SARGENT SHRIVER NEVER ASKED WHAT AMERICA COULD DO 4 HIM, ONLY WHAT HE COULD DO FOR AMERICA ..

NO MATTER WHAT COLOR,RELIGION OR POLITICAL PERSUASION,ANYONE WITH ANY COMMON DECENCY,KNOWS THIS SPECIAL MAN WAS A TRUE SAINT WALKING WITH US MERE MORTAL MEN.

* TOO FEW SARGENT SHRIVERS TO GO AROUND *

HE OBVIOUSLY LIVED A CHARMED LIFE AS GOD INTENDED,HELPING HIS FELLOW MAN WITHOUT EXPECTING ANYTHING IN RETURN... AS IT SHOULD BE,THIS SAINT OF A MAN WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN !!!

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By STEPHEN MILLER

Sargent Shriver, who died Tuesday at age 95, was founding director of the Peace Corps and the chief general of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

Young, dynamic and married to President John F. Kennedy's sister Eunice, Mr. Shriver personified the Camelot glamour of the early 1960s. But his political ambitions collided with the criticism that engulfed antipoverty programs later in the decade.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver and husband Sargent Shriver at a party benefiting the Special Olympics in 2004.

Mr. Shriver's only political campaign ended in a landslide defeat, after he was tapped as an emergency replacement candidate for vice president in George McGovern's ill-fated 1972 campaign.

For the previous two decades, though, his professional rise had been stratospheric. In 1955, at 39, he became president of the Chicago Board of Education. He was an influential local businessman who led charities, and was widely viewed as someone to watch in politics.

Mr. Shriver worked on the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign and then served as the president-elect's chief headhunter for talent to staff federal agencies. Soon he got an appointment of his own, to fulfill a campaign promise the new president had made for a youth-service program.

Looking back at his appointment as Peace Corps director, Mr. Shriver told Time in 1963 that Mr. Kennedy said "that everyone in Washington seemed to think that the Peace Corps was going to be the biggest fiasco in history, and it would be much easier to fire a relative than a friend."

Instead, Mr. Shriver made the Corps an emblem of the Kennedy administration's commitment to international idealism and an enduring Washington institution. Within two years, there were nearly 5,000 volunteers in 50 countries.

Mr. Shriver stayed on in the Johnson administration, where he added to his portfolio a New Deal-style flowering of programs meant to alleviate poverty under the rubric of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Among these was Job Corps, to train urban youth; Vista, a kind of domestic Peace Corps; and Head Start, a child-development program. He spoke of eliminating poverty within a decade.

When he took on the post, Mr. Shriver said the War on Poverty would be "noisy, visible, dirty, uncomfortable and sometimes politically unpopular." He may have understated just how unpopular it would become in some quarters.

Higher-caliber critiques came from mayors unhappy with the federal government intervening in their affairs; from the right, which regarded the programs as boondoggles; and from the left, which wanted more local control of federal spending.

In later interviews he said that the War on Poverty had been underfunded. He contended that it amounted to the same thing as the Peace Corps for the U.S. "We're all in favor of doing it in Peru," Mr. Shriver told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1995. "We're all g— well opposed to doing it in Peru, Ind."

He left Washington in 1968 to become ambassador to France.

Robert Sargent Shriver—"Sarge" to friends—attended Yale, serving during summers as a guide for student groups touring in Germany and France. Impressed by the still-visible destruction of World War I even as a new European war loomed, he helped found an isolationist group on the Yale campus, the America First Committee.

He graduated from Yale Law School in 1941, and enlisted in the Navy. He served as a gunner on battleships and submarines, and saw action at the Battle of Guadalcanal.

Later, Mr. Shriver briefly practiced law and worked as an editor at Newsweek. His long association with the Kennedy family began when he was hired in 1947 by Joseph Kennedy Sr. to edit the papers of his eldest son, Joe Jr., killed in action during the war.

Mr. Shriver stayed on to work in Joseph's Sr.'s business affairs, moving to Chicago to help run one of his investments, the Merchandise Mart. In 1953, he married the boss's daughter.

In addition to running Chicago's largest wholesale marketplace, Mr. Shriver pursued numerous outside interests, serving as director of the Catholic Charities of Chicago and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

While Mr. Shriver had never made a secret of his political ambitions, electoral success eluded him.

After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, there was talk of Mr. Shriver running for vice president on Hubert Humphrey's Democratic ticket. But the Kennedy family was cool to the idea and it was dropped. He also contemplated a run for Robert Kennedy's New York Senate seat and governor of Maryland.

When he finally ran, it was almost by accident in 1972. Mr. Shriver was a late replacement on the Democratic presidential ticket. Thomas Eagleton, the original No. 2 was jettisoned by Mr. McGovern after it emerged that Mr. Eagleton had concealed being treated for mental illness. Mr. McGovern interviewed several other possible candidates before settling on Mr. Shriver.

"I am not embarrassed to be George McGovern's seventh choice for vice president," he told the committee that nominated him. "Pity Mr. Nixon—his first and only choice was Spiro Agnew."

After the campaign ended in a big loss for Democrats, Mr. Shriver returned to his law firm.

Through his wife, Eunice, who had founded the movement, Mr. Shriver got involved with the Special Olympics, serving as president in the 1980s and then as chairman.

In recent years he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. In 2004, his daughter, Maria Shriver, the wife of former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrote a children's book about her father's ailment, "What's Happening to Grandpa?"

Write to Stephen Miller at stephen.miller@wsj.com

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