Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Still, Shriver and the rest of the contenders continued to underestimate Carter, believing that his lead would be short lived. Carter had had the advantage of an early start, but surely, they thought, he didn’t have the stuff to sustain his lead all the way to the nomination.

  In Iowa, particularly, Shriver figured his Catholicism would give him an extra boost, especially because as the January 19 caucus approached, the abortion issue loomed large. Iowa had more than half a million Catholics, including a significant proportion of Democratic voters who considered themselves pro-life on abortion. Neither Carter nor Shriver publicly espoused a strictly pro-life position, but Shriver’s position leaned much farther in a pro-life direction than Carter’s did.

  In truth, both Carter and Shriver over the years had expressed nuanced, and sometimes inconsistent, views on abortion. But whereas for Shriver (and especially for his wife) abortion was one of the most burning issues of the time, more morally urgent than busing or inflation policy or anything else, for Carter it had been just one issue among many that he cared about.

  While governor of Georgia, Carter had strongly supported family planning services that provided abortions, and he had even written the foreword to Women in Need, a book that endorsed a woman’s right to choose. He had supported the plaintiffs who had filed suit to change outdated Georgia laws on abortion and had been a supporter of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which declared it unconstitutional for states to prohibit abortions in the first and generally the second trimesters of pregnancy. After Carter was subjected to some stinging attacks at town meetings for his pro-choice stance, he had begun to moderate his position slightly. Throughout 1975, however, he had expressed his support for Roe v. Wade whenever he was asked about it. He also said he opposed the idea, being advanced by a powerful movement of social conservatives in both parties, of passing a constitutional amendment that would in effect overturn the Supreme Court decision. As the Iowa caucus approached, Carter found himself under increasing criticism for his position from pro-life Democrats. For a time, it seemed, his lead in that state might evaporate.

  Although Shriver, in contrast, had come out tentatively in opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment, he was in his personal beliefs staunchly opposed to abortion. Eunice was even more strongly opposed. Working with the mentally retarded and expanding the Special Olympics was now her life’s work, but since the mid-1960s she had thrown herself with equal moral passion into another project: trying to reduce the number of abortions performed in the United States each year. In 1964, when Bobby was running for election to the Senate in New York and Ted was running for reelection in Massachusetts, Sarge had convened a meeting of the country’s leading Catholic theologians at Hyannis Port to brief his brothers-in-law on the latest Catholic thinking about abortion. After states began relaxing their prohibitions on abortion in 1967, Sarge and Eunice had put together the first-ever conference on abortion, jointly funded by the Kennedy Foundation and Harvard Divinity School. Over three days in early September of that year, scores of experts in medicine, law, ethics, sociology, and religion convened to discuss not only abortion specifically but also various developments in medicine and technology. In the early 1970s, the Shrivers had used Kennedy Foundation money to establish the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, in Washington. “Our idea,” Sarge recalled, was to combine “biology with ethics.” To describe this notion, he coined the term “bioethics,” which is now a full-fledged academic field. Indeed, by 1980, work produced by associates of the Kennedy Institute had changed how the medical profession made many of its ethical decisions.

  Abortion, then, was not merely a tactical political issue for the 1976 Shriver campaign, as it may have been for some of the other candidates. After having spent much of the last decade actively thinking about and discussing the moral and legal aspects of abortion, there was no way Shriver could have come up with a position on abortion that was designed purely, or even primarily, to secure a certain bloc of voters.

  As the most pro-life candidate in the Democratic field, Shriver should have had a real advantage among some of Iowa’s heavily Catholic areas like Dubuque and Carroll counties, especially because Carter was already under attack for being too strongly pro-choice and was in fact being forced to backtrack from his position. But in the week before the Iowa caucus, Carter was quoted in the Catholic Mirror, the official paper of the Des Moines diocese, that he would in fact support a “national statute” to outlaw abortion. Whether Carter was misquoted by the Mirror or was tailoring his comments to suit his audience is not clear—but his ostensible support for a national statute (which can only have meant a constitutional amendment) was clearly at odds with Carter’s previous pro-choice position. Carter would later—when playing to social moderates—say he never actually voiced support for the outlawing of abortion; the misunderstanding reprinted in the Mirror had resulted when a group of priests in the basement of a church in Des Moines asked him a series of “improbable” hypothetical questions, the last of which was: “Are there any circumstances under which you might support a national statute against abortion?” To which Carter says he replied: “Yes, I suppose it is possible, although I cannot think of any.”

  The misunderstanding, if that’s what it was, worked distinctly to Carter’s advantage in Iowa. After the Catholic Mirror quoted him as being in favor of federally outlawing abortion, making him seem the candidate most congenial to Iowa’s pro-lifers, word quickly passed from diocese to diocese; on the Sunday before the caucus, Catholic priests (and fundamentalist Protestants) urged their parishes to vote for Carter. Shriver was mistakenly listed on Catholic fliers as the next-to-the-worst candidate (from a pro-life perspective) on abortion. The Church, the Nation reported, “through its publication, including a bulletin distributed at many masses on the 18th [the day before the caucus], conveyed an inaccurate account of the public positions of Carter and Shriver, making Carter sound tougher and Shriver sound weaker in their mutual opposition to abortion.”

  This destroyed Shriver in Iowa. When Don O’Brien, Shriver’s regional campaign manager in the state, learned that Carter was trying to blur his real position on abortion, he went to Frank Brady, an influential priest in Sioux City, and explained the situation. Monsignor Brady looked into the record and discovered O’Brien was speaking the truth: Carter had clearly always opposed a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. Brady went on local television to denounce Carter for his misrepresentation.

  But it was too late: Shriver had been counting on the Catholic vote to put him among the top finishers. Now, misled, Catholics went heavily for Carter. According to Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Carter’s obfuscation of his real abortion position “made the difference between first and second place for Carter in Iowa.” The Catholic Church did pretty well at helping [Carter] and hurting Sargent Shriver,” the Nation reported. Jack Germond, the political correspondent for the Washington Star, wrote a piece implying that Carter, who was campaigning on his honesty, had shaded the truth for political expediency. “I think I’ve been sandbagged by Carter,” one priest told Germond.

  Shriver told friends he felt he had been robbed. Had he won a larger portion of Iowa’s 600,000 Catholic voters, he would have performed much more respectably. As it was, Carter finished with 29.1 percent, Bayh with 11.4, Harris with 9.0, Udall with 3.8, and Shriver with only 3.1 percent. (The remaining candidates—Wallace, Jackson, Shapp, Hubert Humphrey, and a few others—all got less than that.) With Carter the runaway winner, Johnny Apple’s New York Times piece of late October looked prophetic.

  After the Iowa caucus, Shriver released a series of statements that sought to clarify his personal opposition to abortion and to lay out his long record of interest and concern in the bioethics arena. “I am strongly opposed to abortion,” he said a few days after the caucus. “I intend to work in and out of government, as I have for the past decade, for the day when abortion will no longer be looked upon by anyone as a desira
ble or necessary procedure.” He talked about his sponsorship of the first international abortion conference in 1967 and about his work with the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He also pointed to his work with Eunice in establishing a network of what they called “Life Support Centers,” which provided prenatal care and child-rearing instruction; helped mothers find jobs; and generally tried to augment the incentives for teenage mothers not to abort.

  After consultations with Eunice and advisers from the Kennedy Institute, Shriver stopped short of endorsing a constitutional amendment to override Roe v. Wade and said he would abide by the Court’s decision. “Let me repeat. I am and always have been strongly opposed to abortion—ethically, morally, intellectually, emotionally. I say that without reservation. But as president I must take an oath to uphold the laws the land.”

  Although it hurt Shriver, Carter’s ambiguity on the abortion issue was not the sole cause of his disappointing finish. Carter had done a better job than Shriver (or any of the other candidates) of connecting with Iowa voters, who related to his plainspoken folksiness. Also, despite Shriver’s having billed himself as the bearer of the Kennedy torch, there was nary a Kennedy of Jack’s generation (besides Eunice) in sight in Iowa. Many of the younger generation of Kennedy cousins—the Lawford children; JFK’s daughter, Caroline; and some of the Robert Kennedy children—made appearances, but not the other prominent New Frontiersmen. “The Kennedy clan and its long list of old political and social associates who had turned out in droves for [Shriver’s] declaration of candidacy were in short supply in Iowa,” Jules Witcover wrote. “Sarge had been given a great bon-voyage party at the pier; now, as he sailed off, most of them stood on the dock and waved.”

  Despite the fifth place finish in Iowa, Shriver still had hope. The next caucus was to be held five days later in Mississippi, where, of all the candidates, Shriver had by far the strongest rapport with black voters. Thousands of black (and some white) residents of that state had benefited from OEO programs Shriver had launched there. Shriver’s bitter battles over the CDGM were by now mostly forgotten, but the thousands of children who had passed through Mississippi’s Head Start programs had not been.

  As a Southerner himself, of course, Jimmy Carter had something of a favorite son’s advantage in Mississippi. The real favorite son, however, was George Wallace, who was sure to win most of the white vote. The crucial battle would be for second place. In the days before the caucus, Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, urged him to quickly recruit a group of prominent African Americans with whom he could tour the state, to demonstrate that it was not only Shriver who could reach out to black Southerners.

  Shriver had been leading Carter in the polls just a few days before the caucus. But on Saturday, January 24, Wallace won Mississippi, going away with 44 percent of the vote. Carter finished second with 14 percent, narrowly edging Shriver’s 12 percent. No other candidate won more than 2 percent of the vote. According to Carter’s former aide Peter Bourne, Rosalynn’s ploy spelled the difference.

  Still, not all was lost for the Shriver campaign. The abortion fiasco had led to a disappointing result in Iowa, but the relatively strong finish in Mississippi demonstrated that Shriver remained at least as viable a national candidate as either Bayh or Udall. The upcoming New Hampshire and Massachusetts primaries would go a long way to determining which of the liberal contingent would continue to the finish, challenging Carter (and maybe Scoop Jackson) for the nomination.

  But although Shriver’s name recognition was higher among Northeastern voters than Udall’s or Bayh’s, it wasn’t as high as it had been a few years earlier. Many New Hampshirites seemed to know that he had some connection to the Kennedys but weren’t sure what it was. One day he made a campaign stop at an insurance company in Manchester. “He was laboring to be taken as his own man, not just the Kennedy brother-in-law,” Witcover wrote, “but inquiries among the young women revealed that he wasn’t even doing well in that department. Linda Miller, a twenty-three-year-old customer-service representative said, ‘He’s associated with the Kennedys.… Isn’t he Ethel Kennedy’s brother? No? Joan Kennedy’s brother? No? There’s so many of them.”

  Shriver remained bedeviled by the Kennedy issue. “He is a stunningly young 60,” reported Newsweek magazine from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He is well bred and lovingly tailored. He is thoughtful in private, charming in a crowd. He has positions on practically everything. He has survived half a lifetime in government without a breath of scandal, political or personal. He has good teeth. He excites. He ought to be a dream candidate—and yet Shriver has been unable to fight clear of the notion that he is only an imitation Kennedy holding the franchise until the real thing comes along.”

  Shriver also faced a money crunch. After early success in fund-raising, the money stream had tapered off—almost as if the big Democratic funders decided not to waste their money once they saw that the campaign had lost momentum. Shriver had far less to spend in New Hampshire than either Carter or Udall.

  The primary results, on February 24, 1976, were gravely damaging to Shriver’s candidacy: Carter finished first, with 30 percent of the vote; then Udall, with 24 percent; Bayh, with 16 percent; Fred Harris, with 11 percent; and finally Shriver, with 9 percent.

  Shriver remained in the race, despite dwindling campaign funds, because he held on to the hope that the Kennedy connection in Massachusetts and the Daley connection in Illinois would propel him to success in those two crucial primaries. Shriver knew that to resuscitate his candidacy, he would need to perform well in Massachusetts; anything lower than third place would surely finish him. So he poured most of his remaining resources into the Bay State. As recently as early February, polls had shown him leading the Democratic field in Massachusetts. But his poor showing in New Hampshire sapped his momentum, and several factors were now working against him. First, there were no more scheduled debates—and in a year when no single issue (like Vietnam) galvanized voters, it was proving difficult for candidates to establish distinct profiles. Shriver had to distinguish himself not only from the other candidates but from his in-laws (while at the same time exploiting his connection to them).

  In Massachusetts, as in New Hampshire, the prevailing view seemed to be that Shriver was merely a “step-Kennedy.” One night at a Chinese restaurant in Boston, Ted Kennedy gave a short dinner speech to a gathering of local Democratic operatives. During his remarks, he introduced his sister, Eunice, who was sitting at his table, but without mentioning her husband who, although not present that evening, was campaigning actively in the state. When Ted returned to his table after his speech, Eunice needled him. “You didn’t even mention my last name,” she said.

  In a campaign appearance in Worcester, Massachusetts, in mid-January, Shriver tried to play up his Kennedy connection while also putting some distance between himself and the family. “I think it’s a fabulous family, but I’m happy to have a record that antedates my marriage,” he said. He also reiterated that he had made his decision to run only after he was sure that Teddy would not run. But voters, and Democratic Party operatives, seemed unable to see him independently of his wife’s family. Twice at a campaign appearance in Lowell, Massachusetts, a local party boss accidentally referred to him as “Eunice.”

  Another problem for Shriver—and the other liberal candidates—was that Scoop Jackson was concentrating most of his early resources in Massachusetts. A notoriously liberal state, the only one to have gone for McGovern in 1972, Massachusetts might have seemed an unlikely proving ground for the hawkish Jackson. But Scoop had focused heavily on the hot-button issue of forced busing. For several years, competing factions had been locked in bitter combat over the use of busing to forcibly integrate schools. Many poor minorities and liberal Democrats were in favor of busing; it was a matter not only of abstract social justice and achieving more racial diversity in schools but of giving poor minority students the same educational opportunities that white students had. But many white ethnics—the Irish of South Bost
on, the Italians of the North End, even some of the Brahmins on Beacon Hill—violently objected to forcible integration. Whereas most of the liberal candidates, Shriver included, had staked out positions moderately in favor of busing, Jackson had taken a strong antibusing position, which was the electorally stronger stance.

  On primary day in Massachusetts it snowed heavily, covering the state in a blanket of white. Shriver’s nomination chances were buried as deeply as the cars on Commonwealth Avenue. Jackson won 23 percent, followed by Udall at 18 percent. Wallace, helped by his antibusing stance, garnered 17 percent. Jimmy Carter, suffering his first real setback of the primary season, finished fourth with 14 percent. Behind him were Harris (8 percent), Shriver (7 percent), and Bayh (5 percent).

  “There were a number of us,” David Birenbaum recalled, “who were counseling him to get out after Massachusetts because we didn’t have enough money and he was continuing to run up debts. I didn’t want him to be burdened by it. There seemed to be no way he was getting anywhere. Nobody was paying any attention to him. Everyone thought he would do well in Massachusetts, because of the Kennedy connection. In fact, he did very badly in Massachusetts. Where was he going to do well?”

  Bayh withdrew from the race the next day. Shriver conferred with Birenbaum and his other advisers about whether to follow Bayh out the exit or make one last-ditch effort in Illinois. Logic, and lack of money, dictated that Shriver was finished after Massachusetts and that he ought to drop out. Ted Kennedy told him, as Shriver recalled, “that my candidacy was in bad shape and maybe the best thing for me to do would be to get out of it.” But, largely for sentimental reasons, he decided to press on through Illinois. After all, it was in that state that he had coveted elective office the longest; and with the support of Democratic kingmaker Dick Daley, anything could happen. So Shriver carried on through the March 16 race in Illinois.