“I know there were feelings that we should not have gone,” Eunice would tell Life magazine in 1972. “But I had this understanding with Bobby and it was very clear and very frank. He never said anything to me about being disappointed that we did not stay.” In the end Shriver did not stay on, Eunice said, because he did not feel especially needed. “Sarge was not what you’d call an inner man on Bobby’s campaign. He was never a close friend of Bobby’s and I don’t think he ever felt, quite honestly, that it really made a difference to Bobby.… When Sarge is told he can make a difference, he doesn’t hesitate twenty seconds.”
Neither Sarge nor Eunice intended their decision to go to France to be an insult to Bobby, or a repudiation of his campaign. Far from it. Eunice, in fact, would end up staying in the United States for a week after Sarge had departed for Paris so that she could campaign for her brother. But Sarge believed that since he had already told Lyndon Johnson that he would accept the appointment—and since the French government was expecting him—it would be a dereliction of his patriotic duty to back out now.
“There was a lot of emotional feeling between Bobby and Sarge,” according to someone who was close to both men. “That feeling was not necessarily negative—it wasn’t—but it was competitive. They were both national public figures. Bobby despised the war, and despised Lyndon Johnson. Sarge had run two programs for Lyndon Johnson since Jack was assassinated and he was running them well. So all that created a certain chemistry and a certain atmosphere between them.”
Although Shriver accepted the Paris nomination without malign intent, some of the people in RFK’s inner circle saw it as a slap at their candidate. For instance, one person who worked with Shriver at both the Peace Corps and the OEO before going to work for Kennedy calls the decision to go to Paris one of Shriver’s lowest moments in public life, right up there with the sacrifice of Adam Yarmolinsky. Among some members of the Kennedy family and their intimates, Shriver’s refusal to go to work for Bobby constituted a sort of violation of the family code. For years afterward, when all the Kennedy cousins were gathered at the family compound in Hyannis Port, RFK’s children would mischievously taunt the younger Shriver boys during touch football games or other games: “Your Daddy didn’t come back from France to campaign for our Daddy.” A few of Kennedy’s associates, perhaps absorbing some of their man’s Manichean sense of injustice, never forgave Shriver for what they saw as his betrayal.
With rare exceptions, Shriver brushed aside such pettiness, mainly because to him the idea that he was somehow “betraying” Bobby Kennedy by becoming ambassador to France was absurd. It was an important job he had been given, and a good opportunity for his family, and he didn’t want to turn it down. It didn’t mean he had anything against Bobby’s candidacy, or that he wouldn’t lend him whatever support he could.
Just how much support he could give, however, turned out to be a complicated question. On April 18, when Shriver appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (which had to approve his nomination to the ambassadorship before it became official), senators grilled him about whether he would be unduly influenced by foreign policy positions taken by his brother-in-law in his presidential campaign. What will you do, a South Dakota senator asked, if you find yourself caught between conflicting loyalties? “One is toward your brother-in-law, who has a concept of foreign policy that is diametrically different from the man who has appointed you,” President Johnson. Shriver replied: “Our ambassador supports the positions of the administration and the government of the United States. It is his duty to explain and support the policies of the government of the United States.”
From the Senate’s perspective, that was the correct answer. He could have answered no other way and expect to be approved. But it was a response that helped seal for Shriver the animosity of the RFK camp, to whom simply doing his ambassadorial duty would constitute an acceptance of Johnson’s pro-Vietnam policy, and a rejection of Kennedy’s anti-Vietnam policy.
Shriver was also asked, “If your wife suggests that you come out and help her brother, what are you going to do then?” Caught between State Department rules and his wife’s prerogatives, Shriver hedged: “That’s an iffy question,” he said. “It depends on what happens—what she feels, what the department feels, what I think.” A few days later the Senate confirmed his appointment.
Eunice avidly campaigned for Bobby while continuing to stand resolutely by her husband’s decision. Eunice’s campaigning was “a daring affront to the unity of the administration”—after all, her husband was still working for Johnson—but even that did not satisfy Kennedy’s aides, who wanted Sarge to leave the administration and join the Kennedy campaign. Will you miss the excitement of campaigning once you get to Paris? a Washington Post reporter asked Eunice. “Of course,” she replied. “But what Mr. Shriver is doing is important too. He’ll be working on problems that bear on international peace. You certainly can’t have peace [in Vietnam] without France.” France had just agreed to serve as host for negotiations between America and North Vietnam. “He made his commitment, a very firm one, to the president before Bobby announced. We think it’s a great opportunity.”
On April 24 some 2,000 of Shriver’s friends, colleagues, and poverty program employees attended a musical revue at the Sheraton Park Hotel in honor of the retiring OEO director. Au Revoir, Sarge, written by the OEO public relations director Herb Kramer, was a huge success, featuring songs that gently mocked the Shrivers’ predicament. In one song, a character playing Eunice Shriver sang, “My Bobby lies over the ocean, my Bobby lies over the sea, Oh, how can I campaign for Bobby, when Bobby is so far from me?” There was also a song, “Can’t I Come Home, Dick Daley?” lampooning Shriver’s desire to be governor of Illinois. The columnist Mary McGrory attended the event and sensed “much genuine regret at Shriver’s departure.” Shriver’s new job—trying to sell Charles de Gaulle on American ideas and policy—McGrory wrote, would be “the greatest challenge of his career.”
PART FIVE
France (1968–1970)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Springtime in Paris
On May 7, 1968, Shriver was sworn in as US ambassador to France. The ambassadorship was the oldest diplomatic position in US history: Established during the American Revolution, it had been held by such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But Shriver was inheriting the job at one of the most challenging times in the history of the relationship between the two countries.
In 1968, Franco-American relations had reached a postwar ebb. The problems between the two allies had originated with the Second World War itself. Whereas the Americans had seen France as merely one battleground in the larger war against the Axis, the French Resistance—led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle—saw it as a nation to be liberated. At the liberation of Paris in 1944, US troops graciously had allowed French soldiers to enter the city first, to create the illusion that “Paris had liberated herself.” De Gaulle considered this symbolic act patronizing and had spent much of the ensuing quarter-century trying to ensure that France would never again be dependent on another Great Power for its military defense.
Ever since his election to the French presidency in 1958, establishing the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle had been complicating life for the makers of US foreign policy. Unlike the rest of Western Europe, de Gaulle’s France had chosen to separate itself from America and pursue what de Gaulle called “independent” foreign and defense policies. In February 1960, France became the first country other than the United States and the Soviet Union to have detonated an atomic bomb. France required a force de frappe (a nuclear strike force), de Gaulle argued, to put the country on equal footing with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. Militarily, of course, even with a nuclear arsenal, France was in no position to compete with the Soviet Union or the United States. But de Gaulle’s primary purpose was not military but political: to restore French self-confidence and to steer an independent middle way betw
een competing ideological blocs. As early as January 1961, when President Kennedy took office, “what to do about the French” and “understanding de Gaulle” had become obsessions of the State Department. In early 1963 de Gaulle held a press conference in which he renounced cooperation with the Americans on nuclear disarmament and other projects and declared that France would seek its own way. It was, according to one de Gaulle biographer, “an open and undisguised breach with the Anglo-Saxons.”
Then, in 1966, after years of threats, de Gaulle officially announced that he was withdrawing France’s troops from NATO’s joint command, and he asked that all foreign troops—as well as NATO headquarters—be removed from French soil. This baffled the Americans and the other NATO countries, who had argued strenuously that France should remain in the alliance. The United States and its allies were trying to take a firm line against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact; this dissension within NATO only weakened the cause. What purpose was this serving? But Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Shriver’s predecessor as ambassador, told LBJ that to continue to argue with de Gaulle would just make matters worse. So Johnson ordered 800,000 tons of military supplies to be removed from France immediately.
The NATO gambit was only one of de Gaulle’s provocations. The French president also formally recognized Communist China in 1964; developed relations with East European Communist countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania; and tried to establish France as the leader of all the developing countries not already aligned with either the Soviet Union or the United States. Most alarming of all to State Department types, de Gaulle repeatedly downplayed the global threat posed by the Soviet Union and made friendly overtures to that country’s leadership: France shared as many, if not more, common interests with the Soviet Union, de Gaulle would say, as it did with the United States.
De Gaulle gave Lyndon Johnson fits. He was the first, and for several years the only, Western European leader to question America’s Vietnam policy. When Johnson’s emissary George Ball met with the French president in December 1964, de Gaulle told him that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam. “You cannot win it,” de Gaulle said prophetically. When Johnson declined to heed de Gaulle’s advice, the Frenchman cited Johnson’s folly as yet one more reason for France to pursue an independent foreign policy from America. Hearing of this, Johnson exclaimed to his aides, “If he wants to jack off, he can.”
De Gaulle continued to nettle Johnson. In February 1965 the French president sent a personal letter of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese Communists, deploring the US intervention in the East Asian country. And in May 1965 de Gaulle instructed France’s UN delegate to vote with the Soviet Union to condemn the US military incursion into the Dominican Republic. By this point, “Washington and Paris were scarcely on speaking terms any longer.”
This was the frosty environment in which Shriver would soon find himself as ambassador. Chip Bohlen, a highly respected diplomat who spoke perfect French, was considered one of the most talented people in the whole foreign service. Yet the five years Bohlen spent as ambassador to France had been, according to a de Gaulle biographer, “the most difficult … that any American envoy ever spent in the French capital.” Bohlen had been impressed with de Gaulle personally and found him unfailingly polite, but when he left his post to become an under secretary in the State Department he wrote to Dean Rusk: “Given the attitude of de Gaulle, there would seem to be very little chance of any real improvement in Franco-American relations.… I can offer little encouragement to any belief in a change in our relations with France until after the departure of de Gaulle.”
When Shriver called on Bohlen in Washington before leaving for Paris, Bohlen wished him well but then said, as Shriver recalled, “You’re not going to have any fun.” Explaining that it was impossible to get anything done in France, Bohlen mused, “I’ll tell you what I’d do if I were you. I’d go rent a house outside Paris in the French countryside. Go out there every Thursday afternoon and don’t come back until Tuesday morning.” To Shriver, burned out after four years at the OEO, the prospect of long weekends in the countryside didn’t sound so bad.
Shriver had planned to leave for France on May 11, and he had every intention of following Bohlen’s advice and hunting for a country house once he got there. But events intervened. Shriver was asked to depart three days earlier, so that he could greet Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance when they arrived in Paris to begin negotiations with Xuan Thuy of North Vietnam—the first formal talks between the principal antagonists in the Vietnam War. (The groundwork for these talks had been laid during LBJ’s withdrawal speech on March 31, when the president announced that he would be reducing the number of bombing raids over North Vietnam and that he would make Harriman available for peace negotiations anywhere, anytime.) Shriver, as US ambassador, was to serve as host to the American delegation. Over the next two years, although he was not himself an active participant, Shriver had an up-close view of the confidential negotiations. His old friend and Yale classmate Cy Vance would sometimes use him as an informal sounding board, and Shriver was privy to some of the cable traffic that passed between Harriman and the White House. He would later put this privileged access to controversial use when campaigning for the vice presidency in 1972.
Based on Bohlen’s briefing, Shriver anticipated an uneventful stint in Paris, a respite from the turmoil engulfing America. In the weeks before Shriver had left Washington, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had set off a wave of riots in 110 American cities; from his office at the OEO, Shriver could see flames against the horizon behind the White House. In New York City, students seized control of Columbia University and made it the headquarters for what threatened to become a general revolt. The 1960s New Frontier-Great Society liberal consensus had become completely unglued, producing a centrifuge of radical extremism that appeared to threaten the basic social order.
But upon arrival in Paris, Shriver quickly learned that things were to be no calmer in France; it seemed the spark of revolt had jumped across the Atlantic and found dry tinder among French students and workers. A general spirit of unrest seemed to be sweeping through the youth of the developed world, many of whom sympathized with the plight of the Vietnamese people and not a few of whom subscribed to newly fashionable Maoist theories about the evils of consumer capitalism. There were disturbances in places as far afield as the London School of Economics and Tokyo University. In France, however, the unrest took firmer hold.
The chaos that was erupting when Shriver arrived in Paris on May 9, 1968, had been triggered by a seemingly innocuous event. In March, students had staged protests at the University of Paris at Nanterre to demand the right of male students to visit female students in their dormitories. Under the leadership of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student who would become known as “Danny the Red,” the protest grew, and soon students had taken over the campus. The dean responded by shutting the campus down.
This aroused the ire of student activists at the Sorbonne, in the center of Paris’s Latin Quarter, who demanded that Nanterre be reopened. When administrators shut down the Sorbonne in an effort to prevent more protests, the students rioted, and on the night of Friday, May 10, they erected barricades and seized control of the campus. The French government responded by sending in the riot police, who engaged in violent fighting with student occupiers. Hundreds of students and policemen were injured. By the morning, 600 arrests had been made. Millions of French people followed the events on radio and television. Given France’s history of revolution, the appearance of barricades in the Latin Quarter called to mind previous epochs—1830, 1848, and 1871. Paris braced itself for further upheaval.
To Shriver, who had just arrived for his first day of work at the embassy near the Place de la Concorde, the images of police brutalizing student protesters looked all too familiar. It was a scene he had seen played out many times in the United States in recent years: most recently the riots after Martin Luther King’s death b
ut also the riots of previous summers and the brutal clashes between police and civil rights protesters in the South. “It was,” Shriver recalled, “the kind of welcome I had come to expect in Watts or Berkeley or Detroit.” Since he had not yet presented his diplomatic credentials to de Gaulle, and therefore had little official business to conduct, Shriver decided that “being an ambassador could wait.” To the great consternation of his newly inherited staff, he simply walked out the front door of the embassy and went to see firsthand what the students in the Latin Quarter were up to.
Reluctantly accompanied by Nick King, the embassy’s press attaché, Shriver drove across the Seine and along the crowded streets of the Left Bank as far as the throngs of people massed everywhere would permit. Near the Latin Quarter, Shriver and King got out and walked amid the chaos, finding themselves eventually among a crowd of some 2,000 students jammed onto the Boulevard St. Germaine near the Sorbonne. Suddenly, a student with a bullhorn bellowed, “Assiez, assiez!”—“Sit down!” Shriver, along with everyone else, sat down. As he recalled, if “at that moment the president of the United States had sought consultation with his newly designated ambassador to France—he would have found him squatting on the macadam of a main thoroughfare in the Latin Quarter—surrounded by the angry perpetrators of the French student rebellion.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 63