Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  In Bobby’s view, Shriver was now compounding the issue by not removing himself from consideration for the vice presidency. Bill Moyers had earlier written a memo to LBJ making the case that Shriver would be an ideal running mate. Johnson said he agreed, and he ordered Moyers to leak the memo to the press. For a Kennedy in-law even to contemplate joining LBJ’s ticket in 1964, Bobby believed, constituted a betrayal of the Kennedy family and of him personally. An emissary from Bobby’s camp went so far as to send word to Johnson that if he selected Shriver it would tear the Kennedy family apart. And Moyers got word that “if you are going to take a Kennedy, it’s got to be a real Kennedy”—not “a half a Kennedy.” (Actually, LBJ sometimes worried that Shriver was a real Kennedy. “Just remember,” Johnson told Moyers, evidently forgetting that Shriver was a Kennedy only by marriage, “blood is thicker than water.”)

  Bobby’s antipathy to a Shriver vice presidency was on some level understandable. Bobby had never intended to go into elective politics; he was shy and intospective, and he had based his political career up to 1964 around helping other public figures. But when he emerged from a deep depression following his brother’s assassination and saw the reception he got at public appearances, he realized that the hopes JFK had aroused in people were now focused on him. He felt he had a legacy to fulfill. At the same time, he found it difficult to accept that LBJ was now in the White House, setting a course and an agenda slightly different from Jack’s.

  Shriver, in contrast, was in some ways a born candidate; he was good at the backslapping and handshaking that Bobby hated. Moreover, his successes in Illinois had made him the perfect candidate for office in that state—an honest patrician serving the people in the mold of Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas. And before Jack had tapped him to run the Peace Corps, after all, Shriver had set a course for elective office in that state.

  But given Bobby’s background, the idea of a member of his family pursuing a political career that was independent of the family was difficult to swallow—especially if that family member was from the same party he was, appealed to constituencies similar to those he did, and held similar views on public issues to his own.

  This competition, indirectly created by an assassin’s bullet, was—as always happens—exaggerated by the chatter of aides and the exaggerations of the press. But it formed the environment in which Shriver and RFK had to co-exist, and it fueled Bobby’s grief-driven discontent.

  Naturally, Shriver was aware that his name was being promoted for the 1964 ticket, and he knew, too, that Johnson was using him as a defense against, and provocation of, Bobby. One day Ken O’Donnell was meeting the president in the Oval Office when Moyers’s voice came over the intercom on LBJ’s desk. Moyers reported that Shriver would be willing to join the 1964 ticket and that Bobby would not object. “The hell he wouldn’t!” O’Donnell exclaimed.

  Shortly after this incident, according to a New York Times report some years later, “Robert Kennedy sat in icy silence aboard the Kennedy plane on the way to Hyannis Port, deliberately ostracizing his brother-in-law.” Even Eunice would later say, in a 1972 interview with Life magazine, “At the beginning, I was for Bobby. I thought he should have it over Sarge because of his experience.” “I think maybe there were some difficulties,” she said of the strife the vice presidency question caused within the family, “but Sarge handled that.” (Today, Eunice says she doesn’t recall ever saying that it was “Bobby’s turn,” or that she favored her brother over her husband for the position.)

  The door on the vice presidency wouldn’t publicly slam shut until midsummer, when LBJ officially eliminated people already serving in his administration from vice presidential contention. But from Shriver’s perspective, it was effectively slammed shut one spring weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Earlier in the week, yet another newspaper columnist reported that the president had been singing Shriver’s praises and that the Peace Corps director sat atop the list of likely vice presidential candidates. At a family gathering that weekend, Bobby told Shriver he wanted to speak to him alone. The brothers-in-law walked outside to the lawn. In the background, Atlantic waves crashed onto the beach nearby. “Did you plant that story in the paper?” Bobby asked. Shriver replied that he hadn’t and added that he had not even had any real conversations with anyone in the Johnson administration about the vice presidency. But Bobby, still fueled by grief at Jack’s death, moved in close so that his face was nearly touching Shriver’s. “Let me make something clear,” Bobby growled. “There’s not going to be a Kennedy on this ticket. And if there were, it would be me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Wooing Congress

  For the five-month period that began on March 17, Shriver’s consuming occupation was to get the Economic Opportunity Act passed by Congress. “In no uncertain terms the president said this morning that he wants a report every night from you on the congressmen you saw and talked to each day,” Bill Moyers wrote to Shriver in June. “In a memorandum such as this I dare not repeat the language in which this statement was requested. I cannot possibly emphasize the forcefulness with which the request was verbally delivered. He expects this report by 7:30 every night.… The only thing he is asking you to do is to live in the House until the poverty bill is passed.”

  Shriver had no illusions about how hard it would be to get the bill passed. The Economic Opportunity Act had as many built-in enemies as any piece of legislation of the 1960s. The Republicans had decided to make a partisan issue of the bill. Many members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, thought the whole antipoverty adventure was nothing more than an election-year gambit cooked up by LBJ: Johnson’s executive branch would get a lot of money, hand it out in the right places, and get reelected in the fall. “I know the Republicans thought this to a man,” Shriver said. Getting the bill through the House would pose a special challenge. To succeed, said Larry O’Brien, the JFK political aide who stayed on in the Johnson administration as White House liaison to Congress, OEO’s supporters in the House and the Senate would need to “pull a magnificent rabbit out of a hat.”

  House members from the South, Shriver knew, would be especially ardent in their opposition. They were already traumatized by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which would be signed into law in July—and they were convinced that the antipoverty legislation was another civil rights bill in disguise. Shriver’s fear was that Southern Democrats—seeing the Economic Opportunity Act as a civil rights bill—would gravitate toward conservative Republicans in the region and vote as a solid bloc against the program. So he decided to concentrate his lobbying efforts on the most challenging but still-winnable groups: Southern Democrats and liberal Republicans.

  Shriver went after these groups several ways. First, he ensured that there would be new Community Action agencies in a majority of congressional districts in the country; this meant federal dollars for members’ districts, something they would have a hard time voting against. Second, he sought to downplay any overt racial element in the bill. Although most of the poor people in urban ghettos were black, the popular image of the American poor in 1964 remained the rag-clad white families of rural Appalachia. The task force relentlessly repeated to the press that the bulk of the American poor were to be found in rural and even suburban areas—the coded message this transmitted was that the War on Poverty would primarily benefit white people, not black ones.

  Shriver and his team tried, when talking to Southern members of Congress, to obscure the fact that the OEO would be giving money directly to black communities. These efforts were not always successful. When Jim Sundquist tried to sell Texas congressman W. R. Poage, an old-school conservative, on the bill, he used vague words like “opportunity” and technical jargon like “coordinated service delivery” to obfuscate what the act would do: give money and services to African Americans. Poage looked at Sundquist blankly for a moment before the light dawned. “Oh, I see! You’re talking about the niggers!” When Christopher Weeks, an early Job Corps ad
ministrator, presented an outline of the OEO to Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Mills crumpled the paper and threw it across the room, issuing “a few choice words about how he was not going to be involved in any program to help a bunch of niggers.”

  Shriver’s political masterstroke was persuading Rep. Phil Landrum, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, to serve as the Economic Opportunity Act’s sponsor in the House of Representatives. Landrum’s conservative credentials were impeccable. He was from the South. He had sparred with Shriver over the Peace Corps. Organized labor saw him as an “ogre.” No one could mistake Landrum for a liberal. In fact, he was just about the unlikeliest supporter for the poverty bill one could find. Yet Shriver and the White House congressional liaison Larry O’Brien both had good personal relationships with him. And to their “utter surprise” they found him receptive to the poverty bill. There was poverty in Landrum’s own district, and he perceived that the legislation in the Economic Opportunity Act could help address it. Recognizing the enormous political advantage that bringing Landrum aboard would give them, Shriver and O’Brien talked him into sponsoring the act. His support of the bill, they knew, would convey to other Southern conservatives that it was acceptable for them to support it. “Landrum coming aboard in the leadership role was a real blockbuster,” O’Brien recalled.

  Another of Landrum’s assets was his seat on the House Education and Labor Committee. Because the poverty bill had so many different parts, it contained elements of interest to practically every jurisdiction in the House and could have gone first to just about any committee. But the composition of the Education and Labor Committee was such that, especially with Landrum’s backing, Shriver could be confident of getting the bill reported out with unified Democratic support. Democratic members such as Jimmy Roosevelt, “Topper” Thompson, and Roman Pucinski were all either reliably liberal or close allies of the Johnson administration, or both. Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem congressman, was the committee chair; he would later become a Shriver nemesis, but early on he was a staunch supporter of the poverty bill, and he willingly stepped aside to let Landrum sponsor the bill. Once Landrum, the most powerful Southern congressman on the committee, had lent his support, “there was not going to be any Democratic opposition to it,” and other Democratic conservatives like Carl Perkins of Kentucky would have to fall in line behind it. All the opposition to the bill then came only from the Republican side.

  After Landrum and Powell, the most important member of the Education and Labor Committee was Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon. Like Powell, she would later become a painful thorn in OEO’s side. But as a former schoolteacher, she was an early supporter of the bill, and she was so smart and intimidating that she could scare opponents of the bill into supporting it. Once, when a GOP committee member asked an ill-informed question, Green tore him apart so brutally that he never asked another. Powell watched this eruption with a bemused smile. “Edith,” he said, “you’re the only woman I know who’s been going through menopause for forty years.”

  In the first month of hearings, Shriver, Wirtz, Bobby Kennedy, and Secretary of Defense McNamara all testified on behalf of the bill, along with numerous Democratic mayors and governors, union leaders, and farmers’ advocates. Shriver charmed the committee. “I didn’t know Shriver really,” recalled the Wisconsin economist Robert Lampman, who accompanied him to the opening hearing. “I was impressed by how he easily went to the Republican side of the table and apparently had been at Yale Law School with half of them, I guess.” Lampman was also impressed by “how well he seemed to get along with Adam Clayton Powell and the other side of things.”

  The bill came out of the committee on a party line vote (nineteen Democrats versus eleven Republicans) on May 26. So far, so good.

  In the Senate, meanwhile, the process began straightforwardly. Shriver and O’Brien picked Michigan Democrat Pat McNamara to sponsor the bill there, with the idea that McNamara’s Midwestern liberalism would balance Landrum’s Southern conservatism and thereby demonstrate the bill’s breadth of support. Shriver and others testified before the Senate’s Labor and Public Welfare Committee in mid-June, and the bill was voted out of committee 13–2 on July 7.

  THE STATES’ RIGHTS PROBLEM

  At this point, difficult substantive issues began to arise. Southerners began objecting that giving federal money directly to local groups was a clear violation of states’ rights. Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat who was a giant of the Senate, was threatening to oppose the bill based purely on its trampling of states’ rights. It should be the prerogative of state and local governments, Russell and others said, not the federal bureaucracy, to decide where and how money should be spent on the local level. On some level, Shriver recognized, this was surely true; federal grants to local agencies were a violation of the states’ rights doctrine. States’ rights had been an “absolute cardinal principle” of the Democratic Party in Maryland when Shriver was growing up. Still, the whole point of Community Action was to go around the state and local government agencies (and around the old-line welfare bureaucracy) that were doing such a wretched job of helping the poor. Also, Shriver knew from the ongoing battles over the civil rights bill that for white Southerners, states’ rights was often just diplomatic cover for racism—a way to block federal money from going to blacks.

  What to do? The solution came to him one day on Capitol Hill, while talking to Georgia’s other senator, Herman Talmadge. “Look, this is the problem, Senator,” Shriver recalled saying to Talmadge. “We can’t allow all this money to become bogged down in the state and local government apparatus, and we cannot allow a system to be established whereby the purposes of the legislation can be frustrated totally by the clique that might be hanging around a particular governor. How in the name of God can we get around that problem” and get Senator Russell to support the bill?

  Talmadge looked at Shriver, thought for a minute, and then flipped ashes from the big cigar he always had with him into the spittoon he kept by his desk. “Well, Sargent, have you ever considered a veto by the governor?” Shriver said he hadn’t. Talmadge suggested that Shriver write into the bill a provision that would allow a governor to veto any program in his state if he disapproved of it. “Now, first of all,” Talmadge explained, “they’re not going to disapprove of many programs, because the governors all want to have the money come into their states. Secondly, the governor politically doesn’t want to be in the position of being the person who is preventing a certain program from taking place in his state.” So there were likely to be very few vetoes. “But if you put it in the legislation that the governor has the veto, then Senator Russell will be able to say that the principle of states’ rights, states’ authority, has been maintained.”

  Shriver went back to his office and discussed the veto with his deputies and consulted with Larry O’Brien and Bill Moyers at the White House. Ideally, they all agreed, there would be no veto provision. But as a political accommodation to win Russell’s support and get the bill through the Senate, it seemed necessary. Landrum introduced the amendment in the House and, in the end, the bill the Senate voted on included the right of governors to veto most poverty program grants within thirty days.

  THE EXECUTION OF ADAM YARMOLINSKY

  Through all of July, Shriver stalked the halls of Congress, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner there. After adjourning while the Republicans held their national convention, nominating Barry Goldwater, the Senate resumed deliberations on the poverty bill.

  The bill rolled along. The Senate passed the Economic Opportunity Act on a roll call vote, 61–34, on July 23. There were some anxious moments in the House, where the Virginia Democrat Howard “Judge” Smith—who had saved the day on the original Peace Corps legislation—bottled the legislation up in the Rules Committee, alleging that the bill would allow funding of “nudist” colonies.

  Shriver paid a call to Smith. Much of President Kennedy’s New Frontier legislation had languished
in the Rules Committee, stymied by Smith and his conservative colleagues. Recognizing the rather narrow limits of Smith’s social philosophy, Shriver tried to frame his description of the bill in terms the congressman could support: The War on Poverty, Shriver explained, issuing the program’s mantra, would be a “hand-up, not a handout.” Smith had no objection to Title I; jobs for juveniles sounded good to him. But when Shriver explained Community Action, Smith stopped him. “Sarge,” he said. “You know I have great respect for you. But I’ve been in this Congress for thirty-six years and this is the worst piece of legislation that’s ever been introduced.” Smith explained that Title II’s broad mandate was anathema to a congressman—not only would it give the federal government more power than the states, but in effect it would also give OEO appointees more power to allocate a district’s poverty funds than the local congressman had. No amount of arguing by Shriver could convince Smith otherwise.

  But then Smith turned to Shriver and said, “I trust you.” I think this bill is wrong, Smith continued, and if it comes to the floor I’ll oppose it all the way. But out of our mutual friendship, I won’t use procedural tactics to keep it bottled up in my committee. On July 28, the Rules Committee narrowly (by an 8–7 margin, with all the Republicans plus Smith voting against) allowed the bill to go to the House floor.

  Only one big hurdle remained: the House vote, where the important question was how the 100 Southern Democrats would vote. Whether the Economic Opportunity Act became law or not depended on how many followed Phil Landrum in supporting the bill and how many joined the Republicans in opposing it. Shriver and O’Brien counted and recounted votes, lobbying wavering Democrats incessantly. As the vote loomed, the margin seemed razor thin.

  On Wednesday, August 5, the floor debate began. It immediately took on a bitter, partisan tone. Over the course of that day, Republicans tried to arouse every prejudice in the minds of those most susceptible to them—primarily the Southern Democrats. States’ rights. Integration. Separation of church and state. Birth control. City Hall jealousies. Landrum was compelled to accept many amendments to the bill, but nothing that compromised its essence. The vote was scheduled for the next day, and it remained anyone’s guess whether the bill would pass.