Back in 72, shortly after when Sarge Shriver agreed to undertake the thankless job (not his first) of being the replacement bottom half of the worst landslide losing ticket of the 20th century (and becoming the centerpiece of a nasty National Lampoon parody for his troubles) he was campaigning in Youngstown, Ohio, the buckle of the Rust Belt, with Tip O’Neill. They were about to walk into a working class bar, and O’Neill advised Shriver to buy a round for the house. “Drinks for everyone” proclaimed Shriver, “and make mine a Courvoisier.”
Shriver’s electoral ambitions, whether in Illinois, Maryland or nationally, seemed to have constantly wilted in the face of bad luck, bad timing, lack of facts on the ground and being related to the Kennedys by marriage rather than blood. More than once, his in-laws threw a monkey wrench into his ambitions, whether they be the Illinois Governorship in 1960 or being LBJ’s running mate in 1964.
Even when he got to run, he really never got the chance. The disaster of 72 was followed by the disappointment of 76. Jimmy Carter’s second place 27% to Uncommitted in Iowa allowed the media the opportunity to crown a front-runner and clarify a field it found far too confusing, and that was pretty much the end. Shriver hoped to pull a surprise in the early Mississippi caucuses, where his Kennedy connections and anti-poverty work held him in good stead with both black voters and Mississippi’s heroic white liberals like the courageous publisher Hodding Carter.
It was a given that the rednecks were with Wallace, but conservatives were fractured because the old Bourbon establishment preferred the gentility embodied by Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Shriver was supposed to make a strong surprise showing which would show him the dragon-slayer in contrast to Wallace.
It was not to be; many White Southern moderates thought Wallace’s comeuppance was best delivered by a White Southern moderate, and Iowa emboldened this viewpoint. But it was poor southern blacks who really broke for Carter, a Baptist with simpler, more Southern tastes than Courvoisier and Catholicism. A Kennedy with the common touch might have overcome this, but a Kennedy in-law–at least this Kennedy in-law, could not, despite all the work he’d done in the Country’s various battles for social justice.
And Shriver’s 12% third place showing in Ole Miss was as good as it got. From then on, Shriver, along with Birch Bayh and Fred Harris served the role in state after state of draining just enough liberal votes from poor Mo Udall to give Jimmy Carter a series of narrow victories he never should have won, an especially painful result for Shriver, since Carter not only took his votes in Mississippi, but also drained away from Shriver his secret ace in the hole: the votes of those Democrats not particularly enthusiastic about abortion.
So Shriver never held elected office. The closest he got was as being an in-law to the Kennedys and a Schwarzenegger.
What Shriver got to do instead was to build lasting institutions. The success of the Peace Corp still lives and breathes today, while the legacy of the War on Poverty is far more complicated.
I am of the belief that, flawed though some of the original concepts were, the worst problems with the War on Poverty lie thousands of miles away. When the time should have come for the Poverty War’s crucial second stage of reevaluation and revision–the stage which would really make or break the Johnson-Shriver vision, the morass in Vietnam had so engulfed the administration and was so all-encompassing that the Poverty war’s good ideas were often abandoned instead of refined, while many bad ideas were left to flourish instead of die; Shriver was rewarded with the consolation prize of a trip to Paris. But the best part of the War On Poverty’s legacy, programs like Headstart still serve us well today.
And, then there was his non-governmental work, like the special Olympics.
So what if the man liked a little cognac? I say let’s raise a glass of the stuff for him!