Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Shriver was summoned to take a phone call on one of the secure lines on the third floor of the embassy. It was William Rogers. The line was scrambled and Rogers was hard to hear. “Sarge,” he said, as Shriver recalled, “you know I’ve read your document several times.” He was referring to the Nixon speech drafted by Moyers and Josephson. “I can’t accept it.” Shriver responded that he considered the conditions to be merely a set of ground rules, to help clarify the relationship between the secretary of state and the UN ambassador, which historically had been fraught with tension. “I thought that the document reflected what your opinion was about how we would work together,” Shriver said. “Well, Sarge,” Rogers said, “I really think you must have misunderstood me because I really can’t be Secretary of State successfully if the ambassador to the United Nations has the power and responsibility you think he should have.”

  “Nixon and Rogers have changed their minds on UN,” Shriver cabled to Rusk and LBJ the next morning, “while asking me to continue in Paris indefinitely. Many thanks for your advice and encouragement. Fortunately we love Paris and the job you gave us.”

  The next day, the White House announced that Nixon had named a sixty-one-year-old career diplomat, Charles Yost, who had previously served in Egypt and Poland, to be US ambassador to the United Nations. (He had also been one of Adlai Stevenson’s deputies during the Cuban missile crisis.) When reporters asked what had happened to Shriver, Nixon said he had considered him for the UN post but had ultimately decided that to ensure ongoing good relations with de Gaulle as well as continuity in the Paris peace talks, Shriver would be more valuable remaining in his present post. (In January, when Shriver met again with Nixon in Washington, the new president reiterated this reasoning; Shriver, for his part, believed Nixon’s stance had been formulated “at least fifty percent ex post facto.”) For the UN position, Nixon said, he preferred to have a “professional diplomat” rather than a “political figure.” But the Washington Post reported that in the days before the announcement of Yost’s appointment, Rogers had been raising questions about Shriver’s fitness for the job, worrying that he was “overly ambitious” and “too much of a political animal.” There were also rumors that de Gaulle had personally interceded, asking Nixon to retain Shriver in Paris.

  The reality was that Rogers, an accomplished lawyer who had little background in foreign policy, felt his authority as secretary of state was being eroded from several directions at once. Nixon had several times told his aides that he wanted to serve as his own foreign secretary, obviating the need for a true secretary of state. Meanwhile, it was already becoming apparent that the Nixon administration’s foreign policy would be formulated in the Kissinger-Nixon nexus, not in the State Department. Nixon even went so far as to tell Kissinger that he wanted to “wall off” the State Department. For Rogers, the additional prospect of an ambitious, activist UN ambassador was simply too much, and he blocked the appointment.

  The blackballing was probably to Shriver’s advantage. Shriver and Rogers would have clashed regularly, adding weight to the theory that UN ambassadors and secretaries of state rarely get along. With a few exceptions, neither Rogers nor Yost, edged to the margins of relevance by Kissinger and Nixon, accomplished much of import. Perhaps Shriver would have been able to make more of the position; more likely, he would have seethed with frustration. Finally, by remaining in Paris he stayed at a greater remove from the Nixon administration, sparing himself—and the Kennedy family—the taint of that association.

  One reason that Nixon genuinely wanted Shriver to stay on in Paris was that he hoped to continue to improve relations between France and the United States by paying an official state visit to de Gaulle. Other than at JFK’s funeral, LBJ and de Gaulle had never met face to face; relations between the two countries were so poor that no state visit had occurred between them since Jack and Jackie Kennedy had gone to Paris in 1961. Nixon was eager to put an early imprint on foreign policy and hoped to solidify America’s relations with Western Europe. With the Vietnam peace negotiations still going on in Paris, and with the Soviets flexing their muscles in Czechoslovakia, Nixon was keen to get on a good footing with de Gaulle. Shriver’s relations with the French president were crucial to making this happen.

  As early as November, just after Nixon was elected, Shriver had raised with LBJ’s State Department the possibility of an official state dinner for de Gaulle and the American president. Nixon and Shriver discussed the idea further at their meeting in New York in December. By the time the UN imbroglio was playing itself out in late December, the American Embassy and the White House had each begun their initial planning for a meeting to take place sometime in the spring. In early February, de Gaulle told Shriver that he would welcome a visit from the recently inaugurated American president, as part of Nixon’s European tour.

  Given the symbolic importance of the trip, Nixon wanted to be assured that everything would run smoothly, so in mid-February he dispatched his aides H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to Europe to do advance planning. Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s planning went smoothly in every city except Paris, where Nixon was scheduled to stay for two nights. On the first night, de Gaulle was to host a dinner at the Elysée Palace; on the second night, Nixon was to return the favor at the ambassador’s residence. But when Ehrlichman arrived at the Shrivers’, he was horrified. (When Haldeman arrived a day or so later, he was horrified, too.) The residence was all wrong for a state dinner. To begin with, there was all the clutter: footballs, hockey sticks, and toys everywhere. That, presumably, could be cleaned up. But what could be done about the Shrivers’ taste in furnishings? (Four months later, White House aides were still “shuddering” at the memory of the Shrivers’ “psychedelic” dining room.) Then there was all the Catholic religious paraphernalia—crucifixes, statues of the Blessed Mother.

  But the worst of it was the Kennedy photographs. The residence was a veritable shrine to Jack, Bobby, Kathleen, and Joe Jr. Edgar May, who had accompanied Shriver to Paris as an aide-de-camp, recalled that every time Haldeman and Ehrlichman “saw a picture of President Kennedy, they would recoil, as if to say, ‘Ahhh! Monster!’ ”

  Not long after Haldeman and Ehrlichman toured the residence, Shriver got word from the White House that President Nixon would not be hosting the dinner for de Gaulle at the ambassador’s residence after all but, rather, in the basement of the embassy itself. “This will be less of an inconvenience to you and your family,” Shriver remembered the note said, “and the embassy’s location near the Elysée Palace makes it more convenient for President de Gaulle.” Shriver immediately contacted the White House and said, as he recalled, “The president of the United States cannot have a dinner for the president of France in the cafeteria in the basement of a goddamned office building! That’s not appropriate and the French will be insulted. The dinner must take place at the residence.” He went on to say that he realized the residence did not belong to him but rather to the US government. “If you want my family and me to move to a hotel for a few days, we will,” Shriver said. “If you don’t like the photographs on the wall, we’ll take them down. If you want us to get the place a new paint job, we will.”

  “I was rather unequivocal about that,” Shriver recalls. This caused “some kind of agitation” in the White House, while Haldeman and Ehrlichman debated what to do. Soon, word came back from Washington. The dinner would take place at the ambassador’s residence, after all. But all the Kennedy photographs would have to be taken down, the Catholic iconography removed, and the mansion refurnished. Removing the pictures and statues was easy enough. (In the end, Shriver’s deputy chief of mission Robert Blake persuaded Nixon and Haldeman to allow the family pictures on the piano to remain in place.) Refurnishing the mansion on a week’s notice was more challenging. Fortunately, a few months earlier, Shriver had been offered the opportunity to become the head of MGM studios; now, he took advantage of his connections in MGM’s European office
by ordering a supply of movie-prop furniture to replace the actual furniture, which was moved into temporary storage. Meanwhile, US protocol officers worked feverishly to borrow substitute antiques, some of which had to be shipped in from Washington.

  Nixon and his entourage arrived in Paris on Friday, February 28. Shriver and de Gaulle met them at the airport in a ceremony full of fanfare, then proceeded to the Elysée Palace for meetings and an elaborate dinner. As eighty-eight dinner guests took their places at a single very long table, de Gaulle, with Eunice Shriver on his arm, led the president and his entourage into the palace dining room. After dinner, Shriver, Nixon, de Gaulle, and the two presidents’ top aides retired to a salon for cigars and $600 brandy.

  A full day of meetings scheduled for the next day between Nixon and de Gaulle and their advisers at Versailles was to be followed by a black-tie dinner at the ambassador’s residence. The residence boasted a fabulous French chef, who had been working for weeks planning an elaborate, nine-course meal for the evening. But a few days before the event, word came from the White House: President Nixon would prefer to have Kansas beefsteak and baked potatoes. The residence staff was aghast. “The Nixon people brought their own food,” Edgar May recalled some thirty years later. “I still can’t get over that.” (This kind of reaction wasn’t lost on Nixon’s aides. In his memo on the European trip, Ehrlichman wrote, “There were some raised eyebrows about the President bringing his own food.”)

  All things considered, though, the dinner was a success. Shriver established the tone of the evening when, speaking in French, he stumbled over his opening remarks and had to ask jovially for the wife of the French prime minister, Couve de Murville, to assist him, causing the dozens of gathered dignitaries to burst into laughter. From that point forward, the Nixonian spirit of stiff formality was replaced by a Shriverian spirit of general gaiety. “It wasn’t pompous any longer,” Shriver recalled.

  Haldeman and Ehrlichman had decreed that the Shriver children were not to be present. “I just remember my mother being so incensed that we were not allowed to come down to the state floor,” Timothy Shriver says. But when the Shriver children appeared cautiously at the top of the stairs, peering down at the proceedings, their father gestured for them to come down, and they scampered into the dining room. Nixon looked peeved, but President de Gaulle greeted them warmly and engaged them in conversation in French. The world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his pianist sister, Hepzibah Menuhin, played a Franck sonata after dinner.

  All in all, the meetings between Nixon and de Gaulle were a great success, everything the American president could have hoped for. De Gaulle advised Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam and to recognize Red China. Nixon “listened politely to the first, avidly to the second,” according to William Bundy. “France at once became the bearer, through her ambassador to Beijing, of a general message to the Chinese leadership of Nixon’s interest in changing the American relationship to China.”

  No specific agreements were reached between the two heads of state during the more than ten hours of private and group discussions, but newspapers and foreign policy analysts in both America and France hailed the meeting as a harbinger of improved relations. Several days after Nixon had left, Shriver cabled the State Department to report that French foreign minister Michel Debré had told his staff at the foreign office that “a new era of deeper understanding and cooperation was now opening between France and the United States, and the French should seek to cooperate as closely as possible with us in every area where French and American interests coincide.” There had been, Shriver wrote, “an almost audible sigh of relief on all sides, except on the extreme left, that the two presidents have publicly endorsed improved relations.” In subsequent days, Shriver also reported that de Gaulle had been very pleased with the meetings and was telling his aides that Franco-American relations could now enter an era of “much greater intimacy.”

  But a new challenge lay on the French political horizon. The possibility remained that ongoing negotiations between the de Gaulle government and the French labor movement would stall, producing a domestic crisis. One day not long after Nixon’s visit, the novelist André Malraux, de Gaulle’s longtime minister of culture, stopped by for one of his periodic visits with Shriver. Ostensibly, Malraux had requested the meeting so he could discuss his upcoming commencement address to Harvard University. But once he arrived in Shriver’s huge, oak-paneled office at the embassy, he told Shriver that de Gaulle was secretly planning to resign soon. De Gaulle would call a bogus referendum, Malraux said, and if the referendum failed to pass, he would be able to leave the presidency saying, “I am not deserting the people of France; the people of France have deserted me.” The “financial, labor, social, and monetary situation,” Shriver subsequently cabled the State Department, was “so fragile that any serious problem in any direction could bring on political troubles of major proportions for President de Gaulle.… The waves are rising.”

  Sure enough, de Gaulle, frustrated by a series of small domestic political setbacks, declared a national referendum—calling for a reorganization of the regional governments—to be held April 27. On the eve of the vote, Shriver cabled the State Department. “Odds are so close as to be unmeasurable on the referendum. Thus it is well within the range of possibility that de Gaulle will no longer be president of France on Monday morning.” A reprise of May 1968 seemed possible.

  The referendum was voted down, 53 to 47 percent. Just before midnight on the evening of April 27 de Gaulle told Prime Minister Murville that he was resigning. Over the next several weeks, Shriver monitored the situation anxiously. France endured mild chaos and a lot of confusion, but not the feared breakdown of the social order.

  On June 15 Georges Pompidou, de Gaulle’s former prime minister—who had been dismissed not long after the disturbances of the previous May—was elected to the French presidency. For a few weeks, American newspapers had been speculating that, having made his visit to Paris, Nixon would seek to replace Shriver as ambassador. If Nixon had in fact entertained such thoughts, he abandoned them now. Shriver and Pompidou got along well, and Pompidou’s new prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, played tennis with Shriver several times each week. Nixon and the State Department could not have asked for better access to the highest levels of French government. In the last week in June, Shriver flew to Washington for a week of meetings with Nixon, Kissinger, CIA director Richard Helms, and various State Department analysts. Nixon urged Shriver to stay in the Paris post as long as he wanted. (Several newspaper reporters pointed out that this was not an entirely selfless gesture. Nixon knew that Shriver had his eye out for political opportunities in the United States, so the president figured it couldn’t hurt to keep this popular Democrat overseas as long as possible.)

  Back in Paris in July, Shriver visited thirteen cabinet ministers, some of them multiple times, in five days. In a meeting with Pompidou he raised the possibility of the French president’s making a state visit to America in 1970, to build on what de Gaulle and Nixon had established a few months earlier.

  In July 1969 the Shrivers returned to the United States for a momentous occasion: the launching of the Apollo XI rocket from the newly christened Cape Kennedy. They arrived in Melbourne, Florida, on July 16, having flown from Paris on a chartered airplane that Paris Match magazine had hired for the ambassador’s family (along with various European royalty). Standing in the grandstands alongside former President Johnson and Vice President Spiro Agnew, Shriver watched through his binoculars as the rocket emerged from a “ferocious orange blaze” and began thundering toward the moon. Two days later, the family was back in Paris, ready to watch the first moon landing. Shriver set up television sets throughout the residence and invited French leaders and the entire diplomatic corps in to watch the event. When the astronauts landed on the moon, at about two in the morning, dozens of ambassadors cheered. (The Soviet ambassador, Valerian Zorin, who in his former role as UN ambassador had squared off against Adlai Ste
venson over the Cuban missiles, looked glum and left the party early.)

  For the Shrivers, celebration of the event was short lived. That same day, word had come from Massachusetts that Ted Kennedy had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard, and that his passenger in the car, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to Robert Kennedy, had been killed. The Shrivers called off a trip to the Riviera and flew to Boston to give Ted their support and lend their voices to the family council. At the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Eunice helped script Ted’s nationally televised statement of contrition the following Friday. At one point, Ted proposed that as a result of the tragedy, he would promise never to run for president; Eunice argued him out of it.

  Shriver was never anything other than supportive of his brother-in-law, both publicly and within the family. In a typical television appearance, the following February, an interviewer asked him whether the Chappaquiddick incident had “finished” Ted Kennedy politically. In his response, Shriver observed that “many of the most successful men in history have had episodes like that or occasions like that in their life and they certainly were not finished by them.” Noting that Teddy was “quite young still” with “at least twenty years ahead of him,” Shriver waxed philosophical: “It’s just a stroke of fate you might say, and one of the things that helps a man to mature, I believe, is his capacity to undergo an episode like that and become a better man rather than a worse man as a result of it.”