CAMPAIGNING WITH SHRIVER:
Novak, Michael
CAMPAIGNING WITH SHRIVER Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, was recently cited in the press for his leanings with respect to a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976. The name he singled out...
...Having worked intimately with Shriver in two campaigns (1970 on behalf of Democratic congressmen and 1972), I cannot hold him in the mythic position of presidents I never saw up close...
...In his exuberance, he made mistakes, over-dramatized, became on occasion raucous...
...On the plane, the press and staff held contests for writing limericks, scatology not penalized...
...It has also meant a touch of something else...
...Being number seven on a Democratic list isn't bad," he said, "the talent is so deep...
...Shriver, now in private life as an international lawyer, and others outside of politics but not lacking in political experience...
...But when I think of most incumbents in the White House-not just Ford, Nixon, Johnson, but also Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and all those others-I can't help thinking Shriver would add a grace, elan, and willingness to face hard thoughts and take new starts that few other candidates around even dream of...
...During endless cycles from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Detroit, I saw speech cards, written laboriously, hurled in despair across the room...
...Closeted in the cylindric tube of a modern jet for up to sixteen hours a day (sometimes speech writers stayed aboard while the others disembarked after each short hop), we were all bone-tired, our stomachs off, our nerves ground to irritating edges by weeks of five-hour nights...
...It is a little shameful, isn't it, that Shriver has been so forgotten since 1972...
...The Shriver family, despite some acreage in rural Maryland, has known hard and bitter times, like other small farmers...
...Wherever we would go, a mile underground in a mine in Montana, a sudden stop at a Nazi party headquarters in South Chicago "to see what on earth is in their heads," Shriver showed a lovely zest for life...
...I know his faults, as he knows mine: weeks together in one of those flying penises is a fairly searing light...
...The name he singled out was Sargent Shriver...
...Once a day, a report would be broadcast MICHAEL NOVAK on the plane's intercom, describing the campaign from the duck's point of view...
...How is Teilhard going down in Homestead...
...It's hard for the press to travel with the losing side...
...Shriver likes people, all kinds of people, and picks up waves of empathy in them...
...they would ask...
...There is a gravelly, rough, urban grit in Shriver when he talks to local party officers and workers-as on one night upon a liberally drink-watered dinner on a riverboat in Pittsburgh...
...That selection made memories come flooding back...
...He has never taken a major political risk in electoral politics, a risk of losing...
...In the midst of an impossible situation, after six candidates had turned George McGovern down, Shriver, like Barkis, was willing...
...Pity the Republicans...
...At specific moments in Shriver speeches, a journalist's toy duck would quack...
...It is premature to endorse anybody...
...In his finely tailored suits, Shriver is not in one sense "a man of the people...
...In his nomination address, Shriver insisted, against advice, on closing with a quote from Teilhard de Char-din...
...Continued on page 407) Michael Novak (Cont...
...But I think it is a shame that the list of potential presidents hasn't been expanded to include Mr...
...in crowds of many different kinds he was better able to swing...
...Journalists considerably younger than he, even pumped full of vitamins, puffed to keep up with him...
...Yet Shriver seemed so much more in touch with the country...
...Yet the figure of the well-dressed ambassador to France is itself part of his fun...
...Three or four times, the Secret Service rerouted us because of information about guns in crowds or along the way...
...hard, too, to get their tapes on the air or their columns in the paper with a vice-presidential candidate...
...Those of us who served on it for long stretches of the ninety days from nomination to election day must surely carry as many memories of merriment, pranks, and exuberant energy as any such group in history...
...And on the very last flight across the continent, in interminable darkness, on the eve of the election, a real live white duck suddenly appeared-and quacked-and messed...
...McGovern worked hard for where he was and we served him loyally...
...He could dance a tarantula at the sound of the beat-or, as in South Dakota, almost break his back by agreeing to ride an innertube pulled by a powerboat...
...The discouragements of the campaign-especially in the last two weeks-pressed proud tempers toward eruption...
...Whether he's tough enough is the old saw political watchers raise against him...
...To work with Shriver has always meant an enhancement of life-sheer fun and growth...
...Richard Nixon's choice was Spiro Agnew...
...It's not a side of him his wife, or the Kennedys, often see...
...Professionals as diverse as Patrick Buchanan and Eugene McCarthy, knowing what the Shriver campaign would have to do, poked gentle fun at that touch of high-falutin theology...
...But that was part of Shriver, too: A touch of class, a willingness to reach, no fear of flying...
...backing out was not always his own choice...
...Shriver's college tuition was paid by menial work...
...Some of us felt the frustration, too, which we had to hold in check, that our ticket could have done better if Shriver had been number one and McGovern number two...
...His airplane was called Lucky Seven (there are seven in his immediate family, five children, and he meant them, too...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 14
