Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver (née Kennedy; July 10, 1921 – August 11, 2009) was an American philanthropist. Shriver was a member of the Kennedy family by birth, and a member of the Shriver family through her marriage to Sargent Shriver, who was the United States ambassador to France and the final Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States in 1972. She was a sister of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, U.S. senators Robert F. Kennedy and Edward Kennedy, and U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith.
Shriver nationalized the Special Olympics, a sports organization conceived for persons with intellectual disabilities. For her efforts on behalf of disabled people, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.
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Early life, education, and early career
Eunice Mary Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1921. She was the fifth of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., and Rose Fitzgerald. Her siblings included U.S. president and senator John F. Kennedy, U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. senator Edward Kennedy, and U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith.
She studied at Stanford University, where she competed on the swimming and track and field teams. After graduating from Stanford in 1943 with a Bachelor of Science degree in sociology, she moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Special War Problems Division of the U.S. State Department. Kennedy eventually moved to the U.S. Justice Department as executive secretary for a project dealing with juvenile delinquency. During her time in Washington, she shared a townhouse in Georgetown with her brother John, then a U.S. Congressman. Kennedy served as a social worker at the Federal Industrial Institution for Women for one year before moving to Chicago in 1951 to work with the House of the Good Shepherd women's shelter and Chicago Juvenile Court.
Charity work and awards
Shriver became executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in 1957. She shifted the organization's focus from Catholic charities to research on the causes of intellectual disabilities, and humane ways to treat them. This interest eventually culminated in, among other things, the Special Olympics movement.
A long-time advocate for children's health and disability issues, Shriver championed the creation of the President's Panel on Mental Retardation in 1961. The panel was significant in the movement from institutionalization to community integration in the U.S. and throughout the world. Shriver was a key founder of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a part of the National Institutes of Health in 1962.
In 1962, Shriver founded Camp Shriver, a summer day camp for children and adults with intellectual disabilities at her Maryland farm to explore their capabilities in a variety of sports and physical activities. From that camp came the concept of Special Olympics. Shriver founded the Special Olympics in 1968. That year, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation helped to plan and fund the First International Special Olympics Summer Games, held in Chicago's Soldier Field where 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 26 states and Canada competed. In her speech at the opening ceremony, Shriver said, "The Chicago Special Olympics prove a very fundamental fact, the fact that exceptional children — mentally disabled children — can be exceptional athletes, the fact that through sports they can realize their potential for growth." Special Olympics Inc. was established as a nonprofit charity in 1968; since that time, nearly three million athletes have participated.
In 1969, Shriver moved to France and pursued her interest in intellectual disability there. She started organizing small activities with Paris organizations, mostly reaching out to families of kids who had special needs to provide activities for them, laying the foundation for a robust international expansion of the Special Olympics in the late 1970s and 1980s.
In 1982, Shriver founded the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Center for Community of Caring at University of Utah, Salt Lake City. The Community is a "grades K-12, whole school, comprehensive character education program with a focus on disabilities... adopted by almost 1,200 schools nationwide and in Canada".
Political involvement
Shriver actively campaigned for her elder brother, John, during his successful 1960 U.S. presidential election.
Although Shriver was a Democrat, she was a vocal supporter of the anti-abortion movement. In 1990, Shriver wrote a letter to The New York Times denouncing an abortion rights group for having used a quotation of President Kennedy's words out of context in support of their position. Shriver was one of several prominent Democrats – including Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania and Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York – who took out a full-page The New York Times advertisement opposing "abortion on demand" during the 1992 Democratic Convention (the Party adopted a 1992 platform that emphasized its support for abortion rights). Shriver was a supporter of several anti-abortion organizations: Feminists for Life of America, the Susan B. Anthony List, and Democrats for Life of America.
Despite being a Democrat, Shriver supported her Republican son-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful 2003 Governor of California election.
On January 28, 2008, aged 86, Shriver was present at American University in Washington, D.C., when her brother, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, announced his endorsement of Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic U.S. presidential campaign.
Personal life
On May 23, 1953, aged 31, Shriver married Sargent Shriver in a Roman Catholic ceremony at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Her husband served as the U.S. ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970 and was the 1972 Democratic U.S. vice presidential candidate (with George McGovern as the candidate for U.S. President). They had five children: Robert Sargent Shriver III, Maria Owings Shriver (Schwarzenegger), Timothy Perry Shriver, Mark Kennedy Shriver, and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver. Shriver had nineteen grandchildren at the time of her death.
She had a close relationship with her sister Rosemary Kennedy, who was intellectually disabled and who became incapacitated due to a lobotomy. Shriver suffered a stroke and broken hip in 2005. On November 18, 2007, aged 86, she was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she spent several weeks.
Death
On August 7, 2009, Shriver was admitted to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts with an undisclosed ailment. On August 10, her relatives were called to the hospital. She died at the hospital the next day at the age of 88, two weeks before her brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, died on August 25, 2009, at the age of 77.
Shriver's family issued a statement upon her death, reading in part:
Inspired by her love of God, her devotion to her family, and her relentless belief in the dignity and worth of every human life, she worked without ceasing—searching, pushing, demanding, hoping for change. She was a living prayer, a living advocate, a living center of power. She set out to change the world and to change us, and she did that and more. She founded the movement that became Special Olympics, the largest movement for acceptance and inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities in the history of the world. Her work transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and they in turn are her living legacy.
President Barack Obama remarked after Shriver's death that she was "an extraordinary woman who, as much as anyone, taught our nation—and our world—that no physical or mental barrier can restrain the power of the human spirit."
Funeral and burial
On August 14, 2009, an invitation-only Requiem Mass was celebrated for Shriver at St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church in Hyannis. Following the Requiem Mass, she was buried at the St. Francis Xavier parish cemetery in nearby Centerville, Massachusetts. Pope Benedict XVI sent a letter of condolence to her family. Because her brother Ted had terminal brain cancer, he was unable to attend the funeral, and their sister Jean Kennedy Smith stayed with him. Ted died two weeks later, leaving Jean as the sole surviving child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy until her death on June 17, 2020, at the age of 92.