Arnold's Debt to Eunice

J. Vespa, WireImage / Getty Images Eunice Kennedy Shriver might be known for her famous relatives—and founding the Special Olympics—but it was her political savvy that got Arnold Schwarzenegger into the California governor’s office.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver is likely to be most remembered for her blood relations, especially her politician brothers John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Teddy Kennedy.

In California, she has a lesser-known but crucial role: as the state's most important mother-in-law.

As her work for the governor of California makes clear, her relatives were successful in no small part because they had the good fortune to be related to her.

Eunice’s son-in-law, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has described her as his mentor and strongest political supporter. He’s not exaggerating. Without her, there never would have been an Arnold governorship.

This close if unlikely relationship—between an Austrian bodybuilder and a president’s sister—began the weekend they met, 32 years ago, at a tennis tournament in memory of Bobby Kennedy in Queens. Schwarzenegger played doubles with Rosey Grier, charmed his future wife, Maria Shriver, and earned a post-tournament invitation to Hyannis Port. There, as the story has long been told, Schwarzenegger made a flattering if crude remark to Eunice about the derriere of her daughter. At that moment of truth, Eunice laughed uproariously. Within months, Schwarzenegger was doing events for the Special Olympics, which Eunice had founded.

Arnold and Maria married in 1986. The bond between Eunice and her son-in-law grew deeper. Schwarzenegger’s father was long dead. His mother lived in Austria. So Eunice and her husband, Sarge, the Peace Corps founder and 1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, became his American parents, and he engaged them in the kinds of long conversations about serious things that he’d never had with own parents. Schwarzenegger loved listening to Eunice in particular, because she was provocative and occasionally outrageous. Among the topics the in-laws argued about were, according to Scott Stossel’s biography of Sargent Shriver, the “theology and ethics of Conan the Barbarian.”

Eunice was impressed by her son-in-law, and urged him to consider public service. “Eunice was always hoping that her children would go into politics. She always wanted to see that,” Schwarzenegger recalled in a 2006 interview with me. “Now I come along. She saw my interest in politics, and she was always supportive, saying I should learn and read about issues, and pick one issue…She said her brother Jack always picked one issue, and ran with that for months.”

Schwarzenegger’s first issue was physical fitness. After the election of President George H.W. Bush, the then-movie star sought an appointment as head of the president’s fitness council. But White House aides worried that Schwarzenegger's public smoking of cigars and his previous use of steroids made him the wrong choice for a fitness panel, according to records on file at Bush’s presidential library at Texas A&M. The records also show that groups concerned about movie and television violence were lobbying the White House against the appointment.