The Pakistani Spectator

Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver (July 10, 1921) is a member of the Kennedy family and helped to found Special Olympics in the 1960s as a national organization. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.A., she is the fifth of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy.

Kennedy was educated at The Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, London, England, and in 1944 graduated from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with a Bachelor of Science in Social Science/Social Thought, after which she went to work for the U.S. Department of State, in the Special War Problems division. In 1950, she became a social worker at the then-named Federal Industrial Institution for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, and the following year she moved to Chicago, Illinois, to work with the House of the Good Shepherd and the Chicago Juvenile Court.

On May 23, 1953, she married Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. at Roman Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, New York.

Her husband served as the U.S. Ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970 and was the Democratic U.S. Vice Presidential candidate in 1972 (with George McGovern as the candidate for U.S. President).

They have five children: Robert Sargent Shriver III (born April 28, 1954), Maria Owings Shriver (November 6, 1955), Timothy Perry Shriver (August 29, 1959), Mark Kennedy Shriver (February 17, 1964), and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver (July 20, 1965).

With her husband, she has nineteen grandchildren, the second-most of any of the children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy. Her late brother U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy had eleven children who have produced thirty-two grandchildren.

Upon the death of her sister, Rosemary Kennedy, on January 7, 2005, Shriver became the eldest of the four then-surviving children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. (Her sister, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, later died on September 17, 2006, leaving just her brother U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy and her sister, former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith.)

Shriver, who is believed to suffer from Addison’s disease, has had several health setbacks in recent years, and on November 18, 2007, she was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts; she spent several weeks there.

Shriver actively campaigned for her elder brother, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, during his successful 1960 U.S. presidential election.

In 1968, she helped Ann McGlone Burke nationalize the Special Olympics movement and is the only woman to have her portrait appear, during her lifetime, on a U.S. coin - the 1995 commemorative Special Olympics silver dollar.

Her daughter, Maria, is married to actor and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger who is currently Governor of California (elected 2003). Shriver, a lifelong Democrat, supported her Republican son-in-law’s successful bid. During the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, she was one of several prominent Democrats including Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania, Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York, who signed a letter to the New York Times, protesting the Democratic Party’s plank in favour of abortion, in its platform.

She and her husband are opponents of abortion, and she has been a supporter of Feminists for Life of America,[5] the Susan B. Anthony List,[6] and Democrats for Life of America.

On January 28, 2008, she was present at American University, Washington, D.C., when her brother, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, announced his endorsement of Barack Obama’s U.S. presidential campaign.

Source: Wikipedia