A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver by Mark Shriver

A Good Man
Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
by Mark Shriver

I’ve heard the Shriver name, of course.  Who could miss it in this day and age?  But my knowledge of that time period is relegated to memorized facts and figures as a period I did not live through.  I’d never really paid very much attention to the various people in the Shriver and Kennedy families, but this book caught my attention.  The title immediately made me think of my godfather, who I felt truly embodied the term “a good man.”  I remember at my godfather’s funeral, talking with one of his daughters-in-law about what a kind man he was.  How do you get to be that kind?  I still don’t really know.  Is it something particular people are born with?  Is it something they learn?  I hope everyone has had the opportunity to known someone like that in their lifetime. 

Though I didn’t know much about the man, I had of course heard of the Peace Corps and many other of the organizations that he put in motion.  With this book, Mark Shriver takes on the journey to understand his father Robert Sargent Shriver, known as Sarge, and “what it takes to be not a great man but a good man.” 

“Most of all, I wanted to understand the riddle of his joy.  I knew that his uncanny, boundless joy had powered him every day of his life.  Where did it come from?  How did he sustain it, gracing so many of us along the way?”

Sarge’s life was not a charmed and easy one as part of a well-known family.  A couple truly formative events in Sarge’s life were the Great Depression and his service in World War II. 

Sarge’s father “was ruined financially and emotionally during the Great Depression.  In 1923, his father had moved the family from Westminster to Baltimore, where he went into banking, and then again, in 1929, to New York City to become a founding partner of a new investment bank.  The time could not have been worse.”  They lost everything and his father fell into a depression that he never recovered from.  Sarge lost his father in 1941. 

Like most men who lived through a war, it wasn’t something Sarge talked about often but Mark remembers hearing once about a battle on the South Dakota that must have haunted his father all his life, the memory of slipping on the blood of his friends and having to clean up pieces of them on the deck of the ship afterward. 

Sarge never shrank from duty, as when he was asked to plan President Kennedy’s funeral.  Perhaps the hardest part was telling his pregnant wife, who he loved deeply, that her brother had been shot and killed.

“We are all born into a web of relationships and circumstances, tragedies and opportunities.  As I was coming into this world, my family lived through parades in Ireland one day and a funeral procession soon after.”

Through all of this, Sarge’s faith sustained him.  “I had as my father a man who not only was faith-filled and disciplined but who also insisted, in large part because of his faith, on the grace and joy in life.” 

Even if you don’t believe in God, or the Christian God, I think it’s easy to respect a man who lived by the principles that he learned from his faith to serve and help others with kindness all his life.

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Sarge worked under the Johnson administration in true bipartisan fashion to head the war on poverty.  His New York Times obituary suggests the scope of his influence by the programs that came out of that office, including “Head Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor.”

“Yes, Dad had an ego – you have to have a strong ego to stand up and run for political office at any level in this county, let alone vice president or president… Dad really wasn’t a politician, at least not a modern-day version of an American politician, Republican or Democrat.  I don’t think he ever looked at his defeats and thought, I am not powerful anymore.  It didn’t take him thirty years or, really, any time to get over the losses, because that type of thinking never entered his mind.”

The author takes time to describe the scene and his own life, growing up part of the Kennedy clan, to put in context and show the effect his father had on his life.

“It took me until after his death to see it clearly: his faith demanded his hopefulness, and his hope underpinned his work.  He worked to give others the opportunity to hope – that was his abiding ambition.”

In the words of former President Clinton’s eulogy, “he really was as good as his family just told you, and maybe even a little better, and a whole generation of us understood what President Kennedy meant by looking at Sargent Shriver’s life.”