But over the first weekend of September 1974, when the Kennedy clan gathered in Hyannis Port for Labor Day, the family council convened to discuss Ted’s situation. Earlier in the year, the assumption within the family had been that Teddy would run. But over the summer, the consensus had shifted. For one thing, there remained the specter of Chappaquiddick. Over the Fourth of July holiday, Kennedy had traveled to Decatur, Alabama, where he made a controversial appearance with George Wallace. Kennedy’s intention had been to demonstrate that unity was possible within the party; the liberal, civil rights–supporting Massachusetts senator could coexist in the party with the segregationist Alabama governor. But the appearance had generated a slew of hate mail to Kennedy’s Senate office. What alarmed Kennedy and his family was how frequently these letters made reference to Chappaquiddick. However much he might have hoped otherwise, the incident had not been forgotten. A presidential campaign would produce constant reminders of July 19, 1969. Ted did not think the family could withstand that.
Other family problems also militated against a presidential run in 1976. Kennedy’s son, Teddy Jr., had developed cancer in 1973, leading to the amputation of his right leg; he still required ongoing treatment and care. Caroline and John Kennedy, the children of Jack and Jacqueline, seemed to be growing up into healthy young adults; that was not true, however of many of Bobby and Ethel’s children. Bobby Jr. and David had drug problems. Some of the younger children seemed tormented and confused. Ted, as family patriarch, felt responsible for them; a presidential campaign would interfere with that responsibility and would increase the pressure on Bobby’s children. Then, too, there were the struggles of Ted’s wife, Joan. Several trips to rehabilitation facilities had failed to cure her alcoholism. “He wasn’t going to leave her,” a family friend told Jules Witcover, “but she couldn’t take a campaign like that. He knew it wouldn’t work publicly, and, besides, he wanted to spare her.”
Above all was the fear, shared by many within the family, of a third assassination. Once Ted Kennedy declared his candidacy, he and his family worried, he would become a target for all kinds of psychopaths and radicals.
For years the Kennedys had been, as Witcover wrote, “a kind of royal family in exile, awaiting in their Washington and Cape Cod homes an eventual return to the political summit from which they had been so brutally banished on the tragic day in Dallas. They wanted the promise of John and Robert Kennedy to be realized and fulfilled in Edward Kennedy.” But on this weekend, it was decided finally that the exile would continue, at least through 1976. It was agreed that Kennedy would not run.
Teddy tried to keep this decision a secret as long as possible, so that he would be a more effective campaigner for Democratic congressional candidates in the midterm election. But when reporters insisted on interpreting his campaign trips as early barnstorming for his own 1976 campaign, Kennedy decided to make clear his intentions. On September 23, 1974, he held a press conference at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. Standing alongside his wife, Kennedy declared that he would not seek the Democratic nomination in 1976. His decision, he said, was “firm, final, and unconditional.” He wanted to be as clear as possible, he said, both “to ease apprehensions within my family about the possibility of my candidacy” and to “clarify the situation within my own party.”
The Kennedy family may have been relieved, if regretful, but the situation among the Democrats was hardly clarified. A yawning gap opened up at the center-left of the party, and a large group of contenders rushed in to try to fill it. Whereas before there had been only Ted Kennedy—with just George Wallace, Scoop Jackson, and Jimmy Carter standing barely noticed in his shadow—now there was a clamoring of more than a dozen senators, representatives, governors, and others. Making matters still more chaotic, many Democrats continued to hope that Kennedy—despite his adamant statements to the contrary—would ride to the rescue.
Ted Kennedy’s decision not to run instantly changed the political calculus for Sargent Shriver. If his brother-in-law was “firm, final, and unconditional” about not running, that meant the way was clear for him to throw his own hat into the ring. Many people he trusted were telling him he should run. (A few other advisers—most prominently his wife and Bill Josephson—were telling him he should not.)
On balance, as Shriver’s law partner David Birenbaum recalled, Shriver seemed “very, very reluctant” to throw his hat into the ring. Nevertheless, a series of informal discussions among Shriver’s friends culminated in a dinner one night in late 1974 at the 1789 Restaurant in Georgetown, where Shriver, Birenbaum, Mickey Kantor, Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, pollster Pat Caddell, and others convened to assess Shriver’s chances in the 1976 Democratic primaries.
The consensus was that Shriver’s prospects were reasonably good. Kennedy’s stepping aside had opened the field. That left Scoop Jackson as the likely front-runner with Morris Udall, Jimmy Carter, Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, and Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen as the other declared candidates. (George Wallace remained officially undeclared.)
Surveying the field, the 1789 gang quickly dismissed three of the candidates. The first was Lloyd Bentsen, a freshman senator only two years into his term; he was tall and attractive, but nothing else about him made him seem a viable candidate. The second, George Wallace, had the potential to win a lot of votes, particularly among lower-middle-class white Southerners, but it was a safe bet he would alienate suburban Democrats in the rest of the country. The third was Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor of Georgia; although he had declared his candidacy earlier than anyone else, he was best known for his presumptuous attempt to sell himself to George McGovern as a running mate in 1972. (McGovern’s aides had laughed at him and told him to stick to Georgia politics.) Carter’s national profile was nonexistent. He was the darkest of dark horses.
According to the polls, Scoop Jackson led the other declared candidates. But Shriver’s advisers felt he matched up well against the Washington senator, because Jackson, although not a hard-core conservative like Wallace, tended toward the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, especially on foreign policy. It would be easy to distinguish the liberal Shriver from the conservative Jackson on a range of issues—the most important being relations with the Soviet Union: Whereas Jackson favored taking a harder line with the Soviets, Shriver favored détente.
Harris and Udall would pose more of a problem; both were liberals, like Shriver. All three—along with Indiana senator Birch Bayh and Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp, who were rumored to be contemplating running for the nomination—would be competing for the liberal voters and the “Kennedy voters” made available when Ted Kennedy exited the race. For Shriver to have any chance at winning the nomination, he would have to distinguish himself from the rest of this liberal crowd.
At the time of the Georgetown dinner, that seemed eminently possible, because Shriver had several points in his favor. First, he was the only Catholic in the race. Although his stance on abortion might complicate his standing with some liberal voters, his religion would surely play well in heavily Catholic Iowa, where the first caucus would be held in January 1976. Second, early polls suggested that, although he was the only candidate not to have held elective office, Shriver had the highest name recognition. Third, as veterans of the McGovern campaign reminded him, he was a highly skillful campaigner. He did well both with live audiences and on television.
Finally—and this was, as always, an unpredictable element—there was the Kennedy connection. For voters disappointed not to be able to support Ted Kennedy, a Kennedy in-law might be a next-best alternative; then again, there was a real danger that if Shriver weren’t careful, he might never be able to emerge as an independent candidate in his own right. People might see him merely as a “stalking horse” for Ted Kennedy, collecting delegates through the Democratic primaries only to hand them over to Kennedy at the convention.
At the dinner, as David Birenbaum recalled, Shriver seemed torn: tempted by the opportunity but “clearly co
ncerned about how ‘the family’ would react to it.” He was wary of committing himself before he knew he had the Kennedy’s full-fledged support—or at the very least had secured some kind of nonaggression pact in which they would guarantee they would neither impede his progress nor exile him from the family circle. By the end of dinner, the consensus was that Shriver’s chances were as good as any of the other candidates’ and that it was worth exploring his options further.
Shriver assigned Birenbaum to compile a “Friends of Shriver” advisory committee. Eventually, the list ran to hundreds of names and included the usual New Frontierish array of talent and celebrity: elected politicians, famous actors, professional athletes, Fortune 500 executives, best-selling authors, Nobel laureates, and other public figures. Cyrus Vance was named the chairman of this committee. At first, Shriver didn’t ask these “Friends” for money or to campaign for him or even to meet with him. He was just collecting their names, in case he needed them later.
It seemed to Birenbaum, who would later help run the campaign, that Shriver spent an inordinate amount of time making up this list “because he needed to feel that he had all of these important, prestigious people behind him. It was psychologically necessary for him.” Part of Shriver’s feeling of vulnerability, surely, emanated from perception that some of Robert Kennedy’s advisers thought of him as a “lightweight,” that he didn’t have the intellectual acuity and the political hard edge to hold high office. By lining up academics and novelists and Nobel Prize winners behind him, Shriver was trying to compensate for some perceived deficiency. (“Reading the names,” his friend Colman McCarthy wrote not long after the election, “it was clear that … he must be the last of the sophomores to believe that many voters would be impressed by his knowing so many of the beautifuls.”)
The truth of the matter is that although Shriver may have lacked a hard political edge, he was—according to people who knew both Shriver and all three Kennedy brothers—easily as “smart” as all three of them and more of an “intellectual” than either Bobby or Teddy. Intellect, of course, is an amorphous concept; there are lots of ways to be smart. The three Kennedy brothers (and Eunice, too) had more native political intelligence than Shriver—the instinctive ability to size up voting blocs and make electoral calculations. But Shriver was as quick-thinking as any of them, with perhaps a greater ability to assimilate and contextualize complex ideas and concepts. Shriver was also incredibly creative and imaginative, and he was open to ideas—a fact that Shriver’s detactors interpreted as a sign of his intellectual promiscuity.
Shriver’s real genius lay in his gift for dealing with people. Jack could inspire people with his style and his rhetoric; Bobby with his moral fervor. But only Teddy approached Shriver in his genuine curiosity about people and his gift for putting them at ease.
Yet for all Shriver’s superior acuity and depth of intellect, the lightweight charge stuck. To the socially awkward academics he seemed too smooth; to the policy wonks, too much of a salesman; to the hardened political operators, too much of a naïf. During the 1972 campaign, “Shriver is a lightweight” jokes had become a staple of Johnny Carson’s monologues. By 1976 some of this had penetrated Shriver’s self-confident exterior, making him feel the need to buttress himself with a star-studded cast of supporters, so that he could say to his detractors, “See who’s behind me?”
Father Bryan Hehir had gotten to know Shriver in 1973, when Hehir was working with the National Conference of American Bishops. Shriver had been invited to give a series of lectures at Notre Dame on the subject of religion and civil rights, and he was looking for people to help him compose the speeches. After receiving a typically out-of-the-blue phone call from Shriver, Hehir had ended up writing one of the speeches, and through that experience had become close to the family and a regular dinner guest at Timberlawn. This was a heady experience, as the dinners were often populated not only by senators and other politicians but also by prominent Catholic theologians such as Hans Kung and Charles Curran and by radical priests like the Berrigan brothers.
One day in the spring of 1975, Hehir was invited to one of the Socratic discussions at Timberlawn about whether Shriver should run for president. As Hehir recalls, the evening was a typically perfervid brainstorming session. “We sat down around the dinner table, then we moved into that big family room, where a rambling discussion just raged.” Rarely able to sit still in one place for very long, Shriver fidgeted in his chair. At one point, as Hehir recalls, Sarge stood up and walked over to the picture window that looked out over the expansive Timberlawn grounds. “I have kinds of advantages that most people can’t even imagine,” Shriver said, gesturing at the tennis court and swimming pool and stable of horses. “Doesn’t that give me an obligation to do something?” Hehir was struck by this. “This was obviously the way he was thinking about the presidency,” Hehir recalled. Not because he was hungry for power, but rather because “he felt an obligation to do good things.”
Based on the poll numbers, Shriver’s chances continued to look as good as or better than those of any other Democrat in the race. But doubts about his willingness to go for the jugular began to cloud views of his prospects. During the 1972 campaign, a British journalist had expressed doubt that Shriver possessed the necessary “ruthlessness of his good intentions” to be a successful candidate.
As he walked into the warm Maryland evening after one of these long Timberlawn seminars, Hehir recalls falling into conversation with Anthony Lake, a foreign affairs expert who had worked for both Henry Kissinger and Edmund Muskie and who would later serve as Bill Clinton’s national security adviser. Lake turned to Hehir and said wistfully, “You know, it’s too bad. Basically, Sarge is probably too nice a guy to be president of the United States.” Lake was disappointed because, to him, the same qualities that he believed would make Shriver such an effective president made him unlikely ever to get elected. “What I found both very appealing about him, and disqualifying as a politician, is his passion for ideas,” Lake recalled—and not just his passion for ideas in an abstract, academic sense, but his passion for translating ideas into action. The problem, as Lake and others recognized, was that “I don’t think he ever calibrated these ideas in terms of political effect very well. Which is again why I was for him. Too many of our politicians are too good at that calibration.”
Later that summer, as the campaign began to advance beyond the purely theoretical stage, Lake was struck by how different its culture was from any campaign he had ever been associated with, before or since. “In many campaigns, in my experience, the flow of ideas is upwards. Which is to say the staff has ideas, the advisers have ideas, they go to the candidate, and the candidate takes some and rejects others. And occasionally is allowed to have an idea himself. The Shriver campaign was very much the opposite. There would be an explosion of ideas that Sarge would have, and then the role of his staff and advisers was to encourage him to pursue some, while suggesting that others were not politically wise.” To Lake, that made Shriver practically unique.
Shriver’s passion for ideas at the expense of political calculation gave his strategists fits. One day, he hosted a lunch at Timberlawn for Jewish American leaders. Before the lunch, Lake had spent several hours briefing the candidate on the current state of the Middle East, the status of peace negotiations, and what the other Democratic candidates were saying about Israel. Together, Shriver and Lake worked out all the points he should make to try to win the backing of these Jewish leaders. But as Lake recalled, “When we got into the lunch, rather than launching a discussion of the issues, he starts asking them about [the ancient Jewish philosopher] Maimonides. And so we had a long and fascinating discussion of Judaism and philosophy and Maimonides, and never quite got around to politics.” As Lake glanced around the table, he could see Shriver’s other political advisers staring at their plates, their faces burning with frustration.
THE RUSSIAN LECTURE TOUR
Throughout the spring of 1975, Shriver moved slow
ly, reluctantly, ambivalently toward making his candidacy a reality. Carter, Jackson, Udall, and others had already been fund-raising for months and building ground operations in key primary states. Shriver’s advisers were telling him that, to have a realistic chance, he needed to declare soon. But two factors inhibited him. The first was the Kennedy family. Teddy’s declaration that he would sit out the race notwithstanding, Democrats still (as always) pined for Kennedy to ride to the rescue. As long as there was any chance of that happening, a Shriver candidacy would never fly. He needed to get official family authorization for a campaign from Ted himself.
Second, through his work at Fried, Frank, Shriver had by 1975 made more than a dozen trips to Russia over the past three years. He was well known among the Moscow business community and had developed increasingly friendly relations with government ministers in the Kremlin. Partly as a result, he was invited by the Kremlin to undertake a lecture tour across the Soviet Union in March and April that would culminate with a press conference in Moscow. Shriver happily accepted the invitation.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 77