haven’t had the chance to meet him,” Johnson said, “and I want you to take along a personal letter from me.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 42