Published on: Thursday, January 20, 2011

By Paige L. Hill

BETHESDA - Maryland has lost another great with the passing of Peace Corps founder and longtime national leader Robert Sargent Shriver who died Jan. 18 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, according to a family statement. He was 95.

Shriver’s family released a statement calling him “a man of giant love, energy, enthusiasm and commitment” who “lived to make the world a more joyful, faithful and compassionate place.”

President Barack Obama echoed their sentiments in his statement, calling Shriver “one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation.”

Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, who met Shriver through Franchot’s son, called him “a model for all Americans about how to conduct oneself in the public arena.”

Shriver was born Nov. 9, 1915 in Westminster, Md., to parents Robert and Sara Shriver. Shriver attended Yale as both an undergraduate and then for law school, earning his law degree in 1941. He established himself as an advocate for peace by helping to found “America First,” which campaigned to get the nation out of World War II’s European battles. When he married Eunice Kennedy, sister of a then-senator John F. Kennedy, Shriver’s ideas for world peace were about to be vaulted to a national level. He was appointed the first director of the Peace Corps in 1961 following Kennedy’s inauguration. The Peace Corps will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year.

“The entire Peace Corps community is deeply saddened by the passing of Sargent Shriver,” said the current director of the Peace Corps, Aaron Williams, in a statement. “He served as our founder, friend and guiding light for the past 50 years, and his legacy of idealism will live on in the work of current and future Peace Corps volunteers.”

Later, Shriver served in Lyndon Johnson’s administration as the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for programs such as Head Start. He served as the nation’s ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970 but returned to the United States when presidential hopeful George McGovern appointed Shriver as his running mate. Following his defeat to President Richard Nixon, Shriver returned to private life in Washington, D.C., practicing law.

In 1984, he was elected president of Special Olympics by the Board of Directors; as president, he directed the operation and international development of sports programs around the world. Six years later, in 1990, he was appointed chairman of the Board of Special Olympics.

When Shriver was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2003, his daughter, Maria Shriver (wife to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), published a children’s book, “What's Happening

to Grandpa?”, to help explain Alzheimer’s to children. In 2009, Shriver’s wife of more than 56 years, Eunice, died of natural causes.

“He worked on stages both large and small, but in the end, he will be best known for his love of others,” the Shriver family statement reads. “No one came into his presence without feeling his passion and his enthusiasm for them.”

Shriver is survived by his five children, Robert Sargent Shriver III, Maria Owings Shriver, Timothy Perry Shriver, Mark Kennedy Shriver and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver, and 19 grandchildren.

The funeral is an invitation-only mass being held Saturday at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Potomac.