[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1] [House] [Pages 473-475] [From the U.S. 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. 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 [[Page 474]] 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. 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 [[Page 475]] 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.'' ____________________