At a Glance
- Maria Shriver published an essay ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day calling for national unity
- She asked readers to write 20-minute letters to America as a “manifestation for our country”
- Shriver also condemned President Trump’s move to rename the Kennedy Center
- Why it matters: The plea for civic engagement comes amid deepening political divisions and personal losses for the Kennedy family
Maria Shriver is pressing Americans to reject despair and build a shared national vision, even as she blasts President Donald Trump for what she calls a “weird” attempt to co-opt the Kennedy legacy.
A Call to Write the Future
In her Jan. 17 newsletter, Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, the 70-year-old journalist and former first lady of California framed the upcoming 250th birthday of the United States as a reset moment. She urged readers to spend 20 minutes in the next few weeks drafting a personal letter to America.
“Write what has broken your heart and where you still see the light,” Shriver wrote. “Write what you hope for America’s values, her leaders, her character, and her future.”
She told subscribers to share the letters with family and friends, post them in the comments, and speak them aloud. “This is how we make the country ours again,” she insisted. “This is how we rise-not as factions, not as parties, but as people.”
Invoking JFK
Shriver quoted the speech her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, never delivered. He was to have told a Dallas audience on Nov. 22, 1963, that dissenters spreading “nonsense” rather than solutions were inevitable. Kennedy planned to say, “We can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”
“My friends, we are better than the nonsense spewing out at us today,” Shriver echoed. “We deserve so much better.”
Remembering the Reiners
The essay also paid tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner, found dead in their home last month. Shriver said the couple had sketched out “a campaign unlike any other-one in which America herself was the candidate” shortly before their deaths. “They dreamt of that because they believed America belonged to all of us,” she wrote.
Rejecting Division
Listing Republicans, Democrats, and Independents among her friends, Shriver argued that contempt and fanaticism “are weakening the very thing that makes America strong and beautiful.”
“My friends, this is not a moment for spectators,” she wrote. “This is a moment for engaged, informed, brave citizens.”
Clash Over the Kennedy Center
Shriver’s unity message landed weeks after she joined other Kennedy relatives protesting Trump’s executive order adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The change created the Trump-Kennedy Center.
“C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up!” she posted on Instagram. “This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird.”
Family Tragedy
The essay follows another loss for the extended Kennedy family: the Dec. 30 death of Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and a climate journalist. Shriver, her first cousin once removed, wrote on Instagram that she “cannot make sense of this. I cannot make any sense of it at all. None. Zero.”
Key Takeaways
- Shriver’s letter-writing campaign aims to spark civic imagination amid political rancor
- She pairs patriotic optimism with sharp criticism of Trump’s rebranding of the Kennedy Center
- Personal grief over recent deaths of the Reiners and Schlossberg underlines her call for collective resilience
