Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

R. Sargent Shriver has arguably touched more lives than any living American. He led the famed "Talent Hunt" that recruited President Kennedy's cabinet. He created and launched the Peace Corps. He spearheaded the War on Poverty. He founded Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA, Legal Services for the Poor, and -- together with his wife -- the Special Olympics. In addition, as ambassador to France under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, he single-handedly eased America's strained relations with Charles de Gaulle during a crucial period of the cold war. As former President Bill Clinton has said, "In my lifetime, America has never had a warrior for peace and against poverty like Sargent Shriver." Yet for all his many accomplishments, Shriver's name is surprisingly little known. Why? Because from the moment he married JFK's sister Eunice in 1953, Shriver had to steer a difficult course between independence and loyalty to the Kennedy family that tended to obscure his achievements. In Sarge, the first full-scale biography of this remarkable man, Sargent Shriver takes his deserved place at center stage during an extraordinary time in American politics.

With a finely tuned sense of the era, Atlantic Monthly senior editor Scott Stossel documents Shriver's early interest in international affairs as America grappled with a burgeoning sense of global responsibility after World War II. He tracks Shriver's evolution from a young World War II navy veteran to an employee of the towering Joseph P. Kennedy, at once his boss and future father-in-law, who pressed his daughter Eunice to marry after years of courtship by Shriver. When Sarge and Eunice did marry, the professional and personal spheres of his life merged in a unique way that few could have handled. From then on, Shriver labored to navigate family politics while charting his own ambitious course.

And what a course it was. To look at the lasting legacy of the Kennedy and Johnson eras is to see Shriver's mark everywhere. Between 1961 and 1968, Shriver launched agency after agency, program after program with an energy and a cumulative impact not seen since FDR's New Deal. This book recounts the dramatic founding of the Peace Corps, which became the crown jewel of the New Frontier, and provides the first comprehensive account on record of the successes and political tribulations of Johnson's War on Poverty. Here, too, are new revelations of the aggressive behind-the-scenes jockeying for power, as Bobby Kennedy and LBJ each vied to claim JFK's mantle -- a mantle that, as Stossel shows, Sargent Shriver may in some sense have been best suited to assume. This is also a story of what might have been and of what nearly was: In his riveting account of the 1968 Democratic national convention, Stossel reveals that if Kennedy family politics had not gotten in the way, Shriver (and not Edmund Muskie) might have been Hubert Humphrey's running mate -- and changed the course of history by beating Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

Drawing on exclusive access to Shriver family papers and on hundreds of hours of interviews over seven years with Shriver, this is the first and likely the only authorized biography we will have of a Kennedy family member of JFK's generation. Like Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, Sarge raises important questions about government in our time and about whether "electability" and "effective leadership" can coexist in the same person. In this brilliant debut, Scott Stossel delivers the full measure of the man, making this life-and-times biography required reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American history.