By a Baltimore Sun reporter

August 12, 2009

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a champion of the mentally retarded, the wife of a one-time vice presidential candidate and the sister of a president, died early Tuesday surrounded by relatives at a Hyannis, Mass., hospital. She was 88.

Shriver had suffered a series of strokes in recent years and died at Cape Cod Hospital, her family said in a statement. Her husband, her five children and all 19 of her grandchildren were by her side, the statement said.

A Potomac resident for more than 40 years, Mrs. Shriver was an activist in the field of mental retardation and founded the Special Olympics for mentally disabled athletes. She was the wife of Peace Corps founding director and one-time vice presidential candidate R. Sargent Shriver and a sister of the late President John F. Kennedy.

Mrs. Shriver's son, Mark K. Shriver, is a former Maryland state delegate from Montgomery County. Her daughter Maria Shriver is a former NBC correspondent who is married to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

With Eunice Shriver's death, Jean Kennedy Smith becomes the last surviving daughter of Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy.

"She was the light of our lives, a mother, wife, grandmother, sister and aunt who taught us by example and with passion what it means to live a faith-driven life of love and service to others," the family said.

The hospital is near the Kennedy family's Hyannis compound, where her sole surviving brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, has been battling a brain tumor.

Senator Kennedy said his earliest memory of his sister was as a young girl "with great humor, sharp wit, and a boundless passion to make a difference."

"She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us: Much is expected of those to whom much has been given," he said. "Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough."

President Barack Obama said Mrs. Shriver would be remembered as "a champion for people with intellectual disabilities, and as an extraordinary woman who, as much as anyone, taught our nation - and our world - that no physical or mental barrier can restrain the power of the human spirit."

As celebrity, social worker and activist, Mrs. Shriver was credited with transforming America's view of the mentally disabled from institutionalized patients to friends, neighbors and athletes. Her efforts were inspired in part by the struggles of her mentally disabled sister, Rosemary.

"She was one of the greatest women of the 20th century and the moral center of the family," said Laurence Leamer, author of "The Kennedy Women."

Mrs. Shriver was born in Brookline, Mass., on July 10, 1921, the fifth of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She earned a sociology degree from Stanford University in 1943 after graduating from a British boarding school while her father served as ambassador to England.

While she was best known for her work with the Special Olympics, Mrs. Shriver was equally invested in the 50-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and newer initiatives such as Community of Caring, which she founded in 1981 to reduce teenage pregnancies and the incidence of mental retardation.

Her commitment "was unwavering, amazing and very real," said Michael Hardman, a former Special Olympics board member from Utah. "One of the things she was able to do is keep her focus, which was making significant changes in the lives of people with mental retardation and their families."

Mrs. Shriver's association with the cause began in her childhood, when she, even more than her other siblings, took particular interest in the care of Rosemary. "It always seemed that Eunice reached out to make sure that Rosemary was included in all the activities - whether it was dodge ball or duck duck goose," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy recalled in 1987.

Mrs. Shriver always maintained, though, that her interest in the issue was founded on more than just personal history; the plight of the mentally retarded, for years segregated from the social mainstream and avoided in open conversation, appealed to her most basic instincts, she said.

"I think that really the only way you change people's attitudes or behavior is to work with them. Not write papers or serve on committees," she said in a 1966 interview. "Who's going to work with the child to change him, with the juvenile delinquent and the retarded? Who's going to teach him to swim? To catch a ball? You have to work with the person. It's quite simple, really."

Mrs. Shriver's work started behind the scenes.

In the 1950s, she persuaded her father to direct his foundation's funds to help the mentally retarded, rather than to more traditional Catholic charities. After her brother became president in 1961, Mrs. Shriver coaxed him to take action, too; within months, he created the President's Committee on Mental Retardation, which in turn led to the establishment, in 1962, of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and to the passage of numerous bills combating retardation.

In the meantime, Mrs. Shriver began complementing her policy push with hands-on activism. In 1962, she and her husband set up a day camp for retarded children at Timberlawn, a 20-acre Rockville farm they had rented, because, in her words, she felt some "indignation because they didn't have a place to go."

Five years later, the Special Olympics were born at Soldier Field in Chicago. One thousand athletes from 26 states and Canada took part. Today, the games annually involve more than 1.2 million children in 160 countries.

On the job, Mrs. Shriver established a reputation as a demanding, energetic and forward-looking leader who shared her brother John's rapid-fire, Boston-accented locutions, as well as his impatience for "people who pontificated endlessly," as Mr. Leamer put it.

This occasional terseness extended to the social sphere: Mrs. Shriver's friends joke about her habit of abruptly leaving, or shutting down, her own dinner parties at 10 p.m. when she felt it was time for her to go to bed.

She met her future husband in 1946, at the Georgetown home of her brother John, known in the family as Jack. Sargent Shriver was a son of the Maryland aristocracy, Navy veteran and a graduate of Yale Law School. They married in 1953. Mr. Shriver would go on to be the first director of the Peace Corps, to lead President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and to serve as U.S. ambassador to France. In 1972, Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern selected him as his running mate.

By all accounts, the couple couldn't have been better suited for the work they loved. While her more visionary husband fostered the daydreams of expanding the Special Olympics across the globe, his wife attended to its day-to-day operations, everything from teaching kids how to dribble to arguing event rules with referees.

Although a pragmatist to the core, Mrs. Shriver inherited from her mother, Rose, a Catholic faith as deep as it was private - a faith so strong that some predicted, in her youth, that she would become a nun. It was this faith, Mr. Leamer said, that helped her withstand the loss of three of her brothers, one to war and two to assassinations, as well as countless other family tragedies.

Mrs. Shriver, who possessed the lanky Kennedy frame, had to contend with her own health troubles as well. Like her brother Jack, she suffered from Addison's disease, a disorder of the adrenal system, and suffered two broken arms and hip injuries in a head-on collision in 1991.

All of Mrs. Shriver's children have been actively involved in advocacy for the mentally retarded in some way. Her son Timothy Shriver is the chairman of the Special Olympics, while her son Anthony Shriver is founder and president of Best Buddies International, which provides services to the mentally retarded.

Her death brought an outpouring of condolences from Washington.

"Eunice Kennedy Shriver's fundamental belief that every human has inherent worth and dignity revolutionized perceptions in this country and around the world," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a statement. "She enriched the lives of millions of individuals with intellectual disabilities; by unmasking discrimination and encouraging acceptance, she enriched the lives of all of us. The Special Olympics, and the joy it brings to countless children, will long stand in tribute to her life and work."

Mrs. Shriver was not without her regrets, though. In a 1962 article in the Saturday Evening Post, Mrs. Shriver described her father's decision 20 years earlier to have Rosemary undergo a prefrontal lobotomy - a botched procedure that left Rosemary more disabled than before.

"It fills me with sadness," Mrs. Shriver wrote, "to think this change might not have been necessary if we knew then what we know today."

Baltimore Sun reporter Paul West contributed to this article from Washington. The Associated Press contributed to this article from Hyannis, Mass.

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