Shriver:The Lightweight Label

...He just should be kept from running for office...

...And Michael Novak has actually worked in both of Shriver’s campaigns...

...If I am elected President . . . I shall establish a Council of Ethics Advisors, similar to the Council of Economic Advisors...

...Aristotle Onassis, G. Mennen Williams, Jr., Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, L. Sam Shoen (chairman of the board of U-Haul-It), among others...

...It is standard American politics for public men to display their reverent side, but as Nixon exemplified with his White House prayer services, what we get is not religion but religiosity...

...Some of the power-reliers are such habitual self-linkers that even as dinner guests-relax, boys-they introduce themselves by saying not merely who they are but whom they are with...

...At the wake for his campaign, he called it a “remarkable success...

...Shriver was the only candidate who could go back and say that something he began 15 years ago-the Peace Corps-is still alive today and retains much of the philosophical purity that he originally gave it...

...He began reading aloud...

...Shriver fell after the Illinois primary in March, after he had stumbled into and staggered out of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts...

...In January, he issued a 22-page economic position paper with the kind of persuasive arguments and careful analysis that no other candidate-before or since-has presented...

...Someone else had perceived something that I had seen over the years and had been telling friends about all along...

...And this was before Ms...

...he was only the agent serving another, whether it was the Mississippi Head Start director who needed funds or Lyndon Johnson wanting to be seen as great...

...CCandidates traditionally ride coattails, but this was too much to ignore for even those in the press who had affection for Shriver: a candidate udng the coattails of a man dead 13 years...

...The program was dispiriting because Shriver not only had a weakness revealed so soon but he had openly cooperated in exposing it...

...Nixon tried to kill many of them, but failed...

...Nobody in the neighborhoods is impressed by Sarge’s celebs...

...Shriver was a passionate reader of philosophy, theology and literature, one who sought to make the connection real between daily politics and the resources of the inner life...

...In 1965, when Berrigan was known only as a promising poet, Shriver had asked him to baptize one of his children...

...None of them could point to something initiated 15 or 10 years ago and say, honestly, that it was functioning today...

...One of those he most admired was Daniel Berrigan...

...He would go on, get excited, stop, read on...

...Shriyer would read a sentence, and exclaim, “and just listen to this...

...He was suddenly a free lancer...

...Legal Services at OEO represented the first break in the liberal tradition of throwing money at problems...

...In Washington, it is acceptable to dismiss such programs as Head Start and Job Corps, but in trips I have made around the country in the past few years, whether to the migrant worker camps in southern Florida or the coal towns in east Tennessee, I have come upon people still being served by the administrative structures that Shriver set up a decade ago in OEO programs...

...to dodge a question about why he stressed the Kennedy legacy but not the McGovern legacy, although he had run with McGovern in 1972...

...It was someone else-JFK, LBJ, McGovern-or another cause: poverty, diplomacy...

...There was no tenure at the Peace Corps to guarantee lifetime employment to timeserving bureaucrats...

...Shriver was also the only candidate to try to arouse a campaign discussion about family life and the effect-usually disastrous-of government policy on parents and children...

...The interviewers forced Shriver into an immediate defensiveness about the Kennedy legacy: forcing the new candidate to explain that Ted Kennedy “is the logical claimant, but he decided, you know, not to be a candidate...

...S hri ver’s psychological inability to detach himself from a source of power was standard Washington behavior...

...It is also the kind of behavior that has caused him to be dismissed as a lightweight by many reporters...

...the message was different: Shriver felt insecure about running on his own record and ideas, so he was hooking jumper cables to John Kennedy to be energized by a winner...

...With Shiver-a 60-year-old innocent who had never run for office on his own-it was as though he couldn’t wait to expose his vulnerability...

...He would pass along the latest book he had readUnamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life or something of Bergson, Teilhard, or Ralph Ellison-and suggest that some of the underlined material be used for the next speech...

...On the list-among the Morton Downeys, Carol Channings, has-beens and neverwasbeens-were citizens whose j udgment, values, and ideals were politically and morally sound...

...That Shriver was friends with someone like Prof...

...It is one of the traits by w@ch Shriver has endeared himself to so many of those who once workea.for him...

...I had spent enough time reading this French philosopher to know that Shriver wasn’t bloviating and that he did indeed have a sensitivity to ethics and moral theology...

...of the Baltimore Sun and George Will, columnist...

...For the next four hours, not a word passed between us about OEO, Peace Corps, or anything else of political Washington...

...One of them appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, then and now a lively weekly...

...To imagine his agony is not hard...

...For those who felt no affection, the urge to move in and chew up Shriver was irresistible...

...was saying not only has sharpness and insight now but was able to command serious attention when he said it...

...He could dash around the country, hold forth on the issues and win victories that had to be noticed, because it wasn’t really himself that he was putting forward...

...Wait until he.’s President,” I had said more than once to those who, unable to benefit large doubts, saw Shriver as little more than a well-plumed careerist looking to nest in any roost of Washington power...

...His enthusiasm for ideas and moral issues had to be respected because he was no recent convert-a la Chuck Colson-whose candlestick talk dripped with the wax of piety...

...The0 Lippman, Jr...

...That Shriver, with such a record, didn’t offer himself as an unattached can did at e -avoiding any self-announced association with John F. Kennedy-was a mistake, and instant, ly perceived as a crippling flaw by reporters happy to kick the crutches out from under a candidate...

...I had been roving around the country and sending in articles to some of the smaller magazines...

...The opportunity came the fiext day on “Meet the Press...

...to bay that “my success in business did not start when I married the boss’s daughter...

...We went to dinner...

...His announcement speech at the Mayflower Hotel on September 20 was hardly into its first syllables when he was claiming the legacy of John F. Kennedy...

...Nothing worthwhile he said or did seemed able to free him from the self-inflicted damage of the Kennedy connection or the sheen of his beautiful people image...

...For all the commotion about the supposedly religious natures of Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, a Shriver paper on “Religion and the Presidency” represented the only specific statement of a candidate’s uses of religion should he get to the White House...

...He wasn’t asking Congress or anyone else to do anything for Shriver...

...Shriver:The Lightweight Label by Colman McCarthy When he declared his candidacy dead, and wafted to the after-life of Washington, where losers can, without fear, be put on hold by nobodies and ignored by waiters, Sargent Shriver was characteristically buoyant...

...That was vintage Shriver: ever the mole, boring his way through piles of defeat and fatigue, and coming up to sun himself on whatever ray was left...

...Yet, going back, much of what he actually...

...Instead, the discussion involved the life and thought of such philosophers as Leon Bloy, Ronald Knox, Henri DeLubac, and Romano Guardini...

...Judith Exner stepped forward with tales that gave new meaning to Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye...

...Ti s was another irony...

...Shriver, a NCR subscriber, had read a piece of mine on Harlem...

...Romney, McGovern, and Reagan had all survived earlier hunts, so when running presidential campaigns they were nimble enough to force the press to work a little to sink in their teeth...

...A week or two later, when I was in Kansas City, he called...

...At one point, Shriver went off on a long conversational discourse on the differences between the early Jacques Maritain, the middle and the late Maritain...

...But Shriver was insecure at the prospect of running on his own-despite his record at Peace Corps and OEO, and in Paris as ambassador, and as a corporate lawyer who negotiated contracts with the Soviet Union...

...There were no carpets on the floor at OEO...

...But when they left, he asked the secretary not to be interrupted...

...I was amazed by Shriver, because he was then much the worldly success that Washington embraces...

...John Raines of Temple University’s department of religion, or Charles Frankel, a philosophy professor at Columbia, suggested a side to him that set him apart from the other candidates even more distinctly than his record at Peace Corps, OEO, and Paris...

...A candidate’s basic strategy in political campaigning is to make it hard for the baying press to discover his weakness...

...To reflect on the failure of Shriver is, first, to examine how elective campaigning can be a death rite to an inexperienced candidate who makes an early mistake or two in tactics and, second, to suggest that the Democrats are not so talentrich a party that someone like Shriver can now be dismissed as obsolescent...

...Few of those who have attachments to one form of power or another don’t rely on them...

...Colman McCarthy is on the editorial page staff of The Washington Post...

...The committee list wasn’t all like that, but reading the names it was clear that here was a candidate who may have had a lot of friends but he must be the last of the sophomores to believe that many voters would be impressed by his knowing so many of the beautifuls...

...One volunteer told of phoning field workers in Massachusetts to ask how much more campaign literature they needed from Washington...

...Let’s see if you recognize this,” he said...

...Government employees traveled first class in 1961...

...If there was a legacy crying out to be claimed, it was Shriver’s own: one to take immense political pride in and one that separated him in obvious ways from the Jacksons, Carters, and Udalls...

...saw something more in Shriver...

...It was from Maritain’s Social and Political Philosophy...

...The committee list made it easier to dismiss Shriver as a lightweight, which Johnny Carson regularly took vacuous glee in doing...

...A few months ago, when I went to his headqudrters to talk about his campaign, he rattled on about the progress he was making in New Hampshire and Massachusetts...

...It was not a pose of piety, but an effort to go out of himself to seek communion with minds and spirits larger and deeper than his own...

...It was a heady moment for me, discovering that something I’d written in a small circulation journal was read by one of the few national figures that I respected...

...About half an hour passed and, recharged, he was ready for the outside world again...

...At Shriver headquarters, the list became an embarrassment...

...It is maddening that Shriver’s early campaign botches made it so easy for him to be dismissed...

...for most presidential problems have ethical, not just financial, scientific, military or political dimensions...

...It is useless for a candidate’s supporters to claim that their man is holier-than-thou’s, which is why Shriver, both in 1972 and in the six months of running just past, kept his interior life where it should be: hidden and within...

...Instead of a giant new agency to deal with social problems, a handful of lawyers was turned loose with minimum cost and maximum results...

...There were, at the outset, a few exceptions...

...In April, a month after Shriver retired, Jane O’Reilly ended a column in The Washington Star: “The problems of families and children in the United States are extraordinarily complex and important...

...Writers who have been on the payroll of a newspaper or magazine for years but suddenly try to stand on their own as free lancers can sympathize with Shri-ver’s situation...

...Why aren’t all those men running for President talking about it...

...Because I knew a little about Maritain and Leon Bloy (author of The Woman Who Was Poor), Shriver hired me...

...The evaluation and inspection system at Peace Corps and OEO encouraged whistleblowing, and communication between the top and bottom of those agencies that was unprecedented...

...The waiting goes on...

...One was...

...He botches it, whatever the causes, in or out of his control...

...He has lost out but that is no proof at all that he is worn out...

...The pack gets its thrills by sniffing for scents of naivete (Romney’s “I was brainwashed”), or simplism (McGovern’s $1,000 to every American), or stupidity (Reagan’s $90-billion scheme...

...My own glimpse of it came when I began working for Shriver as his speechwriter in 1966...

...He read a page and a half...

...He enjoyed the article and needed a speechwriter...

...But should the Democrats win in November, the need will be present for someone in the cabinet who has survived countless struggles with Cangress (as he did at the Peace Corps and OEO), brought government to the citizens-through Community Action programs, neighborhood Legal Services offices-well before “down with Washington” became a slogan, and came forward as a presidential candidate with careful thoughts about economics, family life, and ethics...

...As one who cared about the Shriver candidacy-because I had cared about Shriver himself since about ten years ago when he invited me to Washington to work for him at the Office of Economic Opportunity-I was elated by these signs of regard as Shriver’s 1976 campaign got under way...

...It was a form of personal uneasiness common to Washington...

...That Shriver felt distinctly uncomfortable with his free-lance status is suggested not only by his sticking with a dead brother-in-law but by associating himself with a group of the glitteringly alive...

...I can assure you of only a few things,” he wrote...

...The packed and high-mood celebrators in the ballroom cheered and stomped at their Sarge’s taking up the fallen banner of JFK, but for the detached observers...

...Could I come to Washington to talk about the idea...

...Shriver told me that while a student at Yale, 30 years earlier, he had invited Dorothy Day to come speak to a group of students there, and that he had kept up with the Catholic Worker people since...

...He had no difficulty battling the Albert Quies and Charles Goodells who led the congressional fights against OEO...

...But the real irony of Shriver’s making himself dependent on John Kennedy was that, of all the Democratic candidates-the announced ones then and those running now-only he had a record of service and innovation that was unique and substantial on its own...

...In three years of helping him with speeches, it was always striking that rather than my sprinkling in quotes from the heavies-as most politicians, wanting the wise sound, demand of speech writers-the quotes would come from Shriver...

...I would blow it when I met Shriver, I thought, because he would ask me-having been well out of circulation for five years-what I knew about Head Start, VISTA, Foster Grandparents, and I would know no more about them than about molecular physics...

...Others were in the room then...

...By stressing this kind of association, Shriver could have forced the debate about him to revolve about his skills as a social innovator...

...Besides that, he has read Jacques Maritain, early, middle, and late...

...Much time was devoted to organizing the “Shriver for President Committee,” a list of names that included Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman, Arthur Rooney, Roosevelt Grier, Carol Channing, Morton Downey, Ara Parseghian, Mrs...

...They’d always tell me, send up speeches, press releases, but for God’s sake burn those committee-list boaklets...

...For 15 years, he had been safely associated with a force larger than himself...

...The New York Times and other papers devoted editorials to Shriver’s ideas, but how much did anyone want to hear those ideas...

...Each of the four questioners-Bill Monroe, Jack Ger-mond, Martin Nolan, and Robert Novak-pawed Shriver with legacy questions...

...This was also the first job offer I’d ever had...

...But on coming to Washington, I had no reason to be overjoyed...

...The best-selling position in politics today-anti-bureaucratic, pro-lean government-was Shriver’s over a decade ago...

...Journalists use the phone and announce themselves not as John Smith but as John Smith of CBS News or John Smith of The Los Angeles Times...

...He was the only candidate who could point to ten-year-old programs and ideas-Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services, Upward Bound, among others-and claim that they were still productive and working today...

...Shriver’s Peace Corps went tourist...

...He reached into a drawer and took out a book...

...Frequently the more important question is, ‘Should we do it?,’ not ‘Can we do Shriver is as thoughtful, candid, and creative a person as we have in public life...

...Now it’s just me, not me and CBS or me and The Los Angeles Times...