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On its Web site WTTW describes American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver as a biographical documentary about “an all but forgotten American.” Surely that can’t be true. Though stricken by Alzheimer’s, Shriver isn’t even dead yet, and I’d like to believe that Americans who can’t place the name in any other way know him at least as the Democratic, Kennedy-clan father of Maria Shriver, husband of the Republican governor of California — and explain that marriage please!
American Idealist is an hour-long documentary produced by Bruce Orenstein of the Chicago Video Project. It’s being shown nationally Monday night by PBS, in Chicago at 9 PM on WTTW, Channel 11. The best way to view history is often through the eyes of the king’s right-hand man, but to stop there when talking about American Idealist sells both the documentary and Shriver short. It’s the documentary’s thesis that Shriver may touched more lives than any American since FDR. He ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket with George McGovern in 1972, which in the context of his life is a fact hardly worth mentioning.
