In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that Johnson called Haldeman to say that he had never kept Shriver abreast of what was going on in the Paris negotiations because “I never trusted him, the SOB, not even then.” This is most likely apocryphal; Haldeman makes no reference to any such phone call in his diaries and, besides, the source of any distrust Johnson felt toward Shriver had to do with Bobby Kennedy—who had been dead for three months by the fall of 1968. Even if Johnson did say this to Haldeman, Shriver never claimed to have gotten his information from LBJ; he was getting it from Vance and Harriman, who were with him in Paris and who were now staunchly supporting his claims in 1972.
But without Johnson’s active and public corroboration, Shriver’s Vietnam allegations, although they continued to get front-page attention in the press for a while, failed to have any effect on the electorate. Over the summer, as the administration let it be known that Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiators were hastening down the road toward peace, the American public’s approval of Nixon’s handling of Vietnam rose. With Shriver unable to produce some hard piece of evidence that proved Nixon had blown the peace, the argument seemed to voters to boil down to one party’s argument versus the other’s. In August 1972 more people were still inclined to trust Richard Nixon than Sarge Shriver or George McGovern.
At summer’s end, the McGovern-Shriver campaign appeared to be in dire straits. Polling by the candidate’s own staffer Pat Caddell found that McGovern trailed 60–34. (Caddell said that he often felt “like the recreation director on the Titanic.”) Worse, in some of the states that Kantor had deemed essential to victory, McGovern-Shriver trailed by as much as a 2–1 margin. Shriver had been on the ticket for a month, but everywhere he went he was inevitably asked as many questions about the Eagleton affair as he was about his own positions on the issues. Fund-raising was also a problem: It was hard to persuade even the most loyal Democrats to throw money at a losing cause. The Kennedy family had pledged to make significant contributions, but by the end of August they still had not fulfilled their promise. When Lee White and Bill Josephson met with McGovern at the end of the month, the candidate expressed his frustration that Steve Smith, keeper of the Kennedy purse strings, had yet to deliver any money. Larry O’Brien hinted that this might be because Smith feared Shriver would parlay any success into a campaign in 1976.
Everyone knew that, barring some unforeseen miracle, the McGovern-Shriver ticket would go down to defeat. For the next two months the candidates’ campaign staff had to perform the difficult trick of acting as if it would be otherwise, without appearing to have their heads buried deep in the sand. Also, as alluded to by Larry O’Brien, some of McGovern’s people resented seeing Shriver apparently using the 1972 campaign to position himself for 1976. “It’s incredible what’s going on in [Shriver’s] outfit,” a disgruntled senior staffer on the McGovern campaign said. “It looks as if Sarge is trying to put together his own base for a bid for the Presidency in 1976.” Another McGovern aide alleged, “Sarge is out to pull a Muskie. He wants to emerge as the one shining hope of McGovern’s debacle, the one guy marked for higher office despite this year’s disaster.”
Such resentments were natural, given how poorly the Democratic campaign was going—and how much better Shriver’s press notices were than McGovern’s. “Although there is nothing less prestigious than running for the vice presidency on a weak team, Sargent Shriver is probably the most sparkling of the four candidates in the electoral race,” Stanley Karnow wrote in the Washington Post in late September. “In contrast to George McGovern, whose nasal piety borders on the self-righteous, Shriver exudes a natural sense of humor that seems to suggest that he considers the election is a game even if he is playing to win.” And although the McGovern-Shriver ticket was as many as forty points behind Nixon-Agnew in the polls, when Shriver and Agnew were matched up head to head, voters picked Shriver over Agnew.
One reason the vice presidential campaign had so much energy was the presence of Eunice Shriver. She amazed campaign staffers with her political acumen and her sheer endurance. A reporter who followed her for a day described her “sprinting through all-white suburban neighborhoods and all-black slums, laying campaign literature on anyone who would open a door.” Gary Hart recalled,
Eunice Shriver has been described as the most Kennedy of the Kennedys and the best politician in the family. Although that might be considered too potent a distillation for anyone to achieve, her performance during the fall tended to support both descriptions. She seemed inexhaustible.… She also was articulate, but laced her political speeches with anecdotes, improvisations, and spontaneous humor. She also seemed unintimidatable. She would go almost anywhere in search of voters and was not easily put off by precedents or tradition.
Rose, Ethel, Ted, Joan, and various other Kennedy family members and advisers campaigned for the McGovern-Shriver ticket at different times. Rose, Ethel, and Ted all turned out for an “American Family Picnic” for 3,000 people held at Timberlawn in mid-October, where Neil Diamond and other celebrities performed for the crowd. Eunice aside, however, the Kennedy family involvement in the overall campaign effort was tepid. Those close to Ted were wary of associating themselves too closely with a doomed effort. If 1972 turned out to be a debacle, it would be best to keep away from it. Ted and others therefore merely went through the motions of supporting the ticket; they needed to seem like loyal Democrats without going down with the ship.
Jacqueline Kennedy and her new husband, Aristotle Onassis, in contrast, resolutely supported Shriver’s political efforts, not only with financial contributions and campaign appearances but with quiet expressions of support. The Shrivers’ daughter, Maria, and Jackie’s daughter, Caroline, were close friends (Maria spent part of her summers with the Onassises in the Greek Islands); this helped Sarge and Jackie to stay close over the years. Perhaps more than anyone in the family circle, Jackie possessed an acute understanding of how politically difficult it was for Sarge to be a Kennedy in-law. A week after the election in November, Shriver would write to Jackie and Ari, “Both Eunice and I are grateful for all your encouragement and support during these past months and it gives us comfort to know you’re thinking of us now.” And then, handwritten onto the note, Shriver added: “Jackie: You were so solicitous and sensitive to my situation that I must add a note of special thanks.”
“LIKE WATCHING LIGHTNING
STRIKE THE FIREWORKS SHED”
Through August and September, Shriver continued to hammer away at Nixon’s record on unemployment and inflation. Meanwhile, he escalated attacks on what he alleged was the corruption of the Nixon administration, continuing to try to pin blame for the Watergate break-in on the president directly. “How can the president claim to know what’s going on in Peking or the Kremlin,” Shriver asked repeatedly, “if he doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own reelection committee?” He told a crowd in Sacramento, “The Watergate incident will be where Nixon meets his Waterloo.”
Briefly, there was the faintest glimmering of hope. The gap between Nixon and McGovern, although still wide, began to narrow dramatically, dropping from thirty-four points behind at the beginning of September to eighteen points behind at the end of it. Back at the office for a day, after weeks on the campaign trail, William Greider, the Washington Post’s national political correspondent, told his editors that he believed McGovern would win the election. (Greider’s editors looked at him as if he had been smoking something.)
But by the middle of October, Nixon’s lead began to widen again, and then widen some more. Three weeks before election day, the race was effectively over. The only questions remaining to be answered on election day were: How badly will McGovern-Shriver lose? and Will the Democratic Party be completely destroyed?
The will of the McGovern staff had “crumbled,” but the Shriver staff soldiered on. They could see they were headed for a crushing defeat; all they could aim for was to keep the margin of victory from being “historic.” Campaign staffers
were weary from three straight months of twenty-hour workdays. Since the beginning of August, Shriver had logged more miles and given more speeches than any of the other three candidates on the two tickets. (Shriver said that because, unlike a senator or a governor, he could deliver no bloc of votes to the ticket as a “bridal dowry,” he felt he had to work harder.) Eunice had logged more miles than any of the other candidates’ wives.
The mood on the Fighting Lucky 7 grew bleaker, but it never sank into despair; there was still even some joy. This was largely because Shriver’s spirit never seemed to flag. Many on the staff had naturally grown depressed, but the candidate never let his own frustration show through. “I was never depressed during the campaign,” Shriver recalled. “Maybe that shows I was dumb. But I really liked the experience.”
“I remember the last day,” Mark Shields says. “We went from Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Detroit to Madison to Brownsville, Texas. At each stop, we knew we would get our heads handed to us. But at each one, it was almost as though Sarge thought if he could just talk to everyone he could somehow turn it around.”
He couldn’t, of course. Election day was indeed historic, a disaster for the McGovern ticket. Nixon won 60.7 percent of the popular vote nationally, just missing LBJ’s record-breaking 61.1 percent of 1964. In electoral terms, the margin of victory was far greater: 521 votes for Nixon-Agnew, 17 for McGovern-Shriver. Most striking was the almost unimaginable geographic comprehensiveness of Nixon’s victory: he won forty-nine states, more than any president in history, losing only Massachusetts.
Sarge and Eunice voted in the early afternoon at a high school near their Maryland home, then returned for a game of touch football with their kids. Friends and campaign staff gathered for cocktails and dinner at Timberlawn to watch the election returns. Everyone knew what was coming. “This will be a hell of a night,” Eunice predicted grimly. “The first time a Kennedy loses an election.” “It was a horrible night,” Donald Dell recalled. “You know we’re sitting there, all these returns were coming in and we’re getting slaughtered in every state. It was painful because they had done so badly.”
Yet even in this crushing defeat, there was some redeeming joy. Herb Kramer and assorted campaign staffers had composed a brief musical revue, the Lucky Seven Follies, that was performed for a private audience that night at Timberlawn. Despite the undercurrent of disappointment, it was riotously funny. The Shriver campaign, the narrator intoned, “was a happening, a spectacular, a piece of original Americana, a circus, a parade, an ethnic festival, an Italian wedding, an Irish wake, and a Bris all rolled into one.” The Follies poked fun at almost every aspect of the campaign: its general chaos and disorganization; the tension between the McGovern and Shriver staffs; the tension between Shriver’s staff in Washington and his traveling staff on the airplane; Shriver’s problems with George Meany; even Shriver’s aspirations for 1976. The performance was recorded on a vinyl record; thirty years after the event, the uproarious laughter on this saddest of election nights can still be heard clearly over the scratches and blips on the record. The most audible laugh is Sargent Shriver’s.
“We were having a grand old time,” Shriver recalled, “and nobody felt defeated. When the McGovern people called and said I had to go downtown to declare the other side victors, well, nobody wanted me to leave. I didn’t want to leave. We were having a real ball. Which maybe tells you that we were all nuts.”
Although at times the Lucky Seven Follies was merciless in its satire, the last few minutes turned sentimental. “In a campaign of surpassing importance,” the narrator said,
with the opposition in hiding and his running mate 25 percent behind in the polls, Sargent Shriver ran for the vice presidency as if he were running for the Olympic gold—as if it would make a compelling difference to the future of America and the world.
But of course he’s right. It will make a difference. Just as the Peace Corps made a difference. And Job Corps. And Head Start. And Legal Services. And health centers. And day care. And medical ethics. And help for the helpless. And compassion for the down and out and the neglected and the rejected.
Sargent Shriver, like sun spots, the boll weevil, or the very air we breathe, does make a difference. And whatever the outcome of this election, he will continue to make a difference in the lives of all of us.
A little anger. A lot of laughs. A little impatience. A world of respect. Being around Sarge is like watching lightning hit the fireworks shed: Brilliant, explosive, unpredictable, but exciting as hell.
And so Sarge, whether it’s forward to the Executive Office Building or back to 600 Watergate, we sing our fond farewell to you and the great experience of working with you. The words are different but the melody lingers on, as we hope it will linger on for many years to come.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Shriver for President
Watching the Watergate scandal unfold was frustrating. In the ensuing months, the Washington Post and other publications slowly uncovered the president’s direct knowledge of the break-ins and political “dirty tricks” operations. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the administration’s alleged crimes, and within eighteen months, Congress was moving toward impeachment proceedings against Nixon—the first time in more than a century that such an action seemed imminent.
When Shriver himself was not in his law office (which, as it happened, was in the Watergate building and had been bugged by Nixon’s “plumbers”), he was busy traveling the world on behalf of his clients. But as the Watergate scandal built to its denouement, he paid close attention. The inevitable thoughts ran through his head: Why couldn’t people have paid attention to this earlier, when the Committee to Reelect the President had first been implicated in the late summer of 1972? How humiliating to have been so badly defeated by a crook. And, finally, what will this do to the American spirit?
To the race riots of the 1960s and the enduring angst produced by the Vietnam War was now added the ignominious resignation of a president, on top of which the country found itself by 1974 entering its worst economic slump since the Depression. Internationally, of course, the United States remained a military and economic colossus, but its credibility had been damaged by its adventures in Vietnam and elsewhere. The threat of nuclear war had been a fixture of the American consciousness since the 1950s. But whereas in earlier years fear of a nuclear holocaust had been but a single dark blot on an otherwise bright horizon, the nuclear threat was now one more cloud on a dark vista.
Americans’ faith in their national institutions—the government, the presidency, the military, the economic experts—had fallen far and fast. Less than ten years had elapsed since the high-water mark of the Great Society, and scarcely more than that since the great, early promise of the New Frontier. But those years felt like a century ago, so different was the prevailing mood now. Shriver saw this clearly and worried about it, as he made clear in the public speeches that he continued to deliver regularly.
But whereas the prevailing mood of the nation had become one of corrosive cynicism and resignation, Shriver remained energized, if angry. He still carried around in his head the hopeful idealism of an earlier time. His own temperament jibed much more naturally with the early 1960s than with the mid-1970s, and he took every opportunity he could to declaim publicly the importance of, in effect, “getting America moving again” (as JFK had put it in 1960), to restore to American culture the faith and confidence that had characterized the post–New Deal, postwar era. But the post–World War II era had given way to the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era; Shriver’s voice of hope, and his calls to action, sounded dissonant amid the drift and malaise of the 1970s.
Through the midterm elections of 1974, Shriver once again did a fair amount of campaigning and fund-raising for Democratic candidates. “I felt that I shouldn’t just crawl away in defeat” after 1972, Shriver recalled. But because he was busy with his work at Fried, Frank, he could not reprise his full-time Congressional Leadership for the Fu
ture campaign of the previous midterm elections.
To outside observers, it must have seemed that Shriver had now turned his back on his presidential ambitions. He was nearly sixty years old, an age when many men begin looking ahead to retirement, and it seemed unlikely that a man approaching old age, and who had never before held elective office, would make an effort to vie for the presidency in 1976. If he had been a senator or a governor, that would have been another matter; he would have had a political base, a built-in constituency, and a preexisting organization. But he had none of that—all he had was the stench of defeat from 1972.
Yet some of the people around him could not let the dream of a Shriver presidency die. Throughout 1973 and 1974, they quietly transformed the Friends of Sargent Shriver Committee—a vehicle set up during the 1972 election season to raise money and now working to retire campaign debt—into an exploratory task force for a Shriver-for-president campaign in 1976. Many of Shriver’s close friends and associates, some of them influential Democrats, pressed him to consider a race for the Democratic nomination. They had seen how effective a campaigner he had been on McGovern’s behalf and how enthusiastically crowds had responded to him. And they believed that if Sargent Shriver were president, he could put the country back on the right track with the force of his idealism.
Shriver himself was not convinced. After the 1972 debacle, he was a long shot for the president. Moreover, nothing he—or any other prospective Democratic candidate—did would be taken seriously until Ted Kennedy decided what his plans were for 1976. “With the disastrous defeat of George McGovern,” wrote Jules Witcover, then a reporter for the Washington Post, “1973 saw a seemingly inexorable drift in the party back to the dream of another Kennedy candidacy, with all the political magic it promised.” Kennedy led all other contenders in the national polls; “as long as Ted Kennedy was present, no one dared move boldly ahead toward the nomination.” Kennedy himself implied strongly that he planned to run. In May 1973 Johnny Apple reported in the New York Times that “Mr. Kennedy has given his close friends the impression in recent days, as he never did in 1972, that he believes his moment to strike for the summit has come.” Although Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona all began quietly exploring their presidential possibilities, their cautious quasi-candidacies were premised on the gamble that Kennedy would ultimately not run. Only Jimmy Carter, a first-term Georgia governor with a folksy manner, and George Wallace, the racial demagogue, began to plan in earnest for a run for the Democratic nomination. Whenever anyone asked Shriver what his plans for 1976 were, he would say that he expected that he would be campaigning for his brother-in-law.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 76