The harsh, almost mocking press coverage Shriver received between July and September practically guaranteed that his candidacy would never gain the traction it needed. This was unfortunate. Shriver’s record at the Peace Corps, the OEO, and the Paris embassy gave him a résumé at least as impressive as any of the other Democrats. And he had shown his loyalty to the party by heading the CLF in 1970 and, more self-sacrificially, by joining the sinking McGovern ship in 1972. He was also, as Witcover put it, “perhaps the only recognizable ‘celebrity’ in the pack, the only one who could walk into a political reception and get all the hands out of the shrimp tray to shake his.”
Yet he was hemmed into a tight box. He was damned if he didn’t try to make use of the Kennedy connection, because it was that connection that in some ways made him the most distinctive candidate in the group; but he was damned if he did, too. When a Post reporter asked why the candidate’s advisory committee had no Kennedy family names on it, a Shriver aide replied, “There was no effort to get Kennedy family people or those who have a peculiarly close relationship to Teddy. The people we have are friends of Shriver’s. He wanted to demonstrate that he personally has the support.”
A week later, an account by Christopher Lydon in the Times made the Shriver-Kennedy tensions sound dire. “There is trouble in the Kennedy camp and perhaps in the Kennedy family over brother-in-law Sargent Shriver’s incipient Presidential campaign,” the report began. “In his search for active campaign help [Shriver] has time and again been rebuffed by Kennedy hands.” Lydon listed several former aides to Jack, Bobby, and Ted who had supposedly turned Shriver down, or at least deferred giving their support, and reported that the “sharpest turndown” had come from Steve Smith. “I’m waiting for Teddy,” Smith reportedly said, when approached by Shriver. When Shriver persisted, pointing out that the senator had repeatedly disavowed any interest in running himself, Smith replied, “I’m still waiting for Teddy.” “It seems to be one of those times when people want the genuine thing, not the in-law imitation,” said Judge Edmund Reggie, who had been the Kennedy family’s man in Louisiana since the 1960 election. Reggie said that he, too, was “waiting for Teddy.”
Shriver’s predicament was bizarre. He was spending some of his weekends in Hyannis Port, socializing cordially with Ethel’s family, Ted’s family, Jean’s family. His children played happily with all their Kennedy and Smith cousins. Yet for what must have seemed to Shriver like the hundredth time since 1960, alleged tensions and arguments that could have been resolved on one of the porches of the Kennedy compound were being played out in the newspapers.
The press, always hungry for inside dope about the Kennedy clan, made more of the family drama than the participants did. Politics was serious business for the Kennedy family, more serious than any other, and members of the so-called Kennedy apparatus did continue to look askance at Shriver’s ambitions. But within the family councils—at Hyannis Port, at dinner parties in Maryland or Virginia—the tension was hard to perceive, especially in contrast to that of 1968, when the wounds to those in Bobby Kennedy’s circle still ran deep. What signs of tension existed were subtle. For instance, Bobby Shriver thinks it significant that his father staked out his domain on the tennis court, where he knew he could easily beat any Kennedy, while staying away from the Hyannis Port Yacht Club and the touch football field, where he was more evenly matched. Shriver also sought respite from any family conflict by going to Mass with the family matriarch Rose, with whom he continued to cultivate a warm and close relationship. Relations within the family remained outwardly civil.
This did not change the political reality, however. Paradoxically, Shriver was perceived simultaneously to be the Kennedy family’s handmaiden (or stalking horse) and their prodigal in-law, the man whom Ted Kennedy and Steve Smith, among others, had seemed to renounce. None of this was fully accurate, but there was enough truth to it to feed the perception. In politics, perception counts. Shriver’s advisers were realizing that it would be an enormous challenge for their man to emerge as a serious candidate in his own right, especially if he wanted to capture the “Kennedy vote.”
PICKING UP THE DROPPED KENNEDY MANTLE
But while Kennedy family issues were clouding Democrats’ perceptions of Shriver, an influential Republican found himself smitten by this first-time presidential candidate. George Will, a young conservative columnist for the Washington Post, had made arrangements to interview Shriver in August. According to David Birenbaum, Will arrived as scheduled at Fried, Frank only to be kept waiting—in typical Shriver fashion—for several hours while Shriver gabbed cheerfully on the phone. Birenbaum and others fretted that this would earn Shriver a negative column; they could see Will burning with the indignity of being kept waiting.
But then, according to Birenbaum, Will noticed some of the books strewn around Shriver’s messy law office. It wasn’t the law books, or the candidate briefing books that caught his interest; it was the books on philosophy and theology. No doubt suspecting that they had been left lying about for show, to advertise that Shriver was a Serious Thinker, Will began flipping through them. To his surprise, they were all heavily underlined, with lots of comments written in the margin; Shriver clearly had not only read these books by Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Maritain but had also thought hard about them.
Shriver eventually presented himself for the interview, and the result was a highly favorable column from this most unexpected of sources. “When God designed Shriver,” Will wrote in his August 4 Post column, “he left out second gear. Shriver does everything at full throttle, and when campaigning he will eat or drink or dance any ethnic specialty at any hour.” This, Will said, could make Shriver the man to beat in the Democratic primaries. But Will was clearly more struck by what he called Shriver’s “religious seriousness”: “It sets him apart in the political profession, most members of which seem to have no inner life beyond an almost heathen enthusiasm for getting on. He reads—he even underlines—theology books and journals.” Will also wrote that Shriver “has a proper moralist’s intensity which gives him that mysterious quality—call it the ‘earnestness factor’—necessary for wooing liberals. McGovern had earnestness seeping from every pore, but he lacked a redeeming sense of fun. Shriver has that sense, and it keeps him from seeming suffocatingly pious.”
Will recognized that Shriver’s energetic idealism placed him out of sync with the times, and that this could hurt him. Shriver “will be 60 in November, but looks 45; the last dozen dispiriting years didn’t happen to him, physiologically or philosophically. These years have left many Americans listless, in no mood for a President who would clap the nation on its slumped back and exhort it to shape up. Shriver is a back-slapper.”
Yet Will also located Shriver in exactly the context in which the candidate had sought to be placed. “Much more than his brother-in-law, Ted Kennedy,” the columnist wrote, “Shriver evokes the revved-up, wheel-spinning days of the New Frontier. He embodies the political sensibility of 1961. This does not mean Shriver is dated, but that he is the candidate for those people—and they may be legion—whose pulses quicken to the remembered cadences of President Kennedy’s evangelical inaugural address. It is altogether right that the Democratic Party should produce in Shriver an evangelical candidate, to discover how many people still call Camelot their political home, and think they can go home again.”
At 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 20, Shriver held a press conference at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to declare that he would become the ninth active Democratic candidate in the race. Shriver’s advisers were confident of his chances. Birenbaum, Tribe, and others had worked hard on the announcement speech. After hours of tinkering they believed that the speech struck the proper balance between Shriver’s claiming to be a “Kennedy candidate” and his being an independent agent with credentials and assets of his own. “Don’t talk about trying to restore the Kennedys to the throne,” Tribe and Birenbaum had admonished the candidate each time he tried to work
additional New Frontier references into the speech. You’ve got to run on your own record, they told him.
Birenbaum and the campaign press secretary Don Pride had left a draft of the speech on the lectern. All Shriver had to do was deliver it, his aides believed, and they would be on their way to the Democratic nomination.
But something went amiss, and at the last minute Shriver’s confidence in his ability to run as an independent candidate faltered. Partly it was the setting: a room at the Mayflower Hotel, downstairs from the suite where he and his eager band of New Frontiersmen had hatched the Peace Corps for JFK fifteen years earlier. Partly it was the influence of those who surrounded him as he made his announcement: his wife, Eunice Kennedy, on his right and his sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy on his left; his mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, and sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy, along with sisters-in-law Jean Smith and Joan Kennedy in the audience; and “old … Kennedy faithful hanging from the rafters.” And partly, no doubt, he had been intoxicated by George Will’s column, which depicted him as the avatar of the New Frontier.
Shriver began his speech as prepared. He was running, he said, because given the state of domestic and foreign affairs, and given the current lack of leadership at home, “I could not stand aside.” He continued: “For only the second time in this century, the forward movement of America has been reversed; we have retrogressed as a society. And it is this sudden, overwhelming reversal of momentum that has generated the vast crisis of confidence we face today.… Not since the Great Depression has America stood in fear of the future.”
He argued that a Shriver administration would cut a middle path between the Republicans’ antigovernment cynicism and the Democrats’ propensity toward government bloat. “I’m opposed to centralized, rigid, unresponsive bureaucracy,” he said. “I worked to combat that kind of bureaucracy in business, as head of Chicago’s School Board, and later in Washington and in the Foreign Service. In the Peace Corps, in Head Start, in Legal Services for the Poor, in Foster Grandparents, we created the least bureaucratic public enterprises in modern governmental history. But a purely negative approach to government will get us nowhere.”
It was a fine speech. Some quotes from Bobby, an understated reference to Jack: just enough of the Kennedy factor, but not too much, in the calculation of Shriver’s speechwriters. And then, to the alarm of his aides who were looking on, Shriver reached into his breast pocket, drew out a small sheaf of papers, and launched into a long encomium to the spirit of JFK. “His legacy awaits the leader who can claim it, “Shriver concluded. “I intend to claim that legacy not for myself alone but for the family who first brought it into being; the millions who joyfully entered public life with him and the millions of people throughout the world … for whom the memory of John Kennedy is an inspiration and a lifting of the heart.”
It was, Birenbaum and others recalled, a beautiful, stirring conclusion to his announcement—and one that effectively torpedoed Shriver’s candidacy. As Shriver’s former OEO colleague Colman McCarthy recalled, it looked to some detached observers that “Shriver felt insecure about running on his own record and ideas, so he was hooking jumper cables to John Kennedy to be energized by a winner.” And as Jules Witcover observed, the announcement’s “boldness in donning the political mantle of the family surprised some of those who knew that some Kennedy family members frowned on Shriver’s presidential ambitions.”
The next morning Shriver appeared on Meet the Press to talk about his fledgling candidacy. All four interviewers—Bill Monroe, Jack Germond, Marty Nolan, and Robert Novak—“pawed Shriver with legacy questions,” grilling him on why he would claim to be “picking up the Kennedy mantle.” What had he meant by that, Shriver was asked, and why was the mantle his to claim? Don’t you have more claim on the “McGovern legacy”? As Colman McCarthy observed, Shriver was immediately forced on the defensive by newspapermen who found it a bit much that someone would try to ride “the coattails of a man dead 13 years.” Shriver was compelled to admit that, yes, brother-in-law Ted was in fact “the logical claimant” of the Kennedy legacy—but Ted had “decided, you know, not to be a candidate.” Look, he said, “my success in business” was not solely attributable to the fact that “I married the boss’s daughter.”
“He never got out from under that ‘mantle’ business,” Birenbaum recalled wistfully.
The campaign operation in 1976 was actually, by Shriver’s normal standards of “personal anarchy,” quite organized and professional. Still, as Newsweek reported, the campaign ran on “pep, hope, and a kind of creative chaos.” Dick Murphy, a former assistant postmaster general and a political protégé of Larry O’Brien, was campaign manager. Ed Cubberly, who had been treasurer for RFK’s 1968 campaign, and Pat Baldi, a former Peace Corps volunteer who had worked on the 1972 vice presidential campaign, served as Murphy’s deputies. Pat Caddell was in charge of polling, as he had been for McGovern in 1972. Two trusted veterans of administration at the Peace Corps and the OEO, Bill Kelly and Bill Mullins, ran the Shriver fund-raising operation. Don Pride, who had formerly served as press secretary to Florida governor Reubin Askew, and Dick Drayne, a former press secretary for Ted Kennedy, were in charge of the media.
The campaign had several overlapping strategies. Aim for primary victories in the industrial states where JFK had scored big in 1960. Force out the other liberal candidates early on by winning the support of black voters and Kennedy voters. Counteract the McGovernite taint of 1972 by reaching out to old party bosses and by espousing fiscally conservative economic policies. Win back the Catholic ethnics who had gone over to Nixon in 1972. Use the New Frontier–like collection of celebrities who tended to cluster around Shriver—the campaign called them “sparklies”—to dazzle voters with excitement and charisma.
Along with all the other candidates, Shriver spent the following months crisscrossing the early caucus and primary states, primarily Iowa and New Hampshire. The Shriver campaign had reason to believe it could do well in both states—Iowa because it was heavily Catholic, New Hampshire because it was just north of Kennedy country. Shriver could hardly afford not to do well in these states. With Harris, Udall, Shapp, Shriver, and now also Birch Bayh, the Indiana senator, all vying for the same liberal constituency, one of them needed to score significant victories early; otherwise, the liberal vote would get divided and Jackson or Carter would prevail.
In October 1975 a debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, served as the “official” kickoff of the primary campaign. Bayh, Carter, Harris, Shapp, Shriver, and Udall all participated. Surveying the competition, Shriver believed the tall Arizonan, Mo Udall, to be his most formidable competition. By far the weakest competition, he thought, was Jimmy Carter. A lot of these guys might be able to beat me, Shriver told his son Timothy, but I can definitely beat that guy, pointing to the former Georgia governor.
But the poor reaction to Shriver’s Manchester speech revealed some of his key failings as a candidate. One was the degree to which what George Will had called Shriver’s “back-slapping”—and what Witcover called his “shrill hucksterism”—rubbed cynical voters the wrong way. Whether audiences perceived him to be a huckster (which would have been an inaccurate perception) or naively idealistic (which would have been closer to the mark), the exhortatory tone of his speeches failed to resonate. “He’s a lightweight and I think he’s kidding himself,” one longtime Kennedy associate reportedly told the conservative Washington Star. “He thinks he can just run down the runway and the natural air currents will lift him off the ground. He’s still talking and thinking the way we all did in the early 60s but there’s a new ball game out there that guys like Jerry Brown in California and Mike Dukakis in Massachusetts are playing. He doesn’t see it partly because he’s the most politically orthodox one in the family.” This analysis seemed to reflect the source’s bias more than any effort to see Shriver for what he was: Shriver had considerable failings as a candidate, to be sure, but “orthodoxy” was surely not one of them. (Nor, for that m
atter, did Brown or Dukakis turn out to be notably successful in their respective presidential forays.)
What did make Shriver seem most like a lightweight, ironically, was the “problem” that Anthony Lake described: his prioritizing of ideas and substance over politics. Rather than spending his time doing what a candidate should do—calibrating his message to appeal to key groups of voters—Shriver spent his time wrestling with real issues, trying to arrive at the most effective or most ethical policy. David Birenbaum recalled a representative discussion among Shriver and his aides in a New Hampshire motel room about abortion policy that lasted for four hours. “What impressed me about that more than anything else was he just never, never allowed himself to talk about anything but the substance of what was the right thing to say. He never let go of his principles.” Although this concern for principle and substance impressed his advisers—and might have made him a first-rate president—it struck jaded, post-Watergate voters as a put-on. No real candidate could be as much like the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as Shriver sometimes seemed to be.
Nevertheless, Shriver polled well at first in Iowa. An early straw poll put him a close second behind Carter, who had already been campaigning in Iowa on and off for a year, and ahead of Bayh. The other candidates trailed far behind. But because Carter had begun 1975 as the least known of the candidates, the press focused heavily on how unexpectedly well he was doing. In fact, according to Carter biographer Peter Bourne, the crucial turning point of the 1976 campaign occurred on October 27, 1975, when Johnny Apple wrote a front-page story for the New York Times annointing Carter the front-runner; this was “an object lesson in the power wielded by the press in the presidential selection process.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 79