From our files: Eunice Kennedy Shriver - at jet speed
In a 1975 interview with the Monitor, Mrs. Shriver spoke of her family, her heroes, personal ambitions.
Washington
From the December 15, 1975 issue of The Christian Science Monitor
One sandy day in Hyannisport, Cape Cod, in 1975, during Sargent Shriver's last run for the presidency, he announced he was going to Indianapolis to campaign. His wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, announced she was going to swim.
So she and a friend from Ireland, Dot Tubrity, splashed into the ocean. "They were out swimming around," remembers Ethel Kennedy, Mrs. Shriver's sister-in-law, "when Eunice said, 'Maybe I really ought to go to Indianapolis." The problem was, the plane was leaving in seven minutes.
Mrs. Shriver raced into the house, grabbed a few things, and they made a dash for the plane. But when they got to the airport, says Mrs. Kennedy, "Eunice realized she'd forgotten to put a dress on, so she said to Dot, 'Would you take your dress off, I'll need it. You can change behind the car.' So Eunice wore the dress over her bathing suit on board the plane, then on to the speech and reception in Indianapolis.
"Eunice," says Ethel Kennedy, "likes to do things on the spur of the moment."
Meeting the wife of the Maryland Democrat who wants to be president is just that abrupt. Eunice Shriver's door slams open and she shoots out, trailing a sort of jet exhaust, beginning the conversation in mid-paragraph, then sweeping the inverviewer into the robin's egg blue office where she runs the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in Washington, D.C.
