Scott Stossel - Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

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. Crdenas

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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, 19152011. 2. PoliticiansUnited StatesBiography. 3. Democratic Party (U.S.)Biography. 4. Peace Corps (U.S.)Biography. 5. Kennedy family. 6.
BusinessmenIllinoisChicagoBiography. 7. LawyersUnited StatesBiography. 8.
AmbassadorsUnited StatesBiography. 9. United StatesPolitics and government
19451989. 10. United StatesPolitics and government1989 I. Title.
E840.8.S525S37 2011
973.924092dc23
[B]
2011040439

v3.1

For Susanna

H e changed my life.

But that is the 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, yesand he had five years in the navy to show for it. But he carries two passportsone 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 LBJs 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 Johnsons own progressive credentials.

The other was Shriver, JFKs 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 presidents 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 Johnsons knee, the vice president called me and said that the way to sell the Peace Corps was to sell Shriver: They wont be able to resist him.