Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Read online

  Human beings don’t live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than a blink of the eye … I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of the eye is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with memory, so that its quality is immeasurable.

  And so he has.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project has been many years in the making. It would never have come to fruition without the assistance and guidance of many individuals and institutions.

  The archival research for this book was conducted primarily in four places: the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston, Massachusetts (where I pored through 170 cubic feet of uncatalogued Shriver material, much of it still sprinkled with rodent droppings from the Shriver family attic); the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, in Austin, Texas; the National Archives, in College Park, Maryland; the Chicago Historical Society; and the Kennedy Foundation archives, in Washington, DC. I greatly taxed the photocopying machines and drew heavily on the wisdom of librarians and archivists in all of these places. Particular thanks are due to Megan Desnoyers at the JFK Library and Allen Fisher at the LBJ Library. Yale University, the Canterbury School, the Browning School, and the Carroll County Historical Society were also generous in providing access to archives and historical materials.

  The Shriver family was generous in providing photos from their private family collection. I’m greatful to the archivists at the JFK Library (in particular, Allan Goodrich, James Hill, Mary Rose Grossman, and Nova Seals) for helping to produce additional photos. The entire library staff, it should be noted, was extremely tolerant of the three-month-old research assistant that my wife brought along with her on her trips here.

  The Blue Mountain Center, in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, provided the time and space for me to begin writing in the summer of 2001. Both the Atlantic Monthly and the American Prospect magazines were generous in allowing me protracted leaves-of-absence for research and writing. Special thanks to Cullen Murphy and David Bradley at the Atlantic—and to Toby Lester, Amy Meeker, Don Peck, Corby Kummer, and others—for covering for me during my absence.

  Through the years that I worked on this book, I relied on the research and editing assistance of several talented individuals. Katherine Arie and Julie Parker helped get me started by transcribing interviews. Jessica Chapel’s excellent research memos helped me fill in the factual gaps in Shriver’s life before 1960. (I think I still owe Jessica some overdue library books.) Kathy Crutcher deserves combat pay for providing library research, interview transcriptions, administrative work, and good company through the long, hot summer of 2003, when I worked out of a third-floor walk-up office without air conditioning in Boston’s North End. (In July we measured the temperature inside the office at 102 degrees.) And Jessica Dorman provided emergency editing services when I was still wrestling with a 1,300-page manuscript; Jess’s sympathy, judgment, and—most important under the circumstances—ability to read quickly made this a better book.

  Ron Golfarb, agent extraordinaire, deserves much of the credit for keeping this project afloat when it had begun to take on water in the spring of 2002. Ron took firm hold of the rudder and navigated the ship to calmer seas. Once arriving in port at Smithsonian Books (to belabor the metaphor), the book found itself in the hands of an expert editorial team. Caroline Newman, my editor, understood my vision for the book and championed it with passion. Director Don Fehr also understood what the book was about—and made Smithsonian into the natural home for this biography. Carolyn Gleason and Joanne Reams managed to cope with my missed deadlines through the fall of 2003, after I had returned to full-time magazine work. Joanne Ainsworth did the copy editing; I have worked with many copy editors over the years, and Joanne is among the very best. Emily Sollie has held my hand through the editing and production process, patiently answering all of my questions. Brian Barth deserves credit for the cover design, the typeface, and the layout.

  Of all the many people who contributed to this project, several deserve particular mention. Members of the Shriver family—and especially Sargent Shriver—were generous with their time and hospitality. Jeannie Main, who has been Shriver’s deputy for more than thirty years, was not only an invaluable source of information and guide to all things Shriver but also helped get me through many dangerous thickets that otherwise might have permanently entangled me. And this book would almost certainly never have made it through to publication without the wisdom, advice, legal expertise, shrewd editorial eye, and steady exhortations of William Josephson. (Another biographer—Nancy Milford, the award-winning author of books on Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay—once described Josephson as her Virgil, leading her through the circles of hell and purgatory. If Dante should ever return to this earth and if Virgil should be unavailable, he should consider calling on Bill Josephson to be his guide.)

  Finally my wife, Susanna, has gone far beyond the call of spousal obligation in her contribution to this book. She tolerated my extended research travels, my long hours of work, and the financial debt this project incurred on the family. She performed countless hours of research and administrative work over the years, right up to the very day she gave birth to our first child. (And she was back at the research and fact-checking by the time our daughter was two weeks old.) She also edited, tracked down photo rights, and contributed to the book in numerous additional ways. But the hardest and most important task she performed was to keep me sane throughout this arduous journey; no one else could have done that.

  INTRODUCTION

  In early 1964 it looked as though Sargent Shriver would become the next vice president of the United States. After a successful three years directing the Peace Corps, Shriver had just returned from a round-the-world tour on behalf of President Lyndon Johnson. His stewardship of the Peace Corps work had made Shriver enormously popular, and his portrait, handsome and statesmanlike, had recently graced the cover of Time magazine. For Johnson, a Shriver vice presidency would send a powerful symbolic message about the continuing place of the Kennedy family in the executive branch.

  Rumors that Johnson might select Shriver as his running mate for the 1964 election had swirled around for weeks, but without confirmation. When reporters queried Shriver about the prospect of the vice presidency, he deflected the questions by saying Johnson hadn’t asked him. Privately, however, he wondered. The day after President Kennedy was shot, Johnson had cornered Shriver in the foyer of the White House Cabinet Room and said, “Sarge … I’m completely overwhelmed, but I do want to say that I’ve always had a very high regard for you. It hasn’t been possible for me to do anything about it until now, but I intend to.” Shriver wondered what Johnson had meant by that.

  In fact, Johnson did want Shriver to be his vice president, for reasons both exalted and Machiavellian. Having seen Shriver in action, Johnson had a high regard for the Peace Corps director’s abilities; he particularly admired Shriver’s talent for charming Congress. And he certainly saw the symbolic appeal of bringing a Kennedy family member onto the Democratic ticket. But the president’s strongest motivation for selecting Shriver was more personal: He loathed Bobby Kennedy. (Bobby, if anything, loathed Johnson even more.) Naming Shriver to the ticket would allow him to avoid putting Bobby on it—something there was strong pressure for him to do—yet still claim that he was allowing the “Kennedy Era” to continue. In short, naming Shriver to the ticket would be a way for Johnson to score political points while simultaneously sticking it to his nemesis. So Johnson’s aides leaked Shriver’s impending nomination to Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who published the story in their influential Washington Post column. The Post’s editors thought the column of sufficient interest that they took the unu
sual step of running the column on page one of the newspaper.

  Shriver had been out of town when the Post column ran, and to avoid press questioning he retreated to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port. There, he did evade the press, but he couldn’t avoid Bobby. “What’s this about the vice presidency?” Bobby asked him when he got Sarge alone. “Did you plant that story with Evans and Novak?” Shriver said that he hadn’t—that in fact he had been out of town and had spoken to no one in the Johnson administration about the vice presidency. But Bobby, still fueled by grief at Jack’s death, grabbed Shriver by the lapels and moved in close to his brother-in-law’s face. “Let me make something clear,” Bobby growled. “There’s not going to be a Kennedy on this ticket. And if there were, it would be me.”

  Shriver both knew and didn’t know what he was getting into when he married into the Kennedy family in 1953. He knew that he was hitching his fate to that of a large, powerful, overweening, exciting family, and that it would be a challenge to maintain his own identity among such a formidable clan. What he didn’t know, in 1953, was that he was joining what would become an American political dynasty, the closest thing America has ever had to royalty. This would have tremendous costs and benefits for Shriver’s own political ambitions, as it involved constantly negotiating the proper balance between serving his own interests and deferring to the family’s.

  For the most part, Shriver managed this balance deftly. He successfully contributed to and shared in the Kennedy triumphs—without ever being sullied by the Kennedy scandals. Many who entered the Kennedy orbit, whether as lovers or advisers or employees, never really emerged again as independent entities. From the moment of their association with the family, their identities became fixed as “Kennedy acolytes” or “Kennedy in-laws.” Shriver was willing, at times, to dim his own bright star to accommodate the whole shimmering constellation of Kennedys; but in the firmament of history, his star glows with its own inner luminosity—not just reflected Kennedy light. It took a strong man to marry one of Joseph P. Kennedy’s daughters and not be overwhelmed. Shriver survived, however, and in a family of outsized personalities, he held on to his own.

  Shriver was, it might be said, “the Good Kennedy”: in his idealism, heartfelt Catholicism, and commitment to Democratic politics and public service, he was perhaps more Kennedy than the Kennedys—and yet he was also, in his personal rectitude, moral probity, and gentle kindness, less Kennedy than they were. He was in the Kennedy family without being fully of it.

  Shriver’s achievements in his own right make him one of the major figures of the second half of the twentieth century. His period of greatest prominence in American public life—1960 to 1972—corresponds neatly with the rise and decline of New Frontier-Great Society liberalism; the arc of his political career closely paralleled the waxing and waning of an important era. Shriver’s life therefore provides an illuminating window on a significant chapter of American history.

  Shriver was one of the reasons John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960. (Some have plausibly argued that Shriver was the reason Kennedy won, citing in particular Kennedy’s telephone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King that Shriver had urged the candidate to make.) He was the man most responsible (besides Kennedy himself) for stocking the Kennedy administration’s cabinet, and the executive branch generally, with “the best and the brightest.” He created, legislated, and ran the Peace Corps, one of the most unusual—both in its function and in its administrative culture—agencies in the history of American government.

  The impact and significance of this creation should not be understated. Tens of thousands of American Peace Corps volunteers have served abroad; even today, volunteers who have never met the man feel a personal affection for the Peace Corps’ founding father, whose spirit still infuses the organization’s mission. More remarkably, millions of citizens in developing countries have been indirectly touched by Shriver’s presence. On several occasions, I have witnessed current African leaders come up to Shriver and tell him that they owe their careers to him: It was Peace Corps teachers, they said, who gave them their education in the early 1960s. When Shriver launched the Peace Corps he was, in effect, planting the seed of an idea; that idea continues to flower and bear fruit more than forty years later. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one of the first things President George W. Bush did was to call for an expansion of the Peace Corps program.

  As head of the War on Poverty under President Johnson from 1964 to 1968, Shriver created a host of programs—such as Head Start, the Job Corps, VISTA, Foster Grandparents, and Legal Services for the Poor—each of which rivals the Peace Corps in historical significance. These and other programs started by Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) still exist, and Shriver’s spiritual presence continues to animate them. I have been at national Head Start conferences where Shriver has been mobbed like a rock star, surrounded by Head Start parents and teachers (many of them Head Start alumni) wanting to thank him and shake his hand. Shriver’s programs affected not only those who were served by them but also those who ran them. Many members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet and top-level staff had worked in programs started and led by Shriver (several were former Peace Corps volunteers, several had worked on his 1972 or 1976 election campaigns, and several had been in the first generation of lawyers working for Legal Services for the Poor). Shriver cultivated a generation of dedicated public servants who will continue to exert a powerful influence on American history for years to come.

  By the time Shriver stepped down from heading the OEO in 1968, after miraculously preserving the antipoverty program from what seemed like certain extinction, he was a minor legend. Although he had suffered through difficult times at the OEO, when it seemed as if every constituency in the world was attacking him, he emerged with his reputation for political salesmanship, imaginative policymaking, and personal integrity intact. Indeed, it was partly Shriver’s great popularity—and the political clout it conferred—that led Lyndon Johnson to dispatch Shriver to Paris as ambassador to France: Johnson worried that if Shriver had stayed stateside to campaign for Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 primaries, Bobby’s momentum would be unstoppable.

  Shriver’s arrival in Paris coincided with such momentous events as the famous Paris riots of 1968 and the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, and Shriver once again found himself at the center of history. The relationship between the United States and France was then at its postwar chilliest. Charles de Gaulle was outspokenly critical of US foreign policy, and he was threatening to withdraw France from NATO. But Shriver, through his personal relationship with de Gaulle, did as much as anyone to thaw relations between the two countries.

  Returning to the United States in 1970, Shriver headed the successful 1970 midterm elections for the Democrats. Then, in 1972, he joined the doomed presidential campaign of George McGovern as the vice presidential nominee after scandal caused the original nominee to bow out. Having been present at the creation of New Frontier-Great Society liberalism, Shriver was now present at its evident demise—the trouncing of the Democratic ticket, 49 states to 1.

  In some ways, Shriver always seemed to be just missing his moment. In the 1950s and 1960s, Shriver’s reputation in Chicago was such that, had family obligations not drawn him to Washington, he very likely would have become a senator from Illinois or its governor—and from there, he would have had a plausible launching pad for the presidency. In 1964, if Bobby Kennedy hadn’t scuttled Shriver’s vice presidential hopes, it might have been Johnson and Shriver, not Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, who trounced Barry Goldwater—and consequently Shriver, not Humphrey, whom the Democrats selected to take on Richard Nixon in 1968.

  In August 1968, as the Democratic Convention began, it looked as though Humphrey would select Shriver as his vice president. Once again the “Kennedy wing” of the Democratic Party intervened. Polls showed Shriver faring better head-to-head than Maine senator Edmund Muskie against Republican vice presidential nominee Spiro Agnew;
but the Kennedy wing, afraid that Shriver would jump ahead of Ted Kennedy in the line of family succession, put pressure on Humphrey to keep Shriver off the ticket. Given the less than 1 percent margin by which Humphrey lost, it’s easy to imagine a Humphrey-Shriver combination winning the 1968 election, making the last quarter of twentieth-century American history vastly different from how it played out.

  By the time Shriver did grace a presidential ticket, as George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, the timing was wrong; the moment had passed. When Shriver ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1976, he was seen by some in the party as a relic of a bygone time. He got into that race late and then, although he was running as the “Kennedy candidate,” failed to secure the absolutely critical endorsement of his own brother-in-law, Senator Ted Kennedy.

  Shriver’s relationship with the Kennedys was complex. They buoyed him up to heights and achievements he would never otherwise have attained—and they held him back, thwarting his political advancement. In 1959, standing alongside the sunbathing Joe Kennedy by the ocean in Palm Beach, Shriver ventured to his father-in-law that political operatives in Illinois were asking him to run for governor. Mr. Kennedy told Shriver in no uncertain terms that he was not to run; to have three Catholics on the Democratic ticket in Illinois (Dick Daley for mayor, Shriver for governor, and JFK for president) would spell doom for Jack Kennedy’s presidential hopes. No, Mr. Kennedy said, he should forget about being governor for now; Jack needed Shriver to help with his campaign. Shriver dutifully agreed, and he went on to manage key parts of Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign.