CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Au Revoir
By the fall of 1969 Shriver’s many political supporters in the United States were telling him it was time for him to come home. There was still a chance he could get on the national Democratic ticket in 1972—perhaps even be the presidential nominee—but he needed to make his presence felt domestically, preferably by running for some kind of elective office in 1970. Political memories are short; the accomplishments of the early 1960s were receding into the distant past.
The national Democratic Party was in disarray. The Democratic presidential ticket had lost in 1968, ending eight years of Democratic reign in the White House, but that was only the most tangible symptom of a deeper malaise. The New Deal liberal consensus that had prevailed since FDR’s administration had unraveled. Widespread support for New Frontier-Great Society idealism had dissipated in the riots in inner cities and the jungles of South Vietnam. The chaos of the 1968 convention in Chicago had been an unfortunate advertisement for all that ailed the Democratic Party—its uncertainty, its nostalgic longing for the Kennedy mystique, its kooky and disruptive New Left, its militant black power radicals, its lack of cohesion on Vietnam, and its clashes between the new forces of revolution (represented by hippie protesters) and the old forces of reaction (represented by Mayor Daley and the Chicago police).
In the months following the 1968 election, the prevailing assumption among political experts was that by 1972 Ted Kennedy would be seasoned enough—and would have recovered enough from the shock of Bobby’s death—to unite his fractured party, leading a competitive race against Nixon from the top of the Democratic ticket. The Chappaquiddick tragedy changed that calculus in an instant. That episode itself—Teddy had left the scene of the accident and waited until morning before reporting Kopechne’s death to the police—along with rumors of his drinking and womanizing, had made him radioactive. There were serious questions about whether Kennedy could continue his career in politics at all, let alone lead the Democrats to victory in 1972.
Thus, in addition to the Democrats’ other problems, they now confronted a serious leadership vacuum. LBJ had gone off to Texas, where his hair grew long and his health rapidly declined. Democratic politicians still made pilgrimages to him for consultations, but he was a spent force. Hubert Humphrey had similarly been pushed to the margins. Many Democratic partisans were bitter because of the weak campaign he had run in 1968, and liberals in particular could not forget his unwillingness to take a stronger anti-Vietnam stance. That left Edmund Muskie and George McGovern. McGovern, the South Dakota senator, had not done well at the 1968 convention; he was not well known nationally and in any event was perceived as too liberal to compete successfully with the popular Nixon. That made Muskie, the Maine senator and 1968 vice presidential nominee, the de facto Democratic front-runner, but he was failing to inspire voters. The party remained adrift, its rank-and-file hungry for leadership.
So, many Democrats turned their hopeful eyes to Paris, where they reposed their aspirations in the American ambassador. Shriver possessed many of the attributes necessary to bring together a wounded party and to lead the ticket in 1972. He was nationally known. His association with the Peace Corps made him popular with young people, and he had also, helpfully, maintained his ties to the Humphrey-Johnson old guard. His work with the OEO and civil rights made him attractive to blacks—but his solid personal relationships with many Southern congressmen made him viable (for a liberal, anyway) in the South. Most of all, he had surplus quantities of charisma and optimism, two elements that were in short supply among the Democratic leadership as 1970 approached.
Finally, there was the Kennedy connection. With Ted reeling, Shriver, as a Kennedy brother-in-law and creator of the Peace Corps, was the closest the Democrats could get to capturing the Kennedy mystique. To many, Shriver’s style and panache made him the living embodiment of the New Frontier.
Beginning in the spring of 1969 he was inundated in Paris by letters from Democratic leaders all over the country, trying to recruit him for elective office in Illinois, Maryland, New York—even Texas. A group of leading Democrats and business executives in Illinois implored him to run for the Senate seat of Everett Dirksen, who had just died. Senator Joseph Tydings and party boss Richard Schifter asked Shriver to run for Congress in Maryland. Of course, most of these entreaties had an implicit subtext. The job at hand (whatever it turned out to be) was only to be a stepping stone to a higher calling: the presidency of the United States. The obviousness of this subtext would soon cause political problems.
Through most of 1969, Shriver played it coy, denying he was seeking elective office. But in the last week of October he took a weeklong trip to the United States that was clearly an exploratory political expedition: he visited Washington, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles, meeting with Democratic leaders in each city.
Once again, he found himself plagued by the problem that had dogged him since 1964. Everywhere he went, he had wildly enthusiastic supporters—everyone from high-ranking machine politicians and members of Congress to college students willing to volunteer—most of whom believed him to be, in Ted Kennedy’s absence, the carrier of the Kennedy flame. Yet a crucial Democratic constituency—the Kennedy apparatus, mainly Ted and Bobby’s advisers and Ted himself—quietly telegraphed their misgivings. The posture they adopted was not unlike the one adopted by Jack Kennedy’s White House advisers when Shriver had approached them for help with the Peace Corps after he had insisted on keeping it out of AID: “You wanted your independence—now you’re on your own.” All this caused consternation among some of Shriver’s would-be supporters. How can he be the keeper of the Kennedy flame, if the Kennedys deny him that role?
On the evening of October 29, Shriver met for several hours with Mayor Daley and his Democratic slate makers. The meeting was inconclusive. Daley afterward said that Shriver would “always be welcome in Illinois” but did not specify what office he would run for.
The next day, Shriver took a major public step toward dissociating himself from the presidential administration for which he still worked—and toward restoring his credibility among Robert Kennedy Democrats—by condemning Nixon’s policy on the Vietnam War. In a speech at Chicago’s Mundelein College, Shriver said that the United States should get out of Vietnam as quickly as possible. Shriver was asked why, if he was so opposed to US policy on Vietnam, he had continued to work for both LBJ and Nixon. “It was a difficult moral decision,” he said. He had often thought of quitting in protest, he explained, but “decided I could do more good by staying on.” The record shows this to be true; several times Shriver directly confronted Johnson, telling him that if the president did not shift more money from Vietnam to the OEO, he would quit. However, he never carried through on these threats. When Johnson asked him to go to Paris, Shriver said, he had faced “that decision again.” But “I decided that my work for the cause of European peace was important—that I should continue that work even though the war is immoral.”
The next day Shriver was in Baltimore, where the newspapers reported that Mayor Tom D’Alesandro was close to endorsing Shriver in a Democratic primary fight against Governor Marvin Mandel, the interim governor filling Spiro Agnew’s office. (Many Maryland liberals were searching for someone to defeat Mandel in the primary.) Shriver, D’Alesandro said, was a “dynamic personality” who could “catch fire” as a candidate.
In his public statements, Shriver consistently denied that he was actively seeking elective office in the United States. I am keeping my future options open, he would say, but for the moment I’m contentedly serving as ambassador to France. Despite these public disavowals, Shriver’s peripatetic wanderings invited the criticism that he was more concerned with establishing a launching pad for the presidency than he was with the problems and issues of the states he was visiting. “There are those who are saying,” Josephson wrote to him in Paris, “that you are just a political whore looking for a bed to lie down in.”
/> Stung by these accusations—and lacking the unalloyed support of Mayor Daley, anyhow—Shriver formally withdrew himself from consideration in Illinois and began seriously studying what his prospects would be in a primary challenge against Governor Mandel. Shriver operatives on the ground in Maryland commissioned a poll on his behalf, and Mayor D’Alesandro and state attorney general Francis Burch began helping him to build a political organization there.
Back in Paris, Shriver hosted a dinner for Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator he had helped Jack Kennedy to unseat in 1952 and who was now stepping down as head of the American delegation to the Paris peace talks. The next day, Shriver had lunch with Wayne Hays, a Democratic congressman from Ohio. When Hays returned to Washington, the talk in the Capitol Hill cloakrooms was that Hays had anointed Shriver the Democratic presidential nominee for 1972.
In 1964 it had been a Washington Post column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak that had fueled the brief Shriver-for-vice-president fever—and that had led to Shriver’s heated encounter with an angry Robert Kennedy. In 1970 the idea that Shriver might head the Democratic ticket was given establishment validation by another Evans and Novak column. “Shriver Is Boomed by Democrats to Fill ’72 Vacuum Left by Kennedy,” the Post headline said, and the article described how a broad range of prominent Democrats were hoping to make Shriver their man for 1972. It also reported, however, that the cause of Shriver’s indecisiveness about whether and where to run in 1970 was “hostility from the Kennedy apparatus.” “The Kennedy family and its political outriders,” Evans and Novak reported, “still resent Shriver’s loyal support for President Johnson and his failure to back Robert F. Kennedy for President in 1968.” Shriver, they argued, “is inhibited chiefly by his keen awareness of the resentment from the Kennedy apparatus.”
Although Evans and Novak believed that the sorry state of the Democratic Party and the lack of other star-quality candidates could “quickly propel Shriver out of the dark horse category for 1972,” they reported that “a close friend” had told Shriver privately that a presidential campaign “would be seen by Kennedyites as taking advantage of Ted Kennedy’s discomfiture.”
The idea that Shriver would try to “take advantage” of Ted Kennedy’s post-Chappaquiddick predicament was preposterous; the idea that some people would perceive him to be doing so, however, was not as far-fetched. Thus, although many of Shriver’s supporters were recommending that he forget the idea of running for governor or senator, and instead come home and take charge of the Democratic National Committee, or campaign for other Democrats in 1970 (as Richard Nixon had for Republicans in 1966), Shriver decided instead that it would be safer to pursue the Maryland governorship. Surely no one would object to that.
In early January, Shriver told Cy Sulzberger that he hoped “to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Maryland, to win the election, and to go on in 1972 to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency and move into the White House.” Sulzberger was impressed by the nature of Shriver’s ambition, which was “not for power itself” but rather “to assume direction of government policy and channel its principal emphasis along [domestic] lines, particularly social reform to eliminate poverty and hunger.”
By the end of 1969, Shriver was feeling increasingly uncomfortable to be associated with the Nixon administration. He could see firsthand that the Paris peace talks on Vietnam were still going nowhere. Nixon’s new policy of “Vietnamization” seemed to be producing neither victory nor significant deescalation of US involvement. Just before Christmas, Scotty Reston reported in the New York Times that Shriver had told his Kennedy in-laws he would resign from his ambassadorship after Pompidou’s visit to the United States in March 1970. At that point, Reston wrote, Shriver would confer with leading Democrats about running for president in 1972.
Before he left Paris, however, Shriver wanted to make some final grand gesture, to help build anticipation for Pompidou’s trip and to give the French people something to remember him by. One day that fall, he called a meeting of friends and staff to brainstorm about what sort of event might be conducted by the Paris embassy to, in effect, kick off the Pompidou visit the following spring. Various ideas were suggested: a dinner, a symposium, a parade. But the idea that caught Shriver’s fancy was proposed by a young Dominican priest, Father Daniel Morrissey, whom Shriver had retained to teach “the spiritual dimension of life” to his children.
At the time, Morrissey was living in a Dominican monastery in Paris. There he had learned a great deal about the history of Sainte Chappelle, the resplendent chapel on the Ile-de-la-Cité in the shadows of the Palace of Justice and Notre Dame Cathedral. In 1242 Louis IX (Saint Louis) had commissioned the building of Sainte Chappelle to house a holy relic—what was believed to be the crown of thorns that Christ had worn during the Passion—and to demonstrate that the kingdom of France was at the forefront of Western Christianity. Once a year during Saint Louis’s reign, the crown and other relics would be brought from the locked treasury at Notre Dame and displayed during a brief religious service. In the years since, Sainte Chappelle had become a tourist destination, noted for its beautiful stained-glass windows tracing the biblical story of humanity, from creation to redemption through Christ. To the French people, Sainte Chappelle was one of the country’s most glorious symbols.
One of the older priests at Morrissey’s monastery, the Reverend Raymond Leopold Bruckberger, had been a chaplain to the French Resistance. In 1944, after the Allies had retaken Paris from the Germans, Bruckberger had led de Gaulle through Notre Dame and Sainte Chappelle. Why not, Morrissey proposed, hold a special Midnight Mass at Sainte Chappelle? Morrissey knew that the Dominicans had occasionally held Mass there. Wasn’t it conceivable, then, that Shriver could get permission from the French government to hold a Mass there for the diplomatic corps?
Shriver loved the idea. A Midnight Mass at Sainte Chappelle had a combination of elements that appealed to him greatly. It had political and historical significance for the French, as well as for Franco-American relations. If done right, a Mass held in such a beautiful setting would have a distinctive grace, beauty, and style. For Shriver, as a devout Catholic, it would have great personal religious significance. Best of all, as Shriver soon learned, it would be unprecedented in modern times. The last time anyone had held a Christmas Midnight Mass at Sainte Chappelle was before Louis XIV had decamped for Versailles in 1682. And no private, much less non-French, person had ever used Sainte Chappelle for a Mass. This would be an event the French would not soon forget.
The first step was securing permission for the Mass, which proved to be more of a challenge than expected. Shriver had to lobby the Ministry of Culture for several weeks before permission was granted. The next step was to plan the event. Shriver wanted everything to be just right, so he and his staff went to great lengths to make sure that it would be. He hired an elite string quartet to play on period instruments dating from the era of the chapel’s construction. He had someone go to the Bibliothèque Nationale to track down the manuscript of a trumpet voluntary that had been composed especially to be played in Sainte Chappelle. He engaged Anna Moffo, a leading soprano of the Metropolitan Opera, to sing Christmas carols before the Mass.
Shriver thought it would be appropriate for an American priest to say the Mass, so he asked Father Morrissey to do so. Many of the religious accoutrements brought in for the event had special significance, as well. Morrissey’s vestments, retrieved from a museum in Nice, were made partly of gold and had been designed by Henri Matisse. (Matisse’s final work had been the design of a chapel—including its priestly garments—for some Dominican nuns.) The stole Morrissey would wear had belonged to a French saint, Vincent de Paul—the same Vincent de Paul to whose society Shriver’s father had belonged when Sarge was a young boy. It was decided that Shriver’s son Bobby would lead the procession into the chapel. Atop the processional cross Bobby was to carry would be his father’s most treasured possession, the crucifix that had lain
on JFK’s bier and had been blessed by Pope Paul and Patriarch Athenagoras.
There were other logistical challenges that would have deterred someone less determined than Shriver. Paris in winter can be cold and damp; the cavernous, unwinterized chapel would surely be uninviting late on a December night. Also, Sainte Chappelle’s most winning feature—its magnificent windows—could be appreciated only on sunny days, when illuminated by natural light from outside. Shriver wasn’t daunted. He installed portable heaters two days in advance, so that by midnight of December 24 the Gothic chapel was comfortably warm, and he had floodlights set up all around the perimeter of the building, so that the beautiful stained glass would be illumined from without, despite the nighttime darkness.
The event, on December 25, 1969, was one of transcendent beauty. One guest told Time that it was “visually the most beautiful Christmas Eve Mass I’ve ever been to.” Father Morrissey recalled it as “patriotic and beautiful.” Cy Sulzberger, the longtime roving foreign correspondent for the New York Times, recorded in his diary that “the Mass was absolutely beautiful—above all the glowing Sainte Chappelle.” Embassy personnel among the 300 guests—most of whom were French ministers and ambassadors from various countries—tend to recall the Mass as the capstone of the Shrivers’ sojourn in Paris.
PART SIX
Democratic Politics (1970–1976)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Politics of Life
On January 27 Shriver formally submitted his resignation to Nixon. President Pompidou’s visit to the United States would mark “a high point,” Shriver wrote, “from which my successor can felicitously begin another period of Franco-American history.” As for himself, he told Nixon, “the needs of our own country … impinge more and more upon my conscience.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 70