Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Of course, the Soviets’ invitation was not based entirely on their personal affection for the American. At least two groups in Moscow had vested interests in extending the invitation. The first group consisted of the Russian business community and the Ministry of Trade. Shriver had already been instrumental in bringing billions of dollars in American investment into the Soviet economy—more than from the US government—and in opening the US market to more Russian products.

  The second group consisted of Kremlin denizens who were keeping their eye on the upcoming US elections. The Soviet leadership had enjoyed a certain amount of schadenfreude as Nixon resigned and as the Vietnam War sputtered to its unhappy conclusion; in the zero-sum game of the cold war, anything that was bad for the Americans was good for the Soviets and vice versa. But the Soviets also worried about political uncertainty in the United States, because it made it hard for them to know what they would be dealing with in future years. Surveying the American political landscape, they most feared Ronald Reagan and Scoop Jackson, the two presidential candidates who promised to take the hardest anti-Soviet line.

  Thus, when word reached the Kremlin that Sargent Shriver was a potential Democratic candidate, the Soviet leadership paid close attention. Shriver, more than the other candidates, was a known quantity. He clearly liked Russia and got along well with his Soviet counterparts, and they liked him, too. The hard-liners in the Kremlin no doubt saw Shriver as appealingly soft, a man they could take advantage of. The moderates in the Kremlin, who were Shriver’s friends, saw him as someone they could work with to thaw the cold war and achieve mutual benevolent objectives.

  Russia’s foreign intelligence was not always terribly accurate. Distracted by the fact that Shriver was an in-law to the famous Kennedy family, many in the Kremlin evidently concluded in early 1975 that he was the likeliest Democratic nominee for the upcoming election. It could only help the cause of US-Soviet relations to have the next president of the United States tour Russia in the year before he was elected. So after some negotiations between Shriver and his Kremlin connections, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet proposed the extended lecture tour, during which Shriver would be allowed to travel widely across the vast Soviet empire.

  So it was that in March 1975 Shriver put his presidential planning on hold and flew to Moscow for a three-week trip. Traveling with him was a large entourage: Eunice; his three oldest children, Bobby, Maria, and Timothy; his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr.; a young Harvard law professor, Larry Tribe, who had been introduced to Shriver by Democratic strategist Bob Shrum and whom Shriver had brought along so he could explain the differences between constitutional law in Russia and the United States; Chris Whitney, a young Fried, Frank associate who was fluent in Russian; and a priest, Father Murphy, who was to administer private Masses for the family everywhere they went.

  Andrei Pavlov, of the State Committee for Science and Technology, was the Shriver family’s host and tour guide for the entire trip. Pavlov had known Shriver for several years now and considered him a friend. Shriver was fond of Pavlov as well and appreciated the access he provided to the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership. Pavlov had been a member of the Communist Party since he was seven years old and had a corner office in the Kremlin with a huge window. Although this made Shriver suspect that Pavlov was a high-ranking member of the KGB, that didn’t make him like the man any less. (In the 1990s, after the fall of communism, Shriver persuaded Pavlov to join the board of the Special Olympics, in which capacity he has been instrumental in helping that organization expand into former Communist countries.)

  Traveling in a rickety twin-engine plane, Shriver and company visited not only Moscow, Leningrad, Volgograd, and Stalingrad, but also Ukraine and Uzbekistan, as well as Bratsk and Irkutsk and Yakutsk in the far reaches of eastern Siberia. Shriver gave lectures at various universities and research centers around the country.

  According to Tribe, it was evident that the Soviets considered Shriver to be a serious presidential prospect because “everywhere we went, we were received with vodka and Beluga caviar.” Tribe recalled serious discussions about various issues with high-ranking Kremlin denizens. “They showed Sarge everything,” Tribe said. “They allowed a degree of freedom for him and the rest of us to wander around freely. It was clear the Soviets hoped the trip would give him a feeling of the cultural diversity and the ethnic variety and the governmental system of the country.”

  In Moscow, Shriver and company stayed in two rather imposing buildings that had been constructed for the 1950s meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower that had never taken place. Tribe and Maria Shriver were exploring the buildings when Maria opened a door “and stumbled upon a room full of KGB agents watching TV screens.” On one screen Maria saw her father, sitting calmly reading in a rocking chair in his bedroom—clearly the whole entourage was being watched by hidden cameras! Maria and Tribe backed quietly out of the surveillance post, and Maria ran back to her father’s room to report what she had seen. He received the news with calm bemusement.

  Pavlov recalled that the lecture that made the most powerful impression on the Soviets was the one Shriver gave in Siberia, to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. While planning the trip, Shriver had told Pavlov he wanted to make a speech that would attract a lot of attention. (Partly, of course, this was with an eye toward getting free press for his incipient presidential campaign back home.) Pavlov told him that the Academy of Sciences was one of the most august intellectual bodies in the country, and that he would try to arrange something there. Many of the scientists at the academy had been among the first political dissidents who had spoken out during the thaw of the early 1970s. Now they had, in effect, been banished to the institute in Siberia. But as scientists and dissidents they were likely to provide the most open-minded audience a Western capitalist could find in the Soviet Union.

  Shriver’s presentation to the academy, set for March 22, was built up to be a major event: He was the first American, and the first nonscientist, ever to address the body. In the days leading up to the lecture, Shriver made Pavlov nervous by refusing to provide an advance copy of his speech; Pavlov had no idea of what to expect.

  Pavlov needn’t have worried. “Many Americans have believed that they were ordained by God in history to become a model for all mankind,” Shriver said to his audience of some 2,000 Soviet scientists. “You have believed that communism was similarly ordained by history as God. Events have not settled the propriety of either claim, but history has set a priority: that together we must make a détente, so that by perfecting our coexistence, we may achieve a common existence.” He continued, arguing that the United States was not out to conquer the Soviet Union, ideologically or otherwise. “Despite the best progress of negotiation, real differences of policy and principle will continue. We will not persuade you to become capitalists—and you will not talk us into communism. But while we each remain what we are, we can both enlist in a larger cause. We must not only make the world safe for diversity; we must also make a safer world by a degree of unity.”

  To Shriver, it was obvious that communism could not last. The system was creaky. His son, Mark, who did not go on the trip, said, “I remember him coming back home saying how the infrastructure of the country was so decrepit, and that it was really not a military threat to our country. The infrastructure of the country was falling apart.”

  “Once you spent time there, it was obvious the Soviet menace was a joke,” recalled Bobby Shriver, who was twenty years old at the time of the trip. “Everything you saw there from electronic equipment to the finish on cars was poorly made. If they couldn’t even make bathroom fixtures, how the hell were they going to make atomic bombs that really worked?” But in his speech, Shriver equated the power of communism with the power of capitalism and emphasized the endurance of each. Neither one was headed for “the ash-heap of history,” he argued, so “some mode of coexistence was necessary for peace.”

  Shriver acknowledged that deep recession, inflati
on, Watergate, and the first-ever resignation of a US president had all eroded faith in American institutions. But don’t—Shriver warned, speaking “very forcefully” and banging his fist dramatically on the lectern—underestimate the strength of the American idea or the resilience of the American people. You cannot defeat us, Shriver said. So you might as well learn to live with us. And if we’re going to coexist, we might as well turn our joint efforts and resources toward higher goals. “Perhaps the memory of the blood we shed together against fascism can provide the most fitting metaphor for our future. We fought as one to defeat a common enemy. Now Providence, which you call History and I call God, calls us to join together again, this time with all men, to defeat the most ancient and most recent enemies of mankind: the tyranny of hunger and disease and the poverty of a world stripped bare.”

  According to Pavlov, the Russian audience “sat rapt and wide-eyed,” entranced by this lively American preaching détente. After the presentation, a mob of scientists surrounded Shriver, wanting to speak with him. “You made us realize there are some reasonable Americans,” Pavlov recalls them saying. In 1975 most Russians still thought that all Americans were militaristic imperialists who hated the Russian people. (Americans generally thought the same of the Russians.) With no access to Western television or other media, Russians knew nothing of the real America, “only the caricature of our official propaganda,” according to Pavlov. “For that reason,” Pavlov says, “Shriver’s speech was incredibly useful.”

  On April 11, after touring the country for nineteen days, Shriver held a ninety-minute press conference for the Soviet media in Moscow. Surprising almost everyone in attendance, he announced that a group of Western banks led by the Franco-American investment bank Lazard Freres & Company (where David Karr was then a principal) would be providing the largest private loan in history ($250 million) to the Soviet Union.

  While Shriver and most of his entourage flew off for brief visits to Paris and Rome, Bobby Shriver and John Kennedy Jr. prepared to fly to London and then home. When the two young men were seated on their Western commercial airliner, preparing to fly for New York, Bobby noticed his cousin rocking back and forth in his seat “like an autistic child,” and murmuring aloud. “What the hell is he doing?” Bobby thought to himself and leaned in to listen. “Solzhenitsyn … Solzhenitsyn … Solzhenitsyn,” John was saying. “Solzhenitsyn … Solzhenitsyn … Solzhenitsyn!” A year earlier, in February 1974, the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been arrested and deported for his dissident views, and in particular for his devastating account of life under Stalin in The Gulag Archipeligo. The dissident author was a sensitive topic for the Soviets, and Shriver and his family had been explicitly instructed never to mention the writer’s name. This naturally had the effect of making the young people want to say it. After nineteen days of resisting the impulse, JFK Jr. could contain the urge no longer and, to his cousin’s great amusement, the long-repressed “Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn!” came burbling out.

  “I’M WAITING FOR TEDDY”

  While the Shriver family was out of the country, the political rumor mill churned. Mayor Daley declared that, with Ted Kennedy out of the race, Shriver was the Democrats’ best candidate. But on April 14, while the Shrivers were still abroad, the New York Times reported that, although Shriver had indicated he would run for the presidency, at least one labor leader didn’t believe it. “I don’t want to hear it from Sarge,” the labor leader told the Times. “I want to hear it from Eunice.” In other words, Shriver couldn’t be considered a serious presidential candidate until a real Kennedy declared that he was one. And for the moment, the Kennedys did not (as usual) seem enthusiastic about the idea. “I can’t help it if he runs,” Ted Kennedy told Washington Post columnist Victor Zorza with evident exasperation. And Eunice, according to what Christopher Lydon wrote in the Times, was “just as reserved as her brother with the sort of Kennedy family blessing Mr. Shriver … needs.”

  Ted never said anything overtly hostile about Shriver, nor did Shriver publicly express any resentment over Kennedy’s tepid response to his possible candidacy. But to longtime political observers and Kennedy watchers, the tensions were evident. Shriver’s aides continually emphasized that if in fact he were to run, it would be “as his own man.” Yet in his preliminary explorations, one of the key questions was what kind of boost Shriver could get from exploiting his Kennedy connections. Kennedy, for his part, “revealed just that touch of asperity, barely perceptible” toward Shriver; this suggested to Zorza that the senator “was less than happy about [Shriver’s] political ambitions. An old family rivalry, some might say, or resentment at the political complications which the Shriver factor might add to Kennedy’s own plans—whatever those might be.”

  On May 1, after Shriver’s return to the United States, a group of some thirty Harvard academics feted him at the Kennedy Institute of Politics, under the pretense of a discussion of “Ethics and Politics.” The real purpose, however, was to gauge the support of the Boston-Cambridge intelligentsia, an earlier generation of which had been so integral to John F. Kennedy’s election and administration. Shriver came away from the dinner convinced that his support among that group was strong. The prevailing assumption was that he would soon make an official declaration of his candidacy.

  But the most important hurdle had yet to be cleared. On June 4, 1975, after consulting extensively with his own advisers and taking soundings from people around Ted Kennedy, Shriver went to visit his brother-in-law in his Senate office. As Jules Witcover reports in his book on the 1976 election, Shriver told Kennedy “he had found a strong consensus among Democrats that the field of men offering themselves for the nomination was unsatisfactory, that Teddy was still the candidate they wanted.” This was clearly the case. Most Democratic operatives salivated at the prospect of Teddy’s entrance into the race—and if Ted had said at this point he would reconsider running, Shriver would instantly have scuttled any of his own plans. But Kennedy demurred emphatically once again. So Shriver told him he was considering entering the race himself.

  As in 1970, however, when confronted with the decision of whether to challenge Marvin Mandel in Maryland, Shriver was having a hard time making up his mind. The clock was ticking: other candidates were already in the race, and the pool of available Democratic funds was getting smaller by the day. But Shriver didn’t want to commit until he was absolutely sure that he had the stomach for the race. Also, in order to be taken seriously by party leaders—who could never see Shriver clearly because they perceived Ted Kennedy lurking over his shoulder—Shriver wanted to make sure he could assemble a powerful fund-raising and campaigning apparatus before making any public announcement. So he headed to Florida for a vacation, where he could fish and play tennis and think about what he wanted to do.

  His plans for a leisurely contemplation of his options were ruined a few days later when the Washington Star published a front-page article headlined “ ‘All Engines Go’ for Shriver Bid for Presidency,” breaking the story of his clandestine meeting with Kennedy and reporting that his entrance into the race was imminent. Witcover, at the Washington Post, felt he had been scooped and tried frantically to catch up by calling Shriver’s aides for confirmation. When the aides insisted, accurately, that Shriver had not yet made up his mind, Witcover decided to seek out Senator Kennedy.

  As Witcover recalled, Kennedy answered questions about Shriver “with wry amusement.” The “Family of Long Memories” had not forgotten that Shriver had gone to Paris rather than campaign for Bobby; thus “Teddy, while not disposed to stand in Sarge’s way, wasn’t about to become his campaign manager either.”

  “What did Sarge say to you when he came up here to see you?” Witcover asked Kennedy. “And what did you say to him?”

  “He told me he was going to run,” Kennedy replied, “and I wished him well.” He grinned slightly as he said this.

  “Well,” Witcover asked, sensing his cue, “if Benito Mussolini walked in here and
told you he was going to run, would you wish him well?”

  “If he was married to my sister!” Kennedy answered, and laughed heartily.

  Some twenty years later, Shriver would recall that Kennedy had given him his blessing but not his official endorsement because, the senator said, he had already promised other candidates (like Morris Udall, Fred Harris, and Birch Bayh) that he would remain neutral.

  Once Shriver’s visit to the Kennedy family don had been reported publicly, the pressure on Shriver to declare his candidacy escalated. But still he equivocated, taking the necessary steps to move his candidacy forward while declining to say whether he was actually running. On July 15 he announced the formation of a fund-raising committee, to be headed by Cyrus Vance; Arthur Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers; Chesterfield Smith, a former president of the American Bar Association; and Bill Blair, Shriver’s old Chicago friend and the former ambassador to Denmark and the Philippines. Shriver also publicized the existence of his large “Friends of Shriver” advisory group, a constellation of talent that included the actor Paul Newman, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut (quotations from whose novels peppered Shriver’s speeches), and the tennis player Arthur Ashe, who had just won Wimbledon a few weeks earlier. Still, he declined to say whether he was running for president.

  Ronald Reagan, who also announced the formation of his fund-raising committee on July 15, likewise did not say whether he had decided to run against Gerald Ford in the GOP primaries. The press saw Reagan’s official reticence as prudent, but they viewed Shriver’s as silly. “In his coyness,” Witcover wrote, “he had unwillingly gotten off to a comic start”; his campaign was being “openly ridiculed by most politicians and members of the press.” In September Shriver finally stated the obvious: He was going to make a declaration of his candidacy soon. But the run-up to that declaration, according to Witcover, “had the subtlety and smoothness of a final scene in a Marx Brothers movie.” Part of this clumsiness derived from Shriver’s chronic ambivalence about his own candidacy. But much of it also derived from Shriver’s having to make absolutely sure that Ted Kennedy would not object before making any kind of definitive move.