My heart sank; this was catastrophic news. As I
had labored month after month on the book, and one year had become two
and then three and then seven, one of my fears was that someone would
beat me to the punch. I mean, after all, here was one of the great
underappreciated figures of modern American history--founder of the Peace
Corps, commanding general of the War on Poverty, vice presidential
candidate, and so much more besides--and no one had yet written a
full-length biography of him. But now someone else was. And here was
Shriver--using one of the signature motivational techniques he'd
perfected while running the Peace Corps--goading me into working harder
by letting me know that a competitor was tilling the same terrain. If I
didn't want to get beaten, I'd better work faster, and better.
"Is that so?" I said weakly, eagerly waiting for him to finish filling my tumbler with scotch. I was going to need the drink.
Yes, he said, and he went on to regale me with some of the "amazing"
tidbits this writer had unearthed, and all the hundreds of people he
had interviewed, and my mood got bleaker and bleaker--this other guy
seemed to have almost everything I did. How had I not gotten wind of
this earlier? Great, I thought bitterly. Seven years of my life wasted.
And then as Shriver went on, enthusiastically detailing what this other
writer was doing, the light dawned: That other writer was me. Or,
rather, Shriver didn't realize that I was me. Momentarily befogged by
his Alzheimer's, he was telling me about my own book.
I let him
go on for a few more minutes, just to make sure I was right. (Also, what
an unusual opportunity: to get an uncensored opinion of your work from
someone who doesn't know that the work is yours--and from someone whom,
furthermore, the work happens to be about.) Then, as gently as I could, I
steered him toward awareness. "Mr. Shriver," I said. "You're talking
about my book, right? In that section on the founding of Head Start, do
you think that I've managed to reconcile the conflicting views about
where the idea originated?" And then something slipped into place in his
mind and Shriver, with the grace and social skill that is
characteristic of some Alzheimer's patients and that was even more
characteristic of him, smoothly moved the conversation forward, and for
the rest of the night--over drinks and dinner and coffee--he discussed the
relevant chapters with lucidity and great enthusiasm.
For me,
such moments are what stand out most memorably from my years of working
with him on the book: Even as the disease robbed him of his memory, and
sometimes of his logic, it did not rob him of his spirit--warm,
ebullient, devout, inspiring--which was essential to all that he
achieved.
One day in the summer of 1997, during the first week I
spent intensively interviewing him at his summer home in Hyannis Port,
we got to talking about his German ancestry, and about the summers he'd
spent in Europe as a schoolboy in the 1930s. And that got him talking
about his love of certain aspects of Germanic culture, which in turn got
him talking about how years ago he and his son-in-law-to-be, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, had bonded over their shared roots in that region of the
world. We were sitting on the veranda overlooking the Atlantic Ocean
(in my tapes of those interviews, his voice is sometimes inaudible over
the sound of the wind blowing and the water lapping), and he suddenly
stood up and said he had to go get something. Next thing I know, he's
reappeared wearing the authentic leather lederhosen Schwarzenegger had
brought him years ago from Austria. Shriver had, as he ruefully noted,
put on weight since he received the gift, so he sort of had to jam
himself into them, and was spilling out a little over the top, and his
eighty-two-year-old legs were poking out the bottom of the shorts, and
he had to leave the leather shoulder straps unfastened, and he generally
looked ridiculous. Yet when we continued the interview, he still in his
lederhosen, talking about how his eighteenth-century forebears had fled
the wars of Europe, he was completely unselfconscious and, as always,
charismatic.