Review of a Biography of Sargent Shriver
by Father John McCloskey
Counter factual history has become fashionable and popular these days with many volumes being published on the "what ifs" of history. Reading the excellent authorized biography "Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver" by Scott Tassel (Smithsonian Books, Washington, 2004), the reader along with biographer asks "What would have been the course of history of the United States if Lyndon Johnson had chosen Sargent Shriver as his vice presidential candidate in 1964 rather than Hubert Humphrey as almost happened?
Born in 1915, Shriver's life has spanned the twentieth. Century. Part of the "the greatest generation," he can trace his German-French background to the early eighteenth century emigrations from Europe to the Maryland where he grew up. Along the line, great-grandfather married an old Maryland Catholic woman, from whence his Catholicism. Sarge's parents were both Shriver, second cousins in fact, but nonetheless with substantial differences. Robert Shriver was a Republican Protestant while Hilda was Democratic and Catholic. The family's modest fortune came from both manufacturing and banking and enabled Sarge from an early age to attend the best schools, studying at the lay-run Catholic Canterbury School, where he first met his future brother-in-law John F. Kennedy, and later at Yale as an undergraduate and then as a law student.
After his combat service with the Navy in the Pacific theater of World War II, he was for a brief time a journalist in New York, where met Joseph P. Kennedy, for whom he went to work in Kennedy family business in Chicago. After a long courtship, he married Eunice Kennedy in 1953. The rest of the book chronicles Shriver's long life of government service, which is almost unprecedented for both its breadth and spirit of innovation He was the founder of the Peace Corps under JFK, led various government programs as the head of the LBJ's War on Poverty, and served as Ambassador of France, where he became a friend of General DeGaulle.
After leaving government service, he became a partner in a prominent Washington power law firm, and until fairly recently was going daily to the office of the Special Olympics – the international sporting Olympics for the mentally impaired – founded by himself and his wife Eunice. All of this was done while he was raising five children, who continue the family tradition of public service and dedication to philanthropy. The book explains the complicated relationship of Shriver with the Kennedy family, showing his loyalty to the Kennedys even at times at the cost of his possible election to high political office.
Having recently finished taping a series on the life and work of St. Thomas More, I was struck by the similarities between the two men. Shriver has, like More, a strong Catholic piety and belief, a commitment to family, a gift for leadership, high ideals, and a spirit of service to both friends and country that has been at times sacrificial to his own interest. Shriver's example is of great importance for our own day because it demonstrates that it is possible to bring strong Christian convictions to political debate and action within the great multiplicity of possible answers to concrete social problems, both domestic and international. I believe his stature as an model for American politicians who take their Christian convictions seriously in their public life will grow in the decades ahead.
