Sargent Shriver

Sargent Shriver founded the Peace Corps, ran the war on poverty, and is the only person to have created two of the durable institutions of the American 1960s without ever winning an election. He was a Maryland Catholic, a naval officer at Guadalcanal, and married Eunice Kennedy in 1953; he managed the family's Merchandise Mart in Chicago and worked on civil rights in the city before his brother-in-law's presidency. Kennedy asked him to turn a campaign improvisation into an agency, and the Peace Corps was operating within two months of the inauguration, with Shriver insisting it be independent of the State Department and not used for intelligence, which is why it survived. Under Johnson he ran the Office of Economic Opportunity and built Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA, Legal Services for the poor and the community action programme - a set of institutions attacked continuously since and mostly still standing. He opposed the Vietnam escalation privately and was sent to Paris as ambassador. In 1972 he was put on the Democratic ticket as vice-presidential candidate after Thomas Eagleton was dropped, and lost forty-nine states with George McGovern; he ran for the nomination himself in 1976 and got nowhere. He and Eunice worked together on the Special Olympics for four decades. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2003 and died in 2011. His son Bobby runs an anti-poverty organisation and his daughter Maria is a journalist. The Peace Corps has sent around a quarter of a million volunteers to more than a hundred and forty countries since 1961. Head Start still enrols close to a million children a year. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

• Lived: 1915 CE – 2011 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: politician