Special Olympics’ Mrs. Persuasion : Eunice Kennedy Shriver Spreads the Message: ‘Can Do’

It’s Friday night in a small plane bound for Allentown, Pa., and Eunice Kennedy Shriver is asking questions.

She wants to know about Jane Austen, though no subject, it would seem, could be less relevant to Shriver’s immediate interests--Special Olympics and the mentally retarded--than a 19th-Century English novelist.

But since her questions have brought her to her seatmate’s favorite author, she wants to know: What was Jane Austen like? Was she the one with the nasty father? Were her books well received when she wrote them?

The questions keep coming until, finally, an answer about “Persuasion”--that its heroine was deemed a “nobody” and a “nothing” by her family and her own selflessness--seems to satisfy her.

Shriver’s lanky body sinks into a slouch. The briefing notebooks--filled with categorized information on the Pennsylvania Special Olympics, whose games she will visit in less than 12 hours--slide a little closer to the edge of her lap. Her right hand raps absently at the window.

An Inviolable Silence

Several thousand feet above the ground and buckled in, she takes leave of the conversation and turns to stare out the window, into an empty darkness and an inviolable silence. Dressed in a white-on-blue polka-dot outfit, with little, lacy bobby socks creeping out of a pair of blue loafers, she sits in silence. Bobby pins dangle in her tousled thick hair, loose and useless like so many extra twigs in a nest.

Long minutes pass.

“That’s interesting,” she says suddenly. “I find that very interesting.

“You see, that’s how the children are--that’s what happens to them,” she says. “So often they are isolated and overlooked, even by their own families. Pushed aside by society.”

She leans toward the floor, rummages through a bag, pulls out a black notebook and prints on the top of a page, “GET ‘PERSUASION.’ ”

Ethel Kennedy, Shriver’s sister-in-law, says, “She’s just got her own spin on everything. It’s a little different from everyone else. Like putting a spin on a billiards shot.”

Shriver is constantly splicing together the most unlikely subjects and ideas--mixing something that was squirreled away in her mind years ago with a new scrap of information: Jane Austen and the mentally retarded. Or “E.T.” and the mentally retarded.

“ ‘E.T.’ I just loved ‘E.T.,’ didn’t you?” Shriver says. “After I saw it, I wrote to Steven Spielberg--to see if he would do a (television)) spot for Special Olympics. Because, I thought E.T.--you know, that’s how the children are sometimes ignored. Hidden. People are ashamed of them.”

An Athletic Empire

Today, Special Olympics is the world’s largest year-round program of sports training and competition for children and adults with mental retardation. It reaches more than 1 million athletes, ages 8 and up, and is run by more than half a million volunteers. Shriver is its founder and chairman. Last week, during the VII International Summer Special Olympics Games in South Bend, Ind., more than 4,500 Special Olympics athletes representing every U.S. state and more than 70 countries competed in such sports as aquatics, basketball, bowling, soccer and softball.

Twenty-five years ago, Special Olympics was a backyard summer camp with a three-digit enrollment. The numbers were humble: 100 high-school-age volunteers; 100 mentally retarded children; “about five” paid instructors; a weeklong training session; one swimming pool; sundry horses, dogs, fields and barns. The setting was the Shrivers’ farm, Timberlawn, in Rockville, Md.

Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps and now president of Special Olympics International, says the purpose “was for my wife to see what the truth was. What were the facts? What could the mentally retarded do? In that time you had to see for yourself. . . .

“So she tried everything. She had ‘em on horseback, swimming, on a trampoline, shooting bows and arrows, climbing trees, building tree houses, playing tennis. . . .

“It wasn’t that she was sitting up there with a magic wand waving to everybody, ‘Now do this! Now do that!’ She was out there. She’d be in the swimming pool, holding a mentally retarded (teen-ager) up to see whether she could teach him how to kick, how to swim--whether she could get him through the water.”

Her Lifelong Spin

There were signs before Timberlawn that Eunice Shriver would devote herself to people with special problems. After earning her bachelor’s degree in sociology at Stanford University, she worked first for the State Department reorienting American POWs after World War II, and later for the Justice Department as coordinator of the National Conference on Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency.

But before all that there was Rosemary, three years older than Eunice and, as the family’s euphemism goes, “slow to learn.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the youngest of the nine Kennedy children, remembers.

“It always seemed that Eunice reached out to make sure that Rosemary was included in all activities--whether it was Dodge Ball or Duck Duck Goose,” he says. “Eunice was the one who ensured that Rosemary would have her fair share of successes.”

Timothy Shriver, 27 and the middle of the Shrivers’ five children, says his mother--”always committed to the possible”--saw in Rosemary, now 68, “somebody who was succeeding, as opposed to somebody who was barely doing what she could with her limitations.”

Everything’s Doable

“I suppose,” Eunice Shriver, 66, says, “the fact that I had seen my sister swim like a deer--in swimming races--and do very, very well just always made me think that they (the mentally retarded) could do everything.”

But to draw a straight line from Rosemary Kennedy to Special Olympics--or even to the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation for the retarded--is, according to Eunice Shriver, a mistake. It wasn’t because of Rosemary, she says.

“And I think that’s important. Certainly, if you have a sister who learns slowly, you are obviously aware of certain things--insights that you wouldn’t have if you never had a sister who is slow to learn. But would I have gone into this for her, and do I run around for her? No.”

Working his way toward an explanation of Eunice Shriver’s ability to see the positive side of retardation, Sargent Shriver says, “She just didn’t believe that there were human beings who were as useless or hopeless or whatever the right word might be as the mentally retarded were thought to be 40 years ago.”

Then, there was the idea that losing and disappointment would not be good for retarded children.

‘A Lot of Baloney’

The mention of it brings Shriver to a simmer. “Yeah, well, I heard a lot of that,” she says. “That’s a lot of baloney. What proof have they got that as a group of people they can’t take losing? Who? Where does it come from, that idea? Somebody cries because they lose? I can tell you 50 people who cry. I go and watch my own kids cry when they lose.”

Mollycoddling was not a part of her own upbringing. Achievement was expected: She was part of a financial and political dynasty--daughter of businessman and diplomat Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy; sister of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1968, as well as Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Ethel Kennedy remembers a story about Shriver’s drive to excel:

“Eunice prides herself on her sailing ability--she races. And one summer her boat wasn’t going well. Like everything else she does, she got involved in it and she started to investigate. She climbed below (deck) and discovered heavy bricks in the bottom, beneath the floorboards--very, very heavy, like gold bars.

“She’s so competitive that she probably thought--well, I don’t know what she thought--that somebody was trying to sabotage her. Then and there, she threw the anchor overboard and she and the children tossed the bricks out of the boat. As it turned out, the bricks were the ballast.

“Later,” Ethel Kennedy concludes, “she discovered that they were worth something like $3.75 each--and the rest of the summer those children were seen diving for them.”

Uniquely Contradictory

She’s impossible. Autocratic. Shy. The most interesting and exciting woman in the world. Funny. Difficult. Curious. Bright as hell. Irreverent. Spiritual. Eccentric. Sensitive. Insensitive.

People say the most contradictory things about Eunice Shriver. But on one thing they agree: She knows what she wants and she is relentless in the pursuit of it.

“She has a great sense of priorities in her life,” says longtime friend Donald Dell, a Washington sports attorney who was Sargent Shriver’s assistant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in the ‘60s. “Whereas most people worry about ‘What should I do with my life next year?’ and ‘Where do I want to go?’--for Eunice all that stuff is stuff . With her it’s family, religion and causes.”

“She has, through her persistence, strength and the fear she creates, driven people to participate who otherwise wouldn’t have. They might not like it, but they are better for it,” says David Burke, an ABC News vice president who formerly was administrative assistant to Ted Kennedy. He considers his own enlistment in her causes and laughs: “If I get to heaven, it will be because she drove me to it.”

Not a Minute Wasted

“Sure,” friend Ann Buchwald says. “She’s very bossy. Very determined. Hurries. And drops things. And says only the important things. Talks only to the important people. And why not? She has only a limited energy. If she could put 13 more hours into the day, she would. Meanwhile, she wastes not a minute.”

Eunice Shriver operates with a kind of high-octane fervor. “We don’t usually sit and talk,” Deeda Blair says of her friendship with Shriver. “We would swim and talk while were swimming. Or we would walk rather briskly and talk. Or we would be driving somewhere to see something and do something and talk along the way.”

Even when she sits, she’s always moving. Swiping at her hair. Batting the bangs out of her way. Gnawing at one finger or another. Attacking the cluster of diamonds and sapphires on her ring finger, twirling it around and around.

The 25-meter freestyle swim behind him, the Special Olympics athlete, wet and draped with towels, steps up onto a plywood box, throws a tightly clenched fist into the air and shouts, “Eat your heart out, Stallone!” And then he shouts again: “Eat your heart out, Stallone!”

Before him stands Shriver, ribbons dangling from her hand. “The gold one. The gold one,” he says, swelling with adolescent pride. Shriver pulls out a gold medal and hangs it around his neck. “Here you go,” she says. “Well done. Terrific.”

The Pennsylvania Special Olympics summer games echo with Shriver’s “Well done . . . well done.” She spends the day--a dry, hot Saturday--roaming from pool to playing field, one minute handing out medals, the next sitting on the bleachers talking to a corporate sponsor, the next disappearing into a crowd of children. She smiles with them. Pats their arms. Urges them on. “You look in good shape.” “Is this your first gold medal?” “Are you getting better?” “Practice every day.” “Keep it up!”

At the end of the afternoon, as she sits on a bench and talks to a softball player, one side of Shriver--restless, elusive and abrupt--gives way to another--calm, settled and delicate. “Do you read? Do you want to learn to read?” And Annie, an affable, red-haired young woman of almost 20 who pitches a mean softball, shakes her head, smiles and looks at Shriver.

“No,” Annie says. She can’t read. She doesn’t know why not. She wants to, but she just can’t.

“Do you read signs?” Shriver asks. “Do you know your address?” “Do you know what street you live on?” No, no and no.

Eventually Shriver has, in her notebook, Annie’s full name and, from another source, her address.

Annie has from Shriver the promise that she’ll investigate the possibility of a tutor or a reading program, as well as a bit of advice: “What you oughta do,” Shriver suggests, “is go home and memorize your address. If you said it to yourself five times a day, I betcha you could learn it.”