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If you hear the name “Sargent Shriver,” what do you think? If you are like most Americans, you might respond, “Who??” When I ask young people (meaning, of course, anyone younger than I am) that question, perhaps 1 in 50 have heard of him. The father of the Peace Corps, Shriver was among the most influential and important public servants of the 20^th century, yet few people know of him today.

Before I get duly outraged about “young people these days,” I remind myself that I didn’t really know much about Sargent Shriver until I was in my 30s. It was late 2005. My father was sick with cancer, and I spent several weeks at his bedside, talking with him about his career in the Foreign Service and reading while he slept. I’d picked up a new book titled Sarge, Scott Stossel’s mammoth biography of an impressive man who, like my father, had dedicated his life in service to his country. I was stunned by how little I knew of Shriver, and my dad and I had some wonderful conversations about him.

Even those who know Shriver often mis-remember him as simply an appendage of the famed Kennedy family. Yes, he married Eunice Kennedy and became enveloped in the Kennedy mystique, but he was much more than just a “Kennedy in-law,” as the press often referred to him (even in his obituary headlines). More than anyone else, he embodied the idealism and can-do spirit often associated with the Kennedy era.

Sargent Shriver believed in America. Deeply, wholly, fully. He believed in the American promise, in what this country could stand for in the world, even when it so clearly was failing to live up to its ideals. In February 1968, as the nation convulsed over the war in Vietnam and riots tore annually tore through our cities, he told a group of Notre Dame students, “Suddenly we Americans seem to be panicking. It’s time to stop moaning and wringing our hands. It’s true; the country is in a crisis. We ought to thank God we are. Because then we always have something to test us—like a piece of steel that stays strong precisely because it is enduring great pressure.”

Shriver himself had been tested. He was born in 1915 into a storied Catholic family with deep roots in Maryland, but his father, an investment banker, lost everything in the Great Depression. The family descended into poverty and, Sarge recalled, “I had to scrabble for a college education.” His deep, abiding Catholic faith helped him endure the experience and instilled a driving sense of service to his fellow human beings, particularly the poor. To the end of his life, he attended Mass every day – Every. Day. – and considered Jesus to be his role model. He often asked himself, “Am I living my life as Christ would want me to?”

He worked his way through Yale, though his most profound educational experiences came not from esteemed professors but through experiential learning with an idealistic study abroad nonprofit called the Experiment in International Living. Shriver spent the summer of 1934 living and learning with a German family near Stuttgart, and he returned twice as a staff member.

Shriver’s experience abroad both fueled his idealism – he came to believe deeply in the power of intercultural exchange – and steeled him for the hard realities of the world. While in Germany, he witnessed the growing power of the Nazi regime and how it paralyzed his German hosts with fear. He joined the Naval Reserve before Pearl Harbor and served as an officer on combat submarines and battleships during the war, earning a Purple Heart. He appreciated the sense of camaraderie and common purpose he felt in the military, and he later sought to recreate them in the Peace Corps.

After the war and a seven-year courtship, Shriver married Eunice Kennedy, younger sister of Senator John F. Kennedy. Winsome and athletic, with lantern-jawed good looks and an easy smile, Shriver seemed to be a natural addition to the glamorous Kennedy family.

But he never quite fit in. Derided as a “Boy Scout” and “unduly idealistic” by his sharp-elbowed, womanizing brothers-in-law, Shriver stood apart with his principled patriotism and his faith-driven morality.

What the Kennedys saw as Shriver’s political weaknesses – particularly his concern for the poor and his support for civil rights – became important assets during JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960. After Martin Luther King was arrested in Georgia just weeks before the election, Shriver quietly convinced the candidate to call King’s wife, Coretta, to console her. The call infuriated Kennedy’s close advisors, including Robert Kennedy, but it sent a powerful message to Black voters (still largely Republicans at that time) that Kennedy cared about their concerns. Their votes helped propel him into office.

President Kennedy rewarded Shriver by putting him in charge of the Peace Corps, a vague idea to establish a federal international service program. Kennedy only mentioned it a few times late in the campaign, but the idea caught on. When Kennedy famously called on Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” thousands of young people clamored to join the Peace Corps.

The Peace Corps was Shriver’s baby. The president and his expert advisors envisioned a small, pilot program housed safely within the foreign policy establishment. Sarge had other ideas. He wanted something audacious and bold – a high-profile agency big enough to capture the imagination of a generation and win the hearts of potential partners around the world. It also needed the administrative freedom to try new ideas, even fail at times. As Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a critically important supporter) told him, “You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service and they’ll put striped pants on your people when all you’ll want them to have is a knapsack and a tool kit and a lot of imagination.”

Sarge’s vision won out. The Peace Corps became an independent federal agency with Executive Order 10924 on March 1, 1961. Then it fell to Sarge to make it happen.

The indefatigable Sarge was a dervish, a force of nature who seemingly willed the Peace Corps into being. Allergic to bureaucracy, he recruited talented people from all walks of life, set an impossibly high bar, then pushed himself and everyone around him to clear it. Within two years, more than 7,000 volunteers were serving in 44 countries, and the agency is still going strong more than half a century later.

The Peace Corps embodied Sarge’s optimism about America. “It stands for everything that America has ever stood for,” he once said. “It stands for everything we believe in and hope to achieve in the world.” But it was only one chapter in a multi-decade life of service. After John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Shriver embraced incoming President Johnson, whose War on Poverty appealed to his humanitarian instincts. LBJ tapped him to run the Office of Economic Opportunity, where he helped to launch Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, Legal Services, and Upward Bound. He served as ambassador to France, then ran unsuccessfully for both vice president and president. In his later years, he devoted himself to the Special Olympics, which Eunice Shriver founded on the family’s front lawn.

Sarge was involved in so many different initiatives, his biographer Scott Stossel argues, that “a good case can be made that Shriver, through the programs he started and ran, and through the generation of public servants he inspired, may have positively affected more people around the world than any twentieth century American who was not a president or other major elected official or Martin Luther King.”

And he did it all with a smile. Wherever he went, Sarge exuded an irrepressible joy at being alive and doing something he believed in. “There is a delight in accepting responsibility in a world of people who shun it,” he wrote as a college student. He spent his life engaged in hard, important, even noble work that affected the lives of millions. But whether he was chatting up skeptical senators or playing with children in a remote village, Sarge seemed to be having the time of his life. He was a happy warrior who could connect with anyone — people could sense his genuine curiosity and earnestness – and he truly cared about their lives. Shriver passed that sense of joy, as well as his faith and idealism, on to his five children, all of whom have embraced service as a way of life.

To Sarge, the word “idealist” wasn’t an insult; it was a badge of honor. Even as our culture grew angry, cynical, and jaded in the wake of the Vietnam War, assassinations, and Watergate, Shriver remained optimistic about the country and its young people. During one graduation speech in the 1990s, he encouraged students to break their mirrors. “Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own.” Had he been speaking today, he may have wanted them to shatter their screens.

Sargent Shriver devoted himself to the long, hard work of making America a better nation, and he never wavered in his belief that our nation’s best days are ahead of us. When he died in 2011, America lost a good man and a principled patriot.

Sources

· Marian Wright Edelman, “Remembering Sargent Shriver”

· Robert D. McFadden, “R. Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Leader, Dies at 95,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 2011

· Stanley Meisler, When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years(Beacon Press, 2011)

o “Sargent Shriver and the Birth of the Peace Corps”

· Bruce Orenstein, “American Idealist” (PBS documentary)

· Mark Shriver, A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)

· Scott Stossel, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (Smithsonian Books, 2004)