PBS can not only make one-sided documentaries celebrating liberals like Sargent Shriver, who married Eunice Kennedy and became George McGovern’s Democratic running mate in 1972, but they can count on newspapers like the Washington Post to celebrate another outburst of liberal Sixties nostalgia. The gushy Post headline was "Politician-Activist Sargent Shriver: The Real Ideal." TV critic Tom Shales began by getting defensive about the poor, maligned Decade of Hippies:
Eras and epochs seem to take turns being trashed, with the decade of the 1960s getting way more than its share of scorn. It was a time of tragedies and villains, yes, but obviously a time of great heroes, too. One of them, often overlooked, is properly celebrated in a public TV documentary tonight: "American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver."
Shales not only lauded Shriver – father of former NBC News anchor and reporter Maria Shriver – but attacked anyone who opposed him as an ignorant bigot. His guide for the latest PBS hagiography became the omnipresent Bill Moyers:
Bill Moyers, who contributes reminiscence, calls Shriver "the best all-around politician I've ever seen," but in addition Shriver did seem to be that rare thing, a politician with stubbornly high ideals -- instilling in followers what Moyers calls "a sense of almost infinite possibilities." So it was that Lyndon Johnson saw in Shriver the perfect man to run the ambitious war on poverty, a war declared by LBJ to help bring about the "Great Society" that Johnson insisted was within our grasp.
Probably the rarest piece of memorabilia in the documentary is an excerpt from the recording of a phone call that LBJ made to Shriver, still running the Peace Corps, in an effort to persuade him to take on the new job. "I'm just giving you a billion dollars more to work with," Johnson says as only Johnson could. He taunts Shriver by saying that maybe he doesn't have "the glands" to take on such an enormous task; Shriver finally capitulated and became special assistant to the president.
The war proved essentially unwinnable, however, especially once Southern congressmen, some still openly segregationist, got hold of it and, says the narrator, "terrorized" it. Instead of investigating the causes of American poverty, such warped old-timers as Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.) instead launched investigations into the programs themselves, among them the seemingly unassailable Operation Head Start, which helped impoverished and disadvantaged kids. Some 12,000 benefited from Head Start in Mississippi alone before the program there was coldly closed down.
Perhaps heroes and villains were easier to spot then; Shriver seemed clearly to think in socially heroic terms and to be the target of the ignorant. The Special Olympics, another legacy that has flourished in ensuing years, was born in the Shrivers' big back yard, we are reminded. As for the War on Poverty, it was finally done in decisively by another war, the one in Vietnam, and the '60s became a blood bath in more ways than one.
