Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 1915–2011
Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr / Boris Chaliapin / Tempera, pencil and ink on board, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time Magazine
One of the last pillars of the greatest Kennedy generation is gone. R. Sargent Shriver passed away on January 18, 2011, at the age of ninety-five. Shriver was a man driven to serve, and his public service was extensive. During the Second World War, he volunteered and served in the United States Navy although he had spent years protesting American intervention in Europe. He was wounded at Guadalcanal and received a Purple Heart.
Shriver was born in Maryland in 1915 and graduated from Yale and Yale Law School. He married Eunice Kennedy in 1953 and went on to become the founding director of the Peace Corps in the presidential administration of Mrs. Shriver’s brother, John F. Kennedy. In An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, biographer Robert Dallek notes, “Shriver later joked that JFK chose him because no one thought it could succeed, ‘and it would be easier to fire a relative than a political friend.’”
Shriver also served as President Johnson’s chief adviser on the elimination of poverty and closed out the 1960s as United States ambassador to France. He was the vice-presidential candidate on the unsuccessful 1972 Democratic Party ticket headed by George McGovern. Sargent and Eunice Shriver devoted their later years working with the International Special Olympics, for which Sargent Shriver served as chairman; Eunice Kennedy Shriver (her portrait below) died in 2009.
—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery
