Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

Overview

Working for four presidents over six decades, R. Sargent “Sarge” Shriver founded the Peace Corps, launched the War on Poverty, created Head Start and Legal Services for the Poor, started the Special Olympics, and served as ambassador to France. Yet from the moment he married Joseph P. Kennedy’s daughter Eunice in 1953, Shriver had to navigate a difficult course between independence and family loyalty that tended to obscure his incredible achievements.

Scott Stossel, through complete access to Shriver and his family, renders the story of his life in cinematic detail. Shriver’s myriad historical legacies are testaments to the power of his vision and his ability to inspire others. But it is the colorful personality and indomitable spirit of the man himself—traits that allowed him to survive the Depression, WWII, and the Kennedy family—that will inspire readers today to expand the “horizons of the possible.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588341273
Publisher:	Smithsonian Institution Press
Publication date:	05/17/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	704
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.21(h) x 2.15(d)

About the Author

Scott Stossel is a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications. A frequent commentator on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Shriver sat bolt upright in his chair. His first thought was that he had misheard. His second thought was of Halloween 1938, when Orson Welles had inadvertently pitched America into a panic with his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of  the Worlds, with its realistic simulation of a news broadcast announcing a Martian invasion. Could this Pearl Harbor bombing bulletin be simply another hoax, albeit a cruel and ill-timed one?
   Unsure of what to do—not knowing whether to trust his own ears—Shriver picked up the phone and called the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where his brother Herbert was stationed as a junior naval officer. “Herbert,” Sarge recalls saying when he got his brother on the phone. “Have you got the radio on?” Herbert said he did not. “Well turn it on, goddamnit,” Sarge shouted, “turn it on! The Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor!” Herbert confirmed that he was hearing the same reports over his radio set.
   With some trepidation, Shriver sounded General Quarters. In 1941 there was no Internet, no satellite communications, no CNN, no network television news—no way of knowing quickly or reliably what was going on six thousand miles away. So when Shriver flipped the switch that sounded the alarm all up and down the East Coast, sending switchboard operators aflutter trying to reach officers at their weekend country homes, or on golf courses, or at family dinners, he was initiating the first communication that most of these men were to receive regarding the attack. Moreover, when they heard the General Quarters alarm, most of them had no way of knowing why it was being sounded. Thus, within minutes of the sounding of General Quarters, Shriver’s telephone was ringing off the hook. “Shriver!” went the typical refrain. “What the hell is going on here? You better have a damn good reason for interrupting my Sunday afternoon.”

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xi
	Acknowledgments	xvii
	Introduction	xxi
Part 1	Youth (1915-1945)
1.	States' Rights, Religious Freedom, and Local Self-Government	3
2.	The Education of a Leader	18
3.	A Yale Man	31
4.	War	59
Part 2	The Chicago Years (1945-1960)
5.	Joseph P. Kennedy	83
6.	Eunice	95
7.	The Long Courtship	103
8.	Marriage	111
9.	Religion and Civil Rights	117
10.	Chicago Politics	130
11.	Dawn of the New Frontier	140
12.	The Talent Hunt	173
Part 3	The Peace Corps (1961-1963)
13.	The Towering Task	189
14.	Shriver's Socratic Seminar	209
15.	The Battle for Independence	218
16.	"The Trip"	226
17.	Storming Capitol Hill	233
18.	Shriverizing	246
19.	Timberlawn	259
20.	Bigger, Better, Faster	268
21.	Psychiatrists and Astrologers	277
22.	Growing Pains	288
23.	Tragedy	297
Part 4	The War on Poverty (1964-1968)
24.	Shriver for Vice President	325
25.	Origins of the War on Poverty	333
26.	"Mr. Poverty"	345
27.	A Beautiful Hysteria	355
28.	Mobilizing for War	372
29.	Wooing Congress	379
30.	The Law of the Jungle	395
31.	"Political Pornography"	402
32.	Head Start	416
33.	A Revolution in Poverty Law	431
34.	"Double Commander-in-Chief"	447
35.	The OEO in Trouble	452
36.	King of the Hill	468
37.	What Next?	481
Part 5	France (1968-1970)
38.	Springtime in Paris	497
39.	"Sarjean Shreevair"	507
40.	The 1968 Election	513
41.	Nixon in Paris	537
42.	Au Revoir	551
Part 6	Democratic Politics (1970-1976)
43.	The Politics of Life	561
44.	International Men of Mystery	568
45.	Shriver for Vice President	577
46.	Shriver for President	608
Part 7	Private Life, Public Service (1976-2003)
47.	Nuclear Politics	645
48.	Special Olympics, a Family Affair	658
49.	Faith and Hope	673
	Notes	685
	Bibliography	729
	Index	739

Editorial Reviews

In this lengthy but lively biography, the journalist Scott Stossel explains in exhaustive detail how Shriver translated vague mandates to found an international service program and wage war on poverty into the creation of some of the most successful social programs of the past half-century.”—Washington Post

“Required reading for anyone interested in the political affairs of 20th-century America and the story of the Kennedy dynasty.”—Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

“This is a superbly researched, immensely readable political biography.”—Publishers Weekly

“A careful and capable portrait, of much interest to advocates of an activist, beneficent government and students of the Kennedy era alike.”—Kirkus

From the Publisher

In this lengthy but lively biography, the journalist Scott Stossel explains in exhaustive detail how Shriver translated vague mandates to found an international service program and wage war on poverty into the creation of some of the most successful social programs of the past half-century.
— The Washington Post

David Kusnet

An overstuffed but highly readable biography of the liberal stalwart who founded the Peace Corps, Head Start, Special Olympics, and many other good causes. Sargent Shriver was a long-suffering soldier in difficult crusades, writes Atlantic Monthly editor Stossel; a devout Catholic and the scion of Confederate heroes, he felt it his duty, as he wrote while serving as an editor at the Yale Daily News, to "believe that things can be accomplished; that those who have ideals and are willing to work for them can attain their ambitions; in short, that the world is not too much with us but by sincere and untiring effort can be made a better place to live in." Shriver's collegiate idealism never faded, though it shifted at points; his service in the US Navy in WWII, for instance, removed any glamour he might have found in war, though he forever remained a tough anticommunist and Cold Warrior. Indeed, writes Stossel, it was Shriver who brought Robert McNamara into the Kennedy administration, "having been impressed, some years before, by a report on McNamara and the other 'whiz kids' hired by the Pentagon as a management consultant in the 1940s." Shriver himself came into the Kennedy fold, famously, through marriage to Eunice Kennedy, and served as Joseph Kennedy's eyes and ears at the Chicago Merchandise Mart for many years, building valuable political contacts in the business community. "Shriver," writes Stossel, "could be sensitive about his relationship to the Kennedy family" and once snapped at a reporter that his relationship to President Kennedy was "a fact of life, why think about it at all? I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself." So he was, Stossel writes, steering the sometimesunwilling Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to do good deeds, though never attaining elective office himself. Throughout it all, Stossel depicts Shriver without a halo, though he contends, with other observers, that Sargent and Eunice Shriver will one day be beatified by the Catholic church. A careful and capable portrait, of much interest to advocates of activist, beneficent government and students of the Kennedy era alike.

Kirkus Reviews