Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Read online

  “Scott Stossel’s biography of Sargent Shriver is not only the fullest life of the man we are ever likely to have but also a superb reconstruction of mid- and late-twentieth-century American liberalism—its hopes, successes, failures, and enduring legacy to the national experience. Stossel’s book will be required reading for anyone interested in the political affairs of twentieth-century America and the story of the Kennedy dynasty.”

  —ROBERT DALLEK, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963

  “I couldn’t put it down. All that is familiar about U.S. history from the 1950s through the 1970s seems fresh when followed through the career of JFK’s smartest brother-in-law. Sarge is a splendid biography, compellingly written.”

  —ERNEST MAY, Harvard historian and coauthor of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis

  “An inspiring and skillfully told story of a bright American hero … Stossel combines a reporter’s eye for detail, a storyteller’s sense of drama, and a scholar’s consciousness of history.”

  —America

  “Stossel has written a very interesting and incredibly detailed account of Shriver’s remarkable record … Stossel has recounted Shriver’s life with a fullness that brings light and meaning to politics and governing in twentieth-century America.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Sargent Shriver is the most enthusiastic and creative public leader I have ever known. A wonderful biography of the man who gave us the Peace Corps and so much more.”

  —DONNA SHALALA, president of the University of Miami, former United States secretary of health and human services,

  and Peace Corps volunteer

  “An intriguing and candid account of one of the most creative and captivating Americans of the twentieth century and an antidote to anyone’s millennium blues. Sarge is also an upbeat yet sometimes heartbreaking tale of life in an extraordinary family, enjoying the triumphs and enduring the tragedies of the Kennedys.”

  —HARRIS WOFFORD, former U.S. senator and chairman of America’s Promise

  “Whether as a public figure who improved the lives of millions or as a private man whose gifts of love and grace are known to his family and friends, Sargent Shriver is singular. To read this book is to be energized.”

  —COLMAN MCCARTHY, journalist and founder of The Center for Teaching Peace

  “Shriver represents the best in concerned commitment and creativity in the American experience. This book will be a real inspiration to everyone.”

  —MICKEY KANTOR, former United States secretary of commerce and U.S. trade representative

  “A highly readable biography of the liberal stalwart.”

  —Kirkus (starred review)

  “[An] impressive new biography.”

  —JOHN PODESTA, president of the Center for American Progress, in The National Catholic Reporter

  “Stossel has written a really good biography. I hadn’t expected it to be; so many such books aren’t. But there are many things Stossel tells that I never learned while working for Shriver … Stossel, to his credit, gets to the essence of Shriver.”

  —MICHAEL NOVAK, Weekly Standard

  “Stossel … resurrects the career of one of the most important public figures of the 1960s.”

  —Journal of American History

  Other Press edition 2011

  Copyright © 2004 by R. Sargent Shriver

  First published in the United States of America in hardcover by Smithsonian Books, 2004

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Stossel, Scott.

  Sarge : the life and times of Sargent Shriver / Scott Stossel; foreword by Bill Moyers.

  p. cm.

  “First published in the United States of America in hardcover by Smithsonian Books, 2004.”

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-514-3

  1. Shriver, Sargent, 1915–2011. 2. Politicians—United States—Biography. 3. Democratic Party (U.S.)—Biography. 4. Peace Corps (U.S.)—Biography. 5. Kennedy family. 6.

  Businessmen—Illinois—Chicago—Biography. 7. Lawyers—United States—Biography. 8.

  Ambassadors—United States—Biography. 9. United States—Politics and government—

  1945–1989. 10. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.

  E840.8.S525S37 2011

  973.924092—dc23

  [B]

  2011040439

  v3.1

  For Susanna

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Bill Moyers

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART 1: YOUTH (1915–1945)

  1. States’ Rights, Religious Freedom, and Local Self-Government

  2. The Education of a Leader

  3. A Yale Man

  4. War

  PART 2: THE CHICAGO YEARS (1945–1960)

  5. Joseph P. Kennedy

  6. Eunice

  7. The Long Courtship

  8. Marriage

  9. Religion and Civil Rights

  10. Chicago Politics

  11. Dawn of the New Frontier

  12. The Talent Hunt

  PART 3: THE PEACE CORPS (1961–1963)

  13. The Towering Task

  14. Shriver’s Socratic Seminar

  15. The Battle for Independence

  16. “The Trip”

  17. Storming Capitol Hill

  18. Shriverizing

  19. Timberlawn

  20. Bigger, Better, Faster

  21. Psychiatrists and Astrologers

  22. Growing Pains

  23. Tragedy

  PART 4: THE WAR ON POVERTY (1964–1968)

  24. Shriver for Vice President

  25. Origins of the War on Poverty

  26. “Mr. Poverty”

  27. A Beautiful Hysteria

  28. Mobilizing for War

  29. Wooing Congress

  30. The Law of the Jungle

  31. “Political Pornography”

  32. Head Start

  33. A Revolution in Poverty Law

  34. “Double Commander-in-Chief”

  35. The OEO in Trouble

  36. King of the Hill

  37. What Next?

  PART 5: FRANCE (1968–1970)

  38. Springtime in Paris

  39. “Sarjean Shreevair”

  40. The 1968 Election

  41. Nixon in Paris

  42. Au Revoir

  PART 6: DEMOCRATIC POLITICS (1970–1976)

  43. The Politics of Life

  44. International Men of Mystery

  45. Shriver for Vice President

  46. Shriver for President

  PART 7: PRIVATE LIFE, PUBLIC SERVICE (1976–2003)

  47. Nuclear Politics

  48. Special Olympics, a Family Affair

  49. Faith and Hope

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  FOREWORD BY BILL MOYERS

  He changed my life.

  But that is th
e least of it. I can think of no American alive today who has touched more lives for the better than Sargent Shriver. Reel off the names of the organizations he inspired, led, or created and you have a sense of his multiplying legacy: Peace Corps, Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, Community Action, Upward Bound, Foster Grandparents, Special Olympics. To each he brought the passionate conviction that no one need be spiritually unemployed when there is so much to be done in the world.

  He is the radical I would like to have been if only I had met earlier his inner circle: Maritain, Teilhard, Merton, Dorothy Day. He is the Christian who comes closest, in my experience, to the imitation of Christ in a life of service. Not for him what Archibald MacLeish, the poet laureate he often quoted, called “the snake-like sin of coldness-at-the-heart.” This book could well have been entitled, A Leap of Faith, for Shriver has lived his life as a great gamble that what we do to serve, help, and care for our fellow human beings is what ultimately counts.

  He redefined patriotism for us. Love of country, yes—and he had five years in the navy to show for it. But he carries two passports—one stamped American, the other human being. To one group of departing Peace Corp volunteers after another he would proclaim, in essence, that all of us are members of the same great human endeavor but that our tents are pitched on different ground, causing us to look out on the passing scene from different angles. This, he said, means you go abroad cautious about the help you can be to others; the only change that really matters must come from within. But you go because the world is your home.

  He is the one man I know who, if he had obtained the White House, might truly have transformed how we Americans see ourselves and how we see the world. A few millimeters of tilt in the political wheel of fortune and he might have become president. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson had to choose a vice presidential nominee and only two men were in the running in LBJ’s mind, the only precinct that counted. One was Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, with whom LBJ had served in the Senate and who he believed could secure the labor, liberal, and civil rights constituencies that were still nervous about Johnson’s own progressive credentials.

  The other was Shriver, JFK’s brother-in-law. That kinship intrigued Johnson: Could this be the way to keep the Kennedys in the tent without having Robert Kennedy on the ticket? That was not the only reason, however, that LBJ meditated on Shriver as a possibility. The two had spent considerable time together in 1961 when Johnson, then vice president, had “tutored” Sarge in how to sell the Peace Corps to Congress, whose powerful barons considered the idea naive if not hare-brained. I had worked in the Kennedy-Johnson campaign and served briefly in the new vice president’s office before wrangling myself a place on the team Shriver was putting together to turn the Peace Corps into a going concern. After Sarge and I left our first lengthy tutorial at Johnson’s knee, the vice president called me and said that the way to sell the Peace Corps was to sell Shriver: “They won’t be able to resist him.”

  And they weren’t. Over the next few months Sarge and I called on every member of Congress—House and Senate—to pitch the Peace Corps. Most were dazzled to be courted by the president’s charismatic brother-in-law, of course, but what turned the tide was not his glamour but his passion. He was the Apostle Paul and they were the gentiles of Asia Minor; the theology paled in comparison with the intense ardor and appeal of the messenger. I saw jaded, world-weary, cynical politicians begin to pay attention as Shriver talked about America’s revolutionary ideals, about our mission in the world—not to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, he would say, paraphrasing some Founding Father, but to demonstrate that Americans are down-to-earth, believable, card-carrying idealists who can show that democracy begins with a teacher in a classroom and clean water coming from a new pump in the village square. There was one particular megalomaniacal, unreconstructed Southern racist whose chairmanship of a key House subcommittee meant life or death to our appropriations. He was aghast that volunteers living and working abroad under official American auspices might not only “practice miscegenation” but bring it home with them. Sarge never blinked. “Congressman,” he said, “surely you can trust young Americans to do abroad exactly what they do back in your district in Louisiana.” We left the man scratching his head, and much later a member of his staff quoted him as saying, “I was had.” Indeed. While the chairman remained recalcitrant, Shriver plucked off a majority of the full committee above him and mitigated his obstructionism.

  LBJ chose Humphrey, whom I also revered, and Sarge soldiered away at the war on poverty until he went to Paris as ambassador. He still had a presidential race ahead of him—as George McGovern’s belated running mate—and then he turned to those pursuits that mark the character of a man who believes in public service without the aura, power, or reward of public office. I have often wondered, though, what the history of the last thirty-five years might have been if he had been president. Even now, as the journalist Colman McCarthy writes, Shriver “can look back on four decades of public service and a record of successful innovation unmatched by any contemporary leader in or out of government.” But imagine him populating the White House and the government with the astounding array of unconventional citizens he brought to the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity—journalists, public interest lawyers, psychologists (I have not been able to confirm it but McCarthy believes Sarge hired the first psychiatrist ever to be employed by a federal agency), business executives, poets, physicians, and imaginative career civil service officers who were frustrated by the ossified bureaucracies where they worked. To run our programs in India he recruited the American authority in high-altitude medicine who had himself been a leader in the first assaults on K-2 in the Himalayas. To Nepal he dispatched another climber who was a noted professor of English at Phillips Exeter Academy. The West Coast head of the NAACP, the Agency of International Development’s most creative bureaucrat, a seasoned practitioner of West Virginia politics—not since the early days of FDR’s New Deal had such a critical mass of unconventional talent descended on Washington.

  Colman McCarthy’s story is typical and instructive. In the summer of 1966, having left a Trappist monastery, McCarthy was roving the country writing articles about civil rights and the antiwar movement. One of his articles in the National Catholic Reporter was somewhat critical of a Shriver poverty project in Harlem. Shriver tracked him down and said he had a job opening for “a no man because I already have enough yes men.” They met for dinner. For four hours. Not a word was said about the job. Instead, they talked about philosophers and theologians, about Tolstoy, Thomas Merton, and Flannery O’Connor. Only once did McCarthy get lost in the conversation—“when Shriver began talking about the nuanced differences between the early, middle and late Maritain.” Shriver asked questions about the Trappists. “He said he could probably handle the silence, early rising and manual labor well enough, but the obedience would be a killer. Then he exclaimed, ‘Welcome aboard, you’re hired.’ ”

  He did not have to recruit me. I lobbied for the job, having to overcome the reluctance of LBJ to let me leave his staff and the opposition of the White House mafia, who wanted me to continue to serve as a liaison between them and Johnson’s Texans, as I had done in the campaign. Shriver braved both Johnson and Kennedy to take me aboard. I still possess the neat blue stationery on which later he made me the offer, at age twenty-eight, to become his deputy director. They were the best days of my life.

  He was more than a leader, more than my boss. He was a one-man ecumenical society, as curious about my training in a conventional Baptist seminary as I was about his deep roots in Catholic spirituality. He had once been an altar boy to a cardinal; the only place other than the Peace Corps he would have wanted to be, he once told me, was somehow serving close to John XXIII, and on a long plane ride he discoursed in detail how he thought Pope John’s “science of the heart” could transform the Church from a medieval institution into a powerful progressive force in a world polarized by hard-crusted i
deology, implacable militarism, and rampant materialism. There was an opening, no doubt about it. Shriver came to national prominence after a long season during which young Americans had been nurtured in cold-war passions and subjected to the poisons of the Red Scare years. It was widely said that they welcomed the complacency and comfort of the good life in a booming economy. I once gave him a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam with his arm around a youthful American. They were looking at students demonstrating in some foreign country as Uncle Sam said: “We want our young people reading history, not writing it.” He studied it, broke into that great broad-chinned grin, and said: “We’ll give them a chance to make it.”

  They were ready, and from all walks of life they responded. They came from their own motives and with their own aspirations and ideals, and Sarge believed in them. Once he told a gathering of them: “The politics of death is bureaucracy, routine, rules, status quo. The politics of life is personal initiative, creativity, flair, dash, a little daring. The politics of death is calculation, prudence, measured gestures. The politics of life is experience, spontaneity, grace, directness. The politics of death is fear of youth. The politics of life is to trust the young to their own experiences.”

  To serve with such a man is a life-defining experience. One never forgets the personal touches of a friend who had a wife and five children himself and a rollicking extended clan. When my wife, Judith, experienced a miscarriage, he showed up at the hospital with a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. When our infant son was struck by a strange, undefined affliction, Sarge intervened, insisted that we take the boy to Johns Hopkins University Hospital for the scrutiny of one of the world’s leading pediatricians, a Shriver friend.

  I did not think a book could do justice to the man. To his accomplishments and exploits, yes. But to the whole dimension of a remarkably composed life—very unlikely. I was wrong, and Scott Stossel’s work achieves what I thought impossible. He has captured in these pages the full measure of a great humanitarian. Reading it over the weekend, I thought back to a book Sarge gave me decades ago, in the early flowering of our friendship—Chaim Potok’s The Promise. There it is written: