Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics, and did it because of what had been done to her sister. She was the fifth of the nine Kennedy children and closest to Rosemary, whom she swam and sailed with as a child and visited in Wisconsin for decades after the lobotomy that the family concealed until 1961. She worked for the Justice Department on juvenile delinquency and at a women's prison before running the family foundation, which she redirected almost entirely towards intellectual disability. In 1962 she wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post that told the public what had happened to Rosemary, which broke a silence the family had kept for twenty years, and she started a day camp for children with intellectual disabilities in her own back garden in Maryland the same summer - thirty-five children, and counsellors she recruited herself. That became the first International Special Olympics at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1968, with a thousand athletes from twenty-six states and Canada. The movement now involves several million athletes in nearly two hundred countries. She also pushed her brother's administration into the panel on mental retardation that produced the first federal legislation on the subject in 1963, and into founding the institute of child health that carries her name. Her husband Sargent Shriver ran the Peace Corps and the war on poverty. She is on the American commemorative dollar for the Special Olympics, the first living woman to appear on a United States coin. The camp in her garden was run for several summers before the movement had a name. She was still attending Special Olympics events into her eighties. Her daughter Maria Shriver is a journalist and was first lady of California.

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