BETHESDA, Md. — R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law whose career included directing the Peace Corps, fighting the War on Poverty and, less successfully, running for office, died Tuesday. He was 95. Shriver, who announced in 2003 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, had been hospitalized for several days. The family said he died surrounded by those he loved.

His death came less than two years after his wife, Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died Aug. 11, 2009, at age 88. The Kennedy family suffered a second blow that same month when Sen. Edward Kennedy died.

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

At Eunice Shriver’s memorial service, their daughter Maria Shriver said her father let her mother “rip and he let her roar, and he loved everything about her.” He attended in a wheelchair.

The handsome Shriver was often known first as an in-law –- brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy and, late in life, father-in-law of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But his achievements were historic in their own right and changed millions of lives: the Peace Corps’ first director and the leader of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” out of which came such programs as Head Start and Legal Services.

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.

Within the family, Shriver was sometimes relied upon for the hardest tasks. When Jacqueline Kennedy needed the funeral arranged for her assassinated husband, she asked her brother-in-law.

“He was a man of giant love, energy, enthusiasm, and commitment,” the Shriver family said in a statement.

In public, Shriver spoke warmly of his famous in-laws, but the private relationship was often tense. As noted in Scott Stossel’s “Sarge,” an authorized 2004 biography, he was a faithful man amid a clan of womanizers, a sometimes giddy idealist labeled “the house Communist” by the family. His willingness to work for Johnson was seen as betrayal by some in the family.

Shriver had fought for integration in Chicago and helped persuade John F. Kennedy to make a crucial decision in the 1960 campaign despite other staffers’ fears of a white backlash: When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Georgia that fall, Kennedy phoned King’s wife and offered support. His gesture was deeply appreciated by King’s family and brought the candidate crucial support.