Remembering Shriver on JFK's Inauguration Day

Editor's note: Harris Wofford was special assistant to President Kennedy for Civil Rights and U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1995. Among his many roles in public service, he was key to the formation of the Peace Corps and served as its associate director, and was CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

(CNN) -- Those who were not there in the 60s and 70s, when Sargent Shriver was well known as an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, should be duly impressed by the stories they are now hearing about his dynamic role in launching and leading both the Peace Corps, proposed by President Kennedy, and then President Johnson's War on Poverty.

For we who were there in those years of social invention, volunteer service, and action for civil rights, the death of Sargent Shriver, on January 18, at age 95, stirs our happiest and saddest memories of the best and the worst of times.

This is especially true on this day, the anniversary of John. F. Kennedy's inauguration.

Fifty years ago, on a sunny but cold January 20, Sargent Shriver and his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver were on the inaugural platform when the torch was passed to the new generation, tempered in World War II but full of the optimism and can-do spirit that flowed out of victory. No one was more ready to carry that torch than the new president's brother-in-law and his sister.

Sarge had been instrumental in getting us all to this day.

Now, out in the windy crowd in front of the capitol I was full of hope, and also waiting to see if the president would add the six words that Louis Martin -- an African-American newspaper publisher who worked on the campaign -- and I had urged the president's chief counsel, Ted Sorensen, to add when an advance copy of the speech showed no reference to civil rights.

A little background here: Sarge had organized a new civil rights section of the 1960 presidential campaign and we were colleagues in this. Louis Martin and I had proposed to Sarge that he persuade candidate Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King and convey his sympathy and support when Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Georgia. Shriver convinced Kennedy, who talked to Coretta and set in motion a wave of new voters that proved crucial to his slim margin of victory.

Now on inauguration morning we were concerned that the large African-American majority for Kennedy would be disappointed if there were no words reflecting the strong civil rights platform and campaign promises that Sarge had encouraged. The existence of public segregation and the denial of the right to vote through much of the South was not just a vital domestic issue, it was a scandal weighing heavily on America's reputation in the world.

But then we heard President Kennedy say those six words in the second bold proposition of his address. After declaring that "the world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life," he went on to the famous line, "Let the word go forth" with its conclusion, that the new generation to whom the torch was passed would be committed to human rights "at home and around the world."

Later that day, while watching the inaugural parade, the president turned to Sarge and asked him to recommend what should be done about the Peace Corps idea he had advanced in the campaign. So the next week Sarge began assembling a task force and I worked intensely with him, including going on his trip around the world to see if heads of state would welcome the Peace Corps.

Louis and I continued through the next decades to be on call for Shriver as he created the successful institutions that have lasted to this day as his legacy for millions of Americans whom they engaged and helped.

There were Head Start, Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America, which he saw as the ground troops of the War on Poverty and hoped would grow to several hundred thousand full-time volunteers -- the scale of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps.

There were also Foster Grandparents, Legal Services for the poor, and community action grants. Together with the Peace Corps and Special Olympics, started by Eunice, they make Sargent Shriver the most productive social inventor in America since Benjamin Franklin.

After Sarge went to France as the U.S. Ambassador in 1968 and I left my post as associate director of the Peace Corps to become a college president, we kept in close touch, and I campaigned for him both in the 1972 election when he became the Democratic nominee for vice president, and in the Democratic primaries when he ran for the presidential nomination.

All this is a little personal story of one man's devotion to one of the greatest and most constructive public citizens I've ever known, and the most instructive and inspiring I've ever worked for -- and with whom I had the most fun along the way.

It is a small window I hope will throw some light on the reason President Obama calls Sargent Shriver "one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation." And why his five children, five children-in law, and 19 grandchildren have every reason to say in their family statement that he was a "giant of love, energy, enthusiasm, and commitment" who "lived to make the world a more joyful, faithful, and compassionate place."

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Harris Wofford.