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All three newscasts filed an obituary for Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of a President and senators, dead at 88. NBC and ABC assigned their anchors; CBS used Richard Schlesinger. "My mom never ran for office and she changed the world," was the soundbite from Robert Shriver that Schlesinger used. He was referring to Kennedy Shriver's invention of the Special Olympics in 1968, now 3m strong in 108 countries. Her inspiration, NBC's Brian Williams reminded us, was her elder sister Rosemary, "given an experimental lobotomy to control her mood swings, referred to at the time as mild retardation. The gruesome operation left her largely incapacitated for the rest of her life." That very change in vocabulary, discontinuing retards, is symptomatic of the transformation that Special Olympics has spearheaded. ABC's Charles Gibson variously referred to the "developmentally disabled," children with "special needs" and "intellectual disabilities."
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