Sargent Shriver, 1915–2011

It was Robert Sargent Shriver’s fate to be just “half a Kennedy”—as Kennedy retainer Ken O’Donnell once described him. When President Lyndon Johnson was considering asking Peace Corps founder Shriver to be his running mate in 1964, Shriver’s brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy, told Shriver: “There’s not going to be a Kennedy on the ticket. And if there were, it would be me.”

Shriver was born into a prominent Catholic family in Maryland. Though the Depression ruined his stockbroker father, “through the largesse of family and friends” Shriver attended college and law school at Yale, said the Chicago Tribune. In World War II, he won a Purple Heart for wounds he received on Guadalcanal. He joined Newsweek as an assistant editor in 1946; that same year, he met Eunice Kennedy at a party. Her father, Joe Kennedy, soon offered Shriver a job, eventually making him manager of the family’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then the world’s largest office building. He married the boss’s daughter in 1953.

In Chicago, “Shriver rose through the political ranks,” serving as president of the Board of Education, said The Washington Post. In 1960, he was considered a potential candidate for governor of Illinois until his father-in-law told him it was “Jack’s year”—he’d be required to help John F. Kennedy win the presidency. During the campaign, Shriver “advised Kennedy to reach out to Coretta Scott King after her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was jailed in Georgia.” Kennedy’s subsequent phone call “was credited with helping Kennedy win many black votes.”

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After Kennedy’s victory, Shriver made his greatest mark. In 1961, he founded the Peace Corps, a program that launched more than 200,000 Americans into service abroad over the next 50 years. Shriver’s decision to remain with Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination “alienated many of the Kennedys,” said The New York Times. But as Johnson’s point man in the War on Poverty, Shriver launched a battery of anti-poverty programs, some of which, including Head Start and Legal Services for the Poor, survive today. He later served as U.S. ambassador to France.

Shriver and his wife, who died in 2009, each won the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the only married couple ever to do so. In 1994, before he began suffering from Alzheimer’s, Shriver told a graduating class at Yale, “Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other.”