[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.
[[Page H327]]
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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____________________