[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 7 (Wednesday, January 19, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H325-H328]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      REMEMBERING SARGENT SHRIVER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Farr) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight very sadly to talk a little bit 
about one of the greatest Americans of our generation, a true American 
hero, in my view, Sargent Shriver.
  I really have to say I am also very upset that the Republican 
leadership wouldn't allow for a moment of silence in today's session 
for such a distinguished American.

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  I rise today in honor of his life and legacy.
  I got to meet Sargent Shriver when I was a Peace Corps trainee in 
1963, about 22 years old in a small, little town in New Mexico, Questa, 
New Mexico, and I was in awe that I, as a trainee, could meet the first 
Director of the Peace Corps.
  He embodied the relentless spirit of public service that makes 
America great. He will forever hold a special place in our country's 
history. I remember just the vitality and spirit that he had that drove 
me to want to be a Peace Corps volunteer at a time when nobody really 
knew what they did because they hadn't come home yet. It was a risk, an 
adventure, and I was really not sure that it was the best thing to do. 
And yet I look back with pride and admiration and what a privilege it 
was to serve under his leadership.
  With the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver took President Kennedy's vision 
of service and optimism and built it into one of America's best 
institutions. After 3 years as Director of the agency, the Peace Corps 
had more than 6,500 volunteers serving in more than 50 developing 
countries. He once told me the story that in those days, with the 
President's own budgeting, they were able to place Peace Corps 
volunteers in Latin America and Africa before Congress ever got around 
to authorizing the program.
  These volunteers showed the world the true American values of peace, 
prosperity, and opportunity that had been eclipsed by the Cold War.
  Over the past 50 years, through war and conflict, Sarge's 
foundational work of the Peace Corps has enabled volunteers to show the 
world a hopeful, uplifting side of America that reflects our 
fundamental values of service and tolerance.
  Today, Sarge's legacy lives on in a quarter million Americans who 
have served as Peace Corps volunteers in 139 countries around the 
world, all in the name of peace and goodwill.
  Beyond the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver was actively engaged in civic 
society. He served as Ambassador to France; leader of the War on 
Poverty as the first Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, 
which began the Head Start program, which began VISTA, Volunteers in 
Service to America; and as a Vice Presidential candidate. His touch can 
be found on some of our Nation's finest efforts, including the Special 
Olympics and racial integration.
  But above all, Sarge's devotion to public service was beyond 
reproach. Like his wife, Eunice, who really started the Special 
Olympics--and I might add that the Special Olympics is now in more 
countries than is the Peace Corps--I can't think of a married couple in 
America who have done more worldwide than Eunice Shriver and Sargent 
Shriver to help people in need.
  I will always hold my special memories of sharing Peace Corps stories 
with Sargent Shriver--or Sarge, as we called him. At various events 
that honored the agency, we both got to speak. And one of my most 
significant moments of my life was the privilege of being presented 
with a Peace Corps Public Service Award in 2006 by Sargent Shriver.
  To all who knew him, Sargent Shriver was a man of tremendous heart 
and vision who leaves behind a living legacy of service and hope. That 
legacy of public service lives on in the lives of his children. Their 
mother died in 2009, but today we have daughter Maria, who is the first 
lady of California. We have their four other children: son Robert 
Shriver of Santa Monica, who is an activist in California; former 
Maryland delegate, Mark Shriver of Bethesda, Maryland; Tim Perry 
Shriver of Chevy Chase--both involved in Special Olympics; and Anthony 
Paul Shriver of Miami. Most of all, they have 19 children.
  Sargent Shriver's life reminds us of the value of distinguished 
public service, and that it is incumbent upon all of us to renew his 
vision of a better America for future generations.
  My thoughts and prayers are with his children and grandchildren and 
the entire Shriver and Kennedy families.

                   [From Vanity Fair, Jan. 19, 2011]

           Sargent Shriver's Lasting Impact: An Appreciation

                           (By Maureen Orth)

       At a Saint Patrick's Day party at the White House during 
     Clinton's first term, I bumped into Sargent Shriver and 
     introduced him to my husband as ``the George Washington of 
     the Peace Corps.'' Shriver corrected me. ``No,'' he said, 
     holding out his arm waist high. ``George Washington was 
     here.'' Then he raised his arm above his head and said, ``In 
     the Peace Corps, I'm here!'' He laughed so easily and so 
     frequently, and he had such enthusiasm and energy, that he 
     made the idea of service pure fun. And he was right about 
     where he stood with so many of us former Peace Corps 
     volunteers--he was our founding father, an icon. All you had 
     to do was utter his name--Sarge--and it immediately stood for 
     giving your all and being your best.
       I was recruited into the Peace Corps at age 20, right off 
     the Berkeley campus, by a loud southern guy with a bullhorn--
     he was to become the NBC reporter Douglas Kiker (years later 
     we met as colleagues). Sarge had the ability to bring 
     together all sorts of talented and sometimes offbeat people, 
     and to convince them to try something they weren't really 
     planning to do.
       I served in the Peace Corps for two years in Medellin, 
     Colombia, and have remained involved with the community. I 
     was in Medellin last week to help set up a third school for 
     poor kids that is run by a foundation I created several years 
     ago to provide students at all three schools with computers 
     and training in English and leadership. It is a way for me to 
     continue the work I did in the Peace Corps, and I thank Sarge 
     for giving me the means to get along in exotic places, to 
     speak Spanish, and to be a much better journalist, because I 
     learned in the Peace Corps how to observe acutely and to 
     understand issues from other people's points of view.
       Sarge was both brilliant and selfless--too selfless, some 
     might argue, when it came to his own political career. His 
     parents were Catholic intellectuals from aristocratic 
     Maryland stock. They lost their money during the Depression 
     and ended up running a Catholic bookstore where the ideas of 
     social activists such as Sarge's heroine, Dorothy Day, were 
     profoundly influential. Sarge managed to go to Yale for both 
     his undergraduate and law degrees, but he was often like the 
     proverbial kid with his nose pressed against the candy-store 
     window--although he was drop-dead handsome, everybody else 
     had a lot more goodies.
       After serving heroically in World War II as a naval gunnery 
     officer--he was a deadly marksman whose ship, in one Pacific 
     battle, shot down 32 Japanese planes in three hours--Sarge 
     dropped law to become an assistant editor at Newsweek. During 
     that job he met Joe Kennedy, who asked him to run ``this 
     building I just bought in Chicago''--it was the Merchandise 
     Mart, the largest commercial building in the world at the 
     time. By then he had met the forceful Eunice Kennedy, one of 
     Joe's nine children, by whom he had been immediately smitten, 
     but she gave him a hard time for years before they finally 
     married, in 1953.
       There wasn't a tough job that Sarge did not do well. When 
     John F. Kennedy asked him to run the Peace Corps, he joked 
     that J.F.K. had no choice but to give the job to a brother-
     in-law due to its enormous potential for failure. A few years 
     later, Jacqueline Kennedy asked Sarge to arrange her 
     husband's funeral, and he did so flawlessly. After heading 
     the Chicago school board and becoming a leading civil-rights 
     advocate, he was frequently mentioned as both an Illinois 
     gubernatorial and senate candidate. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson 
     very much wanted Sarge to be his running mate, but the 
     Kennedys said absolutely not--it was Bobby's turn first. Then 
     it was Teddy's turn.
       Sarge loved running the very popular Peace Corps, but he 
     reluctantly quit when L.B.J. twisted his arm to head the War 
     on Poverty. Democrat George McGovern turned to Sarge to run 
     with him as vice president, in 1972, after Tom Eagleton 
     dropped out when it was revealed that he had undergone 
     psychiatric treatment, but they lost big-time. Sarge also 
     served as ambassador to France, and in the last decades of 
     his life he and Eunice founded the Special Olympics and made 
     it a worldwide force for the intellectually disabled. He was 
     the kind of husband who seriously thought his wife should be 
     canonized by the Catholic Church; Sarge himself was so devout 
     that even as he was ravaged by Alzheimer's in his later 
     years, the two things he never forgot were his prayers and 
     his manners. ``You're a good looking kid,'' he said to my son 
     a few years ago as he stuck out his hand in greeting. ``Are 
     you my son?''
       I loved spending time with Sarge--he was a wonderful father 
     to Bobby, Maria, Tim, Mark, and Anthony Shriver, all of whom 
     have distinguished themselves in service to others. For years 
     they had to share him with thousands of Peace Corps 
     volunteers for whom he was both a touchstone and an idealized 
     father figure. It is hard to believe that today we can no 
     longer have Sarge among us, exhorting us to ``serve, serve, 
     serve!''
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, Jan. 18, 2011]

           R. Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Leader, Dies at 95

                        (By Robert D. McFadden)

       R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who became the 
     founding director of the Peace Corps, the architect of 
     President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty, a United States 
     ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice 
     president in 1972, died on Tuesday in Bethesda, Md. He was 
     95.
       His family announced his death in a statement.

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       Mr. Shriver was found to have Alzheimer's disease in 2003 
     and on Sunday was admitted to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, 
     where he died. He had been in hospice care in recent months 
     after his estate in Potomac, Md., was sold last year.
       White-haired and elegantly attired, he attended the 
     inauguration of his son-in-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the 
     Republican governor of California in the fall of 2003. Mr. 
     Schwarzenegger is married to Maria Shriver, a former NBC News 
     correspondent.
       But in recent years, as his condition deteriorated, Mr. 
     Shriver was seldom seen in public. He emerged in one instance 
     to attend the funeral of his wife of 56 years, Eunice Kennedy 
     Shriver, a sister of John F. Kennedy; she died in 2009 in 
     Hyannis, Mass., at the age of 88.
       As a Kennedy brother-in-law, Mr. Shriver was bound 
     inextricably to one of the nation's most powerful political 
     dynasties. It was an association with enormous advantages, 
     thrusting him to prominence in a series of seemingly 
     altruistic missions. But it came with handicaps, relegating 
     him to the political background and to a subordinate role in 
     the family history.
       ``Shriver's relationship with the Kennedys was complex,'' 
     Scott Stossel wrote in ``Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent 
     Shriver,'' a 2004 biography. ``They buoyed him up to heights 
     and achievements he would never otherwise have attained--and 
     they held him back, thwarting his political advancement.''
       The book, as well as reports in The New York Times, The 
     Washington Post and other publications, suggested that Mr. 
     Shriver's hopes to run for governor of Illinois in 1960 and 
     vice president in 1964 and 1968 were abandoned to help 
     promote, or at least not compete with, Kennedy aspirations. 
     Mr. Shriver's vice-presidential race in 1972, on a ticket 
     with Senator George S. McGovern, and a brief primary run for 
     president in 1976 were crushed by the voters.
       Mr. Shriver was never elected to any national office. To 
     political insiders, his calls for public service in the 1960s 
     seemed quixotic at a time when America was caught up in a war 
     in Vietnam, a cold war with the Soviet Union and civil rights 
     struggles and urban riots at home. But when the fogs of war 
     and chaos cleared years later, he was remembered by many as a 
     last vestige of Kennedy-era idealism.
       ``Sarge came to embody the idea of public service,'' 
     President Obama said in a statement.
       Mr. Shriver's impact on American life was significant. On 
     the stage of social change for decades, he brought President 
     Kennedy's proposal for the Peace Corps to fruition in 1961 
     and served as the organization's director until 1966. He 
     tapped into a spirit of volunteerism, and within a few years 
     thousands of young Americans were teaching and working on 
     public health and development projects in poorer countries 
     around the world.
       After the president's assassination in 1963, Mr. Shriver's 
     decision to remain in the Johnson administration alienated 
     many of the Kennedys, especially Robert, who remained as the 
     United States attorney general for months but whose animus 
     toward his brother's successor was profound. Mr. Shriver's 
     responsibilities deepened, however. In 1964, Johnson 
     persuaded him to take on the administration's war on poverty, 
     a campaign embodied in a vast new bureaucracy, the Office of 
     Economic Opportunity.
       From 1965 to 1968, Mr. Shriver, who disdained bureaucracies 
     as wasteful and inefficient, was director of that agency, a 
     post he held simultaneously with his Peace Corps job until 
     1966. The agency created antipoverty programs like Head 
     Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the 
     Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor. 
     (The Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled in 
     1973, but many of its programs survived in other 
     agencies.)
       In 1968, Johnson named Mr. Shriver ambassador to France. It 
     was a time of strained relations. President Charles de Gaulle 
     had recognized Communist China, withdrawn French forces from 
     NATO's integrated military command and denounced American 
     involvement in Indochina. But Mr. Shriver established a 
     working rapport with de Gaulle and was credited with helping 
     to improve relations.
       Mr. Shriver returned to the United States in 1970 to work 
     for Democrats in the midterm elections and to reassess his 
     own political prospects. His long-awaited break came two 
     years later when Senator McGovern, the Democratic 
     presidential nominee, picked him as his running mate. Mr. 
     McGovern's first choice, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, was 
     dropped after revelations that he had received electroshock 
     therapy for depression.
       The McGovern-Shriver ticket lost in a landslide to the 
     incumbent Republicans, Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. 
     Four years later, Mr. Shriver ran for the Democratic 
     presidential nomination, pledging a renewal of ethics after 
     the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from the White House. 
     But Mr. Shriver was knocked out in the primaries and ended 
     his political career.
       In later years, he was a rainmaker for an international law 
     firm, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, retiring in 
     1986. He was also active in the Special Olympics, founded by 
     his wife for mentally disabled athletes, and he continued his 
     work with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, 
     an advocacy organization he founded in Chicago in 1967 as the 
     National Clearinghouse for Legal Services.
       In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Mr. Shriver the 
     Presidential Medal of Freedom. Ten years earlier, President 
     Ronald Reagan conferred the same award on Eunice Shriver. 
     They were the only husband and wife to win the nation's 
     highest civilian honor individually.
       In 2008, PBS broadcast a documentary, ``American Idealist: 
     The Story of Sargent Shriver.'' A children's book by Maria 
     Shriver, ``What's Happening to Grandpa?,'' was published in 
     2004, explaining the effects of Alzheimer's disease. In May 
     2009, HBO presented a four-part documentary on Alzheimer's. 
     Ms. Shriver was the executive producer of one segment, 
     ``Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?''
       Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., known as Sarge from childhood, 
     was born in Westminster, Md., on Nov. 9, 1915, the son of his 
     namesake, a banker, and Hilda Shriver. His forebears, called 
     Schreiber, immigrated from Germany in 1721. One ancestor, 
     David Shriver, was a signer of Maryland's 1776 Constitution. 
     The Shrivers, like the Kennedys, were Roman Catholics and 
     socially prominent, but not especially affluent.
       On scholarships, he attended Canterbury, a Catholic 
     boarding prep school in New Milford, Conn.--John F. Kennedy 
     was briefly a schoolmate--and Yale University, graduating 
     with honors in 1938. He earned a Yale law degree in 1941 and 
     joined the Navy shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, 
     becoming an officer on battleships and submarines in the 
     Atlantic and the Pacific and winning a Purple Heart for 
     wounds he sustained at Guadalcanal.
       After the war, he joined Newsweek as an editor. He met 
     Eunice Kennedy at a dinner party, and she introduced him to 
     her father, Joseph P. Kennedy. In 1946, Joseph Kennedy hired 
     him to help manage his recently acquired Merchandise Mart in 
     Chicago, then the world's largest commercial building. In 
     Chicago, Mr. Shriver not only turned a profit for the mart 
     but also plunged into Democratic politics.
       After a seven-year courtship, Mr. Shriver and Ms. Kennedy 
     were married by Cardinal Francis Spellman at St. Patrick's 
     Cathedral in New York in 1953.
       In addition to his daughter, Maria, Mr. Shriver's survivors 
     include four sons, Robert Sargent Shriver III of Santa 
     Monica, Calif.; Timothy, of Chevy Chase, Md.; Mark, of 
     Bethesda, Md.; and Anthony, of Miami; and 19 grandchildren.
       Mr. Shriver's relationships with the Kennedys were widely 
     analyzed by the news media, not least because of his own 
     political potential. He looked like a movie star, with a 
     flashing smile, dark hair going gray and the kind of muscled, 
     breezy athleticism that went with tennis courts and 
     sailboats. Like the Kennedys, he was charming but not self-
     revealing, a quick study but not reflective. Associates said 
     he could be imperious, but his knightly public image became 
     indelible.
       He took root in Chicago. In 1954, he was appointed to the 
     city's Board of Education, and a year later became its 
     president. In 1955, he also became president of the 
     Catholic Interracial Council, which fought discrimination 
     in housing, education and other aspects of city life. By 
     1959, he had become so prominent in civic affairs that he 
     was being touted as a Democratic candidate for governor of 
     Illinois in 1960.
       Mr. Shriver did nothing to discourage reports that he was 
     considering a run. But with the rest of the Kennedy clan, he 
     joined John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. As he 
     and other family members acknowledged later, the patriarch, 
     Joseph Kennedy, had told him that a separate Shriver race 
     that year would be a distraction. So he resigned from the 
     Chicago school board and became a campaign coordinator in 
     Wisconsin and West Virginia and a principal contact with 
     minorities.
       As the election approached, the campaign learned that the 
     Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been sentenced in Georgia 
     to four months of hard labor for what amounted to a minor 
     traffic violation. Mr. Shriver suggested that Senator Kennedy 
     call a distraught Coretta Scott King, who was terrified that 
     her husband might be killed in prison. His reassuring call, 
     and another by Robert F. Kennedy to a judge in Georgia that 
     led to Dr. King's release, helped produce a windfall of black 
     support for Kennedy.
       Senator Kennedy broached the idea for a volunteer corps in 
     a speech at the University of Michigan and crystallized it as 
     the Peace Corps in an appearance in San Francisco. Mr. 
     Shriver, who as a young man had guided American students on 
     work-and-learn programs in Europe, seemed a natural to 
     initiate it.
       After the inauguration, Mr. Shriver, who scouted talent for 
     the incoming administration--people who came to be known as 
     ``the best and the brightest''--was assigned to the task of 
     designing the Peace Corps, which was established by executive 
     order in March 1961.
       As director, he laid the foundations for what arguably 
     became the most lasting accomplishment of the Kennedy 
     presidency. As the Peace Corps approaches its 50th 
     anniversary this year, more than 200,000 Americans have 
     served as corps volunteers in 139 countries.
       Break mirrors, Mr. Shriver advised graduating students at 
     Yale in 1994. ``Yes, indeed,'' he said. ``Shatter the glass. 
     In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less 
     at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face 
     of your neighbor and less about your own.''

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