Sargent Shriver - Blessed is the peacemaker

Sargent Shriver with John Kennedy

R. Sargent Shriver (1915 - 2011) had just stepped down as the Director of the Peace Corps when in 1967 Margo and I headed off to India for two years on the coast just north of Bombay in a town - Bassein - where the Portuguese had built a massive fort, and the Jesuits a college 350 years earlier.  I saw myself as a lay, and secular missionary.  Inspiring  the Peace Corps leader was a Catholic social ethic of service to others.  Shriver and his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver were exemplars of that.  More than anyone else Sargent Shriver was the spiritual leader of the 1960's of the Kennedy years.

Fort Bassein

It is little appreciated that the Kennedy commitment to Vietnam was the product of the same spirit as the Peace Corps.  In Vietnam John Kennedy saw his mission as protecting its people from tyranny.  That the people of Vietnam saw us as successors to the colonial French was the flaw in the plan.  But the spirit that led me to the Peace Corps was the same as that of those who volunteered for military service - like John Kerry, like my neighbor and fellow Crusader John J. Farley (Holy Cross '65) who returned missing a limb  (now a retired Judge of the Court of Veterans Appeals), and my Holy Cross classmates who did not return - Mike Cunnion, Bob Donovan, and Jack Martin, and my dear friend John who returned but lives with the presence of those who did not.


Sargent Shriver had the good fortune to lead the non-combat missions of the Kennedy years.  His list of accomplishments is stunning, as his biographer Scott Stossel has observed:

* His pivotal role in getting John F. Kennedy elected President in 1960;
* Leading JFK's "talent hunt," staffing the cabinet and the upper levels of the Administration;
* Founding and leading the Peace Corps;
* Launching Head Start, Legal Services for the Poor, VISTA, and many other programs critical to the War on Poverty;
* Presiding over the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam;
* Helping his wife Eunice to found the Special Olympics;
* Cultivating a generation of public servants who will continue to exert a powerful influence on American history for years to come

I am proud to have cast a vote for Shriver as running mate of George McGovern in his 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon.

h/t for the link to Stossel: James Fallows