Shriver’s first encounter with the Kennedys came in 1946 when family patriarch Joseph recruited him to serve as director of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, a home furnishings enterprise. A year earlier, Joseph had bought the monolithic limestone and terra-cotta landmark in Chicago for $13 million, which, at half of what it cost to build, was a very good investment. “People often ask where the Kennedys’ greatest source of income comes from,” Sargent Shriver once said while taking a journalist on a tour of the property. “Well, here it is.” (Though it was an off-the-record remark, it was published just the same. Shriver would never make such a statement on the record.) In fact, over the years it would be the income generated by the rental of office and exhibit space in Merchandise Mart that financed the public and private lives of all of the Kennedys, from Joseph and Rose down to the second generation and the third and—today—even the fourth and fifth. At the time Joseph hired him, Sargent had been working as a journalist, first at Time and then Newsweek. He became an official part of the Kennedy family in 1954 when he married Eunice at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Many people today believe that Sargent Shriver started the Peace Corps. That’s not exactly true. It had actually been President John F. Kennedy’s idea, but Sarge implemented it.
In JFK’s first public utterance following his oath of office on becoming president, his inaugural speech in January 1961, he threw down the gauntlet to the American people, imploring, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” This call to service did not fall trippingly off his tongue; it came together following his anguish over the exact wording of how to elicit the most profound response from an eager public willing to fall loyally into lockstep with the new leader of the free world. President Kennedy later pointed out that the Soviet Union had “hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, and nurses… prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism.” The United States had no such program, and Kennedy wanted to involve Americans more actively in the cause of global democracy, peace, development, and freedom. He turned to Sargent Shriver, asking him to organize a Peace Corps Task Force. An executive order dated March 1, 1961, less than two months after Kennedy’s inauguration, established the Peace Corps with Sargent Shriver as its first director. After half a century of service, the Peace Corps continues to be vital and to grow. Inspired by JFK’s vision, it has become an agency devoted to world peace, with volunteers helping individuals to build better lives for themselves, their family, their community, and their country.
After Sargent Shriver distinguished himself in the administration of JFK, he continued to serve Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s death, creating for LBJ the Office of Economic Opportunity (later the War on Poverty and eventually the Shriver Center) and serving as its first director. It was through the OEO that Shriver created Head Start, a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services brilliantly conceived as an early intervention program to provide education and nutrition for low-income children and their families. “It was not primarily an IQ idea,” Sargent said of Head Start, “it was an idea of intervening early in their lives to… help them become more capable of going to school, which is normally the first hurdle outside the home a person faces.”
Sarge always seemed to recognize that there was more to life than politics, maybe unusual in a family like the Kennedys where, at least for the men, politics often seemed to matter more than anything. To Sarge, his family was paramount. He had a strong moral code and passed it on to his children. “He’s the one who taught me it’s never worth stabbing someone in the back to get ahead,” his daughter, Maria Shriver, would recall. “He said that talent and smarts always wins out, that if you’re good, you’ll get the great job. He said never let a puffed-up ego make decisions for you.”
Another priority for Shriver was his faith. “Wherever he traveled to, the first question off his lips would be, ‘Where is the nearest Catholic church?’ ” his son Mark Shriver observed. “Daddy was joyful till the day he died and I think that joy was deeply rooted in his love affair with God. Daddy loved God and God loved him right back. Daddy let go. God was in control and, oh, what a relationship they had.”
“A Very Good Shriver”
Repeatedly over the years, the needs and desires of various Kennedy family members and their advisers would take precedence over what would have been in Sargent Shriver’s own best interest. Because he was unfailingly loyal to his wife’s family, there was always a sort of glass ceiling to how much Sarge would be able to achieve as a public servant. Not that his accomplishments weren’t many and weren’t historical in their own right, because they were. However, one has to wonder how much more he might have accomplished if not for the fact that one Kennedy or another was always standing in his way—first in 1959, then in 1964, 1968, 1972, and finally in 1976.
It started in the spring of 1959 when there was scuttlebutt that Shriver might run for governor of Illinois. Because he had strong connections in that state and a solid groundswell of support, he toyed with the idea. He hadn’t even made a decision one way or another about it, though, when Joseph Kennedy heard the rumblings. “What’s this I hear about you maybe running for governor?” Joseph asked his son-in-law one afternoon at La Guerida, the Palm Beach estate. Sargent said he hadn’t made up his mind yet but that, yes, he had been approached and there seemed to be significant interest. “Well, let me help make up your mind,” Joseph said. “It can’t happen. The whole family is behind Jack for president right now. So forget it. Jack needs your help with his campaign.” And that was the end of that—at least for the time being.
“Not only did Joseph ask for Sargent’s assistance, Jack also had asked for his help… as did his wife, Eunice,” Hugh Sidey recalled. “That was a lot of pressure. There wasn’t much Sargent could do but sublimate his own desires for that of the family’s, which would, as it would turn out, become a recurring way of life for him.”
In temperament and personality, Sarge wasn’t as shrewd as JFK or as cunning as Bobby, and everyone knew it. Sarge was thought of not only by some of the Kennedys but also by many of their counselors—men who wielded great influence over members of the family, such as speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell—as a lightweight, a pretender to the throne. They looked at him as naive, a romanticist who believed too much in the good of people, rarely recognizing man’s duplicitous nature. (That was certainly an ironic view of him, especially when one considers that President Kennedy’s New Frontier would be built on a platform of idealism.) “They believed Shriver had good ideas and was obviously able to make them work in government, but because he wasn’t a real Kennedy, he’d never have the same drive, ambition, and smarts as a real Kennedy,” is how veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas put it. Maybe Bobby said it best when once asked what he thought about Sargent Shriver: “He’s a very good Shriver,” was his response. Ted also felt that way. Surprisingly, so did Stephen Smith, Jean’s husband, who was also not a “real” Kennedy but, in his view, at least never tried to act like one.
The next time Sargent Shriver’s ambition was thwarted was in 1964. At the time, Lyndon Johnson had been considering possible running mates for the presidential election, and Sargent weighed heavily on his mind. Johnson respected Shriver so much that on the day JFK was shot he promised him that if he could, he would one day show just how much he appreciated him. By 1964, with three years of success with the Peace Corps under his belt (Time magazine had reported, “The Peace Corps has captured the public imagination as has no other single act of the Kennedy administration”), Shriver continued to demonstrate the leadership qualities he had shown as an important member of the Johnson cabinet as special assistant to the president. However, Shriver’s role within the Johnson administration always found him in a difficult position—stuck in the middle between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy and the Kennedy family.
Johnson wasn’t in office ve
ry long before Bobby made it clear that he might be interested in running against him in the 1968 election. For that reason, RFK never felt comfortable that Shriver was still a part of LBJ’s administration. For his part, Bobby had lasted as attorney general under LBJ for only ten months after his brother’s death, before departing to run for, and win, his seat in the Senate representing New York. But Shriver was still working for LBJ. “The fact that LBJ had such a direct pipeline to the Kennedys through one of their own, namely Sargent Shriver, troubled a lot of the family members,” said Jack Valenti, who handled press relations for Lyndon Johnson (and went on to become the longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America). Some even thought that Shriver’s being a pipeline to the Kennedys was precisely why LBJ had brought him into his administration in the first place. Others would find this a simplification of LBJ’s thinking, though it’s difficult to believe that it hadn’t at least crossed his mind, especially considering his crafty personality. In fact, Johnson had other reasons for wanting Shriver around.
Of all the Kennedys, LBJ loathed Bobby Kennedy with a burning, searing passion. Everyone knew it—and everyone also knew that Bobby felt the same way about Johnson. Still, because of the memory of JFK, Johnson suspected he would have a clear advantage at the polls if he could at least try to stomach Bobby on the ticket with him. But that was asking a lot—more than LBJ could conceive of, in fact. One way for him to avoid the problem of aligning himself with a running mate he detested was to associate himself with the next best thing in the campaign—a Kennedy brother-in-law and, it could be argued, the best of the bunch: Sargent Shriver. To LBJ, this seemed like a very good strategy. “Most people liked and respected Sargent, and LBJ could put up with him a lot easier than he could any other Kennedy family member, with the possible exception of Jackie,” said Jack Valenti. Because it became such a serious consideration for him, word of a possible LBJ-Shriver ticket soon leaked to the press.
Scott Stossel has a very telling story in his excellent book Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. One day in the spring of 1964, Sargent Shriver was at the Kennedy compound relaxing when Bobby Kennedy happened by. Shriver and Kennedy had always had a difficult, though usually respectful, relationship. Though they tolerated each other because of Eunice, the two were like oil and water. Whereas Shriver was amiable, good-natured, and diplomatic, Bobby was moody, explosive, and dogmatic.
“What’s this I hear about you being on the Johnson ticket as vice president?” Bobby asked his brother-in-law, according to Sargent’s later memory of events. The two men faced each other, standing just inches apart. Bobby tended to invade another’s “personal space” when he was being confrontational. Shriver would recall feeling immediately uncomfortable.
“Well, nothing has been decided,” Shriver said cautiously. “So, I’m not sure what will happen.”
Suddenly, in one swift and threatening moment, Bobby reached out and pulled Sargent in by his collar. “Let me make something clear,” he said in a tone that could only be described as menacing. “There’s not going to be a Kennedy on this ticket,” he said. “And if there were, it would be me.”
Shriver didn’t know how to respond. “Well, like I said,” he told Bobby, backing away from him but still standing his ground. “Nothing’s been decided.”
Bobby sized him up for a moment, then turned and walked away without comment.
Bobby Kennedy
After Joseph Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash death in World War II and JFK’s assassination in 1963, it fell upon Joseph’s third son, Bobby, to once again fulfill what the ambassador had always considered the family’s destiny—the presidency of the United States. Born on November 20, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of nine children of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and her husband, Joseph, Robert Francis Kennedy inherited not only his maternal grandfather’s lack of height but also, as it would happen, his feisty determination. The runt of the litter, he would one day grow into an alpha male, but not before struggling academically with his early education, attending by actual count seven different public and Catholic schools from grades one through twelve. He even repeated the third grade in public school in Bronxville, New York, after his family moved there. He always seemed to be challenged by his older brothers, and, like them, he enlisted in the Naval Reserve before his eighteenth birthday in 1944 and signed up for V12 officer training. Bobby also followed his older brothers to Harvard and, despite his size, made the varsity football team, earning a letter his senior year. Unlike them, though, he chose the University of Virginia for law school, enrolling in 1948 and receiving his degree in 1951, following his marriage a year earlier to Ethel Skakel. He graduated from law school in June 1951, and a month later, in July, his and Ethel’s first child, Kathleen, was born. The rest of their brood followed in rapid succession: Joseph in 1952, Robert Jr. in 1954, David in 1955, Mary Courtney in 1956, Michael in 1958, Mary Kerry in 1959, Christopher in 1963, Matthew in 1965, Douglas in 1967, and Rory in 1968, six months after Bobby’s death.
Making babies would prove to be a sideline for Bobby Kennedy as he also busied himself with the family’s business—politics.
In late 1959, Bobby left the Senate Rackets Committee to run Jack’s successful presidential campaign. Proving himself to be an important adviser to the president, Bobby was rewarded by being appointed to head the Justice Department as attorney general. He was dogged in his resolve to rid America of the underworld, to the point that some of his adversaries—and colleagues, for that matter—thought of him as an angry lightweight pugilist, always eager for a good scrap. In fact, no attorney general in history had ever wielded the kind of wide-ranging influence on a president’s administration that Bobby did.
Bobby also became a tireless implementer of his brother’s civil rights program, going after elected officials and others in authority in the Deep South who would deprive blacks and other minorities of their basic civil rights. At the forefront of great change, he and JFK shared a vision that voting was a means to the solution of racial injustice. Together they introduced the most sweeping piece of civil rights legislation since the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With strong support from LBJ, it was passed after Jack’s death.
If he was hard-hitting in the public arena, Bobby could be just as tough privately. “Incompetence would upset him,” said David Burke, Ted’s legislative assistant and close friend who went on to become vice president of ABC News in 1977 and president of CBS News ten years later. “Lack of follow-through would upset him,” added Burke. “Lack of preparation would upset him: if the speech wasn’t absolutely the best. He was not overly generous with his compliments. Yet I know he felt very strongly about his staff, and I suppose you’d always feel with Robert Kennedy that if his staff was ever criticized, he’d defend them savagely. Yet he never gave direct compliments. If you did something for Edward Kennedy, if the speech was exceptionally good or the legislation prevailed, he’d be very, very generous in his compliments, and the little notes he’d write you and so on and so forth. It is important to staff people who always feel they’re laboring in the bottom of the barrel someplace. I never felt that of Robert Kennedy… it wasn’t in his nature.”
“For him, the world is divided into black and white hats,” Ethel Kennedy once said of Bobby. “The white hats are for us and the black hats are against us. Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad. Good things, in his eyes, are virility, courage, movement, and anger. He has no patience with the weak and the hesitant.”
Bobby’s family and friends knew a man who was often good-natured, a father whose greatest joy was in playing touch football with his many children on the warm summer sands of Hyannis Port, or pushing them on swings to see just how high they could soar. “Let’s set a new record,” he would tell them as he pushed them higher and higher. “A Kennedy cannot be scared!” he would exclaim. Not only was his own brood devoted to him, but also all the rest of the third generation of Kennedys. “The whole f
amily revolved around him,” his nephew Christopher Lawford recalled. “He was the one who taught us what it meant to be a Kennedy. He organized all the games and trips. Everything flowed from him.”
Bobby also had a trenchant wit and a quirky sense of humor, which is what Ethel had always found most attractive about him. Moreover, he was extremely passionate and committed, always true to his convictions about justice and the equality of all men. Also, like all of the Kennedys, he was extremely religious. “His faith meant everything to him and was something else that bonded him and Ethel on a very deep level,” said Kennedy historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “He knew he was flawed. He knew he was given to temptation. He also knew Ethel accepted him for who he was, and that made him love her even more.”
Though Bobby loved his wife deeply, he was capable of the occasional indiscretion. Unlike his brothers Jack and Teddy, though, from all accounts he felt very guilty whenever he strayed. Apparently, Ethel chose to look the other way.
“After Jack’s death, Bobby was a changed man,” recalled his former press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz. “Though he tried to encourage everyone to go on with their lives and offered his support to family members in innumerable ways, he fell into a deep and awful depression.”
“I was shocked by his appearance,” recalled author William Manchester, who was at the time in talks with Jackie to write a book about Jack’s assassination. He had met privately with Bobby in that capacity. “I have never seen a man with less resilience. Much of the time, he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief.”
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