sargent shriver

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Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. (born November 9, 1915) is an American Democratic politician and activist. Known as "Sargent," Shriver is best-known as part of the Kennedy family, the driving force behind the creation of the Peace Corps, and the Democratic Party's 1972 vice presidential candidate. Shriver was an of counsel of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson law firm in the Washington, D.C. branch.[1]

Shriver's ebullient personality and creative energy made him one of the most effective leaders of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. He inspired, directed, or founded numerous social programs and organizations, including Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, Community Action, Upward Bound, Foster Grandparents, Special Olympics, the National Center on Poverty Law, Legal Services, and, as mentioned, the Peace Corps. Shriver also ran the War on Poverty during Johnson's tenure as president. He was such an effective leader, that Job Corps and Adams and Associates dedicated a Center to his name in 1999. This Job Corps Center (Shriver Job Corps) is located in Devens, Massachusetts.

Shriver served as U.S. ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970, becoming a quasi-celebrity among the French for bringing what Time magazine called "a rare and welcome panache" to the normally staid world of international diplomacy.

PBS can not only make one-sided documentaries celebrating liberals like Sargent Shriver, who married Eunice Kennedy and became George McGovern’s Democratic running mate in 1972, but they can count on newspapers like the Washington Post to celebrate another outburst of liberal Sixties nostalgia. The gushy Post headline was "Politician-Activist Sargent Shriver: The Real Ideal." TV critic Tom Shales began by getting defensive about the poor, maligned Decade of Hippies:

Eras and epochs seem to take turns being trashed, with the decade of the 1960s getting way more than its share of scorn. It was a time of tragedies and villains, yes, but obviously a time of great heroes, too. One of them, often overlooked, is properly celebrated in a public TV documentary tonight: "American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver."

Shales not only lauded Shriver – father of former NBC News anchor and reporter Maria Shriver – but attacked anyone who opposed him as an ignorant bigot. His guide to PBS became the omnipresent Bill Moyers:

Bill Moyers, who contributes reminiscence, calls Shriver "the best all-around politician I've ever seen," but in addition Shriver did seem to be that rare thing, a politician with stubbornly high ideals -- instilling in followers what Moyers calls "a sense of almost infinite possibilities." So it was that Lyndon Johnson saw in Shriver the perfect man to run the ambitious war on poverty, a war declared by LBJ to help bring about the "Great Society" that Johnson insisted was within our grasp.

Probably the rarest piece of memorabilia in the documentary is an excerpt from the recording of a phone call that LBJ made to Shriver, still running the Peace Corps, in an effort to persuade him to take on the new job. "I'm just giving you a billion dollars more to work with," Johnson says as only Johnson could. He taunts Shriver by saying that maybe he doesn't have "the glands" to take on such an enormous task; Shriver finally capitulated and became special assistant to the president.

The war proved essentially unwinnable, however, especially once Southern congressmen, some still openly segregationist, got hold of it and, says the narrator, "terrorized" it. Instead of investigating the causes of American poverty, such warped old-timers as Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.) instead launched investigations into the programs themselves, among them the seemingly unassailable Operation Head Start, which helped impoverished and disadvantaged kids. Some 12,000 benefited from Head Start in Mississippi alone before the program there was coldly closed down.

Perhaps heroes and villains were easier to spot then; Shriver seemed clearly to think in socially heroic terms and to be the target of the ignorant. The Special Olympics, another legacy that has flourished in ensuing years, was born in the Shrivers' big back yard, we are reminded. As for the War on Poverty, it was finally done in decisively by another war, the one in Vietnam, and the '60s became a blood bath in more ways than one.