Nixon agreed that Shriver’s resignation should not be made public until after Pompidou’s visit to the United States in March 1970, so Shriver worked assiduously through the winter to help prepare for the meeting. In his free time, he began to concentrate more of his attention on Maryland and on further dissociating himself from Nixon’s foreign policy. In his first appearance on national television after his return to the States, Shriver made clear that he was unhappy with the pace of American de-escalation in Vietnam.
Marvin Mandel’s supporters, clearly perceiving Shriver to be a real threat, began trying to disqualify him on grounds that he hadn’t voted in Maryland within the last five years. (He had lived in Paris for the previous two years, and for many years before that he had maintained his voting address in Chicago, with the expectation that his political future lay in Illinois.) An amendment to the Maryland constitution was introduced in the state legislature that would have barred him from running for governor on these grounds. Ted Kennedy wrote to Shriver, asking if it would be helpful for him to use his influence on Maryland Democrats to try to block this amendment—thereby signaling the Kennedy family’s assent to a Shriver campaign in that state.
Still, the obstacles to attaining the Maryland State House were formidable. First, it is almost always extremely difficult to challenge an incumbent politician in a primary. Mandel had the power of patronage on his side. Second, Shriver’s two-year absence from the state and his Illinois voting address made him vulnerable to charges of carpetbagging. One local paper editorialized, “There is something just a little bit wrong about a rich glamour boy rushing home to challenge an incumbent of his own party for a post in which he had previously shown no interest.” Finally, Shriver’s long period of indecisiveness had begun to hurt him. Some key politicos—such as Montgomery County Democratic chair Dick Schifter and Senator Joe Tydings—got tired of waiting.
Shriver returned from Paris at the end of March and announced that he would make an official decision “within six weeks” about whether to challenge Mandel in the primary. As soon as he was back in Maryland, he began to pull together his team.
The incipient campaign was a disaster, for two main reasons. The first problem was the all-volunteer campaign staff, which although enthusiastic was abysmally organized and not terribly skillful. “A good deal of time and energy has been spent in attempting to structure and organize with volunteers whose political experience is nil,” one internal campaign memo reported in frustration. The second problem was Shriver’s own ambivalence. For a man who had no trouble throwing himself wholeheartedly into projects he believed in, he was surprisingly diffident about his undeclared campaign. For weeks stretching into months, he wouldn’t commit to an open declaration of his candidacy. He kept wanting to wait a little bit longer—to see if his poll numbers improved, to see if he could raise more money, to see if he could line up more blue-chip endorsements, to see if his campaign staff could begin to work more smoothly.
Mainly he wanted to keep his options open. A movement was afoot among Democratic members of Congress to draft Shriver as their leader and spokesman for the 1970 election season, either under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee or as part of a new Democratic organization. Democrats who had no stake in the Maryland State House were whispering in Shriver’s ear that he should skip the governor’s race in favor of barnstorming the country with other Democratic candidates, accruing political capital for 1972. In Shriver’s other ear, however, he could hear the whispers of disapproval of any national effort from the Kennedy apparatus.
The more time that passed, the worse the Maryland situation became. Shriver’s stump speeches could still inflame an audience’s passions, but his coyness about his intentions wore badly with voters. His own campaign staff grew desultory and even more disorganized. Meanwhile, Mandel’s job approval ratings, previously quite low, had begun to rise. Several prominent supporters, convinced that Shriver would never make up his mind, defected to the Mandel camp. On May 22 Shriver’s press secretary wrote to his campaign manager in a state of despair. “The whole picture begins to take on some of the characteristics of a ‘Greek Tragedy’ situation,” he wrote. Some months later, Shriver would say the campaign had been “the worst experience of his life”; he couldn’t recall being involved in anything “so badly managed either by him or in his behalf.”
As his (still undeclared) campaign floundered, Shriver was summoned to Capitol Hill for a meeting with a group of Democratic members of Congress led by the House majority leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma. Forget Maryland, they told him. We need your help. By Memorial Day, more than 100 representatives had signed a “Draft Shriver” petition, calling on him to take charge of their national reelection campaign. One Democrat told the New York Times that Shriver was the party’s only hope, now that LBJ and Humphrey were seen as washed up. “We have no young national figures, no young governors, who can invest the time in this thing that it takes and who can also express … half as well as Sargent Shriver the terrible issues before us. We are in that bad shape. But [Shriver] is a guy who appeals to both the Johnson-Humphrey crowd and the Kennedy people—the old Democrats and the youngsters—and I say we’ve just got to have him.”
On June 3, Democratic congressional leaders issued a press release in which they asked Shriver to head a new party council to help revive the party. The names on the press release included the House majority leader, Carl Albert; the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield; the Speaker of the House, John McCormack; and the Senate majority whip, Ted Kennedy. The next day, Larry O’Brien, the former JFK aide who was now chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), attacked the plan for the new party council, saying it would be “yet another source of division and splintering of our precious resources.” He claimed he had not been consulted and said that the new council would take valuable fund-raising dollars away from the DNC. Shriver and his supporters could have soothed O’Brien’s concerns without too much trouble had it not been for the fact that Ted Kennedy, whose name appeared on the press release, now denied having had anything to do with it.
After an hour-long phone conversation between Shriver and O’Brien failed to settle their differences, O’Brien issued another blistering denunciation of the proposed new council. Three weeks of negotiations ensued. Finally on June 24 Carl Albert and Mike Mansfield announced that Shriver would be heading a newly formed organization—dubbed the Congressional Leadership for the Future (CLF)—that would be independent of, but would coordinate closely with, the DNC. To allay O’Brien’s concerns, it was agreed that the CLF would limit its fund-raising activities and concentrate its efforts on campaigning and serving as a speaker’s bureau.
Shriver gave a speech declaring the end of his political foray in Maryland. “While I have been evaluating the situation in Maryland,” he said, “a national crisis has occurred. The invasion of Cambodia and expansion of war in Southeast Asia; the massacres at Kent State, at Jackson State, and in Augusta; the runaway inflation, rising prices, and growing unemployment—these events have changed the whole atmosphere of our country. They have affected me deeply, more deeply than any political event in my life. Their impact has borne heavily upon me and has made me feel an obligation to focus once again on national and international affairs.” Therefore, he said, he was accepting the invitation of congressional leaders to try to build “a new politics and a new patriotism.”
Shriver immediately began to build an organization, setting up an office on K Street in Washington. It rapidly became the city’s political hotspot, the place with all the sizzle and excitement. Mike Feldman, a former aide to JFK, and Edward Bennett Williams, an influential Washington lawyer, joined the CLF as vice chairmen. Michael Novak, a budding Catholic theologian and political activist, was in charge of formulating policy. (After Shriver had discovered Novak’s book The Experience of Nothingness earlier in the year, he had read excerpts to his family at the dinner table and then invited Novak to Timberlawn.)
; The office was always abuzz with activity, as senators, members of Congress, and celebrities came and went. Drawing on Shriver’s deep reservoir of friends and acquaintances, the list of speakers and advisers the CLF offered to Democrats in tightly contested congressional races was a Who’s Who of Hollywood (Lauren Bacall, Warren Beatty, Carol Channing, Sammy Davis Jr., Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward), high culture (James MacGregor Burns, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut), and sports (Arthur Ashe, Asa Parseghian, Brooks Robinson). The most frequent speaker was Shriver himself. Between July and November he gave nearly a hundred speeches for more than eighty candidates in thirty-six states.
The bulk of the CLF’s work consisted of identifying close congressional races and providing campaign assistance to the Democrats competing in them. Observers commented that Shriver’s speech-making tour was similar to Nixon’s of 1966 and predicted he would use the favors he was collecting as a base for a presidential campaign.
The Democratic Party as a whole had seemed moribund, almost dead, for many months. Now it began to stir again. Its pulse was loudest in Shriver’s K Street offices. “The White House plods its somber way, Congress creaks on sagging hinge—and the swinging spot on the national political scene today is the crisp bustling headquarters where friends and foe alike think R. Sargent Shriver, liberal Democrat, is launching his drive for the presidency,” one political columnist wrote in August. The CLF did have the look of a burgeoning presidential campaign. “The eye-bulging political organization now being put together for Sargent Shriver’s ‘Congressional Leadership for the Future,’ ” Evans and Novak wrote, “looks suspiciously to some politicians like the forerunner of a 1972 Shriver-for-President organization.” Republicans, Evans and Novak reported, were worrying about how to handle Shriver. Should the GOP attack him and risk building him up, as LBJ’s attacks on Nixon in 1966 had inadvertently done? Or should it aim to exploit the fissures between the CLF and the Democratic National Committee, “which already regards Shriver with jealous eyes.”
Still, much as many Democrats longed for a Shriver-for-president campaign, Senator Muskie had to be considered the party’s heir apparent until proven otherwise. In candid moments with friends, Shriver admitted he would not be averse to running for president if a good opportunity presented itself. But his honest analysis was that such an opportunity was not—the exhortations of various members of Congress and political columnists notwithstanding—likely to arise. People would be wary of rallying around a presidential candidate who had never previously held elective office.
Then, too, there was the Ted Kennedy question. If Kennedy won his Senate reelection race in 1970, Shriver figured there was a good chance that calls of “Draft Ted” would be renewed. Did Sarge really want to run that gauntlet again? Every time he was together with the Kennedys at Hyannis Port during this period, as one of his aides recalled, “Sarge would be carved up.” “Why did you say that, why the hell did you say this?” various Kennedy aides would demand, suspicious that Shriver’s personal ambitions might impede Ted’s in 1972 or 1976.
As the 1970 campaign season wound down, Shriver flew from city to city in a frenzy of speech making. His most popular speech, written by Michael Novak, was called “The Politics of Life.” In it, Shriver talked about how coming back from France had been a shock because it seemed to him that, in contrast to the heady idealism of the 1960s, “the hand of death lay heavy upon our society.” What followed came to represent a distilled version of the Shriverian creed. “I make a distinction between the politics of life and the politics of death,” he would say.
The politics of death is bureaucracy, routine, rules, status quo; the politics of life is personal initiative, creativity, flair, dash, a little daring. The politics of death is calculation, prudence, measured gestures; the politics of life is experience, spontaneity, grace, directness. The politics of death is currying favor with the rich, toadying to the established and the powerful; the politics of life is helping the poor to dream and to become strong. The politics of death is fear of youth; the politics of life is to trust the young to their own experience.
Some of Shriver’s advisers thought the speech was too sentimental (“The politics of death has been carried too far,” Bill Moyers said. “We can only die once!”), but by October, Democratic candidates were requesting that speech regularly.
When the CLF was launched in June, the Democrats seemed to be heading for an election debacle. Republicans were calculating they would win control of the Senate and pick up seats in the House of Representatives. The GOP was inspired by the prospect of a big victory and put together the largest, most expensive off-year campaign in history. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a despairing article, “Who Needs the Democrats?”—to which the reply was, “Apparently no one.”
The CLF helped turn election day 1970 into a modest success for the Democrats. The Democrats won a net gain of twelve seats in the House (restoring the size of their majority to pre-1966 levels) and twenty-two out of thirty-five governors’ races, the largest net gain by either party since 1938. Finally, although there were more than twice as many Democratic incumbents up for reelection in the Senate as Republicans, the GOP managed to win only two seats. This was far better than anyone had been predicting four months earlier. “The Democratic party came out of the Tuesday elections like a hibernating bear out of a dark cave, savoring the warm sun of success and stretching political muscle it had suddenly rediscovered,” the New York Times reported.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
International Men of Mystery
After the election, Shriver turned his attention to deciding what to do next. His political star was twinkling brightly above Washington once again, his travails at the OEO ancient history. If he were serious about a run for the presidency in 1972, now would have been the time to start building his organization. It would have been easy to do using the framework and personnel of the CLF. Instead, Shriver scuttled CLF’s operations and—after a trip to Paris for the funeral of Charles de Gaulle—returned after a thirty-year hiatus to the private practice of law.
Shriver’s early experience with the law, in 1946 at Henry Stimson’s Brahmin law firm, had been dismal: routine, boring, with no outlet for his creative energies. Now Shriver was a national figure, a hero to many Democrats. Many people still believed he would be the Democrats’ savior in 1972. Why, then, practice law?
Several factors helped Shriver make his decision. One of them was money. This was not as out of character for the man as it might seem. No one would ever call Shriver greedy; spiritual and religious values were always far more important to him than wealth. It is true that from 1953 onward he had lived in high style—with a sprawling estate in Maryland and a large home on Cape Cod—but this was much more a result of his association with his wife’s family, and all their wealth, than of his own money. Working for Joe Kennedy at the Merchandise Mart between 1947 and 1960, Shriver had established himself as a successful businessman. But for the last ten years, he had worked exclusively for the government and on political campaigns. The truth was that although the Kennedy family was rich, Sargent Shriver himself was not.
The opportunity to earn real money in his own right was important to him, for at least two reasons. The first was largely psychological. Having seen his own father laid low by the Depression, Shriver was acutely conscious of how money, or the lack of it, could affect a person. Like many in the generation that grew up in the Depression, he was always aware of the value of a dollar and had a sense of the ephemerality of wealth. Also, Shriver had always been fascinated with self-made men. He was naturally attracted to men who had made their own way through business—like Joe Kennedy—and who had established a powerful place in the world through their work. The model of Joe Kennedy, who had finally passed away in 1969, loomed large for Shriver. Here was a man who had started with little and built an empire—and then who had, for all his faults, used that empire as a platform for public service for his entire family.
Although money was important to Shriver, he would never have taken a job solely to get rich, and he sought a firm that offered additional rewards. He ended up selecting Strasser, Spiegelberg, Fried, Frank & Kampelman, a large corporate law firm with offices in Washington, New York, and London. (Upon Shriver’s arrival, the firm changed its name to Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.) On the face of it, Fried, Frank was just another large corporate law firm. Like many high-end firms, Fried, Frank was stocked with brilliant lawyers in possession of impressive educational pedigrees. Like many firms at the dawn of globalization, it also had a growing roster of international and multinational clients. And like numerous Washington-based firms, many of its attorneys moved easily back and forth between public service and the private sector. But in other ways, Fried, Frank was anything but typical. Some of its partners—Dick Schifter, Max Kampelman, Arthur Lazarus, Sam Harris—were prominent Democrats, and the firm as a whole had a reputation for being much more liberal than other corporate shops. Its Native American practice was the largest in the country. All these attributes appealed to Shriver.
It also appealed to him that most of the firm’s partners were Jewish. In Shriver’s view, Fried, Frank’s Jewishness marked the firm as different, as outside the mainstream of the typical Brahmin firms. As someone who thought of himself as a maverick or an outsider—within the Kennedy family, for instance, and in his approach to government bureaucracy—he believed he would fit in well. Bill Josephson, Shriver’s former Peace Corps colleague and one of his closest friends, had joined the firm several years earlier and now helped bring Shriver in for exploratory talks. On February 15, 1971, Fried, Frank announced that Shriver was joining the practice as a named partner, working out of both the Washington and New York offices.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 71