Sargent Shriver's Visit

      Note:  This article by Hap Cawood originally appeared in the Dayton Daily News, January 23, 2011.

For those of us fortunate enough to have served in the Peace Corps in its earliest days, Sargent Shriver’s legacy is personal.

I got to meet him on April 15, 1963, nine months into my service as a Peace Corps teacher in Sierra Leone. Shriver was flying around West Africa in a two-engine prop plane that could land in remote places where we Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) worked. We had been invited to meet him at Sierra Leone’s little airport, but I was the only PCV able to get there to join the ambassador and Peace Corps officials to greet him. (In those weeks I was supervising workers in Sierra Leone’s first census, and my region included the airport.)

The times were still golden, with Kennedy alive, five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis that caused us to wonder how we might get home and what would be left of it, and seven months before Lee Harvey Oswald would nearly rip our hearts out.

Shriver’s presence was palpably uplifting, but what touched me most was what happened on the ferry we took to the capital, Freetown. I went to the front of the ferry so he could talk with the officials, but he shortly left them to come to me, asking me about my work and the morale of the group.

That evening we PCVs attended a reception for Shriver. He gave us an overview, and then we just milled around and talked casually. One PCV called him "Chief," which I thought was a good balance between too-familiar "Sarge" and too-formal "Mr. Shriver." On a balcony porch one or two of us at a time would joke with him, maybe chat about something small, then ask him this and that about JFK, and he would share little inside stories and glimpses. I had to concentrate to grasp the subtle enormity of this. Somehow we had gotten into the room with American history, and it was an embracing and friendly place.

Shriver said that on his way out of the country, he would fly up to see us and the folks thereabouts. Four or five of us PCVs came in our Jeeps. For the Sierra Leoneans, especially, it was a big event having an airplane land on a remote, grassy field. After landing, Shriver asked me for tips. I suggested some greetings and comments in Temne, whispering them to him a phrase at a time. I thought, here I am, a little Kentucky mountain boy on the far side of the world, telling the President’s brother-in-law, a national power in his own right, what to say; how humble and kind this remarkable man is.  

When I returned from Sierra Leone in 1964, I stopped by the Peace Corps headquarters before heading to Indiana University to help train a new Peace Corps contingent. When the elevator door opened, there was Shriver, between two assistants carrying briefcases, heading out. He was just as friendly as he had been in the bush.

For years afterward, I had to track him in black and white, on TV, taking over President Johnson's War on Poverty, then in hearings fighting against the tear-down of his work by the drain of the Vietnam War and the obstructionist work of senators like John Stennis who resented and demanded the defunding of the successful program empowerment of the black and poor in Mississippi. But Shriver withstood the test of time.

I last saw him at the Peace Corps’ 25^th anniversary celebration where he talked to hundreds of us at the amphitheater in Arlington Cemetery. On Sept. 23-24 I will be back in Washington for the 50^th anniversary, but mostly to see the group with whom I trained and worked. We are less interested in the big events than in being together.

I guarantee you that we won’t be talking about what we accomplished. We will reminisce about the great adventure we had when were young—what President John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver gave us: the opportunity to appreciate and learn from a kind and generous people; the chance to represent and share in small ways the best values of the nation we love with heart and soul; and to have been able to do it in the empowering shadow of two men who radiated that spirit in a breadth and depth impossible even now to measure.