Sarge, the “original number one skeptic” of the Special Olympics, found himself dedicating more and more time to his wife’s work. Through the 1950s and 1960s, he had helped her fund research on the subject of the mentally retarded and recruit the best and brightest scientists. In the 1970s, as the program grew into a multimillion-dollar organization, he found himself helping his wife with marketing, fund-raising, and speechwriting, all in an unofficial capacity. Timothy Shriver says he recalls his astonishment when he discovered a bunch of his mother’s old notebooks from the 1950s and 1960s—they were all marked up with ideas and suggestions in his father’s handwriting.
On March 24, 1984, Ronald Reagan awarded Eunice the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. “With enormous conviction and unrelenting effort,” Reagan said,
Eunice Kennedy Shriver has labored on behalf of America’s least powerful people, the mentally retarded. Over the last two decades, she has been at the forefront of numerous initiatives on behalf of the mentally retarded, from creating day camps, to establishing a research center, to the founding of the Special Olympics program. Her decency and goodness have touched the lives of many, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver deserves America’s praise, gratitude and love.
As Ana Bueno, a historian of the Special Olympics, has written, “To say that Mrs. Shriver almost single-handedly changed the way an entire world viewed people with mental retardation would not be far from the mark.”
Of course, Eunice’s “decency and goodness” were sometimes more evident in the abstract than they were to those who worked directly with her. “I think my mother does put the fear of God in most people,” Maria Shriver has said. “She’s a perfectionist. She’s very demanding of herself and therefore, I think, demanding of the people around her. Dozens of people who have worked with Eunice—even those who say they like and respect her—say she can be, at times, impossible to deal with: ruthless, demanding, merciless. To those who couldn’t stand up to her, working for her could be absolute misery. She regularly drove employees to exhaustion, tears, drink, or all three. For the uninitiated, merely being in her presence for a few minutes could be a stressful experience. She is so full of nervous energy that even in repose she seems to give off an audible whir, like an overheating computer or a household appliance.
Yet even today, well into her eighties, Eunice can be seen at Special Olympics games running beside handicapped athletes, exhorting them along or tenderly ministering to their wounds when they hurt themselves. Of all the Kennedy siblings, Eunice has always done the most, by far, for her disabled sister, Rosemary. And at fancy Kennedy cocktail parties in Hyannis Port or Washington, Eunice often seeks out the most evidently ill-at-ease or out-of-place guests and tries gently to draw them out of themselves or into the general conversation. Eunice is an extraordinarily complex beast. But she has in spades what her husband’s political campaigns sometimes seemed to lack: the ruthlessness of her good intentions.
“I’VE GOT THIS SPORTS PROGRAM”
By the early 1980s Shriver was spending less and less time at his Fried, Frank office at the Watergate building and more and more time at the Special Olympics headquarters on K Street. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the character of Fried, Frank—like the general tenor of the country—began to change subtly. When Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981, down came many of the pictures of the firm’s lawyers shaking hands with prominent Democrats; up went the pictures of the same lawyers shaking hands with prominent Republicans. Some of the most active liberal Democrats in the firm began to edge rightward—not into the Republican Party, necessarily, but from the liberal wing of the party toward the center. Max Kampelman, for instance, once a Hubert Humphrey liberal, was becoming more sympathetic to the neoconservatives; so, for that matter, was Dick Schifter. Meanwhile, a youngish, maniacally driven securities lawyer named Harvey Pitt (who would later serve an ill-starred turn as George W. Bush’s SEC chief) had taken over the management of the Washington office from Kampelman. In keeping with the ethos of the eighties, Pitt slowly pushed the pro bono work and the Native American practice to the margins.
Shriver’s own practice was thriving. But he had less clout in the executive branch of the federal government than he had had since before he moved to Washington in 1961, and he no longer found the Fried, Frank culture to be as oriented toward public service as it once had been. As his son Timothy said, “His career as an active political leader ended after Carter’s election. And after Reagan was elected, my father could see that, ‘Okay, my next job’s not going to be secretary of state.’ So the balance in our family shifted from Daddy’s work to Mommy’s work.”
By the mid-1980s, the Special Olympics had become a national phenomenon. The next step, Eunice believed, was to make it an international phenomenon. She had revolutionized the way Americans thought about the mentally handicapped—so why not revolutionize the way citizens of the world thought, too? To successfully expand the Special Olympics overseas, Eunice would need someone to lead the effort. Someone who had traveled widely and who had connections in the governments of many foreign countries; someone who had experience in diplomacy and in selling new concepts to new peoples; someone with experience running a large international program; someone with charisma. Someone, that is, like her husband.
In 1984 the Special Olympics board of directors elected Shriver president of the organization, and in 1986 he retired as a partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. In 1990 he was appointed chairman of the Special Olympics Board, a position he held until the spring of 2003.
In the intervening two decades, Shriver—and, later, his son Timothy—were enormously successful in recruiting new countries to start their own chapters of the Special Olympics and in getting them to send their retarded athletes to the International Games. In 1985, Dublin, Ireland, hosted the first European Special Olympics; Austria, Bolivia, Monaco, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia all joined the Special Olympics that year, and the People’s Republic of China sent observers to the United States to watch the International Games.
As the cold war ended, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland all joined the Special Olympics at the coaxing of Sarge Shriver. So, before it collapsed in 1991, did the Soviet Union. In February 1989 the Soviet Union hosted the largest “coaches’ clinic” the Special Olympics had ever held. Shriver recruited his old friend and Communist Party leader Andrei Pavlov to become head of the Soviet chapter of the Special Olympics.
Shriver began his work at the Special Olympics as a dutiful husband. “It can’t have been easy,” his son Timothy says, “at age sixty-five, with his résumé, to be perceived as going to work for your wife at a charity.” But he soon became passionate about it. “He became very excited about Special Olympics,” Timothy Shriver says, “and he was especially excited about its geopolitical, historical, and political relevance, its ability to unite people from different backgrounds and different political systems. So he spent a great amount of time taking this message to foreign heads of state. He would say, ‘I’ve got this sports program. And you’ll probably be like me at first—you’ll probably think it’s crazy. But just go out and watch the games and you won’t believe what happens!’ ”
Sarge was, Timothy continues, “starting to market the Special Olympics movement as a sort of post–World War II sociocultural paradigm. His rhetoric was almost like Lenin’s. ‘There’s a new system out there and it doesn’t have politicians at its head, or kings or queens or palaces. Rather it’s got this kind of karmic aura that comes from these children with a mental disability playing sports.’ My dad became obsessed with the power of this story he could tell, with the movement.”
With Shriver as president and chairman of the board, and Eunice as guiding spirit, the Special Olympics became a Shriver family affair. In 1989 the Shrivers’ youngest son, Anthony, founded Best Buddies (which might best be described as a Big Brother/Big Sister mentor p
rogram for the mentally retarded), starting the operation out of a small office at the Special Olympics headquarters. In just over a decade, Best Buddies has grown from a single chapter on one college campus into an international organization with 750 chapters serving 750,000 mentally handicapped children.
In 1987 the Shrivers’ oldest son, Bobby, produced the first Very Special Christmas album, to raise money for the Special Olympics. Working with coproducers Jimmy and Vicki Iovine, Bobby assembled rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Sting, John Mellencamp, U2, Stevie Nicks, Bob Seger, the Pointer Sisters, Bon Jovi, and the Pretenders, all of whom donated their talent. The seven Very Special Christmas albums, a Jazz to the World album, and a World Christmas album together have raised well over $50 million for the Special Olympics.
The Special Olympics became even more of a family affair when Timothy Shriver was hired by the board as president and CEO in 1996. The most devout of the five Shriver children, Timothy had followed his father and his brother Bobby to Yale for his undergraduate education, then went on to attend Catholic University in Washington, DC, where he received a master’s degree in religion. He moved back to New Haven to teach in the public school system there and to launch a program called the New Haven Public Schools’ Social Development Project. As a result of this work, Timothy was named a fellow at the Yale School Development Program; while there, he started a program that harked directly back to his father’s launching of Head Start twenty years earlier: the Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale Child Study Center. The program brought together researchers, teachers, and social workers to promote early intervention programs in public schools across the country.
Timothy’s professional and academic accomplishments clearly marked him as a smart and serious young man, but he was so young (still in his mid-thirties) that his being hired as president and CEO of Special Olympics would have been seen as pure nepotism had he not already distinguished himself to the board by saving the International Games in 1995.
The story of why the 1995 games needed saving began several years earlier. Early in 1992, Eunice had told Ted Kennedy that she planned to hold the next International Special Olympics Games in Dallas, in 1995. The city of Dallas had put together a generous, multimillion-dollar invitation to the Special Olympics, and Eunice was eager to accept it. But Ted, bruised by his recent involvement in the highly publicized rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith (Steve Smith’s son), and additionally traumatized by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which showed—repeatedly and in slow motion—footage of Jack’s death, said he wanted nothing to do with Dallas. In fact, Ted (along with many of the other Kennedys, although not the Shrivers) had made it a point never to return to Dallas after 1963. The city just held too many unpleasant memories.
Eunice reopened the search for a site for the 1995 games. The International Special Olympics Games require an enormous amount of planning, so a new site had to be settled upon fast. To the rescue came Timothy Shriver, who assembled a civic group in New Haven, Connecticut, that put together a proposal that the next games be held there. The proposal was accepted, and in 1995 Timothy presided over the New Haven games. With a $34 million budget, Timothy coordinated more than 7,000 mentally handicapped athletes and more than 60,000 volunteers—the largest sporting event in the world that year. The 1995 games were so successful that when the Special Olympics board of directors began searching for a replacement for Sarge as president and CEO, Timothy’s name kept coming up. Both Sarge and Eunice expressed their skepticism about this idea—not because they thought Timothy wasn’t up to the task, but because they worried about the perception of nepotism and because they didn’t want Timothy to have to live in the very large shadows they cast. Yet the search committee, after duly considering his parents’ objections, once again concluded that Timothy was the best available candidate. (The committee may also have realized that he was one of the few people on earth who could manage Eunice effectively.) In June 1996 Timothy Shriver succeeded his father as president and CEO of the Special Olympics.
Since 1996—as indeed since its inception in 1968—this multimillion-dollar charity has been run as a family affair. Eunice still serves as “founder and honorary chairman”; Timothy Shriver is president and CEO; and Sarge was chairman of the board. In June 2003, when his father stepped down as chairman of the Special Olympics board, Timothy took on that role as well.
SHRIVER AND SCHWARZENEGGER
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Special Olympics events often featured an incongruous sight: the enormous Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping iron with mentally retarded children.
By the time Schwarzenegger married Maria Shriver, on April 26, 1986, after dating her for nine years, he had already traveled an enormous distance in his life. Born in a small village in Austria in 1947, Schwarzenegger had grown up in relative poverty. Deciding he wanted to transcend his rural origins, Schwarzenegger found his way out through bodybuilding, a then-obscure quasi-sport in which competitors vie to have the biggest muscles and most impressively sculpted physique. Schwarzenegger started competing in Austria and soon was winning competitions throughout Europe.
In London in 1967 Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Universe contest—the bodybuilding equivalent of winning the tennis championship at Wimbledon or being part of the winning football team at the Super Bowl. At twenty years of age, he was the youngest Mr. Universe in the history of the competition. But his ambition was not slaked. In 1968 he moved to the United States to seek greater fame and fortune.
“From the first, Arnold loved America,” his biographer Wendy Leigh wrote in 1990. He became a businessman and entrepreneur, setting up a successful mail-order business that sold various bodybuilding products. Already famous in the arcane world of bodybuilding, his celebrity began to seep into the mainstream.
In 1974 the journalist Charles Gaines published Pumping Iron, a book about bodybuilding that featured many stories about Arnold. Although the book was ignored by the mainstream media, it went on to become an underground classic and, in 1977, it spawned the documentary movie of the same title, which premiered at the Plaza Theatre in New York on January 18, 1977. “Although the film was billed as a documentary study of bodybuilding,” Wendy Leigh writes, “there was no question whatever that it was, in reality, a showcase for Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Movie audiences marveled at him—not just at his remarkable physique but at his peculiar blend of ingenuous charm and Machiavellian scheming. America loved him. “He was,” Leigh writes, “a charmer, a champion, an endearingly arrogant winner.”
It was in August 1977, the year his celebrity began to bloom, that he met Maria Shriver at the Robert F. Kennedy tennis tournament in Forest Hills, New York. In the tournament, Schwarzenegger was paired with Rosie Grier, the actor and former football player who had worked on both of Sarge’s campaigns. (Grier had also been at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968 when RFK was shot, wrestling the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, to the ground after he had fired his deadly shots.) Sarge and Eunice had no idea who this behemoth on the tennis court with Grier was. When Maria, who had just graduated from Georgetown University, saw him, however, she was intrigued. “I could see that Arnold was, like my father, kind of an outsider,” Maria recalled. “I wanted in a husband somebody who was going to deliver me from the madness of the whole Kennedy thing. I looked at Arnold as someone who had his own kind of dream, who was a dreamer, who was different.” As Schwarzenegger put it, “I think what made her fall in love with me was that I was the rebel—the opposite of the establishment” that the Kennedy family represented. “Bodybuilding was a sport that was not socially accepted by the Kennedys or Shrivers, like being a golf player or a tennis player. I was a symbol of a different world for Maria. She went for a rebel so she could defy the Washington scene.”
In 1977 Schwarzenegger was just beginning to make his mark as an actor, climbing through the ranks in Hollywood. (That same year he acted in his first feature film,
a now-forgotten movie called Stay Hungry, for which he won a Golden Globe award for “best acting debut.”) But the Kennedy family stood for the one major goal he had yet to pursue: political power. Earlier that year, Schwarzenegger had told a German news magazine, “When one has money, one day it becomes less interesting. And when one is also the best in film, what can be more interesting? Perhaps power. Then one moves into politics and becomes governor or president or something.”
For this Austrian boy of humble origins, the Kennedy family represented the epitome of American political power. Although he had arrived in the United States after the death of JFK, Schwarzenegger had lived in the country long enough to know that the Kennedy family was political royalty. So when Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy invited him back to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port after the tennis tournament, Arnold eagerly accepted.
Sarge would later say that he instinctively liked the burly Austrian from the very beginning. Maria recalls that, of all the Kennedys and Shrivers, her father was the most accepting of Arnold when she first brought him to Hyannis Port for weekends. But at first, Sarge was wary of Schwarzenegger. Shriver knew little about the worlds of bodybuilding and Hollywood in which Arnold traveled, and what little he did know made him nervous. “Sargent was not really aware of the latest cutting-edge stars or the best action movies, so when we first met he had definitely been not much aware of me at all, beyond what his kids may have told him,” Schwarzenegger said. “So obviously he wasn’t thrilled at first, when I began dating his daughter.”
Some years later, Maria would tell her father that she had known almost from the moment she met Arnold that he was the man she wanted to marry. Shriver decided he liked the oversized Austrian, but he still wasn’t sure how he felt about the man dating his daughter. “I think in the beginning,” Schwarzenegger said, “he was worried about my lifestyle.” Maria remembers a letter her father had sent her very soon after she started dating Schwarzenegger. Arnold was living in California, building his film career; Maria was in Baltimore, starting her television career. One time, Arnold invited her out to Los Angeles for the weekend and offered to pay her airfare. When Sarge learned of this, he wrote his daughter a long letter explaining, as Maria recalled, “why I should never allow a man to pay for an airline ticket for me, because that signaled to a man that he could ‘buy’ me.” “Men do this sort of thing, they want sex, they’re going to pay for your airline tickets, and then you’ll feel beholden to them,” Maria recalled her father writing. “Don’t ever accept that. Be your own woman. Pay for your own stuff.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 83