Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Shriver sought out his brother-in-law in Hyannis Port and asked him whether he would object to an in-law being on the McGovern ticket and whether “it would affect anything you want to do.” Ted said he would not object. It is likely that after the Eagleton scandal, Kennedy believed that McGovern would lose badly—perhaps even very badly, as badly as Goldwater had done in 1964. Such a defeat could turn McGovern into a political leper and his running mate into tainted goods. It seemed unlikely that Shriver could parlay the experience into a viable platform for 1976. And even if he planned to, Teddy figured, the Kennedy family councils could talk Sarge out of it. As one political analyst put it at the time, “This is a slight but not an awesome gamble for the youngest of the Kennedys so long as the McGovern-Shriver ticket seems headed for oblivion.” A more charitable view is that Ted felt bad for having helped block Sarge’s way in 1968 and was now trying to make amends. Also, he recognized McGovern’s desperation; it would be a disservice to the party to block Shriver from the ticket.

  The question that must have been running through Kennedy’s head was, Why would Shriver want the vice presidential nomination? McGovern was trailing badly in the polls and getting abused by the press, and he struck many Democratic Party regulars as a laughingstock. Signing on to the campaign at this point would be political suicide. Besides, everyone knew that five people had already turned McGovern down—Muskie would be the sixth. No self-respecting high school girl would accept a prom invitation if she knew she were her date’s seventh choice; why would a self-respecting politician?

  But Shriver’s mind worked differently from most people’s; also, his situation was different from the first six prospects McGovern had asked. Of all the men McGovern approached, Shriver was the only one who had never held elective office. Leaving aside his half-hearted foray in Maryland, he had never even run for one. And after being actively thwarted from joining the presidential tickets in 1964 and 1968, he welcomed the opportunity when it finally presented itself in 1972—especially since the Kennedy family had officially approved it.

  Like all politicians, a part of Shriver’s mind was shrewdly calculating. Along with everyone else, he could see that the prospects for a Democratic victory in November were tiny. But he perceived that by joining the ticket when no one else would, he would be doing his loyal duty to the party and adding to the bank of gratitude he had built up through his work on the 1970 congressional campaign. That could stand him in good stead for 1976 or beyond. Also, he was confident of his abilities as a campaigner. He believed that showcasing those abilities now, even in a losing effort, might be a good advertisement of his skills. Some of his friends believed that he wanted to show he could campaign as well as, or better than, his Kennedy brothers-in-law.

  But compared with the minds of other politicians, the shrewdly calculating part of Shriver’s mind was relatively small. The part of his mind that believed that doing the right thing is important, in contrast, was large—as was that part of his mind that believed he could accomplish the impossible. Shriver saw that the McGovern campaign was listing badly, in danger of capsizing. If it did capsize, much of the Democratic Party would go down with it. Shriver saw himself as ballast that could stabilize the ticket and keep the party from self-destructing. He also believed, at least some of the time, that McGovern could win. He could see that the poll numbers were terrible and that the press coverage was awful. But there were still three full months until the election. He had seen Truman defeat Dewey. And he had made a habit of accomplishing what other people said was impossible: making the Peace Corps a success; saving the OEO in 1967; winning over Charles de Gaulle. Defeating Richard Nixon, a man he increasingly believed to be misguided and corrupt, couldn’t be any harder than what he had already done.

  As Shriver saw it, he had little to lose. If the ticket went down to defeat, well, that was only to be expected. And if somehow it won? That would be a victory more impressive than any Kennedy candidate had ever pulled off.

  On the morning of August 5, Muskie called McGovern campaign headquarters to say he would not be joining the ticket. McGovern called Shriver in Hyannis Port. A household staff member came out to the tennis court to say that Senator George McGovern was on the phone. Strangely insouciant, Shriver insisted on finishing his tennis game before taking the call; it was as though, having made clear his availability, he was signaling that he was still his own man and would do things his own way. When he picked up, he heard, “Sarge, this is George McGovern. Say, Sarge, we’ve been going over this vice presidential thing pretty thoroughly for the past few days, as I’m sure you know, and I want you to know that everyone here, including myself, would like very much to have you on this ticket.” Shriver accepted the offer.

  By this point, McGovern’s aides had had more than a week to check out all the prospective candidates “very thoroughly,” as Gary Hart recalled, so they were confident that Shriver had no “skeletons in his closet.” Still, after what had transpired with Eagleton, Shriver felt compelled to bring up the one episode that he worried might be used against him. He explained to McGovern that one night while he was ambassador to France, he and Eunice had gone to a social event at a Paris nightclub. Eunice had gone home early but Sarge had stayed late, dancing the night away with a bevy of female admirers. Nothing untoward had happened, but a photograph of him dancing with a famous young French model, who was wearing a (very) short skirt, had appeared on the cover of a French newspaper, accompanied by a saucy caption. McGovern laughed. “If that’s the best you can offer in the way of skeletons,” he said, “then I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

  Shriver began his campaign for the vice presidency in typical fashion: by bringing together the best and the brightest minds he could assemble for a freewheeling, all-day ideas session. “Win or lose,” he told Eunice, “we’ve got to have fun in the campaign.” The morning after McGovern called Hyannis Port, as Hart recalled, “Shriver swung into action with the energy for which he is famous, filling his Maryland estate with ‘old Kennedy people’ by Sunday morning for all day planning and organization meetings.” Hart and others came out to Timberlawn to brief Shriver and company on the issues.

  It was immediately apparent from the assembled crowd that Shriver might help McGovern rebuild bridges to the old Democratic regulars. “That meeting,” Hart recalled, “was generations meeting each other at a crossroad. I tried to talk about grassroots organization, gypsy-guerrilla advance people, and citizen-volunteer canvassers, while the Kennedy people from 1960 and 1968 barked orders, summoned successful lawyers away from lucrative practices, and negotiated heavy salaries. It was like Che Guevara meeting General Patton.”

  After having had a field day with the protracted Eagleton debacle, the press hailed Shriver’s selection. “George McGovern virtually backed into the selection of Sargent Shriver as his ticket-mate but he has latched on to the best that is left of the high aims and high hopes of the New Frontier days,” Charlie Bartlett wrote in his column on August 7. Shriver, Bartlett continued, bore little of the taint attached to conventional politicians. “More open in public and more naive in the backrooms, he is atypical of the species. He comes through, at 56, as one who still believes the world can be a better place and wants another chance to work at it. He enters active politics at a high level only because the lower levels were closed off by professionals who sensed he was not one of the usual breed.” NBC news declared that “there is a dynamism, an excitement about [Shriver] that turns crowds on in a way that George McGovern just doesn’t.” Hubert Humphrey told Time, “Sarge is just what George needs—somebody with enthusiasm, somebody with zip.” Time also reported that Shriver had “quickly made many people wonder why he had not been the first choice all along.” And in his “Foreign Affairs” column in the New York Times, Cy Sulzberger wrote that the best possible outcome of the 1972 election would be for Nixon to win—keeping the wild-eyed McGovern out of office—while Shriver would get enough public recognition to win the presidency in 1976. “M
r. Shriver has not yet made his mark,” Sulzburger wrote, “but, an energetic, intelligent, and compassionate man, he is in some respects the best endowed of any of the Kennedy clan for the Presidency of the United States.”

  Two days later, the Democratic National Committee met for a special miniconvention at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington to officially sanction the replacement of Tom Eagleton. Mike Mansfield and Dan Rostenkowski officially nominated Shriver. The nomination was approved all but unanimously, with only Eagleton’s Missouri delegation (and a few individual Oregon delegates) declining to support it. It was the first time in the history of the party that a second vice president had been nominated before election day.

  Shriver’s acceptance speech on national television that night was not widely seen. By this point the nation, turned off by McGovern’s handling of the Eagleton affair, had tuned the Democrats out. Those few million Americans who did watch, however, were treated to a glimpse of the optimistic Shriver spirit—and of the family drama that had played out behind the scenes. Until Shriver spoke, the evening had had a desultory feeling to it. Shriver enlivened the crowd, “his enthusiasm for the task … in marked contrast to the gloom that had hung over the McGovern camp.” Shriver declared in his speech that “I am not embarrassed to be George McGovern’s seventh choice for vice president. We Democrats may be short of money. We’re not short of talent. Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Abe Ribicoff, Tom Eagleton—what a galaxy of stars. Pity Mr. Nixon—his first and only choice was Spiro Agnew.”

  After saluting Eagleton’s courage and grace in handling his exile from the ticket, Shriver unexpectedly made light of his relations with the Kennedy family. “John Kennedy’s victory ended discrimination against Catholics,” he said. “Lyndon Johnson’s victory ended discrimination against Southerners. And now,” he continued with a sly grin, “George McGovern has proved there is no discrimination against in-laws.” Then, departing from his printed text, he gestured over at Ted Kennedy who was sitting nearby on the platform and cracked, “Look at him with that pensive look. The great Ted Kennedy. I wonder what’s he’s thinking about.”

  The vice presidential campaign began in chaos. Shriver had had no time to prepare—he had just returned from the Soviet Union, after all—but now, since more than two weeks had been wasted on the Eagleton affair, he had only days to get a full-blown campaign up and running. He needed to learn McGovern’s issues and stances, of course. And because he had no pre-existing political organization, he needed to recruit a staff.

  To take charge of the campaign plane, Shriver selected Donald Dell—partly because he liked and trusted Dell, having worked closely with him at the OEO; partly because Dell had been his conduit to the McGovern campaign; partly because Dell had good relations with the other branches of the Kennedy family, having been close to both Bobby and Ethel, and to Ted. But mostly he picked Dell because Don was pretty much the first person to appear on the scene after McGovern’s phone call.

  Dell’s tenure as campaign trip director did not last long. Dell admired and respected Shriver and strongly supported his candidacy. But he had just launched his own business, representing professional athletes as their agent in negotiations, and was ambivalent about abandoning it for three months at such a crucial time. More significantly, he discovered within a few days that he was unable to exert the control over Shriver that was necessary to keep the candidate focused and on schedule.

  Few people could have. Shriver worked according to his own internal clock and was forever running late. For most of his professional life, this was not a fatal problem. But national election campaigns are constantly battling the clock, trying (and usually failing) to adhere to a strict schedule of travel and appearances. When the natural clock-battling of the campaign was combined with Shriver’s obliviousness to the passage of time, the results were predictably disastrous. For the first week of the campaign, the candidate was constantly showing up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong speech. Politically, Shriver seemed to have a perverse sense of priorities: He would spend hours talking to a group of sixteen-years-olds, who weren’t even old enough to vote, while keeping influential local Democratic politicians waiting for hours. It was as if he was refusing to grant any single person more importance than any other—a worthy goal as a Christian, but terrible tactics as a politician. (This was the sort of thing that made Shriver so widely loved by—and so exasperating to—his campaign staff.) Among other things, Shriver’s late and unpredictable schedule was hell on the press corps, which was forever missing its filing deadlines. This affected the campaign’s press coverage.

  Dell, as tough and as smart as he was, simply couldn’t keep Shriver on schedule.

  “Everywhere we go Sarge is late,” Dell recalled. “We had this one stop in Cleveland, where Shriver was supposed to meet the head of the labor union, and we’re up in the hotel suite. And I said, ‘Sarge, the guy’s waiting downstairs.’ And he says, ‘I gotta go get a haircut.’ I said, ‘Sarge, you can’t get a haircut. We’re already 30 minutes late on our schedule, and the labor leader’s down in the lobby.’ We had this huge argument about his haircut. I go into the bathroom. I come out, he’s left. And he’s gone somewhere to get this goddamn haircut.” When Shriver returned, fifteen minutes later, he and Dell went downstairs to find that the labor leader had left in a huff. “The McGovern people called me immediately, and they’re furious,” Dell recalled. “They all blame me, because I’m supposed to get him there on time; it’s my job.”

  On the airplane that night, Shriver and Dell got into a screaming argument, which ended when Shriver banged his hand down on the fold-out tray table and snapped it in two. That was Dell’s next-to-last day on the campaign plane. The next morning, in the car on the way to a speaking appearance, Shriver turned to Dell and said, “Donald, how’s your business going?” Dell acknowledged that with all the time he was putting in on the campaign, his business was suffering. So Shriver, as Dell recalled it, said, “Donald, listen, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you go back to Washington, and you can run your firm, you can help out with Citizens for McGovern/Shriver.” This was, Dell says, Shriver’s “nice, polite way of getting me out of my role.”

  If Dell couldn’t keep a handle on Shriver, then who could?

  Bill Josephson. Although still young, in his late thirties, Josephson had worked with Shriver on and off since 1961, and his years in the Peace Corps had taught him how to manage his old boss. Plus, he was—as Dell happily concedes—even smarter, blunter, and tougher-talking than Dell was. In some ways, Josephson was not unlike Adam Yarmolinsky: He suffered fools poorly; associates at Fried, Frank were afraid of him. Although he had been only twenty-six when he first went to work for Shriver, he had earned his intellectual respect and related to him now as a peer. He was also unfailingly devoted to Shriver, guarding his interests—as one Fried, Frank colleague later recalled—“like a pit bull.” So when Josephson received a call from Shriver on August 6, he dropped everything and flew to Washington. He wouldn’t return home until after the election.

  Once Josephson took over from Dell as trip director—and Mickey Kantor was installed at the Washington headquarters—the campaign ran more smoothly. But it never fully recovered from being thrown together so quickly, and it was always short on funds. The campaign was always scrambling.

  Despite the grim picture the poll numbers painted, the campaign plane (which Shriver christened the Fighting Lucky 7, a reference to his being McGovern’s seventh pick, as well as to the seven—Bobby, Maria, Timmy, Mark, and Anthony, plus Sarge and Eunice—Shriver family members) remained a font of energy, ideas, and creativity, with a typically New Frontierish collection of talent. Mark Shields, a veteran of the defeated Muskie campaign (and today a celebrity pundit), came aboard as political director. Doris Kearns, a Harvard professor and veteran of the Johnson administration (who would later become a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning popular historian), came on as an issues director. Mike Barnic
le, now a famous (and controversial) newspaper columnist, was a speechwriter. So was Richard Parker (now a professor at Harvard), who walked in off the street after finishing up his clerkship to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart. Michael Novak, the Catholic philosopher and veteran of the 1970 CLF campaign, joined up once again.

  Running the show at Shriver headquarters in Washington were Mickey Kantor, the former Legal Services attorney; Lee White, a former chairman of the Federal Power Commission who had served as a special counsel to both JFK and LBJ; and Tersh Boasberg, a public interest lawyer and former OEO colleague. Lloyd Cutler, a longtime Kennedy family legal adviser (and later a lawyer for Bill Clinton), headed up the fund-raising operation. Other team members included Baltimore councilwoman Barbara Mikulski (now a US senator) and former Washington Evening Star managing editor Burt Hoffman.

  Also joining the group was an idealistic young veteran of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign named Jeannie Main, who had been working as a Senate staffer for Walter Mondale for the last few years. She couldn’t stand the idea of four more years of Richard Nixon, so she showed up at McGovern headquarters one day to offer her services as a volunteer. Jeannie ended up as a regular on the Shriver campaign plane. (Shriver recognized that she possessed uncommon mettle, and he hired her as an assistant at Fried, Frank following the election. At the end of 2003, Main was finishing her thirty-first consecutive year of service at Shriver’s side. “Jeannie Main guarded the gate,” one of Shriver’s colleagues at Fried, Frank recalled. “She had worked for Bobby Kennedy and was unbelievably smart and loyal and kept Shriver on track.”)

  The “talented people that Shriver was able to recruit at a moment’s notice to join a doomed effort was a testimony to the effect he had on people,” Mark Shields recalled. “I mean, we knew going in that this campaign was not likely to be a glowing resume item for any of us. But he got the Mickey Kantors of the world to drop high-paying jobs and show up to work.” Shields had never met Shriver before, but he soon understood why so many people were willing to give up so much for him. “I have never been associated with anybody on a daily basis for whom I had more affection or respect,” Shields says.