ROBERT SARGENT SHRIVER:RELATED BY marriage to the Kennedy family, Sargent Shriver, who has died aged 95, had powerful political credentials in the US. He sought high office several times without success. However, through insider appointments in Washington DC, he did more to improve American lives than many elected statesmen.
A devoutly conservative Roman Catholic, but liberal in his politics, Shriver represented a kind of American now largely disappeared from national affairs. He was the scion of an old east coast family – born into wealth in Maryland and educated at Yale, he nonetheless had a devotedly unselfish – although patrician – feeling for public service.
His brother-in-law, President John F Kennedy, whom Shriver had first met at school, appointed him the first chief of the Peace Corps, which sends volunteers to work on community projects in developing countries and which he had created with Shriver’s help in 1961. Shriver suggested later that he had got the job because “everyone in Washington seemed to think that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history and it would be much easier to fire a relative than a friend”.
Shriver made a success of it and remained in the post until 1966.
After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson put Shriver in charge of the newly created office of economic opportunity. He continued there until 1968 as the nation’s untitled but effective chief campaigner against poverty. He used the office to create about a dozen institutions to help the young, the elderly, the disadvantaged and the poor.
Some of these survive today. Among them are Head Start, possibly the most successful in its help for disadvantaged pre-school children and their families; the AmeriCorps, community staff and part-timers assisting families in education, health and safety; the Job Corps in employment; legal services for the poor; foster-parent guidance; Upward Bound, helping students prepare for college, and Community Action, fighting poverty at a local level.
Shriver was also well known for the Special Olympics, for which he served as president from 1984 and chairman from 1990 until 2003.
It was created with his help by his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, daughter of the magnate Joseph P Kennedy, whom he married in 1953. In the early 1960s, Eunice began providing sports for children with learning difficulties in the grounds of the family estate, and out of this grew the Special Olympics. Now the games cater for youngsters from more than 150 nations.
Shriver’s very particular legacy to the Special Olympics was the establishment of the Sargent Shriver International Global Messengers. These Special Olympics athletes serve four-year terms as spokespersons for the global Special Olympics Movement.
Mary Davis, the Irish-based managing director of Special Olympics Europe-Eurasia, paid tribute to Shriver this week. “As an international lawyer, ambassador and an advocate for the disadvantaged, Sargent Shriver enjoyed an unparalleled record of public service at every tier,” she said.
“He was a true leader and a man of honour and strength. He saw athletes of Special Olympics as ambassadors for peace and transformed the roots of discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities by promoting Special Olympics throughout the world.”
In his attempts at high office, Shriver had mixed success initially, but overall defeat. He failed in seeking the Democratic candidacy of the governorship of Maryland, where his family dated back to the 18th century, and Kennedy political infighting cost him the chance of being Senator Hubert Humphrey’s vice-presidential candidate in the Democrats’ 1968 White House campaign, which they lost to Richard Nixon.
In 1972 Shriver did secure the vice-presidential slot in Senator George McGovern’s campaign – albeit as second choice – only to have Nixon inflict on the Democrats a second, heavy, defeat. His own bid for the presidential nomination in 1976 failed dismally.
Soon after his married into the Kennedys, Shriver began volunteering for charitable causes while following his brothers-in-law through their political aspirations. His closeness during the Kennedy presidency stamped him as a family insider for ever, but he did not always do their bidding – as his subsequent loyalty to Johnson showed.
His lifestyle always fitted in. He married Eunice at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with a cardinal officiating and a reception for 2,500 guests at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where Eunice had to climb a ladder to cut the eight-tier wedding cake.
The Shrivers also produced their own celebrity among their five children. Their only daughter, Maria, the second child, became a television reporter. She married the former bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and became first lady of California in 2003. Although a life-long Democrat, Eunice supported Schwarzenegger’s governorship, but by that time Alzheimer’s disease was afflicting Shriver and he became increasingly withdrawn from public life.
Eunice died in 2009. Maria and their four sons, Robert, Timothy, Mark and Anthony, and 19 grandchildren survive him.
Robert Sargent Shriver: born November 9th, 1915; died January 18th, 2011.