Shriver’s brief, sporadic career in elective politics was over. His dedication to public service was not. He returned to Fried, Frank, remaining as active, passionate, and engaged as he had been at the height of the New Frontier.
He continued to play an active role in determining where the Kennedy Foundation would spend its money. He also spent a great deal of time working with scholars on various projects at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In 1979 he spearheaded the Kennedy Institute’s launch of what would come to be called Trialogue, a running interfaith colloquium among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars that aimed to mine all three religious traditions in the hopes of finding “a surer basis for peace.”
Beginning in the mid-1970s, when Shriver’s business trips to Moscow were most frequent, he began campaigning for a more meaningful détente with the Soviet Union and for a reduction in the American stockpile of nuclear arms. After he dropped out of the presidential race in the spring of 1976, Shriver tried to parlay whatever political capital he had left into influencing the eventual Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, to work toward the idea he had spelled out on his Soviet lecture tour the previous year—a peaceful “Common Existence” for the United States and the Soviet Union. On September 18 Shriver teamed up with Herbert and Tom Scoville to form the United States Committee for East-West Common Existence, which sought to maximize international exchange between the cold war superpowers and to impress on them the importance of reducing their nuclear stockpiles. Herbert “Pete” Scoville had been an expert on military technology for thirty years; after working in the federal government (the Defense Department, the CIA, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency), he had become an arms control activist and went on to found the Arms Control Association. His son, Tom, served as executive director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s advisory committee.
In December 1976 the committee sent Jimmy Carter a letter signed by dozens of the most prominent names in arms control and liberal advocacy, including Father Ted Hesburgh, George Kennan, and Charles Yost. “Dear President-Elect,” Shriver and company addressed Carter in Georgia, “We are writing this letter because of our concern that one of the most important challenges confronting America as you take office is to restore momentum to the effort to improve Soviet-American relations.”
Conservative hawks—in particular Ronald Reagan, Ford’s defeated challenger in the GOP primary—had recently escalated their cold war rhetoric. Détente was a sham, Reagan and others said; we need to abandon peaceful coexistence and strive instead for all-out military supremacy. Shriver and his colleagues on the committee found this deplorable, believing it an “illusion” that security and peace could be won through military build-up alone. Should these militaristic policies regain ascendance, the committee warned Carter, “the U.S. and the Soviet Union would be headed toward disaster, with fear in the driver’s seat—not an appropriate fear of nuclear holocaust, not fear of an endless arms race, not fear of atomic weapons in the hands of all nations—but an unreasoning fear of each other. This fear—spread by those who say that the United States is weak, spread by those who say that relaxation of tensions is only a trap, spread by prisoners of the Cold War generation—would become our greatest enemy.”
The committee argued that America already was Russia’s military superior by far. Shriver, based on his own experience in the Soviet Union, strongly believed this to be true. Operating from its position of military strength, Shriver and company told Carter, the United States should substantially reduce nuclear arsenals and delivery mechanisms; formulate a more active policy to block nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the world; and declare a moratorium on all nuclear testing.
Carter initially opted for the path charted by the committee: limiting nuclear-arms build-up, negotiating restraints on strategic weapons, and trying to “raise the threshold” on nuclear war planning. But the apparent failure of the “détente experiment” of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to have loosened superpower restraint; by the end of his administration, Carter was tacking in a more hawkish nuclear direction. In December 1979 the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan destroyed whatever was left of détente. Carter declared that the Soviet advance into Central Asia had to be stopped; he feared the Soviets would advance all the way to the Persian Gulf, to seize the oil supplies there. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s nemesis in the administration, the far more hawkish national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, gained in influence. Carter declared that the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Relations between the superpowers were growing more truculent—and more atomically threatening—than they had been since the early 1960s.
Ronald Reagan hewed even farther from détente than Carter had. In 1981, when Reagan took office, Shriver (along with George Ball, William Fulbright, John Kenneth Galbraith, Averell Harriman, Jacob Javits, George Kennan, and others) sent him a letter similar to the one they had addressed to Carter in 1976. It fell on deaf ears.
Shriver now began strategizing to see how the arms-control movement might achieve more leverage over the rabidly hawkish Reagan administration. As usual, he began by seeking out the best and brightest minds he could identify and bringing them to his home for a discussion. In 1981 the Shriver family had moved out of Timberlawn into a house called Avondale, on Foxhall Road in Northwest Washington. On Tuesday, October 20, 1981, a small but influential band of foreign policy experts joined Sarge and Eunice for a secret dinner discussion at Avondale to discuss “what needs to be done” about the Reagan administration’s policy on nuclear arms. The dinner guests that night included Pete Scoville; Robert McNamara, who was presently head of the World Bank; Paul Warnke, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s chief negotiator during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT); George Kennan, the author of the famous “X” document, which spelled out the policy of containment of communism during the Truman administration, and who was now a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; William Colby, the former head of the CIA; Gerard Smith, Shriver’s boyhood friend, now one of the nation’s leading arms-control negotiators; and Father Bryan Hehir, director of policy for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
To Hehir, who was the youngest and (at the time) least distinguished of all the guests present, the dinner was a heady experience. “Reagan had made a statement that day, or virtually that day, that you could have a limited nuclear war in Europe and Europe would probably survive,” Hehir recalled. “McNamara found that just incomprehensible. And he was apoplectic about that. As the discussion evolved, somebody said, ‘We’ve got to do an article” on the idea that a first-launch nuclear strike was not only immoral but tactically senseless. “Then they had a discussion about who should write it,” Hehir recalled. “And we went around the table and of course they all had a hundred names and it was like the Old Boys’ School of Foreign Policy. Eventually they settled on Mac Bundy.”
Before Bundy would agree to take on the draftsman’s role, he told Kennan he needed to know what core principles the statement would be expressing. Shriver agreed that an outline of principles was a necessary first step—and later that day Kennan dictated a rudimentary statement to Shriver’s assistant Jeannie Main. The statement read, in part:
1. We are persuaded that there is literally no way that either this country or the Soviet Union could initiate the use of nuclear weapons in combat with ultimate advantage to itself—without incurring, that is, a wholly unacceptable risk of escalation into nuclear war disastrous to all parties.
2. This being the case, we consider that the United States should, while retaining the option of a nuclear response to a nuclear attack, abandon the principles of first use of nuclear weapons in any armed conflict.
3. We recognize that this will necessitate an extensive restructuring of American armed forces in points of strategy, tactics, equipment and training. We urge that such a restructuring be put in hand at once.
To accommodate this restructuring, the statement called for a strengthening of conventional forces by both the United States and NATO. Shriver immediately sent the statement to McNamara, Colby, Hehir, Scoville, and Warnke for their comments.
In a series of further discussions at Avondale over the next several weeks, it was agreed that Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, and Gerard Smith would serve as coauthors of a statement calling on the Reagan administration to promise never, under any circumstance, to launch a nuclear first strike. Shriver served as ringleader and cheerleader, collecting and circulating material and trying to recruit additional troops to the disarmament cause. When Averell Harriman wrote an op-ed column in the Washington Post, calling for “decisive leadership” in limiting nuclear arms and for a study on nuclear war options, Shriver forwarded it to McNamara with a letter that sounded the clarion call of the New Frontier. “Decisive leadership,” Shriver wrote, “will not be fulfilled … just by a call for a study to explore the nuclear war options at this time, especially the first-use option. Useful though such a study might be, it would not meet the current situation. Instead, we need a declaration just like Jack’s: ‘We’ll put a man on the moon in this decade.’ ” We need, Shriver wrote, to make a forceful statement calling for the US government to renounce the use of a nuclear first strike.
On the day that Harriman’s op-ed piece appeared in the Post, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced a “contingency plan” whereby US military forces would detonate a nuclear warhead as a “demonstration” meant to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. This, Shriver believed, was one step removed from a first strike. “Human beings,” he wrote to McNamara, “need their eyes and hearts lifted to an alternative to Haig-ism, ‘demonstration blasts,’ etc. You all [Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, and Smith] can do all that; and many centrists would join you.”
For the next three months, Shriver buzzed like a gnat in the ears of McNamara, Kennan, and company, goading them on, sending them new material, winning new recruits to the “no-first-strike” cause. He got Oregon senator Mark Hatfield, a Republican, to agree to endorse any statement on nuclear arms Kennan’s crew made, and Hatfield agreed to introduce his support in the Senate as the “Hatfield Resolution.”
In mid-December, Kennan and Bundy were still wrestling over who would serve as primary draftsman, and Shriver was getting impatient. If we’re having trouble getting Mac Bundy to write a paper for us, he wrote to McNamara, then why not get someone else to do it? He specifically recommended James Fallows, a young veteran of the Carter administration who had carved out a reputation for himself as a journalist knowledgeable on national defense issues. McNamara wrote back that the problem was not “the paper, but rather how to present it. I am running into a lot of opposition from people who I thought would support a ‘no-first-strike’ policy.”
Shriver refused to relent, and he continued to apply pressure on McNamara, Kennan, Bundy, and others to issue some kind of prominent statement. Eventually, they settled upon Foreign Affairs, the most influential and prestigious American journal on foreign policy, as the venue for their statement. (Also, the journal’s chief editor happened to be McGeorge Bundy’s brother, William.) Bundy and McNamara agreed to serve as primary writers, with Kennan and Smith also appearing as named coauthors.
Through January, Shriver held weekly strategy dinners at Avondale, where he brought nuclear disarmament activists and Kennedy Institute ethicists together with McNamara, Smith, and Kennan. At one dinner Averell Harriman spoke. Anthony Lake, who was present, recalled that the discussion turned to the question of
whether you could contemplate tactical nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. There were various experts around the table, and I think a number of Soviet officials. So Harriman looks around the table, and says there are two kinds of people: “There are people who are insane, and believe that we could fight a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And there are people who are sane, who believe that we cannot. I consider myself sane. Is there anyone here at the table who considers themselves insane?” And then he glared around the table, and of course nobody spoke up.
At an earlier meeting, in October, Bundy had mentioned that it would be useful to have the Catholic Church endorse the no-first-strike position Shriver’s group was discussing. In February, Bryan Hehir told Shriver that, partially inspired by the conversations at Avondale, he had begun working up a draft of a pastoral letter—that is, a letter to all the Catholic dioceses in America—on nuclear war, which would echo the moral arguments being made in the Foreign Affairs article. “Dear Mac,” Shriver wrote in late February. “I do remember at least the semblance of a snicker when you mentioned on the phone, ‘Sarge, I understand you are going to deliver the Roman Catholic hierarchy.’ That was last October. Now on March 1, I want you to see that I have delivered. What can I do for you and your fellow-authors now?”
For a full month before the article was published, the rumor in foreign policy circles was that it would be “a blockbuster.” On April 7, 1982, the spring issue of Foreign Affairs was published. In “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance,” Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, and Smith spelled out a sensible, centrist argument for a bold departure from current US nuclear policy: a total renunciation of first-strike capability. “We are four Americans who have been concerned over many years with the relation between nuclear weapons and the peace and freedom of the members of the Atlantic Alliance,” the article began. “Having learned that each of us separately had been coming to hold new views on this hard but vital question, we decided to see how far our thoughts, and the lessons of our varied experiences, could be put together; the essay that follows is the result. It argues that a new policy can bring great benefits.”
The article explained that until 1949, when the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device, the Western military strategy had been based on the assumption of American nuclear superiority. The ensuing thirty years had witnessed the massive arms race between the two superpowers, in which each strove to keep up with the other to maintain nuclear balance. Specific American military doctrine vis-à-vis its responsibilities to its NATO allies had evolved over the years, but “a major element in every doctrine has been that the United States has asserted its willingness to be the first—has indeed made plans to be the first if necessary—to use nuclear weapons to defend against aggression in Europe.” But this policy, the authors wrote, had been formulated in the 1940s, when the American nuclear advantage was overwhelming. Now that any nuclear war “would be a ghastly catastrophe for all concerned,” it was time to revisit the willingness to use a first strike.
The article could not be dismissed as the plaintive coos of mindless doves. It was written, after all, by four men who, as the New York Times reported, “had helped shape America’s defense strategy for a generation.” McNamara, although he had later turned against the war, had been the primary architect of the Vietnam War under JFK and LBJ. Bundy had been a national security adviser to both presidents and was known for his toughness and analytical rigor. Kennan had been the author of containment policy; although less hard-line than the advocates of “roll-back,” he had certainly not been one to underestimate the global Communist threat. And Smith was no namby-pamby liberal; he had served as an arms negotiator on the SALT treaty under Richard Nixon.
The authors made their arguments in both moral and military terms. The idea of global nuclear war was too terrible to contemplate—and the responsibility for loosing such a fate upon the world extremely grave. Yes, the authors conceded, our Western European allies—especially West Germany—relied significantly upon the threat of an American nuclear strike to deter Soviet invasion. But the idea that a “limited” strike, aimed solely at repelling a Soviet ground attack, could be kept from escalating seemed absurd. Thus the solution was to beef up US and NATO conventional forces in Western Europe, so that those could be used as a deterrent, while the United States adopted the morally and strategically wise doctrine of no first use.
One reason the article attracted so much attention was that the authors renounced the doctrine of “flexible response” (which gave the US military the option of responding to conventional Soviet aggression with either conventional or nuclear weapons)—a policy that McNamara and Bundy themselves had been instrumental in formulating during the Kennedy administration. “We do not think that deterrence can safely be based forever on a doctrine which more and more looks to the people like either a bluff or a suicide pact.”
Shriver’s name did not appear on the article. He worried that he was already seen as too much of a peacenik, and he was not, as all of the named authors were, an official expert on foreign policy. Yet his imprint is all over the article; he was its progenitor, the instigator without whom it never would have happened. And the “Gang of Four” (as Bundy dubbed himself, Smith, Kennan, and McNamara) readily acknowledged Shriver’s influence. Several days before the article appeared, McNamara wrote to him: “Sarge, as an unacknowledged author of this article, I hope you are pleased with the result. Many thanks for all you did to make it possible.” Two months later, Kennan wrote to Shriver, “I must say that you touched off a notable series of events with the hospitality you gave us at your home last fall; and I greatly appreciate the self-effacing but greatly effective support you gave to the most important of all causes.”
In the short term, the article had its desired effects: ongoing front-page coverage in major newspapers all over the world and heated public debate about the future direction of America’s first-strike nuclear policy. Ted Kennedy seized the opportunity to reintroduce discussion of a “nuclear freeze” on the Senate floor.
Typically, Shriver turned his attention next to mobilizing the Catholic Church to speak out against America’s first-strike policy. In June 1982 Bryan Hehir sent Shriver a first draft of a pastoral letter on nuclear war, by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, “God’s Hope in a Time of Fear,” which Hehir had cowritten (anonymously) with Bruce Russett, a professor of political science at Yale.
Hehir’s draft began by directing Catholics’ attention to the Christian vision of peace, as embodied by the life of Christ, but then took up specific questions about “just war theory” and the right of self-defense in the nuclear era. Hehir acknowledged that both Christian tradition and just war theory allowed for limited self-defense and deterrent measures. Yet the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the moral calculus involved in deterrence; the danger of tragic consequences on a massive scale were great. “Christians cannot long live by the sign of the mushroom cloud.” Thus, an “ethically acceptable defense policy” required, among other things, adopting the position first developed in Shriver’s dining room and expressed in the Foreign Affairs article: The initiation of nuclear warfare should be cast out of the American military strategic repertoire.
Shriver sent Hehir a ten-page assessment of the draft. His criticisms were several.
First, he felt that Hehir’s “just war” arguments relied too much on St. Augustine without sufficiently noting that when Augustine was theorizing about issues of war and self-defense in the fifth century, he was doing so in a context where wars were fought mainly by professionals, not draftees and conscripts, and where weapons of mass destruction were unimaginable.
Second, he wrote, he didn’t “feel a real presence of Jesus of Nazareth penetrating this document.” To be effective, Shriver believed, it needed to reflect the spirit of Jesus—and that spirit was more inclusive than what the letter reflected. The draft “seems to me … to be too much of a Roman document, too constricted by its emanation from our Western Catholic Church, without any note or harbinger of ‘the world Church.’ ”
Hehir incorporated some of Shriver’s changes, as well as those proposed by other people who had read the draft, and in early October the bishops publicly released the letter, explaining that it was just a draft and inviting further comment on it from the Reagan administration and from ethicists and military experts.
The circulation of the draft letter became front-page news, producing a furor of public debate. The most controversial part was the idea first broached at Avondale and then circulated in the Foreign Affairs article: the bishops’ suggestion that the Reagan administration renounce a first-strike nuclear policy. Both Reagan’s national security adviser, William P. Clark, and his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, responded with letters to the bishops, explaining the strategic necessity of America’s retaining the first-strike option. A pledge not to use nuclear arms first, Clark wrote, might lead “the Soviets to believe that Western Europe was open to conventional aggression.” Weinberger argued that given that the doctrine of deterrence had worked up until now—and given the horrific consequences should nuclear war break out—“the burden of proof must fall upon those who would depart from the sound policies of deterrence which have kept the peace for so long.”
On October 25 the draft letter was excerpted in major national newspapers. “We find the moral responsibility of beginning nuclear war not justified by rational political objectives,” the bishops said. The uproar this generated was significant; after all, the Reagan administration had made “flexible response” a cornerstone of its defense policy.
Administration officials and congressional Republicans reacted as angrily as they dared, given America’s 55 million Catholic voters, asserting that the release of the draft letter just weeks before the 1982 congressional midterm elections was a political gambit designed to help the Democrats. Some GOP officials also argued that the Catholic Church had no business sticking its nose into public policy, and even that it was violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
As the National Conference of Catholic Bishops prepared to meet in Washington in November to discuss the draft letter, argument raged on the nation’s op-ed pages about whether the Catholic Church was meddling where it didn’t belong. (“The whole chorus pleads with the bishops to hie them back to the sacristy, where they can speculate ad infinitum on transubstantiation and other pinheaded if angelic topics,” was how Georgetown University president Father Timothy Healy characterized the bulk of the criticism.) Shriver was still in active consultation with Hehir and felt strongly that the bishops did have the right and, indeed, the duty to involve themselves in moral questions of nuclear war. So he and Gerard Smith drafted a letter on the subject, and Shriver spent the early part of November recruiting prominent signatories.
On November 17 Shriver and Smith forwarded their letter to Ben Bradlee and A. M. Rosenthal, editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively. Acknowledging that some critics believed “that Bishops don’t know about nuclear weapons and should leave the matter to military and civilian experts or governments,” Shriver and Smith yet noted that “nuclear war could well spell the end of modern civilization.” Wasn’t it reasonable, then, to conclude that this prospect presented “a moral problem for religious leaders to be concerned about”? In the letter’s most striking paragraph, Shriver and Smith wrote, “In pre-war Germany the Nazis charged the Jews were a threat to the German nation. Would it have been meddling in secular affairs had the Bishops of Germany and of the world addressed themselves directly to that abomination?” The letter was reported in the Times and sparked an editorial in the Post (“The Bishops Discover the Atom”).
The next day, November 18, a committee of bishops who were meeting in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of endorsing the draft of the pastoral letter and sending it back to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on war and peace to be revised for presentation to the entire conference for a vote the following May. White House criticism had failed to soften the bishops’ stance against a first strike.
Through all this, Shriver himself operated mostly behind the scenes. He was not the principal instigator of the bishops’ letter. His byline had not graced the Foreign Affairs article the preceding spring. But he was the primary link between Bundy’s Gang of Four article and Hehir’s pastoral letter, the moral and logistical linchpin as the bishops moved toward a forceful moral statement on nuclear war. And now, although still behind the scenes (because he worried that his dovish reputation would hurt the cause), he had galvanized civilian support for the bishops’ right to involve themselves in nuclear policy debates. “Thank you for being the stimulus which produced a very useful contribution to this important issue,” former CIA director Colby wrote to him after the Times had reported on the statement Shriver and Smith had drafted. “It is a spirit like yours that produces results. The rest of us just go along and react to the people with real drive.”
In the spring of 1983, the bishops circulated a third draft of their pastoral letter in preparation for the vote scheduled to take place on May 2. The bishops’ letter, George Kennan wrote, “may fairly be described as the most profound and searching inquiry yet conducted by any responsible collective body into the relations of nuclear weaponry, and indeed of modern war in general, to moral philosophy, to politics, and to the conscience of the national state.”
As the day of the vote approached, Shriver once again took it upon himself to marshal lay support—and continued to lobby Bryan Hehir for additional modifications to the text of the pastoral letter, right up until the moment of the vote.
The next morning, the bishops voted overwhelmingly (238–9) to endorse the letter, meaning that it would be published in Catholic publications and distributed in dioceses all over the country. Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin received a standing ovation when he urged his fellow bishops to seize the “new moment” in history to pose a “revolutionary challenge” to outmoded nuclear doctrines.
The only strident opposition from within the Conference of Bishops came from Philip Hannan, archbishop of New Orleans, who had served as a military chaplain to paratroopers in World War II. “You don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about unless you’ve been in war,” he said exasperatedly after a series of amendments he had proposed had been voted down. “If you’re going to speak on weapons, you should know what you’re talking about.”
Reading Hannan’s remarks, Shriver immediately telegrammed the archbishop at the Palmer House, where most of the bishops were staying. “Your Excellency,” Shriver wrote, “having been in war like you, I can understand your feelings, but our times are bygone times. Proud as I am of what we did in World War II, I cannot help but agree that Einstein was right, and that the Popes have been right, when they have said that nuclear weapons require us to change our way of thinking about war.”
“Isn’t it the most wonderful time to be alive?” Shriver continued, with a hint of either facetiousness or profound ingenuousness. “For the first time since Noah, one can seriously think that the world could come to an end, that a new flood could occur nowadays for almost the same reasons the original flood occurred back in Noah’s time. Not since the Caesars and the Huns have we had such tyrants to struggle against as the Bolsheviks. So, keep praying for us all, and if you are really desolate, come help me build an ark in Washington.”
The pastoral letter was warmly received by the Catholic laity. According to the New York Times, “Many of the 50 million Catholics in the United States consider the bishops’ action to be the boldest and most decisive step on social issues in the history of the American hierarchy.” Historians today consider the document to be “the era’s most influential challenge to American nuclear policy.”
The nuclear freeze movement had multiple bases (Ted Kennedy, among others, had been promoting a nuclear freeze in the Senate for months, and religious leaders like Ted Hesburgh and Billy Graham had been touting a nuclear freeze since the 1970s), and the no-first-strike policy had been batted around in various academic settings over the years, although it had never found general public expression before the Foreign Affairs article. One of the common threads tying everything together and bringing nuclear issues to the fore was Shriver’s behind-the-scenes activism. Shriver was the hidden nexus where the bishops and the defense experts came together. When Bundy wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books in June 1983, reviewing the pastoral letter along with the just-released Scowcroft Commission’s report on strategic forces, he forwarded an advance copy to Shriver with a note. “Dear Sarge,” Bundy wrote, “As the invisible hand behind the Gang of Four and probably behind the bishops too, you may enjoy this piece in which one of the former salutes all of the latter.”