Shriver's Other Running Mate

Everybody in the family has said they will work in this campaign. Mother is ecstatic. Pat says she will do anything. Steve Smith is meeting with Sarge today. Ethel has been on the phone to me and to Sarge. She has some good ideas for the campaign. And Jean? Jean will do everything she can because she's my sister. Teddy? Sarge was in touch with him at all times during this thing. He assured Ted that he wouldn't touch it if there was any chance Ted was interested.

SO, flashing the toothy Kennedy smile, tossing the thick Kennedy mane and speaking in the metallic Kennedy accent, did Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver sound the old Kennedy rallying call last week. She candidly admits that her husband Sargent Shriver, the Democratic candidate for Vice President, created a certain coolness among some Kennedy clansmen by staying on to serve in both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations and not sufficiently pitching in to aid Bobby's 1968 campaign. Nothing, however, takes the chill off as quickly as a hotly contested political race for high stakes. "There have been problems," says Eunice. "I acknowledge that. But the past is one thing and the present is quite different--with everything that implies."

The present is in fact just like old times for Eunice Shriver. An enthusiastic campaigner who began by canvassing the dingy walk-ups in Boston for her older brother, Congressional Candidate John F. Kennedy, she has been stumping for one clansman or another for the better part of 20 years. Now 51, the hardest-driving and most intellectual of the Kennedy sisters would not have it any other way. If anything, she relishes the underdog role of the McGovern-Shriver ticket. "Sarge should be in public life," she insists. "He is awfully able, and his whole life has been in public service."

Eunice, too, has always been in public service. A graduate of Stanford with a degree in sociology, she went on to work in Chicago's juvenile court and at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, W. Va. In 1947 she was appointed to the dollar-a-year post of executive secretary of the National Conference on Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency. After her marriage to Shriver in 1953, Eunice shifted her primary field of interest to mental retardation. (Rosemary, the eldest Kennedy sister, is in an institution for the mentally retarded.) When J.F.K. became President in 1960, Eunice persuaded him to establish the National Institute of Child Health and to appoint a panel that became the Presidential Committee on Mental Retardation. Brother Bobby once twitted her by saying that the only reason J.F.K. pushed her plans into law was to get energetic Eunice off his back.

When Sarge Shriver was appointed Ambassador to France in 1968, Eunice polished her French and plunged headlong into promoting her work with the retarded on an international basis. One visitor to the embassy during the Shriver tenure recalls a telling vignette: "Little Mark Shriver, who was about four, was riding his tricycle around the inlaid-marble foyer where toys were strewn about. Phones were ringing and a secretary was giving instructions. Eunice scooped up Mark to dash to the airport. The look of disapproval that crossed the butler's face as he viewed this scene was memorable."

No one stands on protocol at Timberlawn, the 20-acre estate that the Shrivers have rented for eleven years in suburban Maryland. In addition to supervising the chaotic, come-and-go life of her own brood--Robert, 18, Maria, 17, Timothy, 12, Mark, 8, and Anthony, 7--Eunice operates a summer day camp on the grounds for 100 retarded children. Neither a homebody nor a fashion plate, Eunice prefers to call in a caterer when she entertains and is more concerned about the warmth of the conversation than the heat of the consomme. Though she is happier in pants than Paris couture, she dutifully wore Paris designs during her stay in France, and for her husband's acceptance speech last week she turned out in a black fishnet dress by Dior. Lithe and tawny, she still occasionally kicks off her shoes and takes part in family touch-football games; she is particularly noted for a deft maneuver of hauling in a pass and then ducking behind a tree to elude her pursuers.

An early riser, she often devotes the evening to paper work and then retires early. Once, when guests at a party in her Chicago apartment lingered beyond her bedtime, she organized a conga line, led it out the door and into the elevator, pushed the down button and then jumped out just before the doors closed. By the time the guests returned to pick up their wraps, Eunice was in bed. "Eunice is very admirable in many ways," says Sarge Shriver. "But if she were sitting here listening to me talk like this, she'd probably say, 'You fathead.' "

Eunice's approach is best summed up in her reaction to her husband's description of himself as a "romantic." "Sarge," she said, "that's because you weren't raised the way we were. We started with the idea that everybody out there is in one camp, and it's us against them." Shriver's other running mate is optimistic about the outcome of the election. After all, in Greek the name Eunice means "happy victory."

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