Sargent Shriver on Napping

Sargent Shriver is being fondly remembered today for his service as Ambassador to France, leader of the War on Poverty, and founding head of the Peace Corps. It was in that last capacity that he was first mentioned in our pages, in a Comment in January of 1962 by Thomas Whiteside. Whiteside’s piece was prompted by a profile of Shriver in the Times Magazine in which it was reported that, while travelling on Peace Corps business, Shriver “flew tourist class, using the flying time to read up on the next country or cat nap on the floor.”

Whiteside wrote that this “seems to us an unnecessarily severe form of self-denial, even for a No. 1 Peace Corpsman.” He also wondered how Shriver managed to sleep on the floor in tourist class without blocking the aisle.

A month later, The New Yorker published a followup Talk story by Katharine Wallace, which was occasioned by a visit with Shriver, who’d read the Comment and invited the writer out for a drink at the Carlyle to explain that the Times report was accurate. He went on, with the aid of a diagram drawn on the back of a coaster, to indicate exactly how he was able to sleep on the floor of the tourist-class cabin without blocking the aisle:

Crouching, first, in the foot space in front of your assigned seat, you wriggle down until you have your head under the seat in front of you and your legs straight out under your own seat. Even airline people don’t believe, but there is room—a minimum ten-and-a-half-inch clearance between the floor and the bottom of the seat, and an interval of nearly five feet between the front of the seat ahead and the rear of your own seat.

Shriver explained to Wallace that, in the course of his Peace Corps duties, he had managed

to sleep restfully on a German trolley-repair truck running full blast with acetylene torches and the like, and in the corridor of a crowded Middle European third-class railway car, and on the deck of a small Corsican boat swarming with restless Senegalese soldiers in hobnailed boots.

Asked if he’d had this gift since childhood, Shriver responded that it was a skill “necessarily acquired to contend with the increasingly complex circumstances of an active adult life.”

And what a life it was.

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