Sitting there, Shriver recognized the incongruity of his own position. “To the French people, I would be the very epitome of the American establishment, representing its values, its standards, and its policies. Yet, for the past four years, I had been engaged in a fierce effort to undermine that establishment” through Community Action. Therefore, he decided, he would try to make his ambassadorship the living embodiment of anticlericalism, of antibureaucracy. “My own faith,” Shriver wrote not long after his experience in the Latin Quarter, “has always been with the outsider, rarely with the clerk. The rebel rather than the conformist.” He therefore declared his allegiance to the youth of France—“I presented my credentials to the French students before I presented them to de Gaulle,” as he would say—against the stultifying influence of bureaucracy.
The Paris peace talks, which were to have begun triumphantly that day, opened quietly across town, bumped off the front pages by stories of tear gas and revolution. Meanwhile, the unrest spread as workers joined the students in protest, beginning to strike all over France. On May 13 the French prime minister, Georges Pompidou, began negotiating with the students at the Sorbonne, momentarily calming things down. “The tempest is really over,” Pompidou told de Gaulle, urging him to commence a long-scheduled trip to Romania that day.
Practically the moment de Gaulle took off for Bucharest, however, factory workers at a government-owned aviation plant in Nantes staged a sit-in, welding the gates to the factory shut and hoisting a red flag over the roof. Over the next two days, strikes and sit-ins erupted all over the country. Within two weeks, millions of workers had seized control of factories, mines, shipyards, nuclear facilities, and government offices. The banks and the Paris Stock Exchange ceased operation. All flight and rail service into and out of the country was cancelled (although not before Eunice was able to arrive with the children on May 15). Television and radio stations intermittently went off the air.
De Gaulle returned from Romania on May 18 and, with events threatening to spiral out of control, announced that he would address the country on Friday, May 24. In a cable to the State Department, Shriver wrote, “So many spectacular events have occurred the embassy believes it should warn the dept that … there exists the possibility that we could be faced with an insurrectional situation.… Not only are extremist elements ready to ignite again the charged atmosphere, but also there is a possibility of spontaneous combustion developing.” “I knew Sarge Shriver was a dynamic fellow,” LBJ’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, wrote to the president, “but I didn’t think all this would come from sending him to Paris.”
De Gaulle’s speech that Friday evening was a disaster. The great general, the living embodiment of la gloire de la France, looked tired and old. He pleaded for everyone to return to work and declared that he would soon hold a national referendum on whether workers should be granted more “participation” in the ownership and management of both private and state-run businesses. Watching the address on television at the embassy—with power supplied by an emergency internal generator, since the strikes had deprived the city of electricity—Shriver was struck once again by the parallels between the struggles convulsing both America and France: the demands for “participation” by the powerless, the violent expressions of bottled-up impotence and rage.
Although the street disturbances ceased briefly while de Gaulle was speaking, they resumed with a vengeance when he was done. Violence erupted once again in the Latin Quarter, and by the following morning the streets around the Sorbonne “looked like scenes out of World War II.” Cars had been overturned, trees were uprooted, the streets themselves were ripped up; more than 500 people were hurt and some 800 arrested overnight. On this inauspicious morning, Shriver formally presented his credentials to the French government, wondering as he did so how long this government would last. Shriver alluded to the chaos outside only indirectly in his initial statement to de Gaulle, saying that he was taking up his duties in Paris at a time of “volatile movement” and “profound change.” “In many countries,” Shriver continued, “the universal search for new structures offering more freedom to individuals” has helped create “the present, fluid situation.” That was putting it mildly.
Four days later de Gaulle disappeared, slipping out the back gate of the Elysée Palace and fleeing the city without telling anyone, not even his cabinet, where he had gone. Was he abdicating? Chaos reigned.
A day later de Gaulle returned, having held a secret rendezvous in the Black Forest with Gen. Jacques Massu, the commander of the French forces in West Germany. At 4:30 p.m., de Gaulle made a five-minute address to the nation in which he announced that he was in complete control of the nation, that he was dissolving the national assembly, and that he would fulfill his mandate to the French people. “France is threatened by a dictatorship that could only be from totalitarian communism,” he said, before concluding: “Eh bien! Non! The Republic shall not abdicate.”
Just like that, the crisis was over. The strikes ended. Half a million de Gaulle supporters marched up the Champs-Elysée, singing his praises in the name of the Fifth Republic. (The next day, just as de Gaulle had instructed, everyone went back to work. In the election a month later, Gaullists won a huge majority in the new National Assembly.) Shriver, watching from the front of the American Embassy as the cheering patriotic throngs flocked past, stood in awe, not only at the power of the seventy-eight-year-old leader’s charisma but at everything that had transpired since he had arrived less than three weeks earlier. He decided he wouldn’t get that house in the countryside after all.
FAMILY TRAGEDY
Things had scarcely calmed down in Paris when tragedy struck in the United States. A few minutes after midnight on June 5, just moments after he had given a speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles celebrating his victory over Eugene McCarthy in the California primary, Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan while cutting through a kitchen to escape the madding crowd. Despite multiple surgeries and heroic medical efforts to revive him, Kennedy died in the hospital twenty-four hours later. For the day that Bobby’s life hung in the balance, the Shrivers called the family in Los Angeles for regular updates. “We sat in the house saying rosary after rosary after rosary,” Timothy Shriver recalled. For an unfathomable fourth time, one of Eunice’s siblings had died a premature, violent death.
LBJ sent Air Force One to transport Kennedy’s body to New York, and the Shrivers flew—along with Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan, who had been staying with them at the ambassador’s residence—to La Guardia Airport to greet Bobby’s aides and Kennedy family members. When Sarge attempted to help Bobby’s aides unload the casket from the plane, they pushed him away angrily, bitter in their grief, unwilling to forgive his decision to go to France rather than campaign for his now-fallen brother-in-law.
On the morning of Saturday, June 8, some 2,000 luminaries from around the world attended a Pontifical Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, said by Richard Cardinal Cushing. The service was followed by a funeral train ride from New York to Washington, which transported Bobby’s remains, along with Kennedy family members and friends, to Union Station, from which the casket was delivered to the burial site at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of mourners stood along the route, while inside the train fifteen-year-old Joe Kennedy, Bobby’s eldest son, walked up and down the aisles of the twenty-one cars, shaking hands with people and thanking them for coming. In coming years, Joe would be the first of the next generation of Kennedys to try his hand at the family trade. In the meantime, all eyes turned to Ted Kennedy. Would he pick up the dropped JFK-RFK mantle?
THE FIRST SPECIAL OLYMPICS
A week later, the Shrivers were again in Paris. At least part of their attention, however, was back across the Atlantic, on Chicago. Sarge was thinking about the upcoming Democratic convention, scheduled to take place in the Windy City in late August. With Bobby gone, there were two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, Eugene
McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. Bobby’s former advisers soon dispersed among the various Democratic candidates, but the “Kennedy Movement,” as the journalist Theodore White called it, longed for Ted to enter the race, or at least to make himself available as a running mate. For Kennedy supporters outside of Bobby’s inner circle, a next-best alternative to Ted was Shriver: a Kennedy by marriage who shared Bobby’s commitment to social programs for the down and out and who possessed the appearance—the dash and style—of JFK. By the third week in June, newspapers were reporting that Shriver sat atop Humphrey’s list of possible running mates. Talking to reporters on a visit to New York on June 21, Humphrey said he was “very interested” in allying himself with Shriver. Shriver read reports like this with interest but heard no formal word yet from Humphrey himself.
Meanwhile, Eunice was moving forward with a long-planned event: the launching of the Special Olympics. Now that the Shrivers had moved abroad, Camp Shriver could no longer be continued, but Eunice had not slackened her efforts on behalf of the mentally retarded. Since 1964, the Kennedy Foundation had been giving grants every summer to the Chicago Parks District to run programs along the lines of Camp Shriver. In January 1968 Eunice dispatched Kennedy Foundation staff members to Chicago to meet with Parks District staff to work up a proposal for a full-blown track-and-field event. On March 29 Eunice stood alongside Mayor Daley and announced that the foundation would be granting an additional $20,000 to the Parks District for the “Chicago Special Olympics.”
On July 19 the Shrivers flew to Chicago and checked into the La Salle Hotel, where hundreds of mentally retarded children from twenty-six states were swarming around the hallways and the lobby. The next morning, nearly 1,000 athletes gathered at Soldier Field, alongside Lake Michigan, for the opening of the games. At the pre-games press conference, Eunice said: “I wish to announce a national Special Olympics training program for all mentally retarded children everywhere. I also announce that in 1969 the Kennedy Foundation will pledge sufficient funds to underwrite five regional Olympic tryouts.” Now, she said, “Let us begin the Olympics.”
“I was the original number one skeptic of Special Olympics.” Sarge Shriver recalled. “I didn’t believe it would ever work.” But watching those first games, he found that his appreciation for his wife’s vision deepened. Sitting alongside Mayor Daley, Shriver believed he could also feel the mayor’s cynicism softening into marvel as he watched the young athletes. At one point, Daley turned to Shriver’s wife and said, “You know, Eunice, the world will never be the same after this.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Sarjean Shreevair”
The scene at Soldier Field may have seemed at the time to have no bearing on life in Paris, but Eunice’s work with the mentally retarded would play a crucial role in thawing the relationship between the United States and France. Even as she was planning the inaugural Special Olympic Games in Chicago, Eunice had thrown herself into working with the mentally retarded in Paris. She sought out French experts on mental retardation and brought them in for conversations at the ambassador’s residence. She went to work every Monday at the External Médico-Pédagogique, a nearby facility for mentally retarded children, where she taught the children how to swim, helped out with their occupational therapy, and got them to play games and sports. And to the consternation of the French staff at the ambassador’s residence, she brought dozens of mentally retarded children into the Shrivers’ home on Avenue D’Iena, near the Trocadero Fountain, where they would scamper around with the Shriver children.
The ambassadorial staff had never seen anything like this. In France, even more than in America, mental retardation was a taboo subject; a mentally retarded child was something to be ashamed of. Yet here was the ambassador’s wife, not only working openly in a school for the retarded but also regularly busing dozens of retarded children over to her home, where she would let them run amok. It was just too much. Longtime housekeepers and other staff members at Avenue D’Iena quit in disgust.
It wasn’t just the retarded children that offended the French staff’s sense of propriety; it was the whole Shriver family. They didn’t behave the way an ambassador’s family should. For one thing they insisted on supplementing the permanent residence staff with their own, imported from America. For another, they completely refurnished the residence. Out went all the ornamental antique furniture and French paintings. In came more comfortable, modern-looking furniture and lots of avant-garde American art—paintings by Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Roy Lichtenstein. In addition the Shrivers hung hundreds of photographs, a museum’s worth, of the Kennedy family. (Shriver also hung his favorite crucifix, the one that had lain atop JFK’s casket and been blessed by Pope Paul, on the wall of his oak-paneled office at the embassy.) The Shrivers’ two dogs, Lassie and Shamrock, scampered underfoot. A guest arriving in the great hall of the ambassador’s residence might find all the furniture pushed to one side, the better to accommodate a game of floor hockey among various Shrivers and visiting retarded children, and the carefully manicured backyard being used as a badminton court. (The residence gardeners threatened to quit over this offense.)
Within weeks of their moving in, the Shrivers and their cheerily chaotic household had become notorious on the diplomatic circuit. Soon, the story of the lively new American ambassador and his unusual family made its way to the Elysée Palace, the home of Charles de Gaulle and his famously prim wife, who was known to the French people as “Tante Yvonne” (Aunt Yvonne).
One day not long after his family’s arrival in Paris, as Shriver recalled, someone called the ambassador’s residence from the Elysée Palace to say that Madame de Gaulle would like a private audience with Mrs. Shriver. Could that be arranged? Shriver was alarmed. This was simply unheard of—an unsolicited invitation from the president’s wife? Madame de Gaulle was rarely seen in public and was not known for making casual social calls. Shriver worried that the shake-up of the residence staff had somehow offended the de Gaulles.
On the appointed day, Eunice had lunch with Yvonne de Gaulle. It turned out that Mme de Gaulle had indeed heard about the goings-on at the American ambassador’s residence and that she did want to talk to Eunice about them, but not for the reasons Sarge had feared. Although few people knew it, the de Gaulles had had a retarded daughter, Anne, who had died twenty years earlier. Privately, the general and his wife had doted on Anne; publicly, they had scarcely acknowledged her existence. Now Mme de Gaulle, intrigued by the stories of Eunice’s work with the mentally retarded, wanted to learn more. So the two women talked about the problem of retardation, Eunice’s plans for a Special Olympics program, and their respective family travails.
Not long thereafter, Sarge was invited to the Elysée Palace to meet with de Gaulle for the first time since he had formally presented his credentials. As it turned out, Mme de Gaulle’s account of her meeting with Eunice, and her description of the Shrivers’ unconventional habits, had struck a chord with her husband. President de Gaulle decided that he wanted to become better acquainted with the new American ambassador.
At the palace, Shriver joined de Gaulle and his minister of culture, André Malraux, for lunch. The president and the ambassador immediately took to each other. De Gaulle was intrigued by this charismatic American who seemed incapable of behaving like a typical career diplomat and who seemed genuinely interested in interacting with the French people, not just with members of the formal diplomatic apparatus. De Gaulle had respected Shriver’s predecessor, Chip Bohlen, too, but Bohlen didn’t thrill ordinary French people the way Shriver did. Shriver, for his part, was enthralled by de Gaulle: his physical presence, his charisma, the boldness of his conception of France’s role in the world.
Several factors contributed to the warming of relations between the United States and France in 1968. One factor was Lyndon Johnson’s willingness to send negotiators to talk to the North Vietnamese, an implicit admission that de Gaulle had been right all along: Outright victory in
Vietnam was impossible. A second factor was the social unrest that rocked both America and France that year, giving them common ground for discussion. A third was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia that summer, which undermined de Gaulle’s conviction that the USSR was not a threat to Western Europe and forced him closer to the United States. Other geopolitical factors, too, helped make the environment more conducive to better Franco-American relations. But without the highly unexpected personal relationship that the Shrivers struck up with the de Gaulles, the healing of the rift between the two countries—culminating with President Nixon’s state visit to Paris early in 1969—might not have been possible.
Robert O. Blake, Shriver’s deputy chief of mission, worked in the foreign service for forty years. He recalled that “of all the ambassadors I’ve seen in all the places I’ve been, Shriver was more original and effective at ‘public diplomacy’ than anybody we’ve ever had.” He improved the “morale and mood of the foreign service,” Blake said, “by inspiring us to reach out to the French with warmth rather than pessimism and restraint.” Bob Holliday, a longtime member of the foreign service who worked in the embassy, says that Shriver almost single-handedly “won the hearts and minds of the French people and the heart and mind of de Gaulle.” As ambassador, Holliday believes, “Shriver did probably the best job that has ever been done in the history of our foreign service.”
Shriver created a youth corps consisting of the embassy’s younger staffers, and he instructed them to convey American values to their French counterparts. He established exchange programs for American and French politicians, groundbreaking science-and-technology transfer programs, and (with Eunice) a French Special Olympics.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 64