Announcement Statement of Sargent Shriver at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. on September 20, 1975.
I am happy to announce my candidacy for President of the United States. I seek an open nomination openly arrived at, earned in the primaries and local caucuses and state conventions. I want to tell you why I am running and why I am asking people to join in running with me.
It may be hard for some to believe, but it is not lust for elective office or power. I know too well, and in ways too personal, the sadness and isolation associated with the Presidency. So I do not approach this campaign in a spirit of compulsive ambition or naive exhilaration.
Every candidate for the office of the presidency in recent memory has believed that his was the critical hour. So, it is difficult to find language undebased by the rhetoric of the past to express how I feel about where we are as a people today.
So I look forward to a people's campaign. And I'm grateful to the many who are here to start with me, including planeloads and busloads of friends and associates who have known me most of my life; people committed to justice and community, regardless of region, race, religion, and all the a conventional divisions of left, right and center.
Finally, I'm fortified by my family -- by my mother who has seen 23 presidential campaigns, by my wife, Eunice, and our sons and daughter, by my brother Herbert, by Rose Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy and Jackie, by Jean, and Pat, and Joan, and when my most admirable sister-in-law, Willa Shriver of Baltimore. In peace and war, in public and private life, they know the demands and duties, the joys and sorrows of the kind of course I'm taking, and have encouraged me to take it.
I intend to claim it, not for myself alone, but for the family that first brought it into being, for the millions who joyfully and hopefully entered public service in those days in order to produce a better life for all, and to those billions of unknown, uncounted human beings who I've seen all over the world -- in Asia, South America, Western Europe and the Soviet Union -- for whom the memory of those days and of John Kennedy is still an inspiration to their minds and a lift to their hearts. That's what we must all be proud of once again.
