Donald began, “So, Sarge, we were thinking, what are the chances of you not going to Paris and staying here to work for Bobby?”
Shriver seemed to mull it over for a second. Though he didn’t say as much, he was perhaps still wondering why Bobby hadn’t called him personally. “It does sound interesting,” he said. “But I’m not really sure that I’m needed.”
“Why, of course you are needed, Sarge,” Donald responded, according to his memory of the conversation. “How could you think otherwise? Bobby has the greatest respect for you.”
Sarge didn’t respond. At just that moment, Eunice walked into the room with her usual briskness. After carefully studying the two for a moment, she said, “And what’s going on here?”
The two men just looked at her.
“Well, I think we should leave for dinner now, Sarge,” she said, eyeing them with more than a little suspicion. “I have reservations at eight, you know?” She and her husband then shared a secret look. “So, what are you two talking about anyway?” she asked.
“Well, Donald here has an interesting proposition,” Sarge answered.
“Oh really?” Eunice asked as she stood before her husband and the visitor. Since the two men were still seated on cushioned chairs, Eunice towered over them in a way that was perhaps a tad intimidating.
“Bobby sent me to talk to Sarge about possibly joining the campaign,” Donald said. “We all know Sarge would be invaluable to—”
Eunice cut him off. “Well, that can’t happen,” she said, her face darkening. “It’s not possible now.”
“Why is that?” Donald asked.
Looking down at Sargent, Eunice asked in a commanding tone, “Well, you told the president we were going to France, didn’t you? Is that not what you said?”
“Yes, I did say that,” Sarge answered. “But, you know, I thought that perhaps we could—”
“Well, then, that’s that,” Eunice said, interrupting her husband. “We’re going to France to be ambassadors there, just as we promised President Johnson. So it’s done. The decision is made,” she concluded. “Now, let’s go to dinner.”
Not Meant to Be
Ted Kennedy had an ominous feeling about his brother’s decision to run for president. He wasn’t the kind of man to verbalize his fears to many people, but it had been clear from the beginning that he was afraid for Bobby’s life. He decided to abandon his concerns, however, and do what Kennedys always did at important junctures in their family’s history—pull together for the greater good. “I know that he had a difficult time overcoming his fear,” said David Burke, Ted’s close friend, “but at the time, what could he do? He couldn’t just sit around in fear. He couldn’t allow himself to be immobilized in that way. To the extent that Bobby believed with all his heart he could be of service, that the party needed him, indeed, the country needed him, Ted had no choice but to be completely supportive. I have to also say, though, that Ted wasn’t alone in his concerns. The rest of the family was quite fearful but took the same action as Ted—which was to swallow their fears and hope and pray for the best.”
Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for his party’s nomination was in high gear almost from the start as he racked up delegates everywhere, attracted as they were by his youthful energy, his pit-bull style, and his liberal agenda. But then, of course, everything changed one awful June night in 1968 when he was gunned down in Los Angeles. It seemed impossible, yet it was true. Another brother, gone. “It was as if everyone had to then reset and try to figure out how to proceed with all of the rules once again changed, just as they had been when Jack was killed,” recalled David Burke. “You had a sense that the world had gone mad, that nothing made sense. It was as dark a time as I can remember, a period in our country’s history we still have not been able to reconcile. Those of us who were personally involved were, of course, devastated beyond words.”
On the political front, who can say what kind of President Bobby Kennedy might have been had he run and won the election that fateful year? “[Bobby] achieved something special in that last campaign,” observed Bobby’s son Max—who was just three when his father died. “It was the first time Americans in the middle class and the poorest Americans were really brought together. Men and women from all sorts of racial and economic backgrounds joined together in that campaign. I have always found it striking that after June 4, 1968, many of the Americans who supported my father supported George Wallace, not because of the latter’s racial views but because he was the voice of the middle- and the lower-middle-class worker. Wallace, however, appealed to the dark side of their hopes. I believe that there is a dark side to every American and it is easier perhaps for politicians to appeal to that darker side, but we are all also receptive to what is best in us. Robert Kennedy chose to appeal to the light.”
Of course, Bobby’s senseless and tragic death would impact everyone in the Kennedy family in a deep and very personal way. His mother, Rose, would be left wondering how God could take her boys in such a cruel way, and her daughters—Bobby’s sisters—would never be able to get over the loss. His devastated wife, Ethel, would be left with eleven children—her cross to bear made even heavier by the troubles her oldest sons would bring into her life. His sister-in-law Jackie would take an unlikely husband, in great part due to her fear that her two children were now in danger. For their parts, Sarge and Eunice would leave for Paris as they had agreed to do, but now with great sadness and regret. Meanwhile, the last surviving brother, Ted, would spend years trying to decide if he was up to the task of accepting his lot in life as the next Kennedy in line for the presidency.
Without Bobby, life would go on for all of the Kennedys, just as it had without Jack. But it would never be the same.
Humphrey-Shriver?
I know there were feelings that we should not have gone,” Eunice Kennedy said in 1972, referring to her husband Sargent Shriver’s accepting the appointment as French ambassador by President Lyndon Johnson rather than staying in America and campaigning for her brother Bobby. “But Sarge was not what you’d call an inner man on Bobby’s campaign. He was never a close friend of Bobby’s.” Certainly there were people in the Kennedy family who seemed never to have gotten over the Shrivers’ decision, not understanding that it sprang, in part, from the feeling that Bobby hadn’t had enough respect for Sarge to call him and personally ask for his assistance. “Your daddy didn’t come back from France to campaign for our daddy,” some of Ethel’s children used to chide the Shriver children. Indeed, the sense that Sargent had been disloyal was even passed on to the next generation of Kennedys, none of whom could have been expected to understand the subtle nuances of emotions that had figured into the Shrivers’ decision.
The ill will against Sargent Shriver had been subtle up until Bobby’s death, but afterward, it bubbled over in a very hurtful way.
Sargent and Eunice had been in Paris on that terrible June day in 1968 when Bobby was killed. It just so happened that Ted’s wife, Joan, was there as well, visiting them. They returned immediately upon hearing the news, flying into LaGuardia Airport to rendezvous with family members and aides there. As some of these family members and Kennedy advisers loaded Bobby’s casket onto the plane, Sargent tried to help. However, they angrily pushed him aside, acting as if he was a traitor. “I think maybe nothing hurt him and Eunice more that that,” Pierre Salinger later recalled. “That was an awful way to treat Sarge. I don’t think he ever got over it.”
It seemed to many that Ethel Kennedy was one of those who had held a grudge against Sargent for his decision. Ethel’s feelings about the matter were very complex, though. When, just weeks after Bobby’s death in 1968, Hubert Humphrey began floating the idea of asking Sargent to be his Democratic running mate, Ethel wasn’t comfortable with the idea at all. It was too soon, she felt, for anyone in the family to try to continue where Bobby had left off. Plus, there was a rule of succession in place, and she wanted the family to stick to it. It wasn’t official, but it could
not have been more clear: first Jack; then Bobby; then Ted; then, maybe, Sarge. Also, Ethel couldn’t help but still question Sarge’s loyalty to Bobby when she factored in his decision to go to France. Finally—and this was perhaps the biggest issue for her in her consideration of these matters—she was loyal to Ted at all costs. What he wanted, she wanted—and that was the end of it for her. He was there for her as Bobby’s stand-in, and she would be there for him too, always. However, she was still deeply grieving Bobby’s death and wasn’t up to debating family politics. So she just let it be known that she wasn’t supportive of the idea of Sarge taking part in the Humphrey campaign, and then let it sit.
Maybe Eunice Kennedy Shriver didn’t catch on to Ethel’s signals, though, because she told Life magazine in 1972, “I consider Ethel my greatest friend. I’ve never had any feeling ever from her about disloyalty. And if she didn’t want Sarge to do something, I have full one hundred percent confidence that she would call me and say, ‘For God’s sake, will you say this or say that to Sargent.’ ”
Be that as it may, the clear word back to Humphrey was that the Kennedy family would not be pleased with the idea of Sargent Shriver as vice president. In fact, Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell—who often derisively referred to Shriver as “half a Kennedy”—went so far as to pass a message on to Humphrey that the family would consider his adding Shriver to the ticket “an unfriendly act.”
A big reason to bring Sargent Shriver onto the ticket, at least as Hubert Humphrey saw it, was to garner the Kennedys’ blessing. “What the Kennedys said and how they felt mattered a great deal to Democrats, and having them support the ticket might go a long way toward ensuring its victory at the polls,” explained Hugh Sidey. “However, if the Kennedys were going to just disavow Sargent Shriver—either by leaking negative stories to the press about him or even by just not saying anything at all about him—then what was the point of putting him on the ticket?” Of course, such reasoning totally overlooked Shriver’s years of stellar achievement and his obvious qualifications for the job, but as Joseph Kennedy once put it, “Politics presents itself as a nasty bit of business, doesn’t it?”
Besides Ethel, there were others in the Kennedy family and connected to it who were not exactly supportive of a Humphrey-Shriver ticket. “The family resents it,” Stephen Smith told a politico—off the record—at the time. It was clear that Stephen Smith resented it, anyway, and Smith’s feelings could not be overlooked. He was the family’s financial analyst and political strategist. Not only was he responsible for much of the money that came in and went out of the Kennedy organization, but his duties also included raising money for all of the campaigns, namely Jack’s, Bobby’s, and Ted’s. He was a powerful person in the family who also kept a low profile. Other than his wife, Jean, and his brother-in-law Ted, he really didn’t have close personal relationships with the Kennedys. Put it this way: There aren’t a lot of warm family anecdotes about Stephen Smith. But somehow he managed to stay out of the line of fire by just keeping his nose to the grindstone and doing his job. He wasn’t politically ambitious, though he toyed with the idea of running for mayor of New York City in 1969. He generally believed that politics was a game better played by the Kennedy brothers, certainly not their in-laws. When he took issue with another person’s ambition—such as he did with his brother-in-law Sarge’s—people knew it and paid attention to it. “In Stephen Smith’s mind, Sargent Shriver was on a par with Peter Lawford,” is how Pierre Salinger once put it. “He had little respect for either of them, but at least Peter never tried to run for office.”
Siding with Stephen Smith against Sargent Shriver was just about everyone who had ever supported Bobby—including aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ted Sorensen, and Kenny O’Donnell. “Some of us didn’t believe Shriver to be intellectually equipped enough to handle the demands of the presidency,” Schlesinger once recalled. It was difficult to fathom such criticism considering Shriver’s mammoth achievements, but politics does have a way of sometimes making the most reasonable of men act like competitive children in a schoolyard. Another issue had to do with what might happen in 1972. For instance, if the winner of the 1968 race was the Democratic nominee and Shriver was his VP, what would happen should the president decide not to run again in ’72? If Ted was interested in running at that time, how would Shriver’s presence in office affect things? Or what if the winner was the Democratic nominee and Ted decided he wanted to challenge him by vying for the party’s nomination in ’72? How would Shriver’s presence affect that scenario? As usual, Sargent Shriver found himself in the way of Kennedy ambition.
Still, Shriver decided to take secret meetings in Paris to determine the feasibility of his being added to Humphrey’s Democratic ticket. “We need Ted’s approval,” he finally decided. “That’s the only way this thing can work.” That was easier said than done, though. After Ted sent word that he definitely wasn’t interested in running himself, he agreed to meet with Sarge in Paris to discuss the matter. The much-anticipated meeting was set for the second week of August 1968 at Shriver’s home.
Ted Disappoints
One person who worked for Eunice Shriver as a personal assistant when the Shrivers were in France recalled Sargent Shriver’s being locked away in his private study waiting for Ted’s arrival that second week in August 1968. He took no calls and spent hours studying certain issues so that he would be able to present his case to Senator Kennedy, recalled the assistant. Shriver’s study was enormous and graceful-looking, with a carved pine fireplace, pine-paneled walls, fine antiques all about, and expensive, comfortable furniture with rich colors on chintz fabrics. There was also a great deal of French oil artwork of great value, just as there was all over the ambassador’s residence. Of course, there were books everywhere—he was an avid reader. Also in this study—and only in this study—Sarge put mementos of his public life. This room was Sargent’s private sanctuary in the sense that there were no mementos of his public life anywhere else in the sprawling mansion.
At his homes in the States—both at Timberlawn and at the Kennedy compound—Sarge had his own bedroom that was decorated in much the same way as his study in Paris, and it had the same purpose—as a safe haven from which he could escape the madness of his wife’s world. His sons used to love going into his bedroom because, as Bobby put it, “you had a sense that things were different in there, that it was a world apart from the Kennedys—it was the Shrivers’ world.” Indeed, Sarge had all of his best suits hanging in his closet, his finest coats and hats and other apparel, all orderly and in pristine condition. His bottles of expensive cologne were lined on his bureau along with his gleaming cuff links and shining watches—and there was never any dust on anything. Books about politics, science, and religion were perfectly arranged on shelves. Moreover, all of his stellar achievements were memorialized only in his office in Paris or his bedrooms in Virginia or Massachusetts, nowhere else in the homes. In these special rooms would be found many framed pictures of Sarge with an assortment of political figures such as Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, and other dignitaries—including, of course, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, everyone looking courageous, strong, and determined.
“We’d been told that Mr. Kennedy left the States and was on his way, but that his plane had been delayed,” recalled Eunice’s former assistant. “After the passing of several hours, Mrs. Shriver came into the house, ran up the stairs and directly to the study. She seemed agitated as she raced by me and burst into the study.”
“He hasn’t even left America, Sarge,” Eunice exclaimed, according to the assistant’s memory. Shriver was at first confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked his wife.
“Ted!” Eunice exclaimed. “I just spoke to Joan. Ted is still in the States. He’s not coming, Sarge!”
“What?” Sargent responded. “But that’s not possible. His office told me he left the States hours ago.”
“Well, it’s apparently not true,” Eunice said. “It’s not true!”
; As members of the staff congregated in the hallway to see what was going on, Sargent told Eunice that maybe there had been a scheduling conflict and that they should give Ted the benefit of some doubt. However, Eunice said she was certain there was no mistake. She decided that she would call her mother to find out what had happened. Eunice then made a transatlantic call to Rose Kennedy. Apparently, either Rose hung up on her daughter or Eunice decided to terminate the call herself, judging by the way she slammed the phone down after a very brief conversation. “This is your time, Sarge,” Eunice then said, turning to her husband. “You’ve worked hard for it. And you deserve it.” Noticing the household employees who were now standing in the hall, Eunice turned to face them. “What are you all doing out there?” she demanded. “There is no show here. Nothing is happening in here that concerns any of you. So go about your duties and leave us be.” With that, she slammed the door shut.
The Shrivers stayed in the study for another hour. When they emerged, Eunice seemed somewhat calmer. “There, there,” Sargent said to her, his arm around her.
“She repeatedly had me place calls to Mr. Kennedy, but he was never available to her,” recalled Eunice’s former assistant. Later that day, Eunice was seen outside on a patio in the garden, walking back and forth slowly with her beads in her hand, saying the rosary.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 10