Robert Sargent Shriver, 95, a lawyer who served as the social conscience of two administrations, launching the Peace Corps for his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, and leading the War on Poverty for President Lyndon Johnson, died at a Maryland hospital on Tuesday, Jan. 18, of complications due to Alzheimer’s disease, his family said.
“Serve, serve, serve” was Shriver’s credo. “Because in the end, it will be the servants who save us all.”
He launched such innovative social programs as VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps; Head Start, an enrichment program for low-income preschoolers; the Job Corps, providing young people with vocational skills; and the aptly named Legal Services for the Poor.
He had a strong connection to Chicago, coming to the city after World War II to run the Merchandise Mart for the Kennedy family and developing his style as a values-based, pragmatic idealist. In the 1950s, Mr. Shriver served as president of the Chicago Board of Education.
In 1967, he created the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago.
“To base a national anti-poverty organization in Chicago instead of on one of the coasts is an example of his attitude about the city and its leadership role as the capital of the heartland,” said John Bouman, president of the center. “Chicago was also the place where his ideas about law and advocacy and organizing, the relationship between communities and public policy, took hold and remain vital to this day.”
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Mr. Shriver served for decades on the board of Special Olympics, the athletic games for people with intellectual disabilities that his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, helped start in the late 1960s.
From 1968 to 1970, Mr. Shriver served as U.S. ambassador to France. In 1972, he stepped in as Democratic presidential nominee Sen. George McGovern’s running mate after Sen. Thomas Eagleton bowed out. Four years later, Mr. Shriver briefly sought his party’s presidential nomination.
Being a member of the Kennedy family put him at the apex of power but also thwarted his political ambitions. Mr. Shriver considered running for governor of Illinois in 1960, but family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy told him he was needed for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, official Shriver biographer Scott Stossel told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
When President Johnson was considering Mr. Shriver as a running mate in 1964, his wife’s brother Robert Kennedy told him, “There’s not going to be a Kennedy on the ticket. And if there were, it would be me,” Stossel wrote in “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver.”
Yet Mr. Shriver’s record of public service and innovation was “unmatched by any contemporary leader in or out of government,” Colman McCarthy wrote in 2002 in the National Catholic Reporter.
Robert Sargent Shriver was born Nov. 19, 1915, in Westminster, Md., to Robert and Hilda Shriver.
The Depression financially ruined his stockbroker father. Through the largesse of family and friends, Mr. Shriver attended Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1938 and a law degree three years later. He served in the Pacific with the Navy during World War II.
In 1946, he took a job as an assistant editor at Newsweek and met Joseph P. Kennedy, who two years later asked Mr. Shriver to manage the Merchandise Mart. When Mr. Shriver fell in love with the daughter of his boss, he became a close and valued member of the famously clannish Kennedy family. He married Eunice Mary Kennedy in 1953.
John Kennedy — then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts — turned to Mr. Shriver in 1960 for help with his quest for the presidency. As manager of the campaign’s civil rights arm, Mr. Shriver engineered a feat that some say tipped the close election in Kennedy’s favor.
When a young African-American minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was jailed in Alabama for civil disobedience, Mr. Shriver persuaded Kennedy to reach out to King and his wife, Coretta. The call was credited with helping to cement the crucial black vote for Kennedy.
The day after John Kennedy’s inauguration, the president asked Mr. Shriver to help him develop a program for young Americans to serve overseas. “Make it big,” the president counseled. “Be fast, and be bold.”
It was Mr. Shriver’s idea to send Americans to the farthest reaches of the globe, bringing with them education, technology and a sense of fellowship that Mr. Shriver believed could break down barriers and win grass-roots respect for the U.S. He promised low pay, primitive conditions — and the reward of translating ideals into action.
Peace Corps volunteers arrived in five countries in 1961. In just under six years, Mr. Shriver developed programs in 55 countries with more than 14,500 volunteers. Since its inception, the Peace Corps has sent 200,000 volunteers to 139 countries. Today, more than 8,500 volunteers serve in 77 countries.
After John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Johnson asked Shriver to tackle the problem of poverty in the United States.
In the next four years, Mr. Shriver unleashed a flurry of new programs. Using the Peace Corps as his model, he crafted Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, a service corps aimed at U.S. cities. Head Start was designed to prepare underprivileged preschoolers for elementary school, just as private day care and nursery schools served more affluent children.
Community Action provided low-income housing. Foster Grandparents matched elderly volunteers with young children. Legal Services guaranteed lawyers to poor people. Indian and Migrant Opportunities brought training to Native Americans. Neighborhood Health Services targeted community medical needs.
At 79, Mr. Shriver received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton. “In my lifetime, America has never had a warrior for peace and against poverty, a warrior to make peace the noblest of endeavors, like Sarge Shriver,” Clinton said at the 1994 ceremony.
Eunice Shriver died in 2009. In addition to his daughter, Maria, Mr. Shriver is survived by four sons, Bobby, Timothy, Mark and Anthony; and 19 grandchildren.
Mehren is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer.
Tribune reporters Valerie J. Nelson and Margaret Ramirez contributed to this report.