Eunice Kennedy Shriver:EUNICE KENNEDY Shriver, who has died aged 88, was a member of a political dynasty but devoted her life to improving the welfare of the mentally disabled by founding the Special Olympics.
A sister of President John F Kennedy and senators Robert F Kennedy and Edward Kennedy, she was credited with playing a major role in changing the perception of the mentally handicapped in the United States and, through the spread of the Special Olympic movement, in much of the rest of the world.
When she began her efforts half a century ago, it was common for mentally disabled people to be placed in institutions that did little more than warehouse them. Through her programmes and hands-on efforts, she demonstrated that with appropriate help, most developmentally disabled people can lead productive and useful lives.
After her death, her family noted: “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.”
In the 1950s, as executive vice-president of the Joseph P Kennedy Jnr Foundation, she shifted the organisation’s focus from Catholic charities to research on the causes of mental handicap and humane ways to treat it. In 1963, the foundation, which had been established in honour of a brother killed in the second World War, published fitness standards and tests for people with intellectual disabilities that became widely used.
When John F Kennedy became president in 1961, she persuaded him to appoint a committee to study developmental disabilities. An outgrowth of the panel’s work was the establishment the following year of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as part of the National Institutes of Health.
In 1962, in a ground-breaking article in the Saturday Evening Post, Kennedy Shriver, the fifth of nine children born to Joseph P Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, disclosed that her older sister, Rosemary Kennedy, was developmentally disabled.
The story demonstrated how not to treat the mentally disabled and summoned a change in conditions that still existed on a wide scale.
“Like diabetes, deafness, polio, or any other misfortune, mental retardation can happen in any family,” Shriver wrote. It was different from mental illness, she said, and there were no grounds for the belief, widely held at the time, that people with the condition were belligerent or unmanageable.
“The truth is that 75 to 85 per cent of the retarded are capable of becoming useful citizens with the help of special education and rehabilitation,” Shriver wrote. “Another 10 per cent can learn to make small contributions, not involving book learning, such as mowing a lawn or washing dishes.”
Rosemary, institutionalised from the time she was 23, never had that opportunity. By 1941, she had become increasingly subject to fits of rage, and her mental faculties and judgment had declined. Concerned about her behaviour and the possibility that men would take advantage of her, her father arranged for her to have a prefrontal lobotomy, an experimental operation in which part of the brain was destroyed.
The results were disastrous. Rosemary regressed into an infantlike state in which she could barely speak and spent most of the time staring at walls. Her father arranged to keep her out of sight, first at an institution in New York and then at St Coletta School in Wisconsin.
Because medical opinion held that visits from family members would be too upsetting for someone in Rosemary’s condition, no one visited her for years. She died in 2005.
Kennedy Shriver organised the Special Olympics in 1968. The first competition, a two-day affair at Soldier Field in Chicago, attracted 1,000 contestants from 26 US states and Canada. Although a number of famous athletes heeded her request to attend, the spectator turnout was minuscule, and most of the media declined to cover it.
But the Special Olympics has since then become the world’s largest year-round sports programme for mentally disabled children and adults. More than some three million athletes in 180 countries take part in competitions each year. Contestants work through local and regional meets toward the World Special Olympics, held every two years.
A pencil-thin woman with a big, toothy smile, she was well known for her willingness to get close to those she was trying to help – joining children in their games, listening to and encouraging them, talking to their parents.
“I think that really the only way you change people’s attitudes or behaviour is to work with them,” she told an interviewer.
“Not write papers or serve on committees. Who’s going to work with the child to change him – with the juvenile delinquent and the retarded? Who’s going to teach them to swim? To catch a ball? You have to work with the person. It’s quite simple, actually.”
In 2003, the Special Olympics moved outside the US for the first time and were held in Ireland where there are currently 11,275 athletes registered with Special Olympics Ireland.
Kennedy Shriver strongly supported the Irish games and Matt English, chief executive of Special Olympics Ireland said: “Eunice Kennedy Shriver leaves behind a significant legacy. Few people can be credited with having changed the lives of so many. Her vision and determination to change attitudes towards intellectual disability has resulted in an organisation that offers people with an intellectual disability, the opportunity not only to win at sport, but to win at life.”
Tributes were paid also by President Mary McAleese and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
Kennedy Shriver’s honours included the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US, which was conferred on her in 1984 by President Reagan.
Eunice Mary Kennedy was born in 1921, at the Kennedy family residence in Brookline, Massachusetts.
She grew up there and in the Bronx and Bronxville, New York. She was educated at Catholic schools, and at one time the family thought she might become a nun.
She graduated in 1943 from Stanford University with a bachelor of science degree in sociology. Her first job was with the State Department in Washington, where she was part of a programme to help former prisoners-of-war become acclimated to civilian life.
In 1946, she worked in John F Kennedy’s first political campaign, for a seat in Congress; she later worked in the campaigns of brothers Robert and Edward. In 1947 and 1948, she was executive secretary of the National Conference on Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency in the justice department. Having gained control of a $1 million trust fund at 21, she accepted a salary of $1 a year.
In 1950, she became a social worker at the federal prison for women in West Virginia. In 1951, she moved to Chicago and worked at the House of the Good Shepherd, a youth shelter, and with the city’s juvenile court system.
On May 23rd, 1953, she and Sargent Shriver were married at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They settled in Chicago, where her husband was manager of the Merchandise Mart, a Kennedy interest.
Sargent Shriver became head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and the founding director of the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration. He was the vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic presidential ticket headed by senator George McGovern in 1972 and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.
Besides her husband, of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, survivors include the couple’s five children, Maria Shriver, a former NBC television journalist and the wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bobby Shriver III, a lawyer who co-founded an anti-poverty group, Data (Debt Aids Trade Africa), with U2 lead singer Bono; Mark Shriver, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and an official with Save the Children; Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics board; and Anthony Shriver, founder of Best Buddies International, a programme that encourages students to work with mentally disabled children.
Survivors also include her brother Edward; a sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, a former US ambassador to Ireland; and 19 grandchildren.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver: born July 10th, 1921; died August 11th, 2009