Sargent Shriver, the ever-upbeat Kennedy in-law who served as the US’ first Peace Corps director and later led a national assault on poverty, was remembered on Friday evening as an energetic idealist who left a legacy of public service.
“Sargent Shriver was the kindest, most cheerful, most optimistic person I knew in 50 years of public life,” said former senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, referring to his running mate that year. “It’s remarkable that those virtues could all be combined in one person. I don’t ever recall seeing him down in the dumps. He must have had days like that, but nobody ever saw them if he did.”
Hundreds filled Holy Trinity Catholic church in Washington to pay their respects at a wake to Shriver, the brother-in-law of president John Kennedy and the late senators Robert and Edward Kennedy. He died on Tuesday at a Maryland hospital at 95, eight years after announcing that he had Alzheimer’s disease.
Photo: Reuters
US Vice President Joe Biden and former president Bill Clinton were scheduled to speak at a funeral Mass yesterday at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Potomac, Maryland. First lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey were also to attend.
On Friday, some of Washington’s most prominent figures filed past the casket and photos from Shriver’s life to extend condolences to family members, including his daughter, former NBC reporter Maria Shriver; her husband, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Shriver’s four sons.
Some of those who attended the wake had met Shriver through his work and others only knew him by his reputation.
“He was the finest man I think I ever met in my life,” said Gene Theroux, 72, of Loudoun County, Virginia, who worked at the Office of Economic Advancement where Shriver served as director in the 1960s. “He was full of positive energy.”
“He took a thankless job at President Johnson’s request to run the poverty program,” Theroux said.
And though many of the programs were unpopular, Shriver was able to bring people together to get them off the ground, he said.
The outpouring of praise for Shriver and support for his family since his death on Tuesday was extraordinary because he had not been in the public eye for years, said Bill Moyers, a journalist and former Johnson aide who wrote the foreword to a Shriver biography and worked with him at the Peace Corps.
The descendant of a prominent Maryland family, Shriver was also remembered in eulogies by US House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer; former US senator Chris Dodd; C. Payne Lucas, former president of development aid at nonprofit Africare; Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth; and Colman McCarthy, a journalist and former Shriver speech writer.
A businessman and lawyer, Shriver helped his late wife, Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, run the organization that allows disabled people to participate in sports. She died in 2009 at age 88. The couple had 19 grandchildren.
Shriver was to be buried last yesterday in the same cemetery in Hyannis, Massachusetts, as his wife, according to Reverend Daniel Lacroix, pastor at St Francis Xavier Church.
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