Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Eunice Kennedy Shriver

1921–2009

Born into one of the country’s great political dynasties, Eunice Kennedy Shriver distinguished herself by creating the Special Olympics, which annually brings together 3 million developmentally challenged athletes in 181 countries. She died at 88, following a series of strokes.

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Because she was one of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, “newspapers chronicled the minutiae of her life,” said The Boston Globe. But after graduating from Stanford University and marrying Sargent Shriver, the future founding director of the Peace Corps, she “left behind as much as possible the trappings of privilege.” Shriver devoted herself to social work and, in 1962, published a groundbreaking Saturday Evening Post article about her sister, Rosemary, who had been born mildly retarded and was institutionalized following a botched lobotomy. “It fills me with sadness to think this change might not have been necessary if we knew then what we know today,” she wrote.

Six years later, Shriver’s desire to bring the mentally and physically disabled to public attention blossomed into the Special Olympics, said The Washington Post. Although “the spectator turnout was minuscule, and most of the media declined to cover it,” she continued to push the program. Eventually, the “pencil-thin woman with a big, toothy smile” became famous “for her willingness to get close to those she was trying to help—joining children in their games, listening to and encouraging them, talking to their parents.” In 1984 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Shriver is survived by her husband, five children (including California First Lady Maria Shriver), sister Jean Kennedy Smith, and brother Ted.