One of the last links to President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Shriver, who announced in 2003 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, died Tuesday after being hospitalized for several days in his native Maryland. He was 95.

A businessman and lawyer, Shriver helped his wife and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver — a sister of John and Edward Kennedy — run the organization that allows mentally challenged children to participate in sports, and also spent two years as ambassador to France.

For all his accomplishments, though the handsome and charming Shriver ultimately became known first as an in-law — brother-in-law of the late president and, late in life, father-in-law of actor-former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

President Barack Obama called Shriver, “one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation.” “Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Sarge came to embody the idea of public service,” Obama said in a statement.

Born in 1915 to a prominent old Maryland family, Shriver was the son of a stockbroker who would lose most of his money in the crash of 1929.

Shriver went on a scholarship to Yale, then went on to Yale Law School. After serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, he returned and became an assistant editor at Newsweek magazine. About this time, he met Eunice Kennedy and was immediately taken by her. They married in 1953 in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Speaking outside Suburban Hospital in Maryland where his father died, Anthony Kennedy Shriver said his father was “with my mom now,” and called his parents’ marriage a great love story.

Eunice died on Aug. 11, 2009, at age 88. The Kennedy family suffered a second blow that same month when Sen.

Edward Kennedy died after a long battle with brain cancer.

At her mother’s memorial service, the Shrivers’ daughter and former California first lady Maria Shriver said her father let her mother “rip and he let her roar, and he loved everything about her.” The white-haired Shriver attended in a wheelchair.

After Shriver and Eunice met, family patriarch, the powerful Joseph P. Kennedy, hired his son-in-law to manage his Merchandise Mart in Chicago. He was a big success on the job and in Chicago in general — and even was elected head of the school board in 1955.

Though the Kennedys granted Shriver power, they also withheld it. As he would throughout his life, he sought higher office and considered running for governor of Illinois in 1960, only to be told the family needed his help for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

During that campaign, Shriver, who had fought for integration in Chicago, helped persuade Kennedy to make a crucial decision despite other staffers’ fears of a white backlash. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Georgia that fall, Kennedy, urged by Shriver and fellow aide Harris Wofford, phoned King’s wife and offered support. His gesture was deeply appreciated by King’s family and brought the candidate crucial support.

Soon after taking office, President Kennedy named Shriver to fulfill a campaign promise to start the Peace Corps.

Although it was belittled by some as a “kiddie corps,” Shriver quickly built the agency into an international institution that it remains today.

In public, Shriver spoke warmly of his famous in-laws, but the private relationship was often tense. According to Scott Stossel’s “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver,” an authorized 2004 biography, the ebullient and charismatic Shriver was a faithful man amid a clan of womanizers, a sometimes giddy idealist labeled “the house Communist” by the family.

“He was never about personal accomplishments or personal celebrity except insofar as it helped him achieve his policy goals,” Stossel said. “He thought of public service more broadly than just holding elective office.” After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson called upon Shriver to run another program which then existed only as a high-minded concept: the War on Poverty, a part of the new president’s Great Society.

Shriver’s willingness to work for Johnson, whose dislike for the Kennedys was well-known, was seen as betrayal by some family members, according to Stossel.

Shriver’s efforts in the Johnson administration demonstrated both the reach and frustrations of government programs: Head Start remains respected for offering early education for poor children, and Legal Services gave the poor an opportunity for better representation in court. But other Shriver initiatives suffered from bureaucracy, feuds with local officials and a struggle for funds as Johnson devoted more and more money to the Vietnam War.

In early 1968, with Shriver rumored to be on the verge of quitting, Johnson offered him the ambassadorship to France, a position he held for two years. He accepted it even though some family members wanted Shriver to support Sen.

Robert Kennedy’s presidential candidacy instead.

In Paris, Shriver won many French fans, but he left the post for a job in private business not long after President Richard M. Nixon took office in 1969.

Like always, he aspired to national office, but at times was thwarted by the family.

Hubert Humphrey considered him for his running mate in the 1968 election, but family resistance helped Humphrey change his mind. When Shriver finally became a candidate, the results were disastrous: He was George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 election, but the Democrats lost in a landslide to Nixon.

Four years later, Shriver’s presidential campaign ended quickly, overrun by a then-little-known Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter. In September 1975, Shriver joined an already crowded race for the 1976 Democratic nomination.

But he dropped out in March 1976 after poor showings in the early primaries and never again sought office. Instead, he helped run the Special Olympics and advocated an end to the nuclear arms race.

In 1994, Shriver received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Besides Maria and Anthony, the Shrivers also three more sons - Robert, Timothy and Mark. Mark Shriver was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1995 and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002. They also had 19 grandchildren.