Eunice by Eileen McNamara

Author:Eileen McNamara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

PART THREE

IN HER OWN RIGHT

NINE

FROM CAMP SHRIVER TO SPECIAL OLYMPICS

You know, Eunice, the world will never be the same after this.

—CHICAGO MAYOR RICHARD DALEY, JULY 20, 1968

SIX WEEKS INTO the new year, the winter days were lengthening and grief was loosening its grip on a nation still mourning the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Time had not stopped on November 22, 1963. Since the year turned, Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona had declared his candidacy for president of the United States. The paperback edition of The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, had become a best seller. The Beatles had appeared live on The Ed Sullivan Show.

That life goes on, even in the face of tragedy, was a lesson the Kennedy siblings had learned long ago. The deaths of Joe Jr. and Kick and the damage done to Rosemary did not prepare them for Jack’s assassination, but those early losses—and the family’s innate fortitude—steeled them to survive the blow.

By February, Eunice was dividing her time between Kennedy Foundation headquarters and a small office at HEW, where she monitored the application of the mental retardation laws. Sarge was wrapping up a monthlong tour of Peace Corps sites in Asia and acting as an emissary for President Lyndon B. Johnson to the leaders of Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Jordan, Nepal, Thailand, Pakistan, and Israel, where he delivered a letter from the new president to Pope Paul VI, who was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Even Bobby, for whom Jack’s death had triggered an existential crisis, returned, forlorn, to the Justice Department to serve in the Cabinet of a man he loathed. Their contempt was mutual and of long standing. LBJ had dismissed Bobby as a “grandstanding runt” since he worked for Joe McCarthy in the Senate, and Bobby, in turn, had mocked the often-coarse vice president from the Texas Hill Country as Uncle Cornpone.

But Jack’s death had altered the political landscape for the Kennedys. There would be no more spontaneous drop-ins at the White House for Eunice, no more midnight strategy sessions in the Oval Office for Bobby. They were, as Sargent Shriver told a friend, a “palace guard now without a palace.”

Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, while Sarge was still abroad. Declaring his intention to mount “an unconditional War on Poverty in America,” Johnson told the joint session of Congress that his aim was “not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” He asked Sargent Shriver to lead that charge, a vote of confidence in his Peace Corps director and a snub of his attorney general, who had discussed just such a program with Jack in the weeks before the assassination.

Sarge was a reluctant conscript. His heart was in the Peace Corps, a promising but fragile experiment that still needed a guiding hand. LBJ dismissed that concern, pressing his notably energetic administrator to do both jobs at once. To decline would be a dereliction of duty.

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