Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  “I’ve carried that message from my father my whole life. I always remember my dad saying, ‘Make your own way, make your own money. Never let anybody feel that they own you.’ Even after I married Arnold and people were telling me I could quit my job, because Arnold was doing so well, I remembered what my father told me.”

  Sarge wasn’t the only one who was initially dubious about Maria’s relationship with Arnold. Although “in public neither the Kennedys nor the Shrivers have ever made any negative comments about Maria’s relationship with Arnold,” Wendy Leigh has written, “in the early days, there were those who declared that he was the Kennedys’ worst setback since Chappaquiddick.”

  Schwarzenegger, for his part, became deeply attracted to her beauty and her indomitable will, which she had inherited from her mother; he also quickly came to respect his girlfriend’s parents. He readily allowed Eunice to talk him into becoming the “honorary weight-lifting coach” for the Special Olympics. As it turned out, weight-lifting was a highly effective morale booster for the mentally handicapped, because, starting from very low weights, training can produce rapid improvement.

  In 1982 Schwarzenegger starred in Conan the Barbarian, which, despite being roundly panned by critics, was a box office bonanza, the top-grossing film of the summer. People magazine published a feature titled “Arnold Schwarzenegger Conquers as Conan and Maybe as a Kennedy In-Law.” (A family friend recalled looking on in bewilderment as a discussion between Eunice and Arnold about “the theology and ethics of Conan the Barbarian” became increasingly heated.) In 1984, the year after he was granted American citizenship, Schwarzenegger starred in The Terminator, a movie that not only produced huge box office revenues but also attracted positive critical notice. He was now officially a huge star, an A-list celebrity.

  Eunice and Sarge exploited his celebrity fully. Schwarzenegger became a fixture at the International Special Olympic Games every few years, and many of his movie premieres, beginning with Twins in 1988, have doubled as fundraisers for the charity.

  Like Eunice and Sarge, Maria and Arnold dated for a long time before becoming engaged. Finally, on August 10, 1985, they announced their engagement. They were to be married on April 26, 1986, in Hyannis Port.

  It seemed impossible that any wedding could top the glitz, glamour, and raw celebrity power of Sarge and Eunice’s 1953 nuptials. At that wedding, there had been senators and cardinals, Supreme Court justices and gangsters, millionaires and movie stars, all paying their obeisance to Joseph P. Kennedy and the growing political prospects of the Kennedy family.

  Thirty-three years later, Joe Kennedy was gone, Rose Kennedy was nearing her 100th birthday, and Jack and Bobby were dead. The family’s remarkable political future, in distant prospect in 1953 (when Jack had just been elected senator from Massachusetts), was now a part of still-living history. The story of the Kennedy family had hardened into American political legend. Ted remained an active liberal Democrat, of course, and a fixture of the Senate, and RFK’s son Joe Kennedy now occupied Jack’s old Massachusetts congressional seat. But after Sarge’s defeats in 1972 and 1976, and Ted’s failed challenge against Jimmy Carter in the 1980 primary, the New Frontier seemed dead and buried for good. Yet the wedding of Arnold and Maria would recapture the buzz and ferment, if not the substance, of the New Frontier era.

  In late April, Arnold flew by private jet to Hyannis Port from Mexico, where he was in the midst of shooting the movie Predator. Maria came up from New York City, where she had recently landed one of the most prestigious jobs in television, as anchor of the CBS Morning News. On Friday, April 25, Maria’s matron-of-honor, Caroline Kennedy, and Caroline’s mother, Jacqueline, hosted a luncheon for the wedding party. By Saturday, placid little Hyannis Port was bustling with celebrities; for all the media camped outside the compound, it could have been November 1960.

  Of all the disparate red-carpet celebrities present—from Tom Brokaw to Quincy Jones, Queen Noor to Barbara Walters (President Reagan and Pope John Paul II were unable to attend and sent their regrets)—none made more of an impression on the older Kennedy generation than Grace Jones, Schwarzenegger’s co-star from Conan the Destroyer, and her date, Andy Warhol. Jones, tall, sleek, strong, and black, arrived midway through the ceremony, stepping out of her limousine in a clingy outfit that kept her, just barely, from violating laws against public indecency; at her side, small, frail, owlish, and pale white, was Warhol.

  The ceremony was held at the local Catholic church, St. Francis Xavier, the white clapboard structure where Sarge, Rose, and usually Eunice attended daily Mass every summer. Sarge, Eunice, and Ted Kennedy all gave readings from the Bible; Oprah Winfrey, Maria’s colleague from her early years in television, read a poem. “It was the most beautiful wedding ceremony I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ethel Kennedy said.

  At the reception Stephen Hesnan, the Shriver family’s chef, unveiled the wedding cake he had baked, 7 feet tall and 425 pounds, modeled after pictures he had seen of the 8-foot cake at Sarge and Eunice’s wedding. Arnold presented his new in-laws with a gift: a silk-screened portrait of Maria done in vivid colors by Andy Warhol. (It hangs in the Shrivers’ Potomac, Maryland, living room today, at right angles from a photograph of Pope John Paul II.) After dancing with Eunice and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Arnold announced to the assembled guests, “I love her and will always take care of her. Nobody should worry.”

  After his marriage to Maria, Schwarzenegger continued to be active in the Republican Party. He campaigned with George H. W. Bush in 1988, and in 1990 he was named chairman of President Bush’s Council on Physical Fitness. It was in the early 1990s that his name started coming up regularly in conversation as a possible GOP candidate for governor in California. “Conan the Republican” the pundits called him. But for more than a decade he remained coy about his political ambitions. His flirtations with California politics were somewhat reminiscent of his father-in-law’s in Illinois through the 1950s and 1960s.

  When Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial ambitions became more serious, thanks to California’s recall initiative in the summer of 2003, his father-in-law encouraged them. “You’re making me very happy,” Shriver wrote to him on July 11. “I can’t think of any person today that I would rather have in office. If I were a resident of California, I hope you realize that I’d be voting Republican for the first time ever!”

  In some bizarre, not wholly apt way, Schwarzenegger represents the apotheosis of Shriver’s ambition. Sarge genuinely thinks highly of Arnold. He sees in his son-in-law many of the traits he admired in his father-in-law, Joe Kennedy: the intelligence; the boldness verging on brazenness; the charisma; and, above all, the drive to rise far above humble origins. “I would say certainly the biggest influence in Arnold’s life has been Daddy and Mummy, which is kind of ironic,” Maria says, because although her parents are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and devout Catholics, her husband is a Republican. “Arnold is interested in ideas and creation and dreaming; he’s a force that way, like my dad.”

  “Eunice and Sargent are like my second parents,” Schwarzenegger says, “and I have drawn my deepest inspiration from Sargent’s work and advice.” Schwarzenegger says that he could tell, when he first started dating Maria, that Sarge believed he should be doing something more substantial with his life than just acting in movies. “I could feel it,” he says, “the feeling that, you know, we already have an actor [Lawford] in the family and he didn’t do much. ‘You’re an expert in health and fitness,’ Sargent would tell me, ‘so why don’t you continue your education and work in that area.’ I remember him just pushing me and pushing me.”

  As Schwarzenegger started moving into public service and then into electoral politics, he used Sarge as a sounding board and a principal source of advice. “I would sit there for hours and just pump him for information,” Schwarzenegger says, “because I think this is a rare opportunity to talk to someone that has worked with the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration, and the Nixon administratio
n. Also, he gave me a glimpse of what it’s like to work with politicians”—for instance, LBJ and Nixon—“who may not think highly of your family.” As a Republican married into America’s foremost Democratic family, this was a situation with which Schwarzenegger knew he himself might someday have to contend.

  Despite his allegiance to the Republican Party, Schwarzenegger’s politics have clearly been affected by his association with the Shrivers. He explicitly credits Shriver with teaching him the value of building partnerships between the public and private sectors, which had been a signature of the War on Poverty. Schwarzenegger’s first serious foray into politics in his own right, in 2002, was in support of an initiative to provide after-school programs to all California’s children—a policy idea that followed clearly in the pattern of Head Start. And on August 8, 2003, two days after Schwarzenegger declared his gubernatorial candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Washington Post quoted one of Schwarzenegger’s former movie producers as calling him a “Shriver Republican.” “You can’t be married to Maria Shriver and spend all that time in Hyannis Port and be a continuous-tax-cuts-for-the-rich monomaniac,” Matthew Miller, a prominent Democratic newspaper columnist, wrote a week later.

  On October 7, 2003, Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in a landslide. At his victory party that evening, the governor-elect stood alongside his wife, flanked by Bobby, Timothy, Mark, Anthony, Eunice, and Sarge—the whole Shriver clan had turned out to support Maria and her husband. For his part, Schwarzenegger proudly claimed association with the Shriver family—even though his wife’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, had already signaled his dismay with the Republican’s victory. “These are all Shrivers standing behind me,” Schwarzenegger said during his victory speech, gesturing over his shoulder.

  At some level, surely, it must be disappointing to Shriver that the first man into public office from among his children’s generation is not his son Anthony (whom Florida Democrats have tried several times to recruit to run for mayor of Miami) or his son Mark (who lost a tough Democratic primary race for Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in 2002) but Schwarzenegger—a Republican and an in-law, not a Shriver by blood.

  Yet Shriver knows all about being “only” an in-law. There is a certain fitting irony that, as he fades into the twilight, he should once again find himself being eclipsed by an in-law.

  In 1994 President Bill Clinton recognized Shriver for his life’s work, awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, making Sarge and Eunice the only husband and wife in history to have each won this highest civilian award individually. “Sargent Shriver,” Clinton said at the awards ceremony,

  is the man who launched the Peace Corps thirty-three years ago. Because of his creativity, his idealism, his brilliance, the Peace Corps remains one of the most popular government initiatives ever undertaken. From the time he and his wife, Eunice, helped to organize a Conference on Juvenile Delinquency for the Attorney General in 1947 to his efforts for public education in the 1950s, to his leadership of Head Start and Legal Services and now the Special Olympics, Sargent Shriver has awakened millions of Americans, including many in this administration, to the responsibilities of service, the possibilities of change, and the sheer joy of making the effort.

  Yet, despite this recognition, along with dozens of honorary degrees, named buildings, and other such honors (in 2002 Congress appropriated $10 million to start a Sargent Shriver Peace Center), Shriver, when he is remembered at all, is still viewed mainly through the prism of the Kennedy family. In an early episode of Seinfeld, the zeitgeist-defining sitcom of the 1990s, the character Elaine asks, apropos of nothing, “Whatever happened to Sargent Shriver? Is he still with the Kennedys? You don’t hear much about him these days? Is he out of the loop?”

  Mark Shields, the political commentator, has reflected, “I’m one of those (and I’m sure I’m not alone) who believe that if Sarge had married Susie Glotz—and I’m not in any way disparaging his choice of a wife—he would have been governor of Illinois. I think he would have been a national figure in his own right. I think marrying into the Kennedy family really hurt him. And once he was in the family, his own independent ambition was more a curse than a blessing.”

  Once, on a plane flight during the 1972 campaign, Shriver was reading a newspaper account of an appearance he had made the night before when he dropped the paper onto his lap in frustration. The article had identified him as “the brother-in-law” of Ted Kennedy. “I used to be Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law,” he said in exasperation. Then it was Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law. “Now I’m Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law. I suppose in twenty years I’ll be the uncle of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Right idea, wrong in-law: It is not as the uncle of RFK Jr. that he is now primarily known, but as the father-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Faith and Hope

  In “The Lightweight Question,” written after the 1976 election, Colman McCarthy said:

  Shriver was a passionate reader of philosophy, theology, and literature, one who sought to make the connection real between daily politics and the resources of the inner life. It was not a pose of piety, but an effort to go out of himself to seek communion with minds and spirits larger and deeper than his own. It is standard American politics for public men to display their reverent side, but as Nixon exemplified with his White House prayer services, what we get is not religion but religiosity.… Shriver, both in 1972 [and 1976] kept his interior life where it should be: hidden and within.

  Shriver’s deep faith and his salesman’s enthusiasm might have led him to become a proselytizer or evangelist. Yet he never traveled that route. Shriver, now in his late eighties, remains serious about his Catholicism. He attends Mass daily, goes to confession regularly, carries rosary beads in his pocket, and reads widely in Catholic literature—everything from Catholic periodicals such as Commonweal and the National Catholic Reporter to abstruse theological tracts and works of biblical exegesis. Yet he retains an open-mindedness and a curiosity about other faiths—and even the lack of faith—that many of his Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and atheist friends find disarming. He still thrills to the back-and-forth of theological discourse across faiths and denominations.

  But for all his privacy about his own faith, and for all his broad tolerance of other faiths, the root of Shriver’s self-concept is as a lay Catholic, as a non-clerical servant of God, who has tried always to model his life after the ethics of Jesus as expressed in the Gospels. This has not been a passive pursuit. Ever since he was a schoolboy, Shriver’s bedrock system of values has never changed: “Christian, Aristotelian, optimistic, and American” was how he characterized himself in the Yale Daily News in the late 1930s, a description that applies with equal accuracy today. Each of those four qualities is important, but it is the Christian in him—and the Catholic in him—that underlies and inflects the rest. He is always asking himself, “Am I living my life as Christ would want me to?” “You cannot separate Daddy from his faith,” Maria Shriver says. “Faith has been the motivating factor in his whole life. Maybe this sounds kind of corny, but he totally looks to Jesus as his role model. In tough times, he looks to Jesus.”

  There are many breeds of religiosity among the devout, cutting across faiths and denominations: the fire-and-brimstone sermonizer; the zealot; the Puritan; the holier-than-thou; the power-hungry; the ritualistic; the superstitious; the lonely; the desperate; the God-is-a-tool-for-realizing-my-desires instrumentalist; and the skeptic, to name just a few partial variations. Shriver is none of these. Nor, strictly speaking, has he signed on as a man of faith for the most common of reasons—for a ticket to the afterlife or to heaven (although he aspires to get there). Rather, what Shriver gets from his faith is less the solace of the Lord’s presence, less the promise of transcendence in the hereafter (although he does derive both of those qualities from his faith), than a mobilizing vision for action here on earth. It is telling that in the 1930s Shriver invited Dorothy Day to s
peak at Yale. Shriver’s Catholicism is in some ways analogous to Day’s: rooted in the ethics of the Christian Gospels; dedicated to working toward peace, social justice, and redemption of suffering here on earth (as opposed to in the afterlife); and concerned especially with easing the plight of the poor and the disabled.

  As Christopher Lydon put it in a New York Times article during the 1972 presidential campaign, “Sargent Shriver is a Roman Catholic candidate of an unfamiliar sort, a man who slips quietly out to mass many mornings of the campaign and works a little harder because of the thought that a good day’s effort can be a form of prayer.” Indeed, much of Eunice and Sarge’s endless appetite for work comes from their belief in the Benedictine dictum that “to work is to pray.” According to Catholic tradition, one of Shriver’s closest Catholic friends says, “you can choose either the contemplative or the active life. In the contemplative life, you try to make yourself a better person through reflecting and praying. In the active life, you emulate Jesus and try to sanctify the world. Sarge has chosen the active life.” Almost everything about Shriver—his politics, his moral values, the decisions he made or failed to make, the way he thinks—can be better understood in the context of his powerful and abiding faith.