Shriver was the only candidate Daley allowed to have a personal audience with the Cook County Democratic Committee, but ultimately the mayor withheld his personal endorsement, remaining neutral so that he could put forward Adlai Stevenson III as a favorite-son candidate at the convention. Although “some elements of the Daley machine helped Shriver behind the scenes,” his lack of “money, organization, and power base” prevented him from winning. Shriver finished a respectable third place—behind Carter and Wallace, but far ahead of the rest of the field. Now, however, he was out of money, and Carter’s momentum seemed unstoppable. “If I couldn’t do any better than [third] in Illinois,” Shriver said later, he knew he had no chance. It was time to call an end to this adventure. On March 22, 1976, he withdrew from the race and released his delegates.
“This is not a happy day for me,” he said. “I have to face up to the failure of my campaign, and I don’t like it. But I blame no one but myself and I make no excuses.” He used his withdrawal speech to call on American leaders to put forward a more idealistic vision for the future, something that would help draw the country beyond its cynicism, and “out of such spiritual doldrums.” Shriver paraphrased his favorite theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, in deploring those who had mocked his campaign as representing the spirit of the 1960s, the idealism of a more hopeful time. “Down with the cowards and the skeptics, the pessimists and the unhappy, the weary and the stagnant,” he said.
He retained his good humor. When a Japanese businessman came to Fried, Frank not long after Shriver had been trounced in both the New Hampshire and the Massachusetts primaries, the visitor tried to offer consolation by saying he had heard that American primary elections were just “beauty pageants.” Shriver shocked the businessman by bursting out laughing and replying, “Well, I must be one ugly son-of-a-bitch!”
To many who had worked with Shriver for years, the most infuriating thing about the 1976 campaign was not that he had lost; it was that the loss seemed to have permanently affixed the “lightweight” tag to his reputation. Newsweek, for instance, reported that the 1976 campaign had heightened “Shriver’s reputation, in the conventional political wisdom, as a lightweight—an overbred dilettante with great exclamation-pointed enthusiasms, notably about himself, and very little bottom.” During the campaign, a reporter for the Washington Star had written, “Some people, including some old Kennedy hands, consider him something of a lightweight, a Boy Scout with a marshmallow core who isn’t tough enough. They see him as a sort of political Willy Loman who married well and is out there with a shoeshine and a smile trying to play Jack and Bobby’s game.”
Many of Shriver’s friends and colleagues—especially those who had known him before he married into the Kennedy family—found this maddening. The idea that Shriver was somehow the weak link in the Kennedy chain, or the prodigal son-in-law horning in on sacred turf, or the inferior of his brothers-in-law, was preposterous to them. Shriver, whose litany of significant personal sacrifices to the Kennedy family extended over twenty years, deserved better than this.
In 1976 Mark Shields, who had worked on the 1972 campaign before becoming a political commentator, said, “Shriver’s a bright guy and he’s as good a candidate as there is, willing to go sixteen hours a day. He’s full of joy and vitality and he likes people. He’s not one of these liberals who loves mankind and hates people. But because of this some people unjustly write him off as a lightweight. We make the mistake of equating ponderousness with profundity.”
In the aftermath of the 1976 election, the most spirited and eloquent defense of Shriver’s intellect was mounted by Colman McCarthy, who wrote a long article for the Washington Monthly, titled “Shriver: The Lightweight Label.” After his withdrawal speech, McCarthy wrote, “Shriver was characteristically buoyant.… That was vintage Shriver: ever the mole, boring his way through piles of defeat and fatigue, and coming up to sun himself on whatever ray was left. It is one of the traits by which Shriver has endeared himself to so many of us who once worked for him. It is also the kind of behavior that has caused him to be dismissed as a lightweight by many reporters.”
To McCarthy, as to so many of Shriver’s supporters, the death knell of the 1976 Shriver-for-president campaign was sounded as soon as he tried to stake his claim to the Kennedy legacy. Not because he didn’t deserve it, but because, in trying to stake that claim, he inevitably obscured what he had achieved in his own right. McCarthy wrote:
The real irony of Shriver’s making himself dependent on John Kennedy was that, of all the Democratic candidates … only he had a record of service and innovation that was unique and substantial on its own. Shriver was the only candidate who could go back and say that something he began 15 years ago—the Peace Corps—is still alive today and retains much of the philosophical purity that he originally gave it. He was the only candidate who could point to ten-year-old programs and ideas—Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services, Upward Bound, among others—and claim that they were still productive and working today.…
If there was a legacy crying out to be claimed, it was Shriver’s own: one to take immense political pride in and one that separated him in obvious ways from the Jacksons, Carters, and Udalls. None of them could point to something initiated 15 or 10 years ago and say, honestly, that it was functioning today.
PART SEVEN
Private Life, Public Service (1976–2003)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Nuclear Politics
Shriver’s brief, sporadic career in elective politics was over. His dedication to public service was not. He returned to Fried, Frank, remaining as active, passionate, and engaged as he had been at the height of the New Frontier.
He continued to play an active role in determining where the Kennedy Foundation would spend its money. He also spent a great deal of time working with scholars on various projects at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In 1979 he spearheaded the Kennedy Institute’s launch of what would come to be called Trialogue, a running interfaith colloquium among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars that aimed to mine all three religious traditions in the hopes of finding “a surer basis for peace.”
Beginning in the mid-1970s, when Shriver’s business trips to Moscow were most frequent, he began campaigning for a more meaningful détente with the Soviet Union and for a reduction in the American stockpile of nuclear arms. After he dropped out of the presidential race in the spring of 1976, Shriver tried to parlay whatever political capital he had left into influencing the eventual Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, to work toward the idea he had spelled out on his Soviet lecture tour the previous year—a peaceful “Common Existence” for the United States and the Soviet Union. On September 18 Shriver teamed up with Herbert and Tom Scoville to form the United States Committee for East-West Common Existence, which sought to maximize international exchange between the cold war superpowers and to impress on them the importance of reducing their nuclear stockpiles. Herbert “Pete” Scoville had been an expert on military technology for thirty years; after working in the federal government (the Defense Department, the CIA, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency), he had become an arms control activist and went on to found the Arms Control Association. His son, Tom, served as executive director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s advisory committee.
In December 1976 the committee sent Jimmy Carter a letter signed by dozens of the most prominent names in arms control and liberal advocacy, including Father Ted Hesburgh, George Kennan, and Charles Yost. “Dear President-Elect,” Shriver and company addressed Carter in Georgia, “We are writing this letter because of our concern that one of the most important challenges confronting America as you take office is to restore momentum to the effort to improve Soviet-American relations.”
Conservative hawks—in particular Ronald Reagan, Ford’s defeated challenger in the GOP primary—had recently escalated their cold war rhetoric. Détente was a sham, Reagan and others said; we need to abandon peaceful coexistence and strive instead f
or all-out military supremacy. Shriver and his colleagues on the committee found this deplorable, believing it an “illusion” that security and peace could be won through military build-up alone. Should these militaristic policies regain ascendance, the committee warned Carter, “the U.S. and the Soviet Union would be headed toward disaster, with fear in the driver’s seat—not an appropriate fear of nuclear holocaust, not fear of an endless arms race, not fear of atomic weapons in the hands of all nations—but an unreasoning fear of each other. This fear—spread by those who say that the United States is weak, spread by those who say that relaxation of tensions is only a trap, spread by prisoners of the Cold War generation—would become our greatest enemy.”
The committee argued that America already was Russia’s military superior by far. Shriver, based on his own experience in the Soviet Union, strongly believed this to be true. Operating from its position of military strength, Shriver and company told Carter, the United States should substantially reduce nuclear arsenals and delivery mechanisms; formulate a more active policy to block nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the world; and declare a moratorium on all nuclear testing.
Carter initially opted for the path charted by the committee: limiting nuclear-arms build-up, negotiating restraints on strategic weapons, and trying to “raise the threshold” on nuclear war planning. But the apparent failure of the “détente experiment” of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to have loosened superpower restraint; by the end of his administration, Carter was tacking in a more hawkish nuclear direction. In December 1979 the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan destroyed whatever was left of détente. Carter declared that the Soviet advance into Central Asia had to be stopped; he feared the Soviets would advance all the way to the Persian Gulf, to seize the oil supplies there. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s nemesis in the administration, the far more hawkish national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, gained in influence. Carter declared that the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Relations between the superpowers were growing more truculent—and more atomically threatening—than they had been since the early 1960s.
Ronald Reagan hewed even farther from détente than Carter had. In 1981, when Reagan took office, Shriver (along with George Ball, William Fulbright, John Kenneth Galbraith, Averell Harriman, Jacob Javits, George Kennan, and others) sent him a letter similar to the one they had addressed to Carter in 1976. It fell on deaf ears.
Shriver now began strategizing to see how the arms-control movement might achieve more leverage over the rabidly hawkish Reagan administration. As usual, he began by seeking out the best and brightest minds he could identify and bringing them to his home for a discussion. In 1981 the Shriver family had moved out of Timberlawn into a house called Avondale, on Foxhall Road in Northwest Washington. On Tuesday, October 20, 1981, a small but influential band of foreign policy experts joined Sarge and Eunice for a secret dinner discussion at Avondale to discuss “what needs to be done” about the Reagan administration’s policy on nuclear arms. The dinner guests that night included Pete Scoville; Robert McNamara, who was presently head of the World Bank; Paul Warnke, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s chief negotiator during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT); George Kennan, the author of the famous “X” document, which spelled out the policy of containment of communism during the Truman administration, and who was now a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; William Colby, the former head of the CIA; Gerard Smith, Shriver’s boyhood friend, now one of the nation’s leading arms-control negotiators; and Father Bryan Hehir, director of policy for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
To Hehir, who was the youngest and (at the time) least distinguished of all the guests present, the dinner was a heady experience. “Reagan had made a statement that day, or virtually that day, that you could have a limited nuclear war in Europe and Europe would probably survive,” Hehir recalled. “McNamara found that just incomprehensible. And he was apoplectic about that. As the discussion evolved, somebody said, ‘We’ve got to do an article” on the idea that a first-launch nuclear strike was not only immoral but tactically senseless. “Then they had a discussion about who should write it,” Hehir recalled. “And we went around the table and of course they all had a hundred names and it was like the Old Boys’ School of Foreign Policy. Eventually they settled on Mac Bundy.”
Before Bundy would agree to take on the draftsman’s role, he told Kennan he needed to know what core principles the statement would be expressing. Shriver agreed that an outline of principles was a necessary first step—and later that day Kennan dictated a rudimentary statement to Shriver’s assistant Jeannie Main. The statement read, in part:
1. We are persuaded that there is literally no way that either this country or the Soviet Union could initiate the use of nuclear weapons in combat with ultimate advantage to itself—without incurring, that is, a wholly unacceptable risk of escalation into nuclear war disastrous to all parties.
2. This being the case, we consider that the United States should, while retaining the option of a nuclear response to a nuclear attack, abandon the principles of first use of nuclear weapons in any armed conflict.
3. We recognize that this will necessitate an extensive restructuring of American armed forces in points of strategy, tactics, equipment and training. We urge that such a restructuring be put in hand at once.
To accommodate this restructuring, the statement called for a strengthening of conventional forces by both the United States and NATO. Shriver immediately sent the statement to McNamara, Colby, Hehir, Scoville, and Warnke for their comments.
In a series of further discussions at Avondale over the next several weeks, it was agreed that Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, and Gerard Smith would serve as coauthors of a statement calling on the Reagan administration to promise never, under any circumstance, to launch a nuclear first strike. Shriver served as ringleader and cheerleader, collecting and circulating material and trying to recruit additional troops to the disarmament cause. When Averell Harriman wrote an op-ed column in the Washington Post, calling for “decisive leadership” in limiting nuclear arms and for a study on nuclear war options, Shriver forwarded it to McNamara with a letter that sounded the clarion call of the New Frontier. “Decisive leadership,” Shriver wrote, “will not be fulfilled … just by a call for a study to explore the nuclear war options at this time, especially the first-use option. Useful though such a study might be, it would not meet the current situation. Instead, we need a declaration just like Jack’s: ‘We’ll put a man on the moon in this decade.’ ” We need, Shriver wrote, to make a forceful statement calling for the US government to renounce the use of a nuclear first strike.
On the day that Harriman’s op-ed piece appeared in the Post, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced a “contingency plan” whereby US military forces would detonate a nuclear warhead as a “demonstration” meant to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. This, Shriver believed, was one step removed from a first strike. “Human beings,” he wrote to McNamara, “need their eyes and hearts lifted to an alternative to Haig-ism, ‘demonstration blasts,’ etc. You all [Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, and Smith] can do all that; and many centrists would join you.”
For the next three months, Shriver buzzed like a gnat in the ears of McNamara, Kennan, and company, goading them on, sending them new material, winning new recruits to the “no-first-strike” cause. He got Oregon senator Mark Hatfield, a Republican, to agree to endorse any statement on nuclear arms Kennan’s crew made, and Hatfield agreed to introduce his support in the Senate as the “Hatfield Resolution.”
In mid-December, Kennan and Bundy were still wrestling over who would serve as primary draftsman, and Shriver was getting impatient. If we’re having trouble getting Mac Bundy to write a paper for us, he wrote to McNamara, then why not get someone else to do it? He specifically recommended James Fallows, a young veteran of the Carter administration who had carved out a reputation fo
r himself as a journalist knowledgeable on national defense issues. McNamara wrote back that the problem was not “the paper, but rather how to present it. I am running into a lot of opposition from people who I thought would support a ‘no-first-strike’ policy.”
Shriver refused to relent, and he continued to apply pressure on McNamara, Kennan, Bundy, and others to issue some kind of prominent statement. Eventually, they settled upon Foreign Affairs, the most influential and prestigious American journal on foreign policy, as the venue for their statement. (Also, the journal’s chief editor happened to be McGeorge Bundy’s brother, William.) Bundy and McNamara agreed to serve as primary writers, with Kennan and Smith also appearing as named coauthors.
Through January, Shriver held weekly strategy dinners at Avondale, where he brought nuclear disarmament activists and Kennedy Institute ethicists together with McNamara, Smith, and Kennan. At one dinner Averell Harriman spoke. Anthony Lake, who was present, recalled that the discussion turned to the question of
whether you could contemplate tactical nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. There were various experts around the table, and I think a number of Soviet officials. So Harriman looks around the table, and says there are two kinds of people: “There are people who are insane, and believe that we could fight a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And there are people who are sane, who believe that we cannot. I consider myself sane. Is there anyone here at the table who considers themselves insane?” And then he glared around the table, and of course nobody spoke up.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 81