A breed of politician that is facing extinction

"American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver" is not a title that prepares you for an hour and a half of heartbreak and indignation. But watching this Chicago Video Project biopic about the man who launched the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty, it is difficult not to feel both these things. Along with pride, regret, rage and hope. But mostly heartbreak. Because so many of the things Sargent Shriver stood for, fought for, are now simply absent from our national conversation. Indeed, even the term American idealist seems nostalgic at best; at worst, it's an oxymoron.

"Idealist," which airs tonight on PBS, reminds us of a powerful man too often eclipsed in public memory by the family he joined when he married Eunice Kennedy and now known more widely as the father of Maria, first lady of California. Which says as much about the vagaries of politics as anything else because "Sarge" Shriver was as powerful a politician as any of the Kennedys. Good looking, funny, well-spoken and incredibly driven, he both touted and lived "the politics of service," unapologetically and seemingly without guile.

Shriver played social conscience to two presidential administrations while creating programs that continue to serve millions of people. He convinced his brother-in-law to step up his support of civil rights and then to start the Peace Corps. After Kennedy's assassination, Shriver headed Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, keeping the president focused on the progressive social programs even as racist Southern politicians attempted to derail them and everyone's attention strayed increasingly, and fatally, to Vietnam.

Written and directed by Bruce Orenstein, "Idealist" is clearly a labor of love. Why, the effective use of the French horn and lone trumpet in the score is enough to evoke the word "haunting." Indeed, as portrayed in "Idealist," Shriver seems almost too good to be true. The son of Catholic activists -- his mother and father founded Commonweal -- the young Shriver watched as the stock-market crash ruined his well-to-do family. On the charity of friends and family, he went to Yale; he was briefly an editor at Newsweek before becoming a lawyer. Then he met, and wed, Eunice Kennedy, became part of the dynasty and the rest is baby boomer history.