Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  So it was that on January 3, 1964, Shriver departed Washington, bearing messages for the shah of Iran; the prime minister of Turkey; the kings of Afghanistan, Jordan, Nepal, and Thailand; the presidents of India and Pakistan; and Pope Paul VI. Shriver was accompanied on this trip by Dick Goodwin, who would become one of the few Kennedy aides to remain for an extended period under Johnson, and by his old Yale friend Walter Ridder, the newspaper publisher. Shriver also brought along with him the crucifix from his bedroom wall, the one that had lain atop President Kennedy’s casket in the East Room.

  The trip was welcome therapy after the dark times in Washington. Shriver was greeted warmly by all the foreign leaders he met. And everywhere he went he felt with great poignancy the “almost miraculous” impact of the life and personality of Jack Kennedy. It wasn’t just the Peace Corps volunteers who said they had been inspired by the late president; it was also the people of the countries he visited. Peasants in Nepal, who had never laid eyes on even a picture of Jack Kennedy, Shriver recalled, had gotten their idea of America through the Peace Corps and through their image of Kennedy.

  For Shriver, the highlight of the trip was the meeting with the pope. It turned out that on the same day Shriver was to deliver his personal message from LBJ to the pope in Jerusalem, the pope was scheduled to meet with Athenagoras, the patriarch of Constantinople, who was the head of the Eastern wing of the Catholic Church. This was an epochal event in the history of Christianity.

  For 1,400 years, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church had jostled theologically and politically, as each wing wrestled for supremacy over all Christendom. On July 16, 1054, with neither side able to gain undisputed supremacy over the Christian religion, the leader of each wing of the Church had declared the other a heretic. With these mutual excommunications, the Church of the East and the Church of the West were irrevocably rent apart. The divide grew larger and more violent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 engendered centuries of enmity between the Greek and Latin churches. Over the ensuing 800 years, the violence and bloodshed had subsided and the two wings of the Church had fallen into an uneasy coexistence. But leaving aside a failed attempt at reconciliation between Pope Eugenius IV and Patriarch Joseph II in 1431, there had not been a single meeting between the heads of the two churches in all that time. Until now. The meeting between Pope Paul and Patriarch Athenagoras was, as Shriver would recall, “an event of ecumenical significance such as the world had not witnessed in a thousand years.”

  Shriver and company arrived in Israel on January 4 and the next morning went to the Church of Nazareth, where the pope was saying Mass. That evening, the Shriver party proceeded to the large, yellowish stone Apostolic Delegation building on the Mount of Olives, where the pope was holding his historic meeting with the seventy-eight-year-old Patriarch Athenagoras.

  At about 10:00 p.m., Shriver, Goodwin, Ridder, and Paul Conklin, a Peace Corps photographer, were ushered into a second-floor anteroom to wait for the pope to conclude his meeting with the patriarch. “Suddenly the door swung open and in walked the pope,” Shriver recalled. “Just like that. I had expected someone to formally escort me to his presence in another more private room. And here he was, bursting in on us.… I had been sitting on a sofa, and I jumped up, but he motioned me to sit down, and seated himself next to me.” Goodwin, Conklin, and Ridder tactfully excused themselves. Pope Paul, “leaning forward slightly, in a very direct, personal way,” asked Shriver if he spoke French. Shriver said he did and, as Shriver recalled, “We started talking … very easily at once.” The pope complimented the Kennedys on their dignity and composure in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s death, and Shriver said that the Kennedy family had asked him to convey their respects to the pope. He handed the pope LBJ’s letter and watched as he read it. When the pope was finished, he looked up and said he would be delighted to meet with LBJ.

  After a few minutes of conversation, Shriver brought out the crucifix that ordinarily hung on the wall of his bedroom. This cross, he explained, had been a gift of a Bahamian priest and had recently lain on the bier of John F. Kennedy. It is my most precious possession. Would you bless it for me? Pope John obliged. Six days later, Shriver would meet with Patriarch Athenagoras in Istanbul and ask him to bless the cross as well. “How many crucifixes in the world,” Shriver would later ask, “have been blessed by the heads of both the Eastern and Western wings of the Catholic Church?” For years, it continued to hang above his bed—not only a sad reminder of Jack’s death but also a talisman of luck and a tribute to God.

  At almost precisely the same time, events in Washington were altering the course of Shriver’s life. On the evening of Monday, January 6, as Shriver and the pope traveled through Israel, Lyndon Johnson was hosting the annual reception for the White House staff. Some 1,200 guests were present to enjoy cold cuts and cocktails in the Blue Room, followed by the Marine Band playing calypso in the East Room. The president himself was an hour late to the event, delayed by a cabinet meeting. But he lingered past the 7:30 departure time listed on his official schedule and then surprised everyone, including the ten or so reporters who were present, by holding an impromptu press conference.

  Standing in front of the still-decorated Christmas tree in the Blue Room, Johnson talked briefly about a few pressing topics and then talked longer about the pope’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem, explaining that he had arranged for a personal emissary, Sargent Shriver, to deliver a message to the pope. Johnson ended his remarks by explaining why he had asked Shriver, in particular, to deliver his message. “I regard Sargent Shriver,” Johnson said, “as one of the most brilliant, most able, and most competent officials in the government. I regard him as my real confidant.”

  Lyndon Johnson may have been the most political creature ever to stalk Capitol Hill. In private he was capable of genuine warmth and wayward enthusiasms, but in public he rarely said anything that was not politically calculated. Thus he knew that his statement in the Blue Room would have an instant effect on those who heard it.

  The speculation began immediately. Was the president preparing the public for the announcement that Shriver would be his running mate in 1964?

  The proposition made a certain amount of sense. When President Kennedy had been killed, the Constitution stipulated that Vice President Johnson instantly become president. But there was no automatic mechanism for filling the vice presidency that LBJ had left behind. For the moment, there was no vice president.

  Vice presidents play at least two crucial roles. One is to serve as the president’s understudy, the person who can assume command in an emergency. Shriver had clearly demonstrated at least several of the key qualities of a successful president: charisma, leadership, and—especially—the ability to get along with Congress. One Peace Corps colleague marveled to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis how completely Shriver had wooed Congress; Shriver is, Lewis wrote, “a grand politician in the sense that his brother-in-law [President Kennedy] was.” Shriver also had the advantage of already enjoying good personal relationships with many of the executive branch aides and cabinet secretaries—he had personally recruited many of them during the Talent Hunt. He had better rapport with many foreign leaders than most vice presidents historically had upon taking office. Finally, there was his inescapable Kennedy connection: If Shriver were to become vice president and then for whatever reason were to succeed Johnson, it would have represented to many Americans the proper restoration of Kennedy’s Camelot. Shriver wasn’t a Kennedy by blood, but he was one by marriage—and in looks and spirit and public record he was everything that the New Frontier was supposed to be.

  From Johnson’s perspective, however, a potential running mate’s fitness to serve as president was a necessary but not sufficient condition for selection, subordinate to the more important considerations of what political benefits the running mate brought to the ticket. In thinking about Shriver, in particular, as a vice p
resident, Johnson’s calculations were doubly political. Political in the electoral sense—what additional votes would Shriver be likely to bring to the national Democratic ticket and what votes might he be likely to repel? But also political in a more psychological and Machiavellian sense—he could use Shriver to keep Bobby Kennedy off the ticket and as a kind of vaccine to immunize himself against attacks from Bobby’s wing of the Democratic Party.

  Shriver could bring more-conventional political capital to the ticket as well. From LBJ’s perspective, one of Shriver’s greatest assets was his continued popularity in Illinois. The state had been crucial to JFK’s victory over Nixon in 1960—and he had won it by only the thinnest of margins. Johnson, as a Southerner, figured Illinois would be even more crucial to his election chances than they had been for Kennedy. As one Democratic leader from Illinois, speculating in 1964 about Shriver’s joining the Johnson ticket, put it, “Johnson’s going to need Illinois in 1964 and personally I think Shriver could carry it for him. Don’t forget that in 1960 Shriver did as much, if not more, than any other single individual to get [that state] for President Kennedy.”

  But Shriver could bring more than merely regional appeal to the ticket. As head of the Peace Corps, poll data showed, he was the most popular figure in the federal government (after President Kennedy himself) among young voters. He would bring the nation’s Catholic voters to the ticket. And, because of the connections built up through running the Catholic Interracial Council and his experience heading the Civil Rights Section of the Kennedy campaign, he was as assured as any Democrat of wooing to the ticket black voters skeptical of President Johnson. And because Shriver had generated so many elite business contacts through his job at the Merchandise Mart, the business community would not fear him as it might other candidates as liberal as he was on civil rights. “He hasn’t made enemies,” one Democratic political insider explained in 1964. “Even Southern Democrats like him, whereas Bobby Kennedy and Senator [Hubert] Humphrey … are anathema below the Mason and Dixon line.”

  In the end, of course, Shriver’s biggest political asset was his connection to the Kennedy family. As an in-law, he didn’t have the Kennedy name and was therefore less politically potent than Bobby or Ted would have been, but he was seen in 1964 by most outside observers as a better alternative than either of Jack’s brothers. Ted, one Democratic political operative said at the time, “was too young and inexperienced.” Bobby, even leaving aside his grief and his combustible relationship with Johnson, had “made too many enemies as a hatchet man for the late president” to be a good candidate. That left Shriver. And Johnson loved the idea that selecting Shriver could inoculate him against political attacks by Bobby.

  As was so often the case, however, the Kennedy connection had a paradoxical effect. Although it would have made Shriver in some ways the ideal vice presidential candidate, it also served ultimately to prevent Johnson from selecting him. For one thing, there was the concern that because Shriver had never held elective office in his own right, putting him on the ticket would create the perception that a Kennedy dynasty had somehow inappropriately taken control of the federal government. A housewife told Anthony Lewis that Shriver “has never been elected to anything. He’s the brother-in-law of a president. That’s just not the way it ought to be.” Even Chicago’s Mayor Daley, a longtime Shriver friend and supporter, was reported to have scoffed when he heard that Johnson was considering Shriver for the ticket. Daley had seen how Shriver had been forced to submerge his interests to the Kennedy family in 1960, putting his own political prospects in Illinois aside to work for Jack’s national campaign; Daley knew that the Kennedy family would never allow a close associate to jump the line of succession in front of Bobby or Ted. A Johnson-Shriver ticket that won in 1964 might win again in 1968. That would make Shriver the natural Democratic candidate for 1972—meaning that Bobby and Teddy would be blocked from the presidency until possibly 1980. And the Kennedy family would never stand for that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Origins of the War on Poverty

  Some 7,000 miles away, Shriver was for the moment oblivious to all this talk. Traveling through the Middle East, he had no idea that Johnson’s calculated invocation of his name had set the wheels of Washington political gossip churning. Nor, of course, was he aware that President Johnson’s Blue Room encomium to him would ultimately have less effect on him than what Johnson would say two evenings later, as part of his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

  “This administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson said to a prime-time television audience on January 8, “and I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in this effort.” He continued, “It will not be a short or easy struggle—no single weapon or strategy will suffice—but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.” With 20 percent of American families not able to meet even their basic needs, he explained, poverty was a national problem and a coordinated federal-local effort would be required to address it. He wanted, he said, to ensure that “more Americans—especially young Americans—escape from squalor and misery.” And he couched this call to arms in the rhetoric that would characterize much of what would come to be known as his Great Society projects (such as Medicare, the Secondary and Elementary Education Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964). The cause of poverty, he said, lies “in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities—in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.”

  In his address, Johnson took care to emphasize points of continuity with the Kennedy administration. In his post-funeral address to Congress, on November 27, he had purposely echoed the words “Let us begin” from Kennedy’s inaugural address by saying, with emphasis, “Let us continue.” Johnson pressed Congress to pass Kennedy administration legislation (primarily a tax cut to help the economy and a civil rights bill) that had stalled in 1963. But, as he told his speechwriters, he also wanted to present something that had a distinctive Johnsonian imprint. Something that emanated from the Kennedy administration but that he could make his own. Something bold.

  But an “unconditional war on poverty”? Many people—and especially many liberals, who believed Johnson’s true colors to be a conservative Southern Democrat’s—were surprised by this, not only by the boldness of the rhetoric but by the mere acknowledgment of poverty as a national problem. Since World War II, America’s economy had grown steadily. Through the 1950s, sociologists and cultural commentators had focused more on rising affluence as a problem—its effect on morals and social conformity—than on poverty. In the early 1960s only a very few Americans—such as the social worker Dorothy Day, the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and the Illinois senator Paul Douglas—were making any kind of effort to make poverty a national issue. The Kennedy administration had never made any significant statement about poverty. In fact, before 1964, the word poverty had not appeared even in the index of either the Congressional Record or the Public Papers of the Presidents. So how did it happen, people wondered, that Johnson had seized upon this issue with such gusto?

  In truth, the seeds of the War on Poverty were planted by the Kennedy administration. By background, President Kennedy himself, born into affluence, was an unlikely champion for the poor. But he had become attuned to the problems of poverty in the spring of 1960, during the West Virginia primary race against Hubert Humphrey. Campaigning in the hollows of Appalachia, Kennedy had been struck by the terrible destitution he saw there: illiterate families living in shacks, children in rags, adults with no teeth. Many families in the region had lived in poverty for generations—and appeared to have no means of escaping it in the future. Some places in West Virginia seemed like a third world country, and Kennedy’s experience there seems to have moved the problem of pove
rty more toward the center of his consciousness. That August, speaking at an event celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Social Security program, Kennedy spoke of this New Deal–era program as being part of a “war on poverty.” At his inauguration the following January, he referred several times to poverty, something no American president since FDR had done. “If the free society cannot help the many who are poor,” Kennedy said, “it cannot save the few who are rich.”

  But for the first two years of his administration, Kennedy’s legislative priorities lay mainly elsewhere. “The notion of declaring a war on poverty in 1960 just wouldn’t have grabbed people,” Kennedy is reported to have said. Insofar as he addressed poverty at all in the first months of his administration, it was through dealing with a longtime concern of his sister’s: juvenile delinquency. In the spare moments when she wasn’t pressing her brother to have the federal government do more for the mentally retarded, Eunice was urging him to have the federal government do more for juvenile delinquents.

  President Kennedy assigned his brother, the attorney general, to set up a program in the Justice Department. Modeled on the commission that Eunice and Sarge had headed under Truman, Bobby began working on the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD) in the first months after the inauguration in 1961. To direct the PCJD, Bobby hired David Hackett, a prep school classmate.

  Although the PCJD itself never became a major federal program, it was a crucial intermediate step on the road to Johnson’s Great Society. Hackett knew nothing about juvenile delinquency, so he began traveling the country and talking to experts who did. On March 16 he met Lloyd Ohlin, a professor at Columbia University who, with his colleague Richard Cloward, was studying urban gangs and delinquency. Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was attributable primarily not to individual moral failings but rather to the “social systems” in which these individuals lived. The proposed solution was to fix the problems of the delinquents’ communities. Hackett hired Ohlin as the PCJD’s technical director. (About this same time, the Ford Foundation launched its “Grey Areas Project,” which similarly explained urban poverty as a result of community rather than individual pathologies. Ford gave funds directly to cities in desperate need, charging them, as Ohlin put it, to “change the institutional life of poor communities.”)