When Sargent Shriver Ran for Vice-President

SARGENT SHRIVER has been patiently waiting on the sidelines for so long that his selection by default seems almost anticlimactic. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was interested in having Shriver as his running mate if the Kennedy family had no objections. Shriver’s wife Eunice, the most vigorous of the Kennedy sisters, was quick to set the record straight. “No,” she reportedly said, “it’s Bob’s turn.” Kennedy Aide Ken O’Donnell was even blunter. He sent word to Shriver that if any Kennedy clansman was going to run for Vice President, it would be Bobby, not “half a Kennedy.” Four years later Hubert Humphrey wanted Shriver to accompany him on the Democratic ticket but turned instead to Ed Muskie, partly because, as Humphrey puts it, the family made it plain that they had no interest in a Shriver nomination.

Shriver is the first to realize how much his membership by marriage in the Kennedy family has both plagued and promoted his political career. He is, in fact, the maverick inlaw, an ambitious man whose efforts to gohis own way have created a longstanding coolness between himself and some of the Kennedy family members. Not that he can or even wants to shake the ties that bind him to the charismatic Kennedy image. Kennedys or no Kennedys, Sargent Shriver would be seeking a high position. “For 250 years my family has been in public office,” he says. “We’ve always been bankers, businessmen, public officials. It’s a natural thing.” The Shriver pride is an inherited trait. “We’re nicer than the Kennedys,” his mother once said. “We’ve been here since the 1600s. We’re rooted in the land in Maryland.”

Shrivers fought in the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War; one ancestor, David Shriver, was a member of the original Bill of Rights Congress, and Sargent’s grandfather rode with Jeb Stuart in the Confederate cavalry. Son of a banker, Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. was born in Westminster, Md., where the nearby family homestead and grain mill, built in 1797, is now a museum run by the Shriver Foundation. Sargent prepped at Canterbury School, New Milford, Conn., went on to graduate cum laude from Yale. As editor of the Yale Daily News, Shriver, a Catholic, once proudly described himself as “Christian, Aristotelian, optimist and American.” After graduating from Yale law school, he joined the Navy and fought the war on battleships and in submarines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Working in New York after the war, he met toothy, tawny-haired Eunice Kennedy at a cocktail party. Joseph P. Kennedy, impressed with his daughter’s handsome, 6-ft. suitor, offered young Sarge a job at his Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Shriver accepted and eventually moved up to assistant general manager of the Mart; he wed the boss’s daughter in 1953, and they settled down in a 14-room duplex. Shriver’s energetic involvement in local affairs, most notably as president of the Chicago board of education for five years, prompted some pols to tout him as a promising candidate for the 1964 Illinois gubernatorial race. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, however, dashed Shriver’s hopes when he let it be known that he was supporting the Democratic incumbent, Otto Kerner. It was the first of Shriver’s several disappointing attempts to run for elective office.

In 1960 Shriver left Chicago to join the presidential campaign of his brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy, as an adviser. Described by Theodore White in The Making of the President 1960 as “the gentlest and warmest of the Kennedy clan,” Sargent was appointed director of the newly formed Peace Corps the following year. He reluctantly accepted the job, he says, only after J.F.K. told him that “everyone in Washington thought that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history, and that it would be easier to fire a relative than a friend.” Shriver developed the corps into one of the U.S.’s most successful and fastest growing peacetime agencies. In his first two years on the job, he logged 350,000 miles visiting corps outposts, learned to sleep sitting up in a Jeep, ate countless helpings of stomach-churning local dishes, developed three cases of dysentery, and bravely insisted all the while that “I have the best damn job in Government.” In 1964, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, Shriver took on the additional job of director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. A realist, Shriver said at the time that the all-out war on poverty was and would continue to be “noisy, visible, dirty, uncomfortable and sometimes politically unpopular.” Shriver’s performance in that war won him valuable battle ribbons as a friend of the poor and disaffected. When he left the Peace Corps, some 1,500 former staffers and volunteers crowded a huge Shriver-a-go-go farewell party; at one high point, Harry Belafonte called from the stage: “We’ll miss you, baby.”

Appointed U.S. Ambassador to France in 1968, Shriver continued his frenetic pace on the foreign front. Says one observer of the Shriver style: “He thought it was better to try 50 things and succeed in 30 of them than to try ten and succeed in ten.” Some things did succeed. Helped by Nixon’s admiration for De Gaulle, the acerbated diplomatic relations between the U.S. and France became better than they had been in more than a decade. The fact that Shriver was the only Kennedy man to stay on during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations did not, however, improve his relations with the family back home. When Bobby Kennedy announced his presidential candidacy in 1968, many clan members, especially Bobby’s wife Ethel, were miffed because Shriver did not promptly return home to join the campaign. Two years later, when Shriver resigned his ambassadorship with the hope of possibly running for Bobby’s New York Senate seat, the family reacted with a firm no. “Ethel,” says one Kennedy aide, “couldn’t abide the thought of Shriver in Bobby’s old Senate seat.”

Turning to his home state of Maryland, Shriver campaigned briefly in 1970 as an undeclared gubernatorial candidate against the Democratic incumbent, Marvin Mandel, who proved too securely dug in to be challenged. To keep visible, Shriver accepted the petition of more than 100 Democratic Congressmen to head up a group called the Congressional Leadership for the Future. For the four months before the 1970 election, Shriver visited 32 states stumping vigorously for the election of 80 Democratic candidates for Congress, everywhere calling Nixon “King Richard” and Agnew “the nation’s great divider.”

After the election, Shriver became a partner in the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Kampelman. A charmer in a Cardin suit and Gucci loafers (he has made the top-ten best-dressed lists), he surprised some of his associates by putting in long hours and energetically taking on such vital but generally shunned jobs as recruiting top law students for the firm. “At first,” says one partner, “I thought he was a lot of smooth oil. Now I’m very high on him.”

One of his problems will be making the most of the Kennedy image while still remaining his own independent man. The shadow is not easy to shake. A few years ago, in an effort to inspire one of his five children to work harder at his studies, Shriver explained that “when Abraham Lincoln was your age, he walked twelve miles back and forth to school every day.” “That’s nothing,” the boy replied. “When Uncle Jack was your age, he was President of the United States.”