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Sargent Shriver, who died on January 18, 2011 aged 95, serving in submarines and battleships in the

Discussion in 'WWII Obituaries' started by sniper1946, Jan 19, 2011.

  1. sniper1946

    sniper1946 Expert

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    Sargent Shriver - Telegraph

    Sargent Shriver

    Sargent Shriver, who died on January 18 aged 95, was appointed the first director of the American Peace Corps three days after his brother-in-law, John Kennedy, became president in 1961.

    [​IMG] Sargent Shriver and President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 Photo: CORBIS








    7:16PM GMT 19 Jan 2011

    It was an example of the family patronage which was to earn increasing criticism. But the idea of an organisation that would send out bright young Americans to bring technical assistance to underdeveloped countries and, in the process, offer a positive image of American culture, had an immediate appeal.

    Aware that the programme would engender suspicion and jealousy, Shriver declared — with all the abundant confidence of the times — that it did not set out to proselytise or propagandise, or to carry the “white man’s burden”. Volunteers would not be agents of the Cold War or colonialism; they would participate, directly, personally and effectively, in a struggle for human dignity.

    “It is a world community, not an American Mecca, that we are trying to build,” he insisted. Those who volunteered should be prepared for attacks by Communists and “ill-informed nationalists”. They should realise that their service would not offer moonlit trips on the Amazon, but hardship and self-sacrifice.

    Sargent’s unbounded energy and transparent integrity carried the project forward within weeks. His office walls were decorated with mottos proclaiming “There is no place in this club for good losers” and “Bring me bad news; good news weakens me”. Meanwhile, he joked that Kennedy had appointed him because it would be easier to sack a relation than a political supporter.

    Although there were some mishaps, as when a girl described Nigerian living conditions as primitive and squalid on a postcard, causing a protest by local students, trained volunteers went to five countries in the first year. Over the next five years more than 14,500 went to 55 countries, though there was then some falling off of volunteers for a time, prompting Asian leaders to ask Shriver if young Americans had gone soft.

    The Peace Corps remains one of the Kennedy administration’s lasting achievements, though Shriver’s identification with the Kennedys was ultimately to damage his own political ambitions.

    Robert Sargent Shriver was a member of a patrician Roman Catholic family which had arrived in Maryland in 1693 and was very different from the rough-and-tumble Kennedys. He was born at Westminister, Maryland, on November 9 1915, the son of a banker, and went to Canterbury School, Connecticut, where JFK remembered him as being “financially threadbare”. On going to Yale University on a scholarship, he became editor of the student newspaper, announcing that he was “Christian, Aristotelian, optimistic and American”. He acted as a tour guide for students in Europe under a work-and-earn programme and, to his later embarrassment, founded Yale’s America First Committee, which wanted to keep the United States out of the coming war.
    He then joined a New York law firm before serving in submarines and battleships in the Atlantic and Pacific. Coming out as a staff officer in the rank of lieutenant-commander, Shriver became an assistant to the editorial director of Newsweek, then was asked by the controversial Joe Kennedy to edit the letters of his son Joseph, John’s elder brother who had been killed flying over the English Channel during the war. He advised only private publication.
    The patriarch was sufficiently grateful to ask Shriver to help his daughter Eunice in setting up a national conference on juvenile delinquency under the Attorney General in Washington. He then made him an assistant general manager of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. In 1953, six years after they had met, Shriver married Eunice Kennedy, with whom he would have four sons and a daughter. At the wedding reception she toasted her husband, saying: “I searched all my life for someone like my father, and Sarge came closest.” Privately, the patriarch thought Shriver was “soft”.
    Shriver’s liberal outlook and smooth, friendly demeanour led him to become president of the city’s board of education, a position of some significance in the Mid-West which enabled him to aid John Kennedy’s bid to become the country’s first Catholic president. He began by discreetly assuring those he met that Joseph Kennedy was “100 per cent” behind his son, whatever rumours might suggest, though this added to the unease of some Democrats who believed that America was not ready for a Catholic leader. Harry Truman, the party’s last Democratic president, joked of the Kennedy clan: “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.”
    As the election approached, Shriver abandoned any hopes he might have had of running for governor of Illinois and resigned his job to run the Kennedy campaign in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries. When Martin Luther King was jailed on a trumped-up motoring charge, Shriver told Kennedy of the distress of the civil rights leader’s wife, but the candidate’s advisers urged him not to intervene for fear of upsetting the campaign in the southern states. Shriver listened, then, after they had left the room, persuaded Kennedy to ring Mrs King to express his concern.
    Following Kennedy’s election Shriver was charged with finding people to fill cabinet, ambassadorial and other posts. One of the most significant was Robert McNamara, who had never heard of “Mr Shriber” when he called, and was astonished to be offered either the post of treasury or defence secretary, though he eventually accepted the latter.
    Two years later, when John Kennedy was assassinated, Shriver was invited to become Lyndon Johnson’s running mate, but was forcefully reminded that the family came first, and nothing must interfere with Bobby’s chances. Even when he agreed to take on Jobs Corps, which Johnson was setting up to tackle poverty inside the United States, Bobby told him he was letting himself become a hostage to a political rival.
    But Shriver took on numerous other charities. Most significantly, he aided his wife in setting up Special Olympics International, the games she started for those with intellectual disabilities, and which has become a success without any of the political overtones that characterise the main Olympics.
    When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, the family made it clear that the way should now be left clear for brother Teddy. Shriver was appointed ambassador in Paris, and arrived in exciting times. The veteran diplomat Averell Harriman was there trying to negotiate a Vietnamese peace agreement and the city was awash with rioting students. Embassy staff were surprised by their new chief’s informality and lack of punctuality, but while they were uneasy about his habit of asking those he met what they really thought about de Gaulle, he earned approval for trying to improve his French and admiration for playing in the veterans’ doubles competition at Wimbledon.
    Having returned home after Richard Nixon won the White House, Shriver made an unsuccessful attempt to win the Maryland governorship.
    Then, when George McGovern’s running mate Thomas Eagleton stood down in 1972, having admitted concealing that he had undergone electric shock treatment for psychiatric disorders, Shriver replaced him. But the ticket captured only one state and the District of Columbia.
    Four years later Shriver made a bid for the Democratic nomination, eventually won by Jimmy Carter. By then the cost of the Kennedy connection was becoming clear, thanks to the revelations about the murdered president’s sex life and Teddy Kennedy’s involvement in the scandal of Chappaquiddick. But the public appeared to have forgotten Shriver’s achievement with the Peace Corps, and was now inclined to dismiss him as simply “the brother-in-law”.
    No whiff of personal scandal, however, was ever attached to either him or his wife, who died in 2009. In 1994 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, from President Bill Clinton.
    In his later years Shriver practised law and continued with his charitable interests, taking on the presidency and then the chairmanship of the Special Olympics .
    But it became noticeable that he was increasingly forgetful in public, and in 2004 his daughter Maria — wife of the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger — wrote What’s Happened to Grandpa? to explain Alzheimer’s disease to children.
    She also produced a television documentary about her father, American Idealist, which showed how he was inspired by his faith, attended Mass every day and always carried a wooden rosary.
     
    Lady Prime and brndirt1 like this.
  2. Lady Prime

    Lady Prime Member

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    Thank you for sharing this!
     

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