After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Eunice and Sargent stared at Ted. Was he also suggesting that the Shrivers—and Eunice in particular—had commandeered the foundation?

  In truth, the Kennedy Foundation had always been Eunice’s venture. Long before she started Camp Shriver, Eunice had wanted to transform the public’s point view of mental retardation, and in the process also be of assistance to the mentally handicapped. It may seem reductive to put it in these terms, but the truth is that, more than anything, she just wanted to make a difference. Because of her family’s many connections, she had the power and influence to do so. Joseph sensed that of all his daughters, Eunice was the one who was the most astute, the most focused, and, it’s safe to say, the most like him. Therefore, her opinion mattered to him a great deal, and from 1947 on she was very instrumental in advising him about the kinds of charities she felt were most deserving of the Kennedys’ interest and financial support. Of course, she wanted to prove to her father that she could do it—that she could, in fact, do anything he wanted her to do, and do it as well as any of his sons. But she also truly believed in the cause, and much of her emotional attachment to it had to do with the plight of her sister Rosemary. In the end, it’s safe to say that if not for Eunice, the Kennedy Foundation never would have thrived. After all, it was her drive and passion that fueled its many projects, and it was because of her resolve and persistence that she was able to get legislation passed that would make significant changes in the way the government thought of and handled the plight of the mentally retarded. Ted said it best in a letter to Jean Kennedy Smith dated March 1, 1981: “The Kennedys owe her a debt of gratitude that we as a family have been so associated with a cause as worthwhile.”

  By the mid-1970s, though, Ted, Jean, and Pat—who were also trustees of the foundation—were pushing hard for it to begin to support causes other than MR. At the time, the foundation’s annual income was a little over $2 million, and Eunice wanted to spend all of it on causes related to mental retardation. But her siblings had other ideas. For instance, the John F. Kennedy Library needed help in organizing the hundreds of thousands of documents that were being stored there; the facility was greatly understaffed. Jean felt strongly that some portion of the foundation’s money should go to the library, and she even managed to get Jackie’s support in that regard, which under most circumstances would have all but guaranteed success for any family venture. But not for this one. Eunice wasn’t impressed with the idea, and Jackie’s support of it meant little to her. “The library is its own entity,” she wrote in a letter to Jean. “Perhaps money can be siphoned from the Foundation’s endowment for this purpose, but most certainly not from its annual income.” Moreover, the properties on the Kennedy compound needed structural work, and it was Pat who felt that some of the foundation’s money should go to that purpose. Ethel—not a trustee of the foundation but obviously a powerful family member—agreed with her. That proposition was unreasonable to Eunice, though. Home renovations did not fall under the purview of responsibilities of the Kennedy Foundation, at least in her opinion.

  In the spring of 1977, Eunice met with Ted, Pat, and Jean at Jean and Stephen Smith’s home in the compound to discuss the siblings’ ideas for spending the foundation’s money. In the minutes from that meeting, it is clear that Eunice would not be swayed from her point of view. She really could wear down her siblings if she chose to—and she chose to.

  At the meeting, no matter what the others came up with as a valid reason to spend money on something other than MR, Eunice countered with an equally valid reason as to why the expenditure shouldn’t occur. “Then it is decided,” she said—even though it really wasn’t—“that $2.3 million will continue to be spent from the annual income for the mentally retarded.” The others didn’t say anything, but it’s doubtful that they were completely happy. Eunice then ran from the Smiths’ home to Rose Kennedy’s house—and that was quite a distance!—to discuss the matter with her mother. She had such extraordinary energy and stamina that no one could keep up with her as she darted from one person’s home in the compound to another’s, taking care of important business as only she could. According to Eunice’s notes, she spent “considerable time” with Rose, discussing with her what her siblings wished to do with the foundation’s money and how she so vehemently disagreed with them. According to what Eunice later wrote, Rose confirmed for her that the foundation had been started specifically to help the retarded and that its money should be spent only for that purpose and nothing else. With her mother’s approval, Eunice then ran back to the Smiths’ and told them that the family matriarch agreed with her—and that was the end of it. For the time being, anyway.

  By the fall of 1983, the Kennedy siblings again had other ideas for the Kennedy Foundation’s money, and again the JFK Library and the Kennedy compound had come to their minds as projects to be taken seriously; now they were also concerned about some structural repairs necessary to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One meeting at Ted’s home in Virginia between himself, Pat, Jean, Stephen, and Eunice and Sargent became particularly contentious, according to its minutes.

  “I’m sick and tired of the same old arguments,” Eunice told her siblings. “Father’s intention for the Kennedy Foundation was clear from the outset and it was that mental retardation be at its forefront, not the restoration of any of the homes we own.”

  Ted wasn’t so sure. “I do not recall Father being quite so adamant,” he said.

  “Well, I do,” Eunice insisted.

  Actually, Eunice was stretching the truth. In fact, Joseph had started the Kennedy Foundation mostly as a tax shelter for the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, and it was Eunice who ended up using it as a way of furthering her own cause of mental retardation when she took it over in 1960. Joseph was only mildly interested in the cause of MR; it was Eunice who really propelled it forward, turning it into her life’s work. That was the way it happened, but not the way Eunice chose to remember it. In fact, it was stipulated in Joseph’s will that the Kennedy Foundation’s money be used “to fulfill its dedicated purpose.” Joseph’s will said nothing about mental retardation. As the meeting ended, the siblings were not happy with Eunice at all, yet they were wondering if maybe she was right and they were wrong; that’s how compelling Eunice was when it came to debating.

  A couple of weeks later, it was Bobby Shriver—instead of his parents, Eunice and Sargent—who met with Ted Kennedy, which suggests that animosity was definitely building between Eunice and Ted. Ted and Bobby agreed that yet another meeting should be held to discuss the Kennedy Foundation, and at this next meeting, Ted said that he wanted to see some proof that his father’s intention behind the foundation was that it be solely directed to the cause of mental retardation. According to a later recollection, when Bobby told his uncle that he was not comfortable going back to his parents with such a request, Ted had to laugh. He probably knew what his nephew would be up against, and he felt badly for him. But it had to be done.

  Sarge on the Kennedy Curse: “So Be It”

  At the same time that Eunice Kennedy Shriver was in discussions with her siblings over the business of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, her husband, Sargent Shriver, was dealing with a predicament of, arguably, much greater importance—a crisis that would provide him with an opportunity to once again consider his faith.

  When Sargent used to say that he had never been sick a day in his life, it wasn’t just hyperbole. No one who knew him well recalled the man ever even having so much as a cold. That’s why it was such a surprise in the fall of 1983 when he woke up in the middle of the night with a wrenching, searing pain in his abdomen. He was sixty-eight at the time. Eunice was on a business trip and the only other person in the house was his son Anthony. The pain was so severe, Sargent was not even able to get out of bed. Anthony had to pick him up and carry him downstairs, then put him in the car and drive him to Georgetown Hospital.

  After two weeks of tests, no one seemed to have a clue as to what the problem might be with
Shriver, and it was decided that he “probably” had stomach cancer. More tests would have to be conducted, though, to be sure. “So they decided I should go and see this top-notch cancer guy,” Sargent recalled to this author many years later in 2002. “Can you imagine that there is such a thing? A cancer guy?” he asked, laughing.

  Of course, the Shriver family was greatly concerned about Sargent’s health. However, to hear him tell it, he wasn’t all that worried. “Something just made me feel that I didn’t have to be concerned,” he said. “So I went to see the cancer guy. And he did all of his tests and, sure enough, even he didn’t know what was wrong except that I probably had cancer. I asked him what he knew for sure, and he said, ‘Nothing, really. I think we need to do more tests.’ But the timing was a little off,” Sarge recalled with a laugh. “You see, the cancer guy had to go to Hawaii for a medical convention. So he gave me a bag full of awful medications and said for me to take them and then come back to see him in a couple weeks. I left there thinking, ‘Okay, so let me get this straight. The cancer guy is going on vacation—I mean on a medical convention—and meanwhile I have to sit home and have cancer? No,’ I decided. ‘I’m not going to accept it.’ ”

  Sarge discussed the matter with Eunice, who simply could not reconcile the possibility that her husband had cancer. “There’s only one solution,” she said. “We have to pray. And we have to pray like we never prayed before,” she said according to his memory, “because there is no way I will accept this.” Of course, Sargent agreed.

  That day, Sarge, who had gone to church nearly every day of his adult life, went to his place of worship, Holy Trinity, in Georgetown—the same church in which JFK had attended his last Mass before he was assassinated. Founded by the Jesuits in 1794 and administered by them ever since, it’s the oldest Catholic church in the nation’s capital. There, sitting in a wooden pew in an empty church, Sargent Shriver contemplated Jesus Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper. As described in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, during the agony in the Garden, Christ’s human will had to decide whether or not to submit to the divine will expressed by the Father’s command that Jesus offer redemption to all of humanity through His painful and public death by crucifixion. Presumably since Christ’s human will was free, in His human nature He did have a choice in this matter. His agony was that, as a human being, He did not want to suffer, just as no human being does. This point is important in the teaching of Christianity in that it suggests that Christ is not merely a distant deity but also someone who deeply identifies with man’s sufferings while remaining perfectly divine. In the end, despite His understanding of the suffering He would have to endure, Christ willingly submitted His human will to the command of His Father. “Though there was no justification for the pain Jesus was to suffer,” Sarge would observe, “He accepted it anyway. He didn’t cry about it. He didn’t whine about it. He didn’t try to figure out a way around it. He just accepted it as God’s will. And that day in church, I thought, hell, if He could accept death like that, then who am I not to accept whatever it is that is causing me this present problem? I sure as hell can do it if He did it. And as I was thinking this thing over, really mulling it over, something washed over me. It was a peace and calm such that I had never before experienced. I knew in that very moment that it didn’t matter if I had cancer and it didn’t even matter if I didn’t. I was fine. I knew I was perfect and whole no matter the outcome, that it didn’t make any difference what was going on in my body, my soul was okay. And from that moment on,” Sarge recalled, “I am not kidding you, from that moment on, I began to feel a hell of a lot better.”

  In fact, two weeks later, Sargent Shriver had never felt in better shape. The pain he’d had in his stomach was gone. He went back to the doctor, who conducted all of the tests Sarge had intended to take upon his return. The results all came back negative. “And I was sitting there in the doctor’s office,” Sargent recalled, “and the doctor looked at me and said, ‘Sarge, I don’t know what you did, but you sure did it. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ I just looked at him and said, ‘I know, doc. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.’ And that was the end of it.”

  Sargent Shriver said he felt uncomfortable relaying this particular story, “Because the suggestion is that it’s a big deal and the first time anything like that ever happened to me. In fact,” he said, “I have had many times in my life when I was saved—especially when I was in the service, times when everyone was killed but me, or times when I had escaped death just at the last minute. People ask me why I am so religious,” he said. “It’s because I have just always known that my faith protects not only me, but my family. All of us have felt the same way.

  “And some might say, well, what about the Kennedy curse?” Shriver asked. “To that I say, we as a family have always believed that there’s more to consider than just our human experience, something better, something richer and more important. And if we Kennedys and we Shrivers and we Smiths are in some way cursed to experience the hereafter just a little sooner than the rest of humanity, well then, so be it. That’s how I look at the Kennedy curse, anyway. So be it.”

  Eunice Faces a Family Revolt

  Soon after Sargent Shriver’s health scare, the disagreements over the Kennedy Foundation continued. Bobby Shriver went back to his mother, Eunice Shriver, with Ted Kennedy’s request of some proof that their father intended the foundation to focus its attention solely on the cause of mental retardation. Eunice was, not surprisingly, quite angry. “This again!” she exclaimed, probably referring to the fact that the issue had been raised at the last meeting. “Does he think we are lying?” she asked her son. Bobby said his uncle “just wants proof.” As expected, this didn’t sit well with Eunice at all. She got on the telephone with her brother and told him that the “proof” he wanted was not written, it was in fact verbal. In many conversations that Joseph had with her and with Sargent, she said, the family patriarch made it quite clear that all of the money from the foundation should be used for the purpose of researching mental retardation. “It’s what Father wanted and it’s what Mother wants,” Eunice said, according to one recollection of the conversation. “And I am not going to stand by and allow the trustees [meaning her siblings] to continue to question my own ethics or that of the foundation.” In other words, she was sick of the debate and not going to engage in it any longer.

  There were several more meetings in late 1983, but Eunice would not be swayed by her siblings. It was finally becoming clear to them that even as trustees they had no power to make decisions where the Kennedy Foundation was concerned, or as Ted put it in a letter to Sargent Shriver at this time, “I am sure my father intended for all of his children to take part in the decision-making process, and I am not sure that this is what has been occurring.”

  Finally, in January 1984, Ted, Pat, and Jean shot off an angry letter to Eunice telling her that, as far as they were concerned, the foundation was a family business and, as such, it should support all of the areas of philanthropy viewed worthwhile by the different members of the family. In other words, the foundation didn’t belong to Eunice—it belonged to all of them. They still had the same goals in mind for the way the money should be spent, according to what they wrote to Eunice, namely: the Kennedy Center, the Kennedy Library, work on the Kennedy compound, as well as several charities that interested Jean and Stephen, such as Jean’s own venture, the Very Special Arts.

  The siblings maintained that they were also unhappy about the way the Kennedy Library was being run as it related to researchers. Several Kennedy biographers had gotten hold of documents through the library that they were able to utilize in their work, books of which the family did not approve—such as the aforementioned Kennedys: An American Drama by Horowitz and Collier, which they felt had just added to the myriad problems young David Kennedy was experiencing. The Kennedy siblings wanted more restrictions placed on documents made available to researchers, which also meant
a complete review of the library’s holdings—and that was going to cost money. In Eunice’s view, that concern was chiefly to do with the family’s image. It might have surprised outsiders to know that she couldn’t have cared less about how the family was portrayed in books about them. “Do you think it matters in the least?” she would later say. “People will always write what they will write. We should be used to that by now.” Her interest was in mental retardation, not family public relations. (Of course, Eunice was also the first one to shoot off an angry letter to a newspaper if they published a falsehood about a family member, but as she would explain it, “I believe there’s a different standard for newspapers to be reliable. Books, you either believe the author or you don’t. But a newspaper, a daily newspaper, you want to know that what they are putting out there is the news, and it’s the truth.”) The Kennedy siblings also mentioned in their missive that “the next generation” of Kennedys needed to be brought into the business of the foundation as soon as possible and that if it were to survive it could only do so if the grandchildren began to take an interest in it.

  Now this matter, which had been brewing for years, had turned into a bit of a war. As far as Eunice Kennedy Shriver was concerned, the siblings (or trustees, as they were referred to) were engaged in a mutinous battle against her. The only thing she agreed with them on was that the next generation should be brought into the decision-making process of the foundation. That was it, though. Everything else she disagreed with. Moreover, in her view, getting the next generation involved in the foundation’s business wasn’t going to happen overnight; it would likely take five to ten years, she said. Eunice was now quite disenchanted with her siblings and wasn’t very friendly to any of them from January to April of 1984—which brings us back to the meeting at Ted’s home on April 9, 1984.