Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 93, was diagnosed in 2003 with Alzheimer's disease, and it worsened in recent years to the point that he no longer recognizes his family. He ran for vice president with George McGovern on the 1972 Democratic ticket, and he helped found the Peace Corps and Head Start, the child development program. The couple had five children, including Maria, a former NBC news reporter married to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; Mark, a former Maryland state legislator; and Tim, a physician who serves as chairman of the board for the Special Olympics.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver's sister Rosemary, born with mental retardation made worse by a surgical lobotomy, spent most of her adult life at a private institution in Wisconsin and died in 2005. Shriver devoted much of her energies to countering the social stigma once attached to mental disabilities. "If I (had) never met Rosemary, never known anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace," she told National Public Radio in 2007.
In 1956, she became executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, which helped fund Catholic organizations and those that benefited the mentally retarded. In 1962, she opened her Maryland estate to a summer camp for mentally retarded children. In July 1968, just weeks after Robert Kennedy was killed, about 1,000 people from 26 U.S. states and Canada participated in the first Special Olympics at Soldier Field in Chicago. Shriver persuaded Chicago officials to join with the Kennedy Foundation to sponsor it.
JEAN KENNEDY SMITH, 1928- Served five years as ambassador to Ireland in the Clinton administration. Married Stephen Edward Smith in 1956; he died in 1990. Former U.S. attorney general, a U.S. senator from New York and a presidential candidate in 1968. Assassinated in Los Angeles, 1968. Married in 1950 to Ethel Skakel. They had 11 children.