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An extraordinary life

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The family biographical details of Kennedy Shriver’s life would have made hers a remarkable one by any measure if she were simply a witness to the 20th century. Through her own efforts and intervention, though, she made it an extraordinary one.
Her father was the first chairman of the SEC set up in the early years of the Great Depression. She and her family went to London where her father served his highly controversial term as ambassador in the immediate run-up to and the first year of World War II in Europe. After she graduated from Stanford University, she herself worked in the State Department during the war, a conflict that claimed the life of her brother Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Following the war, her sister Kathleen died in a plane crash.
The following decade brought marriage, to Robert Sargent Shriver, and the first three of her five children. It also saw the political rise of the Kennedy family. That ascent reached its apex with the election of her oldest surviving sibling to the highest office in the land
Nothing could prepare the family and the world for the next tragic chapters: the murders of her brothers President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy. One had to go back to Rome in the 2nd century BC, to the deaths of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, to find a comparable example of two politician brothers that were assassinated in their prime.
In 1957, Eunice Kennedy Shriver had taken over the running of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which had been set up by her parents in memory of their first-born child. She could have done magnificent work if she had continued it in its original mission, which was to support Catholic charities. However, she radically changed its focus to highlight and research the plight of the mentally retarded and this is what her made her a celebrated figure in her own life. But first, she had to uncover a family secret: Rosemary, who was born the year after the president, was mentally retarded.
The oldest Kennedy daughter had been in an institution since she underwent a lobotomy, an experimental procedure at that time. It was supposed to improve her condition, but in fact made it worse. Nonetheless, she had been raised through childhood with her brothers and sisters, when many others in her position were institutionalized. The family saw that vigorous physical activity did not harm or hurt an intellectually challenged child, as people generally believed at the time. Rather, it had the potential to help a great deal.
Senator Edward Kennedy once commented half-jokingly that his brother dreaded his sister Eunice’s visits to the White House because she had an agenda. That agenda was nothing less than the full inclusion of some of the most marginalized people in our society. Kennedy Shriver’s efforts were officially recognition when she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. In 1995 her image appeared on a coin to mark the Special Olympics, the first living woman to be honored in that way.
Her son Robert said in a 2004 interview: “My mom never ran for office, and she changed the world. Period. End of story.”

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