Maria and three of her brothers sat down with PEOPLE to talk about the work their generation of Shrivers is doing, and why it's more important than the "full-time job" of paying attention to what others are saying
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NEED TO KNOW
- With the endless stream of Kennedy family portrayals in the media, including FX’s recent hit series Love Story, the Shriver siblings are focused on what matters in their real lives
- “If you tried to keep up with the amount of movies and TV shows and books on our larger family, that’s all your life would be about,” Maria Shriver tells PEOPLE
- She and her brothers are instead spending their energy modeling their parents’ legacy of service, or — as Tim Shriver puts it — working to “kick ass and make a difference”
The Shriver family — and their extended Kennedy family — is almost always in the news, most recently with the phenomenon of the hit FX series Love Story about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, but Maria Shriver is clear about where their personal focus lies.
“If you tried to keep up with the amount of movies and TV shows and books on our larger family, that’s all your life would be about,” says Maria. “And if we went down that road, it’d be a full time job."
Four of the five children of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver — Bobby, 71; Maria, 70; Tim, 66; and Mark, 62 — recently spoke to PEOPLE at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library about their family roots and the surprise discovery of their father's long lost manuscript. It's now a published memoir titled We Called It A War that details how the Shriver patriarch led the War on Poverty, a sweeping set of 1960s social programs to help low income Americans.
That, the Shriver siblings say, is their focus.
“We've all worked really hard to work together to support both of our parents and their vision and continue to honor their legacy, keep it alive,” notes Maria.
Maria founded The Sunday Paper and the Women’s Alzheimer's Movement. Bobby is a philanthropist and co-founder of the RED campaign with Bono. Tim is the chairman of the Special Olympics. Mark, a high school president, also founded the Save the Children Action Network, and their younger brother Anthony, 60, runs Best Buddies International.
“We all work with each other,” Maria explains. “We go to visit Mark's school. We work at Save the Children. I work at Special Olympics — Bobby's on the board, he raises a lot of the money. And if we went down that [other] road, it'd be a full-time job.”
Adds Mark, “Daddy said, 'Don't pay any attention to it. Go do your work. If you can, go to mass.' And that's where you get the results.”
Credit: Larsen&Talbert
“Daddy really understood that there was a larger narrative out there," Tim says. "But his job was to kick ass and make a difference. And that relentless focus on making the difference in whatever way he could, whether it produced a child who has a head start, that was what mattered. The question is, did you make a difference?"
As Maria puts it, “I think it's a really good lesson. It's noisy out there. And you can get pulled in a hundred different directions by a hundred different people and then end up in a mess yourself. Or you can stay focused. It’s a message I say to my kids.”
With 19 kids and 10 grandkids between them, the Shriver siblings are building a dynasty of good deeds all on their own. "If you give your kids something that's real, not BS, not veneer, not flash, they keep coming back," says Tim. "Our parents gave us the privilege of being involved in work that matters, so our kids, I hope will feel that."
For more on the Shriver siblings and their father Sargent's new memoir, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
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