Word: shrivers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Easy Man to Fire. Inevitably distorted by that same image of halos and high school heroes is Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 47, director of the Peace Corps and brother-in-law of President Kennedy. He was once introduced on television as "the man known as Mr. Clean." He is so closely identified with the public's good-will-and-good-works vision of the Peace Corps that many people think he created the idea, sold it to the President, then dashed out in a blaze of idealism to make it work...
...Shriver, if nothing else, is a realist. He shuddered when he heard himself described as "Mr. Clean." He did not dream up the Peace Corps. Indeed, when the time came in the winter of 1961 for John Kennedy to make good on a 1960 campaign promise to create the corps, he tapped his brother-in-law-and Shriver dodged. "But he told me," says Shriver, "that everyone in Washington seemed to think that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history, and it would be much easier to fire a relative than a friend...
Brother-in-Law Shriver took the job, but was by no means swept up in the idealism of it all. Says he: "There's a great difference between a noble idea, no matter how well conceived, and the execution of that idea in practical, realistic, down-to-earth terms. I had misgivings. I lay awake at night...
...Shriver had cause for insomnia-as one event swiftly proved. Hardly had the Peace Corps put its feet on foreign ground than there was a major flap: a corps girl named Margery Michelmore, stationed in Nigeria, dropped a home-addressed postcard that seemed critical of life in that shoeless African nation; it was picked up, put in anti-American channels, and screechingly publicized.*Shriver is convinced that the subsequent success of the Peace Corps has been such that there will be no repetition of that incident. "It won't happen again -not like that," he says...
...Shrivers fought in the French and Indian War and the Revolution; Sargent's grandfather rode as a teen-ager with Jeb Stuart in the Confederate cavalry. Shriver was reared in Maryland, a devout Catholic and hard-core Democrat. There was a fair amount of money from the family grain mill, built in Union Mills, Md., in 1797, and from a canning business. The son of a Baltimore bank vice president, Sargent prepped at Canterbury School, New Milford, Conn., went on to Yale, graduating cum laude in 1938, got his law degree three years later. While he was still...