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December 1988
The Unfinished War
A product of the conflicting ambitions of the men who shaped it, the War
on Poverty was ill-fated--but its fate need not be that of all
anti-poverty programs
by Nicholas Lemann
"In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won," Ronald Reagan
said last year, in one of the one-sentence pronouncements he has sometimes
made to the press while walking across the White House lawn to his
helicopter. Most people would probably agree with him. There is a
widespread perception that the federal government's efforts to help the
poor during the sixties were almost unlimited; that despite them poverty
became more severe, not less; and that the reason poverty increased is
that all those government programs backfired and left their intended
beneficiaries worse off.
The truth is that the percentage of poor Americans went down substantially
in the sixties. The idea that poverty increased comes from what people
know about conditions in inner-city black ghettos, where unemployment,
crime, illegitimacy, drug abuse, and physical decay did worsen through
most of the sixties and afterward, even while the rate of black poverty
overall was dropping. There is a strong temptation to see the ghettos as
the embodiment of some kind of fundamental rottenness at the core of
social-welfare liberalism.
The ghettos today are the country's greatest social problem, and with the
Reagan years at their end, both political parties have begun tentatively
talking about addressing poverty directly, with government programs. So
the question of what really did happen in the sixties--what kind of war we
waged on poverty, and why it didn't heal the ghettos--is of more than
historical interest right now. It bears directly on our decision about
whether, and how, to try again.
The sixties' other war, Vietnam, has been re-examined much more
extensively than the War on Poverty. Even the academic literature on the
War on Poverty is not extensive. The public is far more familiar with the
main events and figures of Vietnam (and other great upheavals of the time,
like the civil-rights movement and the rise of the New Left) than with the
history of the War on Poverty. This article, which will be continued next
month, is the first full journalistic account of the War on Poverty--the
first one based primarily on interviews with the living principals. This
article also draws on White House papers, some of which have never been
quoted before, including newly released material from the Richard Nixon
archives that provide for the first time a close look at Nixon's thinking
as he began to dismantle the apparatus of the War on Poverty. (The Nixon
years will be discussed in the second part of this article, which will
appear next month.)
Among the lessons to be drawn from the story of the War on Poverty is that
what happened is not preordained to happen again. The War on Poverty was
planned in a time of much greater national harmony and prosperity than
exists now, with an optimism that today seems reckless, and carried out in
a time of much greater tension and violence. The main tactic that the
government used to fight poverty was a new and unproved one; almost no
effort was made to find out what kinds of anti-poverty programs already
worked and then to expand them.
We now think of the sixties as a time of faith in big government, but it
wasn't. The War on Poverty looked for solutions to poverty that would be
local and diffuse, and would circumvent state and local government and
Congress. This earned the enmity of members of Congress, mayors,
governors, and Cabinet secretaries, so the War on poverty was in trouble
politically from the start. Its planners hoped to build public support for
it by achieving quick, visible successes, but in setting up hundreds of
separate anti-poverty organizations run largely by inexperienced people,
they practically guaranteed that there would be quite a few highly
publicized failures. These turned public opinion against the War on
Poverty.
Out in the field, especially in the ghettos, the War on Poverty was
carried out in disregard of a powerful demographic force. It tried, and
later government antipoverty programs tried even more pointedly, to revive
the ghettos as communities. But the ghettos were dying all the while,
because millions of their residents were moving out, into new and
better-off black neighborhoods. The more the government tried to create
opportunity in the ghettos, the more opportunity it created for people to
leave the ghettos. In fact, opening up jobs and housing that enabled
people to move out was one of the great, if originally unintended,
successes in the government's anti-poverty efforts. The people who
couldn't or wouldn't take advantage of the new opportunities stayed behind
to form the core of the underclass. Some government programs that were
aimed at helping these people by giving them the education and training
they needed to get out did have considerable success, but they were of
limited scope.
A final important aspect of the War on Poverty is its place in the
political competition between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson which
dominated Washington at the time. It was Johnson who declared war on
poverty, but he did so looking over his shoulder at Kennedy, and Kennedy,
not Johnson, was the political sponsor of the war's main strategies.
Johnson and Kennedy cared more about black poverty than did any other
major politicians of the twentieth century, but they disliked and
mistrusted each other so much that they were incapable of cooperating on
the cause that was closest to both their hearts. Because the two men could
not reconcile their ideas, the War on Poverty became an untenable
combination of Kennedy's love for the rebellious moral crusade and
Johnson's for the grandiose political gesture.
THE NEED FOR A LYNDON JOHNSON INITIATIVE
Lyndon Johnson's state of mind in his first few days as President included
a generous helping of insecurity. Johnson's self-esteem was not unshakable
to begin with, and almost immediately after the assassination it became
clear to him that he was going to be compared unfavorably with John F.
Kennedy. Johnson did not consider Kennedy to have been a towering figure,
but he knew that Kennedy had won over the makers of enlightened opinion,
the journalists and intellectuals and speech-making liberal politicians.
These people had never liked Johnson. He used to complain to friends that
even when he had been a liberal congressman, back in the thirties, he had
been unable to win the approval of the liberal establishment, not so much
for substantive reasons as because he was a southwesterner with a
second-rate education who looked and talked like a hick. On the day after
the assassination he told President Kennedy's top assistant, Theodore
Sorensen, that he knew he lacked President Kennedy's education, culture,
and understanding, but that he would try his best. Johnson gave Sorensen
his first assignment by saying, "I want you to draw the threads together
on the domestic program, but don't expect me to absorb things as fast as
you're used to."
Johnson may have been playing to what he already knew to be Sorensen's
opinion of his abilities, but he had never been able to disregard
condescension when it was directed at him. Proving that it was misplaced
and establishing himself as President were related tasks. Late in the day
on Saturday, November 73, 1963, Walter Heller, Kennedy's chief economic
adviser, was called into the Oval Office to brief Johnson. "Just as I was
about to go out of his office and had opened the door," Heller wrote in
notes he made just after the conversation and marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL,
"the President gently pushed it shut and drew me back in and said, 'Now, I
want to say something about all this talk that I'm a conservative who is
likely to go back to the Eisenhower days or give in to the economy bloc in
Congress. It's not so, and I want you to tell your friends--Arthur
Schlesinger, Galbraith, and other liberals--that it is not so....If you
looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a
matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too
conservative to suit my taste."
For some months Heller had been urging Kennedy to launch what he called an
"attack on poverty." At the time of the assassination it was in the
planning stages and had not received any public attention. Johnson was
instantly attracted to the idea. According to Heller's notes of the
meeting, "The new President expressed his interest in it, his sympathy for
it, and in answer to a point-blank question, said we should push ahead
full-tilt on this project." As Heller remembered it years later, "I told
him it was the last thing I'd discussed with Kennedy. He said, That's my
kind of program. It's a people program.'"
A week later Johnson invited two old friends, Arthur Goldschmidt and his
wife, Elizabeth Wickenden, over for Sunday dinner at his house in
Washington, where he and his family were still living while Jacqueline
Kennedy prepared to leave the White House. The invitation itself signaled
a change in Johnson. The couple were liberals who had long worked in
government, friends from his days as a New Deal congressman, and they and
the Johnsons had been less close since the late thirties, when Johnson
began preparing to run for the Senate. Changing constituencies, from his
congressional district to all of Texas, had caused Johnson to modulate his
politics. Now that he was President, his constituency had changed again,
in the opposite direction, becoming more liberal, and this made him think
back to his time in Congress.
"Johnson talked very freely at that Sunday dinner," Wickenden says today.
"He said, 'I have a very difficult problem. I feel a moral obligation to
finish the things that JFK proposed. But I also have to find issues I can
take on as my own.' So he came to this poverty program--making it
nationwide. He didn't go into what it would do specifically. He said, 'I
have to get re-elected in a year and a half, so I have to have something
of my own.'"
Johnson quickly discovered, though, that finishing the work of the Kennedy
Administration was not going to be a matter of passing Kennedy's modest
legislative agenda. Almost immediately after the assassination the Kennedy
legacy began to grow, especially where liberal issues like the attack on
poverty were concerned. The Kennedy camp framed the question facing
Johnson as whether he could possibly accomplish all the things that it
claimed John Kennedy would have done.
In early December of 1963 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published an article on
Kennedy in the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote, "In one of the last talks
I had with him, he was musing about the legislative program for next
January, and said, 'The time has come to organize a national assault on
the causes of poverty, a comprehensive program, across the board.'" No
sooner was Schlesinger's article published than Johnson wrote a letter to
the American Public Welfare Association promising, identically, "a
national assault on the causes of poverty." The severely grieving Robert
Kennedy found a piece of notepaper on which his brother, during the last
Cabinet meeting he had conducted, had scribbled the word poverty several
times and circled it; he framed it and kept it in his office at the
Justice Department. By the time Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency,
fighting poverty had taken on the coloration of having been John F.
Kennedy's last wish.
In truth there is no evidence that this was his last wish, and it is not
at all clear how far Kennedy would have let Heller go with his poverty
program. Certainly all the living principals agree today that one thing
Kennedy would not have done is publicly declare war on poverty. In
Heller's next-to-last talk with Kennedy on the subject, on October 21,
1963, Kennedy had, it is true, been quite enthusiastic. He said that an
article on a poor white area of Kentucky by Homer Bigart in the previous
day's New York Times had convinced him that "there was a tremendous
problem to be met," according to Heller's notes of the meeting. The notes
continue, "It's perfectly clear that he is aroused about this and if we
could really produce a program to fit the bill, he would be inclined to
run with it."
Compared with those comments, however, Kennedy's last words to Heller
about the poverty problem, at a meeting on November 19, three days before
the assassination, represented a pulling-back. In the time between the two
talks Kennedy had been briefed on the 1964 election by Richard Scammon,
the director of the census. Scammon said that many voters thought that
federal programs really didn't help them. Kennedy asked him how a new
poverty program might affect the campaign. Scammon said that it wouldn't
do him much good, because most voters didn't consider themselves poor, and
those who did weren't the ones a Democratic presidential candidate had to
win over. On November 19, according to Heller's notes, "I wondered just
what his current feeling about it was. His attitude was, 'No, I'm still
very much in favor of doing something on the poverty theme if we can get a
good program, but I also think it's important to make clear that we're
doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs, etc. But the two
are not at all inconsistent with one another. So go right ahead with your
work on it.'"
In December of 1963 Johnson, in order to avoid seeming to abandon
Kennedy's commitment to an attack on poverty, would have to do much more
than Kennedy himself had been prepared to do. And there was a further
complication to this business of the Kennedy legacy: the Kennedy poverty
program, such as it was, was one with which Johnson felt instinctively
uncomfortable right from the beginning.
WHEN RACE, GHETTOS, AND POVERTY SEEMED MINOR PROBLEMS
Between the beginning of the Second World War and the end of Johnson's
presidency more than four million black Americans moved from the rural
South to the urban North. Along with affluence and the Baby Boom, this was
one of the great transforming demographic events of American life after
the war, one that profoundly affected such diverse matters as urban
geography, education, popular music, presidential politics, and government
social policy. Unlike affluence and the Baby Boom, though, the great black
migration was not widely recognized as important while it was happening.
By the fall of 1965 Lyndon Johnson's poverty program would stand as the
national government's chief direct response to the problems of the
northern ghettos to which the migrants came, but the program was conceived
with only the haziest understanding of what the ghettos' problems were.
Today, with the events of the civil-rights movement enshrined in history
and racial issues a constant theme in politics, government, the press,
entertainment, and intellectual life, it is easy to forget how different
the feel of race was inside the American establishment at the time Johnson
took office. The Montgomery bus boycott had taken place in 1955 and 1956,
but well after that most liberals considered the segregation of public
facilities and the denial of the vote to blacks in the South, though
wrong, not a pressing moral crisis for the nation. It was still an Eleanor
Roosevelt issue rather than a primary concern for tough, pragmatic
liberals. The civil-rights movement was tiny: the Congress of Racial
Equality had a field staff of two people in 1960, the year before it began
to stage the Freedom Rides. The most famous civil-rights event of the 1960
presidential campaign was a phone call that Kennedy made to Coretta Scott
King to console her about the imprisonment of her husband in Georgia.
Kennedy made the call only because his brother-in-law and chief
civil-rights adviser, Sargent Shriver, got him alone in a room, away from
his political strategists and his brother Robert, who, Shriver knew, would
be opposed to the call. A day later Robert Kennedy called the judge who
had put Martin Luther King, Jr., in jail, to ask for King's release, but
this, Kennedy revealed later, was at the request of the governor of
Georgia, who had asked him to put pressure on the judge. A long jail term,
the governor thought, would raise King's visibility in Georgia and thus
worsen Kennedy's chances of carrying the state in November.
Blacks in the North were regarded during the 1960 campaign as classic
machine
politics urban ethnic voters, rather than an oppressed group with a moral
claim to justice. As Robert Kennedy said in 1964, "I think those running
for office in the Democratic Party looked to just three or four people who
would then deliver the Negro vote. And you never had to say you were going
to do anything on civil rights." Of the four black members of Congress,
the one with the highest national profile, Adam Clayton Powell, of New
York City, was regarded inside the political world as an intermittently
lovable rogue who, in Robert Kennedy's words, "always exacts a price, a
monetary price, for his support"; for whatever reason, Powell had endorsed
Dwight Eisenhower for President in 1956. Besides courting the black
congressmen, presidential candidates campaigned in northern black
communities by buying advertising in black newspapers. An important issue
in the Kennedy campaign's efforts among blacks in 1960 was that the black
publishers had not yet been paid for advertisements bought in 1956, and
they were reluctant to get behind the Democratic ticket until they were.
The feeling that money changing hands was necessary for black support led
the Kennedy campaign to offer to buy Simeon Booker's column in Jet
magazine--meaning that it would continue to appear under Booker's name but
would be written by the Kennedy staff until November. (Booker and his
publisher refused.)
In 1960 there simply was no widespread sense that the country would soon
become intensely preoccupied with race relations. The prevailing view of
black life in the North in the early sixties was optimistic: blacks who
left the South were bound to better themselves economically as well as to
escape legal segregation. Alarmism about ethnic migrations to cities
seemed like a relic of the 1880s, long since proved unjustified by the
experience of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and others. In 1963 James
Baldwin published The Fire Next Time. In 1964 the first summer race riot
of the decade occurred, in Harlem, but outside New York this harbinger of
disaster in the ghettos wasn't seen for what it was. As late as February
of 1964 Business Week was optimistic enough about the power of migration
to solve the problems of black America to say, "The basic cause of Negro
poverty is discrimination--in education, jobs, access to medical care.
Many Negroes have improved their lot by moving to the cities. But many
others still live in the rural South."
In the ghettos the mood had already begun to turn sour by the time Kennedy
was elected President. Virtually everywhere in the urban North there was
strict residential segregation, which meant that as the migration
continued, overcrowding became an increasingly serious problem in the
ghettos. Public schools had to begin running double shifts, and many of
the new students were starting at a disadvantage, because they and their
parents were products of the inferior black rural school systems in the
South. Hard drugs had appeared. Crime began to rise. The economic
rationale for the migration was beginning to evaporate: during the
prosperous early sixties manufacturing employment dropped in such cities
as New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Newark. The
welfare rolls were growing. The Black Muslims were catching on, a
development viewed within the ghettos as salutary, because of the Muslims'
amazing ability to rehabilitate criminals, but nonetheless a sign that
there was fertile ground for a bitter anti-white ideology.
Before the Kennedy assassination the white public-policy experts who knew
all this constituted a self-conscious advance guard. In the late fifties a
psychiatrist at the National Institutes of Mental Health named Leonard
Duhl convened a group of social scientists who for a decade discussed
ghettos, among other exotic subjects, under the rubric of studying the
country's mental health. They called themselves the "space cadets,"
because on the day Sputnik was launched, one of them said, "If people
think the Russians are out in space, they should see us." At around the
same time, a program officer at the Ford Foundation named Paul Ylvisaker,
who often rode the bus to the airport through the growing Newark ghetto,
and who sensed a mood of stored-up anger there, started a Gray Areas
program at the foundation-
"gray areas" being a euphemism for black areas. And also in the late
fifties Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, two academic experts on juvenile
delinquency, were helping to found Mobilization for Youth, on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan, which they hoped would be a new kind of
social-service agency to help the ghettos.
There was cross-fertilization among these groups, and by the fall of 1961
all of them had established relations with an obscure new federal agency
called the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. The agency had
been created at the instigation of John Kennedy's sister, Eunice Shriver,
who was the family social worker, having long been interested in mental
retardation, physical handicaps, and juvenile delinquency, which she had
studied while a staff member of a government commission in the forties.
She talked her brother the President into establishing a
juvenile-delinquency committee and he put his brother the Attorney General
in charge of it. Robert Kennedy, in turn, made David Hackett the director
of the committee.
Hackett, Robert Kennedy's best friend from prep school, was surely the
unlikeliest possible liaison between the federal government and the
leading edge of left-liberal social policy. At Milton Academy, in Milton,
Massachusetts, in the 1930s, Robert Kennedy had been, to use Hackett's
word, a "misfit"--Irish in a school with no Irish, Catholic in a school
with no Catholics, runty, shy, and the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, a hated
figure in the Boston WASP culture that dominated the school. Hackett, who
had grown up near Milton and was descended from a line of Episcopalian
naval officers, was the star of the school, a great athlete (he played on
two U.S. Olympic hockey teams), who supposedly was the model for the
Phineas character in John Knowles's A Separate Peace. He alone in the
Milton student body befriended Bobby Kennedy. Thus the psychological
grounding of their friendship contained an element of Hackett's reaching
out to the oppressed and of Kennedy's feeling oppressed himself. And the
two shared a mistrust of what Hackett calls "normal
behavior"--pejoratively, since it was normal behavior that had caused
Kennedy's prep-school ostracism.
Before the Kennedy presidential campaign Hackett was the editor of an
entertainment guide distributed free to hotel guests in Montreal. He
joined the campaign as a delegate counter, and after the inauguration was
given a small office adjoining Robert Kennedy's in the Justice Department.
He was not part of the inner circle there; people didn't know what he did,
exactly, and in contrast to the Rhodes scholars and law-review editors
with whom Kennedy surrounded himself at Justice, who were laconic, Hackett
was simply inarticulate. Having begun a sentence, he often found it
impossible to extricate himself, and helplessly waved his hands or said
"et cetera" to imply that everyone understood what he was trying to say.
He was emotional, ruled by his heart, much more than the other Kennedy
men. The rest of them have gone on to jobs running major institutions,
while Hackett directs a tiny foundation in Washington.
Juvenile delinquency was a perfect theme for Robert Kennedy, involving as
it did two of his central concerns, young people and fighting crime. But
among experts in the field, many of whom the completely unintellectual and
nonideological Hackett now had to meet, it was the subject of an abstruse
debate. The academic study of juvenile delinquency was dominated by a
long-standing fight between social workers and sociologists--to be
specific, between the School of Social Service Administration and the
sociology department at the University of Chicago. Social workers tended
at the time to focus on the individual, sociologists on the society;
delinquency was said by social workers to be caused by an insufficiently
nurturing mother or a too-threatening father, while to sociologists it was
part of a larger social process. The Chicago sociology department, under
the influence of Professor Robert Park, had a tradition of taking to the
city's neighborhoods to learn what life was really like--Park had
dispatched his graduate students to the funerals of the victims in the St.
Valentine's Day massacre, because they'd get good stuff there. One of
Park's proteges, Clifford Shaw, wrote the seminal book in the
juvenile-delinquency field, Delinquency Areas (1929), which showed that
certain poor neighborhoods in Chicago had always led the city in
delinquency, no matter which ethnic groups were living in them. He saw
delinquency as merely a stage in the great ongoing natural process of
assimilation.
In the fifties the latest twist in delinquency theory was to marry the
street-wise Shaw tradition to the concept of anomie, especially as
elaborated by Robert K. Merton, of Columbia University, the leading
theoretical sociologist of the day. Anomie was said to afflict teenage
males when they experience a conflict between what they want and what they
can get--when they lack the means to achieve their goals. Delinquency was
seen as an expression of anomie. Delinquent Boys, by Albert K. Cohen,
published in 1955, explained delinquency as the result of a realization by
lower-class kids that they couldn't have middle-class success and so had
to set up an alternative status system in which they could succeed.
In 1960 Cloward and Ohlin published Delinquency and Opportunity, which
went Cohen one better by arguing that delinquents turned to crime not out
of a sense of failure but because society had denied them any other form
of opportunity: in effect, their delinquency constituted a critique, and a
perceptive one, of society. There were nowhere near enough data available
in 1961 to prove or disprove the correctness of this theory; in any case,
the debate about whether social deviancy is the individual's fault or
society's has been going on in the industrial world for centuries, and it
will never be settled. The appeal of Delinquency and Opportunity to
government was theoretical, not practical.
Hackett himself is no great help in explaining why, as he made his way
through the thicket of explanations for delinquency, the Cloward-Ohlin
theory attracted him. "It just made sense to me," he says. He hired Ohlin
as a consultant and made a large grant to Mobilization for Youth, which
was announced by President Kennedy himself in May of 1962. The idea of
insufficient opportunity as the cause of delinquency was the guiding
principle of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency as it made grants to
organizations all over the country, several of them working in urban black
ghettos.
In the Kennedy family by far the most devoted adherent of the theory was
the Attorney General. To the President the theory seems to have been a
technical point to be mastered, but it became one of the fundamental
principles of his brother's life. Ohlin briefed both Kennedy brothers, at
different times. John Kennedy listened impassively to Ohlin for ten
minutes just before he was to announce the Mobilization for Youth grant
and then walked outside, gave a flawless summary, and went on to the next
item on his agenda with his customary coolness. Robert Kennedy, who had
invited Ohlin to breakfast on the day he was to testify in Congress in
behalf of the authorization of funds for the committee, took much longer
to get it. Finally, in the car riding to Capitol Hill, he said, "Oh, I
see--if I had grown up in these circumstances, this could have happened to
me."
Poverty, as a topic of national concern, was only a little bit less
peripheral than ghettos in the years before the War on Poverty was
launched. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, the liberal bible
of the late fifties, included a chapter on poverty which so much
downplayed it as a problem that Senator Paul Douglas, of Illinois,
commissioned a study refuting Galbraith. The reason that poverty was not a
major issue even for liberals was that it seemed to be disappearing in the
post-Second World War boom. From 1947 to 1957 the percentage of American
families with incomes under $2,000 went from 35 to 23, and the percentage
of black families went down even more dramatically, from 62 to 36. The
rate of exit from poverty had begun to slow in the late fifties, but this
was not widely known; prevailing opinion agreed with Galbraith that
poverty had become confined mainly to "poverty pockets," like Appalachia.
John Kennedy had seen some of these during his primary campaign in West
Virginia, and after taking office he set up the Appalachian Regional
Commission to try to improve conditions there.
At the level of practical politics there was (and still is) a fundamental
hostility in congressional and public opinion to the idea of an American
welfare state, especially one that gives money to poor people. The biggest
social-welfare program, Social Security, travels under the guise of an
insurance policy; Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the main
program for making cash grants to the poor, was created along with Social
Security in l935 and was billed as a kind of pension plan for widows and
orphans rather than a welfare system. Even though it has been widely
believed for decades that AFDC encourages the formation of single-parent
families, only last September did Congress pass a provision making all
two-parent poor out-of-work families in the country eligible for
welfare.
Michael Harrington's The Other America, which claimed that one third of
the country was poor, was published in 1962, and it was rescued from
obscurity by a long review in The New Yorker by Dwight Macdonald, which
appeared in January of 1963. (The consensus among President Kennedy's
aides is that he read the Macdonald article, not the Harrington book. The
article, dry, witty, and elegantly written, would have been much more to
Kennedy's taste than the book, which is earnest and impassioned.) But
practical-minded Washington liberals didn't for a minute believe that
books and articles about poverty would suddenly melt Congress's deep
hostility to social-welfare programs. The liberal cause of the time in
Washington was increasing government spending, in order to stimulate the
economy (the unemployment rate in the Kennedy years was over five percent,
which was considered unacceptably high) and to respond to Galbraith's
warning that America was becoming a nation of "private affluence and
public squalor." Even this proved impracticable, though. Kennedy,
possessing neither great legislative skill nor a sweeping electoral
mandate, couldn't get spending programs past the southern committee
chairmen who ruled Congress.
In March of 1962 Walter Heller began pushing a tax cut as an easier way to
stimulate the economy, and in January of 1963 Kennedy finally agreed to
the idea. That March, Heller raised the subject of poverty with Kennedy,
taking care to couch it in practical terms: since the poor didn't pay
taxes, he said, the tax cut would come under attack for being a subsidy to
the middle class and the rich unless the Administration did something for
poor people at the same time. In June, Robert Lampman, an old student of
Heller's who had temporarily joined his staff, worked up a memo on the
subject of poverty.
Lampman, who considered himself more the realist than Heller, believed
that any program aimed at doing something about poverty was doomed.
"Probably a politically acceptable program must avoid completely any use
of the term 'inequality' or of the term 'REDISTRIBUTION of income or
wealth,'" he wrote Heller. In August, Lampman returned to a professorship
at the University of Wisconsin, pessimistic about the future of the
poverty initiative. Heller pressed on, without much success. He invited
John Kenneth Galbraith to a lunch at the White House mess with several
government officials, but, as Heller remembers it, Galbraith, too, was
cool to the idea of a concerted effort to help the poor. As Heller told
me, "Ken sort of took the position he took in The Affluent Society--'We
even build our superhighways over them, on concrete stilts.' His position
was, they were not a major element in the picture--not that it wasn't a
problem, but that it was a problem the political system wasn't going to
address."
Heller began to talk up poverty among the political people around Kennedy
who would make the final decisions about the 1964 legislative program. The
argument emerged--political people say from Heller, who they sometimes
wished would stick to economics--that a poverty program would help in the
1964 campaign, not by bringing in more of the poor-person vote but by
pulling good-hearted suburban Republican Protestant churchwomen away from
Nelson Rockefeller.
With the departure of Lampman, Heller put another of his assistants,
William Capron, in charge of poverty, and Capron began to convene meetings
of people from several federal departments and agencies to figure out what
the poverty effort would actually consist of. This was a disaster, at
least in the views of Heller and Capron. Every government agency has a
wish list of programs it has long been unable to get past the White House
and Congress; the poverty idea brought out the wish lists, and a number of
programs that hadn't made the cut for the New Deal, thirty years earlier,
came up. The Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz, a ponderous man who had
been Adlai Stevenson's law partner in Chicago, wanted jobs programs, run
by the Labor Department. The key bureaucrat at the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, Wilbur Cohen, an old New Dealer and a veteran
lobbyist for social-welfare programs, wanted education and welfare
programs, run by HEW. Neither man shared Heller's belief that something
publicly billed as an attack on poverty could work. In October, after
months of meetings, Capron presented Theodore Sorensen with a list of 150
separate programs for fighting poverty, intending to demonstrate what a
mess the departments were making of the effort. He got the reaction he had
been hoping for: Sorensen firmly told him to come back with something
better.
THE SOLUTION ARRIVES
The poverty fighters in the white house were like frontier settlers with
their wagons circled and the arrows flying in faster and faster: they
needed the cavalry to ride to their rescue. It came in the form of the
crime-fighters at the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. The
committee's poverty-fighting (and delinquency
fighting) idea was called community action. Over the years there was a
great deal of confusion about what community action meant--not
surprisingly. It was an intentionally vague idea, difficult to understand
and subject to widely varying interpretations.
The theory of community action was that what poor people needed were new
neighborhood-based organizations. As it was, there were many government
efforts to help the poor--nutrition programs, employment programs, welfare
programs--but there was no coordination among them, and no concerted
attempt had been made to find out what services the people in the poor
neighborhoods most needed. Under community action the government would set
up a kind of planning board in the neighborhood, the board would consult
with the poor people there, and, eventually, a mission would emerge. In
principle, a community-action agency could do ANYTHING--it was not an
anti-poverty program so much as a mechanism through which new anti-poverty
programs would be invented. Also, rather than take on all the traditional
functions of a government agency itself, it would be small and would
coordinate the work of existing agencies. The only rule was that the
solution to the neighborhood's problems could not be imposed from above
(that is, from Washington).
In practice, community action was not quite so Zen-like. The activities of
organizations that received grants from the Committee on Juvenile
Delinquency varied, but not radically. Probably the two best-known early
grant recipients were Mobilization for Youth and the Ford Foundation's
Gray Areas program in New Haven, Connecticut. Both offered remedial
education, job training, and help in getting poor people through the
welfare and health-care bureaucracies. Mobilization for Youth was more
confrontational, occasionally organizing rent strikes and demonstrations
at government offices, while the New Haven project had a spirit closer to
that of an old-fashioned settlement house, whose aim was to teach
immigrants (in this case Puerto Ricans and southern blacks) the skills
they needed to assimilate in the new land.
To Walter Heller, community action had value as a theory (he was an old
friend of E. F. Schumacher, who later wrote Small Is Beautiful), but more
to the point, it solved all the bureaucratic problems of pulling together
the Kennedy attack on poverty. It had a powerful bureaucratic patron in
Robert Kennedy. Involving as it did one-year local grants, it was much
cheaper than the big national programs that Labor and HEW were proposing,
and President Kennedy didn't want to spend much money. Community action
seemed small, flexible, and nonbureaucratic, and this was consistent with
the ethos of the Kennedy Administration. In domestic policy as in foreign,
there was a strong bias toward doings things through lean, action
oriented agencies--the Peace Corps, the Green Berets--rather than through
the clumsy, slow-moving traditional bureaucracies and their friends in
Congress. Heller had already decided that poverty could be fought
effectively only through a new government agency. Finally, community
action was easy to sell inside the Administration, because it had the
sheen of originality: it was the only proposal for fighting poverty that
seemed fresh and new and exciting.
It is by no means universally accepted that crime and poverty are caused
by a lack of opportunity. But if you accept the premise, then increasing
opportunity ought to cure crime and poverty. In retrospect, there was a
glaring logical flaw in community action. Past experience suggested that
the best way for the federal government to increase opportunity for the
poor was through major national efforts: lowering the unemployment rate,
improving schools, undertaking public works, and eliminating
discrimination. Sometimes the programs that turned out to be the most
effective at reducing poverty--like the Homestead Act, the Erie Canal,
universal public education, and the GI Bill--weren't planned for that
purpose but nonetheless changed social and economic conditions in some
important way. Community action, however, was based on the idea that only
through local efforts--in fact, only through efforts inside the poorest
neighborhoods--could the government increase opportunity. How, it now
seems fair to ask, could there have been so much faith in the ability of a
program INSIDE the ghettos to increase the amount of opportunity available
to the people living there?
Policy-makers are always strongly impelled to believe what it is
convenient for them to believe. For foundation executives, or social
activists, or officials of a tiny government committee, or members of the
White House staff who knew there was nearly no give in the federal budget,
the temptation to find small-scale solutions to the large problem of
poverty was very strong. Community action was at least a beginning. Also,
the urban ethnic neighborhood was then just starting to be glorified as an
alternative to the conformist, gray-flannel tract-house America of the
Eisenhower years. In the late fifties Leonard Duhl's group at the National
Institutes of Mental Health had funded an influential book by Herbert Gans
called The Urban Villagers, about a thriving Italian neighborhood in the
West End of Boston that had been destroyed by an urban-renewal program
under the misguided banner of slum clearance.
The interstate highway system and urban renewal (or, to use the nickname
its critics gave it, "Negro removal") were to liberals' minds two of the
great mistakes of the Eisenhower years, promoting downtown business
development and suburban sprawl at the expense of vibrant, though poor,
inner-city communities.
By the time President Kennedy was killed, Walter Heller and his circle had
decided that the attack on poverty should begin with the creation of a
handful of community-action demonstration projects. They had not formally
presented this idea to Kennedy, however. Selling Lyndon Johnson on
fighting poverty had been accomplished with great ease on his first day as
President. Now they had to sell him on community action.
This was not an easy task. Johnson shared almost none of the opinions that
had steered Heller toward community action. He liked the New Deal. He
liked the Labor Department and HEW. He liked the old-line committees in
Congress. Johnson was uncomfortable with abstract concepts: he liked
government programs that involved things you could see and touch, that
produced results. "His conception of the War on Poverty had this sort of
CONCRETE idea," Heller told me. Bulldozers. Tractors. People operating
heavy machinery."
Over the Christmas holidays of 1963 Heller and Kermit Gordon, the director
of the Bureau of the Budget, flew down to the LBJ Ranch, where part of
their mission was to talk Johnson into community action. "Kermit told me
he and Heller presented it to Johnson, but [Johnson] was scared." says
William Cannon, who was Gordon's assistant assigned to the poverty
program. "He killed the community-action part of it. But the next day they
persuaded him, so they came back to Washington with it in." It is not at
all clear how much Johnson understood about what he was agreeing to, or
what his reasons were. All through 1964 rumors would emanate from the
White House that Johnson had thought community action was going to be like
the old National Youth Administration, the New Deal agency where Johnson
had worked before running for Congress, and that he hadn't realized that
it would give money to local nonprofit organizations. Certainly some of
the appeal that community action held for him must have been financial. He
told Heller and Gordon that they had to hold the federal budget under $100
billion, because he didn't want to look like an irresponsible spender in
an election year.
For $500 million in new funds, which is what he gave Heller and Gordon for
poverty-fighting, a much more visible program could be created through
community action than through more traditional means.
As he approved community action, Johnson also changed it. The advocates of
the idea had intended to start small. Heller's staff wanted ten local
community-action agencies, five urban and five rural. Hackett thought that
even this was too much, and proposed that the initial funding for the War
on Poverty be $1 million a year. But Johnson was by nature not interested
in small, slowly developing programs, especially when his first major
initiative as President was involved. The President on whom he modeled
himself was not, after all, Kennedy but Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once, while
strolling through the White House with Hugh Sidey, of Time, Johnson
stopped at a bust of FDR and caressed it. "Look at the strength in that
face!" he told Sidey. The poverty program was the opening shot in
Johnson's New Deal. By the end of January, 1964, the plans were for
community action to begin in seventy-five cities.
As Allen Matusow points out in his book The Unraveling of America, there
was no proof at that point (and there is still no proof) that any of the
local organizations funded by the President's Committee on Juvenile
Delinquency had actually reduced delinquency. Hackett himself said a few
years later, "There've been a great many critics of the program, that it
was not successful; that's probably right." It was just as unclear whether
community-action agencies could reduce poverty. Community action was a
totally untested idea that Johnson suddenly transformed into a large
undertaking.
Some of Johnson's old friends felt that by giving the nod to community
action Johnson showed not just his ambition but also the uncertainty of
his self-esteem. Here was an idea that his instincts told him to avoid but
that all the Kennedy people were for--Heller and Gordon and Ted Sorensen
and, not least important, Robert Kennedy. "If THEY thought it up, that was
it," says Horace Busby, who had been a Johnson aide since the late
forties, and who was the lone dissenter in the discussions of community
action at the ranch that Christmas. Elizabeth Wickenden wrote a memo
opposing community action and in response got a form letter from a White
House aide thanking her for her interest. On the last Sunday night in
1963, after a meeting with Heller, Gordon, and Sorensen, Busby stayed up
late in Johnson's office at the ranch, writing Johnson a memo that urged
him to go slower. Five years later it was clear that the Democratic
Party's greatest problem was (as it still is) an inability to hold
middle-class voters; Busby was almost alone in seeing that the
anti-poverty effort might come across as a departure from rather than a
continuation of the New Deal, and thus alienate part of Johnson's natural
constituency. He wrote, "It is the American in the middle...who is the key
to our economy, society, and political stability...his consent is
vital--his dissent fatal--to our social progress vis-a-vis Negro rights,
etc."
In his 1964 State of the Union address, delivered on January 8 and written
primarily by Theodore Sorensen, Lyndon Johnson said, "This Administration
today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America."
His speech did not mention community action at all; instead, Johnson
talked about such old-fashioned ideas as better education, housing, health
care, and job training, and he was careful to mention the need to work
closely with state and local governments. A research study ordered up
afterward by Johnson showed that the speech had been interrupted by
applause more times than any other State of the Union speech since 1933.
THE UN-KENNEDY
On February 1 Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver head of the War on
Poverty, and essentially dropped out of the planning himself. The
appointment of Shriver represented a victory for Walter Heller, because it
implied that a new agency would be created--Shriver was too much of a
heavyweight to be made an assistant secretary of HEW or Labor. But there
was more to it than that.
In the public's mind, Shriver was a Kennedy: Eunice Kennedy's husband,
John and Robert Kennedy's brother-in-law. So it appeared that Johnson was
so deeply loyal to the dead President's desire to fight poverty that he
would entrust it only to a family member. As the director of the Peace
Corps, Shriver was already perhaps the most visibly successful head of an
agency in the federal government; certainly he had demonstrated an ability
to get a new agency off the ground and to win over Congress, the press,
and the liberals. He had close ties to the White House through Johnson's
adviser Bill Moyers, who was his deputy director at the Peace Corps and
who had promoted Shriver for the poverty job, hoping to open up the Peace
Corps directorship for himself. (Johnson, however, kept Shriver in both
jobs simultaneously.)
What the public didn't know was that Shriver wasn't really quite a
Kennedy--the family would never elevate him past a certain level, which he
resented--and that his appointment must have needled Robert Kennedy, who
was already feuding with Johnson. Kennedy had let it be known in December
that HE was interested in running the War on Poverty, so, in picking
Shriver, Johnson was turning down Kennedy, though the family tie was
strong enough to ensure that Kennedy wouldn't criticize the appointment.
In the longer range, both Kennedy and Shriver were interested in being
Johnson's running mate in 1964, and by giving Shriver this high-visibility
job Johnson seemed to enhance his chances of getting on the ticket.
To the close observer, some strain was visible between Shriver and
Kennedy. Shriver was closer to embodying the Kennedy legend, as it came
together during 1964, than Robert Kennedy was. Kennedys were aristocratic,
handsome, heroic. But Shriver was more aristocratic (coming from an old
Maryland family), more handsome (conventionally, anyway, with his barrel
chest and resolute chin and jaw), more heroic (he had a distinguished
though unpublicized war record, having served four years in the Navy in
the South Pacific). He was also more seriously Catholic and, unlike the
Kennedys, came from the socially concerned wing of the Church; he was, as
his father had been, a member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. He
had been in charge of civil-rights issues during the 1960 campaign, when
the Kennedy inner circle had considered such issues secondary and a little
sob sisterish. During the staffing of the Kennedy Administration, Robert
Kennedy had pointedly refused to appoint Shriver's aide Harris Wofford as
his assistant on civil rights in the Justice Department, because, as he
said later, Wofford "was very emotionally involved in all of these matters
and was rather in some areas a slight madman." Shriver and his wife had
been interested in juvenile delinquency since the late forties, Robert
Kennedy since the early sixties.
A few days after the Kennedy assassination an aide came upon Lyndon
Johnson in the Oval Office studying a notecard headed "What Bobby Thinks,"
which contained a list of Robert Kennedy's complaints about Johnson's
conduct since the death of his brother. Johnson had kept Jacqueline
Kennedy waiting on the ground for two and a half hours inside Air Force
One in Dallas so that he could be sworn in as President; Johnson had been
too quick in clearing President Kennedy's things out of the Oval Office.
These were not rational complaints--they were born of grief, and it was
somewhat embarrassing to Robert Kennedy to have them circulated--but it
was useful to Johnson to know about them. Who told you this? the aide
asked him. Sargent Shriver, Johnson said. So Shriver had signaled Johnson
that he was not so blindly loyal to his brother-in-law that he couldn't
help the new President.
Shriver thought a little like Johnson. Though his background and Johnson's
were entirely different, both came from families that had lost their money
and both worked their way through college. Like Johnson, Shriver loved the
application of the war metaphor to poverty--the idea of himself as the
general in charge of managing, if not an actual war, at least something
that belonged in the pantheon of grand successful American efforts. He
used to tell the first head of community action to think of himself as
running the Chevrolet division of General Motors. Shriver's mind, like
Johnson's, automatically focused on what could get through Congress, and
he instinctively thought big. Once, somebody was briefing him on what
would become the Foster Grandparents program, which was a small part of
the War on Poverty. Shriver broke in impatiently, "It's not big enough!
Not big enough!"
By the day after his appointment was announced, Shriver was at work with
his staff, even though it was Sunday. Heller, Gordon, and Sorensen met him
at Gordon's office to brief him on community action, which they envisioned
as being all of the War on Poverty. As Johnson, at the ranch, had been,
Shriver was immediately wary. In running a war, you had to produce
victories, and it was hard to see how community-action agencies could be
quickly perceived as successful. The premise that the activities of
various government entities could be successfully coordinated by a
neighborhood board was questionable. There had to be other ways to fight
poverty. At one point Shriver and Adam Yarmolinsky, an assistant to Robert
McNamara at the Pentagon, whom Shriver had asked to serve as his deputy,
left to go to the men's room. There Shriver turned to Yarmolinsky and
said, "It'll never fly."
All through the month of February, 1964, Shriver chaired meetings with
government officials, academics, writers, activists, foundation
executives, and even financiers, to plan the Economic Opportunity Act of
1964, the legislation that would create the War on Poverty. These sessions
surely represent a high-water mark for the essential quality, whether it
was confidence or hubris, that characterized American society in the late
fifties and early sixties. The Vietnam War did not represent nearly as
great a departure from the usual activities of a world power as did the
attempt to eliminate poverty in a capitalist country without giving poor
people either money or jobs--and yet the people at Shriver's meetings had
little doubt that they could do it. America could do anything. Even if one
lacked faith in community action as the means, poverty, which hung on
mostly in isolated pockets, could hardly be an insurmountable challenge.
One evening during this period the diplomat George Kennan came to an
informal seminar at Robert Kennedy's house and said that he had heard
there was talk of eliminating poverty. Didn't everyone know, he said, that
it was impossible to eliminate poverty, that no one in history had done
it? Kennedy heatedly insisted that of course it could be done.
There was in early 1964 (before the escalation of the Vietnam War) comity
in the house of liberalism. Socialists like Michael Harrington and Paul
Jacobs participated amicably in some of the planning sessions with
Shriver, and were judged by the government insiders to be good-hearted and
supportive, though of little help in formulating a program. The feeling
that, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it later, "a big bet was being made"
did not dominate the meetings, because most of the participants felt that
as money was spread out across the country the War on Poverty would win
friends in Congress, and they would be able to pump more money into the
programs that worked best and scale back the failures. The economy was
bountiful and would become more so after the tax cut went into effect.
"For the proponents of social legislation, this was our Camelot,"
Yarmolinsky says.
Because there was no sense that this was the last chance to get
poverty-fighting right, there weren't great battles over the design of
community action. According to one version of events, the community-action
man on Kermit Gordon's staff at the Bureau of the Budget feared that
Shriver might jettison community action entirely, and so got Hackett to
persuade Robert Kennedy to prevail on Shriver to keep it. (Schlesinger
accepts this version in Robert Kennedy and His Times.) But even if Kennedy
had had that kind of clout with Shriver, community action wouldn't have
needed it to survive. Shriver thought that community action was part of
his charge from Johnson. "The only thing he gave me was community action,"
he says now. Also, he had great faith in experts, and all the experts said
that community action was a great idea.
Shriver and Yarmolinsky put their energies into broadening the bill. After
his first briefing on community action Shriver called Richard Lee, the
mayor of New Haven, to ask him about the Gray Areas project there. Lee
said it was important not to overfund a brand-new community-action agency,
because much of the money would be wasted. This strengthened Shriver's
resolve not to spend all the money available to the War on Poverty on
community action, as Heller and Gordon wanted to. In the bill he lobbied
through Congress there were ten separate new programs. Community action
was by far the biggest, but the one most important to Shriver was the Job
Corps, which would take poor young men and women to wholesome camps and
train them to join the work force.
Shriver's immediate contribution to community action was to expand it, as
a way of improving the War on Poverty bill's chance of passing, even while
he was limiting its funding. Within a month of Shriver's appointment the
plans called for not ten or seventy-five community-action agencies but
many more; by 1967 there were more than a thousand. (Future poverty
warriors should realize the folly of trying to fund a thousand independent
local organizations, most of them new and run by inexperienced people.)
Hackett and Lloyd Ohlin drifted away from the War on Poverty, having
decided that community action had become so big as to be irredeemably
distorted in conception. This left as the leading advocate of community
action within Shriver's planning group Richard Boone, who had been
Hackett's chief confederate at the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency.
Boone was the most radical of the Kennedy Administration poverty fighters,
but he was a radical in the Kennedy spirit. Compact, tough, with a
piercing gaze and a crew cut, he had establishment credentials, such as a
degree from the University of Chicago and a tour of duty at the Ford
Foundation, but he came across as something more than a cosseted expert;
he had been a captain on the Cook County sheriff's police force (granted,
as an aide to a professor who had been elected sheriff on a reform
ticket). He struck the people who worked with him as half revolutionary,
half operator, a man to whom working in government was both a cause and a
game.
Unlike Hackett and Ohlin, Boone saw the War on Poverty as an opportunity
to be seized, and he became a constant, terrierlike presence at Shriver's
meetings, always pushing for language in the law that would ensure that
poor people would be represented on the boards of community-action
agencies. In one meeting he asked Yarmolinsky how many times he had to
insist on what became known as "maximum feasible participation" by the
poor before it got into the bill. "Oh, just a few more times," Yarmolinsky
said. So Boone asked a few more times, and it was in.
It had always been a part of the community-action creed that the poor
should be consulted about their needs, so that they would get the proper
government services. This would be a way to avoid what Robert Kennedy
called planning programs "for the poor, not with them." Boone believed in
this, but there were also other reasons for his idea about putting poor
people on community-action boards. First, Boone believed that the cause of
poverty was political as well as economic: when a community was poor, the
reason was that it lacked power as well as money. Therefore, part of the
cure for poverty was empowerment--training the residents of a poor
neighborhood to organize themselves and learn to get things from the power
structure. Maximum feasible participation was a way of turning the
community
action boards into a power base for the poor.
Second, Boone saw the course of community action as a struggle between
poor people and social workers, whom he regarded with contempt. Unless
some preventive action was taken, social workers would appropriate
community-action agencies and infuse them with the "social-worker
mentality," in which, for example, all juvenile delinquents were regarded
as psychologically troubled and in need of professional help in order to
become normal members of society. Boone saw maximum feasible participation
as a way of hitting social workers where they lived, challenging them for
control over the many social work jobs that community action and the rest
of the War on Poverty would create.
In the ghettos there was a hunger for good jobs. In most cities blacks had
been effectively shut out of the skilled trades and higher-paying
municipal-service work, which were the logical next step up the ladder
from unskilled manual labor. Maximum feasible participation appealed to
neighborhood pride, and it held out the promise of a new employment
base--administering the War on Poverty and the other new domestic programs
of the Johnson Administration. Over the next decade, as the related ideas
of fighting poverty and neighborhood control of government social programs
spread through federal, state, and local government, these new jobs became
extremely important to the growth of the black middle class, although they
didn't help the ghettos much as communities.
In the Washington of 1964 the day when there would be black mayors of big
cities seemed impossibly far off; therefore it appeared to be necessary to
mitigate the influence of local government in order to bring the benefits
of government--both services and jobs--to blacks. Circumventing existing
political structures (not just the big federal departments in Washington
but also city machines) was already part of the ethic of community action.
Also, there was some fear among the planners of the War on Poverty that
public officials in the South would make their local community-action
agencies all white unless Washington had some specific way to prevent
it.
Most of Shriver's group, and certainly Shriver himself, failed to see that
these areas of mild rebellion against the way things were usually done in
politics would make the community-action program very unpopular with even
stalwart Democratic politicians in the North. So much was being planned in
February of 1964 that maximum feasible participation seemed like a minor
point; for Shriver to have worried about its coming to dominate the War on
Poverty would have been like an orchestra conductor's worrying that the
piccolos might drown out the brass section. The loyalty to the national
Democratic Party of the big-city Democratic mayors and the blue-collar
constituencies they represented still seemed rock solid. Of the people who
might create trouble for the War on Poverty, mayors and congressmen in the
North ranked far behind Republicans, southern Democrats, and professional
social workers, in the minds of the members of Shriver's inner circle.
Today it seems obvious that community action was headed for political
trouble. Politics then was more organized than it is now, but even now
politicians don't like surprises. Spending federal money in the district
of a congressman, the state of a senator or governor, or the city of a
mayor will not automatically be popular with the official: he or she wants
to know ahead of time who is going to get the money (preferably a
political supporter) and to announce the grant personally if possible. In
return for these favors, the local official should become a loyal defender
of the federal program.
Because community action broke all these rules, it eroded political
loyalty to the War on Poverty. Much of what the community-action agencies
did was popular. Probably the single most common activity of local
community-action agencies around the country was running Head Start
programs for preschool children, and Head Start was from the moment of its
founding, in 1965, the best-liked of all the government's anti-poverty
programs. Head Start was technically a part of the community-action
program; so were other popular programs, like Foster Grandparents and
Upward Bound. But the association did not help community action
politically. It was always an uphill battle to draw attention away from
the chief mechanism of the War on Poverty--the quasi-autonomous
community-action agency--and toward programs like Head Start. Shriver
didn't see, and perhaps couldn't have seen, what he was getting into.
JOHNSON'S FIRST TROUBLED WAR
It isn't really Shriver, who had never run for office, but Lyndon Johnson
whom one would expect to have understood that the War on Poverty faced bad
political problems. Johnson was a totally political man who had no
hobbies, read no books, could barely sit through a movie: politics was
virtually his only interest, and his fascination with it knew no bounds.
He personally scrutinized the membership of even honorary presidential
commissions. One of his Cabinet officers remembers going to see him on a
Sunday at Camp David and finding him on the phone with a friend in Texas
running down the results of local school-board elections there--just to
relax, as it were.
His ambition as President was a politician's ambition: he wanted in
particular to pass a lot of legislation, and in general to unify the
country to heal the divisions of geography and race and class that even
FDR had failed to close. He wanted to set world records in politics, as a
star athlete would in sports. "Get those coonskins up on the wall," he
would tell the people around him. He pushed hard for the desegregation of
5,000 southern school districts by September of 1965, and as the deadline
approached he had an aide call the commissioner of education daily: How
many more have you brought in--what's the count? On the day before
Congress went on its Easter recess in 1965, when Johnson's lobbyists were
sweating to finish up the many bills they were working on already, he
called to say, "Well, can't you get another one or two yet this
afternoon?"
And yet Johnson had a streak of rebelliousness. He was not at all an
organization man of politics--as, say, the late Mayor Richard Daley, of
Chicago, was. He came from a one-party state where there was no tradition
of slowly moving up through the ranks. He had done things in the service
of his political ambition that he knew were wrong, and he knew that there
were national problems that the political system would not ordinarily
address. It was a point of pride with him in the first two years of his
presidency, as it would not be for most politicians, that he was doing
things that would hurt him politically. "Every day while I'm in office I'm
going to lose votes," he told one aide. "I will probably lose about a
million votes a month," he told another in the great days after the 1964
election. Of all the things Johnson wanted to do, the one he wanted most
to do was also the one he knew would be the most unpopular: help blacks.
After the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, he told aides, accurately, "I
think we just gave the South to the Republicans." There was at times
almost a recklessness to the way he spent his mandate. He submitted the
fair housing act, the piece of liberal legislation that most terrified
members of Congress, a few months before the 1966 midterm elections.
Johnson's confident talk about losing support was not, however, based on
seasoned self-knowledge. He was an extremely thin-skinned man who needed
to be loved and was deeply wounded by criticism when it came. Even if he
was prepared for attacks, it was for attacks of a certain kind: he would
rile the old southern crocodiles on Capitol Hill, and Texans like John
Connally, while winning over all the intellectuals and the liberals and
the students and the blacks who had mistrusted him. He would pass the
legislation they had dreamed of for decades--civil rights, medical care,
aid to education--and they would love him for it. He might lose the South,
but he would win over the North. Perhaps Johnson was constitutionally
unprepared for the possibility that anyone might turn against him, but he
was much more vulnerable, psychologically, to reproach from liberals than
from conservatives, because leftward was the direction to which he was
looking for approval.
The War on Poverty became embattled almost instantly. The Economic
Opportunity Act of 1964 passed in August, creating the Office of Economic
Opportunity, headed by Sargent Shriver, which would administer community
action, the Job Corps, and most of the other programs that made up the War
on Poverty. On January 20, 1965-
not yet half a year into the existence of the OEO--President Johnson
received a confidential letter from Theodore McKeldin, the mayor of
Baltimore, complaining about the community-action program and adding that
the mayors of St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia didn't like the
agencies in their cities either. At the end of 1965 several Democratic
mayors set up a meeting in Miami just to grouse about community action,
and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, whom one would have expected to be an
ally of the War on Poverty, had turned against community action, because
of his role as Johnson's liaison to the mayors.
The most important enemy, by far, of community action among the mayors was
Daley, who at the time was the single most powerful politician not just in
Chicago but also on Capitol Hill, where he controlled the largest bloc of
votes that would reliably move on one person's orders. He was crucial to
Johnson's legislative program, and Johnson took great pains to keep him
happy. Daley considered it essential to maintain total control of all
politics and government in Chicago. He once personally saw to it that a
small HEW grant to Martin Luther King, Jr., for a literacy program in the
Chicago ghetto was canceled--after it had been publicly announced--because
he considered it wrong for the federal government to put money into
Chicago without going through him, especially when the recipient was King.
To Daley, community action was the political equivalent of original sin.
"You're putting M-O-N-E-Y in the hands of people who are not in my
organization," he told Bill Moyers. "They'll use it to bring you down."
"Many mayors assert that the Community Action Program is setting up a
COMPETING POLITICAL ORGANIZATION in their own backyards," Charles
Schultze, who had succeeded Kermit Gordon as budget director, wrote
Johnson in September of 1965. To be more precise, they were worried about
competing black political organizations. White backlash in the North,
still blurry from the Washington perspective of 1964 and 1965, was
perfectly obvious to the big-city mayors. Daley, who drove a car with the
license plate 708-222 to commemorate the number of votes he got when he
became mayor of Chicago, in 1955, saw his vote drop below 700,000 for the
only time in his career in the 1963 mayoral election, and actually lost
the white vote that year, because of his visible incorporation of blacks
into his machine. Daley needed to hold on to Chicago's black voters, who
were among his most dependably loyal constituents; the appearance in the
ghettos of an independent black political force would not only threaten
his black base but also cause white voters to panic and begin voting for
candidates to the right of Daley. Like all the old-politics mayors, Daley
thought that it was already enough of a struggle to keep the Democratic
city organizations alive without Washington's stepping in to fund the
opposition.
Community action had political problems not just with the mayors but also
in Congress. Most southern conservatives never liked any part of the War
on Poverty. During the initial lobbying for the Economic Opportunity Act,
Wilbur Mills, of Arkansas, told one of Shriver's aides that he was not
going to be involved in any program to help "a bunch of niggers," and
threw the man out of his office. White ethnic congressmen, men like Dan
Rostenkowski and Roman Pucinski, of Chicago, and James Delaney and Hugh
Carey, of New York, turned against community action, for the same reasons
that the mayors did. And these were only the Democratic opponents of
community action; Republican conservatives, especially mid-westerners and
westerners, of course disliked it too.
As the most visibly liberal government agency, the OEO was a frequent
target of both the right and the left. Opposition to the OEO was one of
Ronald Reagan's early political themes Adam Clayton Powell, who was the
chairman of the House committee that authorized the OEO's funds, never
thought that the agency was fully responsive to his concerns, and at one
point he banned all OEO employees from his committee's offices. Richard
Boone, who worked for the community-action program in the early stages,
left in 1965 to start an organization called Citizens Crusade Against
Poverty, whose purpose was to make sure that community action wasn't
selling out.
In the executive branch the OEO's main enemies were HEW and the Department
of Labor. Wilbur Cohen tried repeatedly to get Johnson to abolish the OEO
as an independent agency and to put most of its parts in HEW, where they
would presumably be better managed and less visible. Willard Wirtz was
opposed to the idea of community action from the start, opposed to the OEO
as a separate agency, and positively enraged when he discovered that the
big jobs program in the War on Poverty, the Job Corps, would be run by the
OEO and not the Labor Department. He was given the Neighborhood Youth
Corps as a consolation prize, but he still tried constantly to sabotage
the Job Corps. Inside the OEO there was always the suspicion that the
Labor Department's U.S. Employment Service, whose responsibility it was to
screen people for the Job Corps, was sending along people with criminal
records in order to make the Job Corps look bad.
All these officials were inevitable enemies of community action, who would
create political trouble for the programs no matter how well they did out
in the field. But out in the field there were problems too. Shriver hoped
that the OEO, and especially the Job Corps, would loose an avalanche of
favorable publicity, the way the Peace Corps had. He wanted the Economic
Opportunity Act to pass in a blaze of glory, and successful anti-poverty
programs to spring up immediately. Shriver agonized but went along when
the North Carolina congressional delegation demanded that Shriver get rid
of his deputy, Yarmolinsky, as the price of its support, probably because
at the Pentagon Yarmolinsky had advocated the integration of public
facilities near military bases in North Carolina. Having deprived himself
of his key administrator, Shriver tried to produce administrative
miracles. He insisted that 10,000 kids be enrolled in Job Corps camps by
the end of June of 1965; his staff had them sleeping on the floors of
gymnasiums to meet the quota. At the signing of the first batch of grants
to community-action agencies--grants to more than 250 nongovernment
organizations, most of them new and unproved--Shriver picked out one, the
agency in Albemarle, North Carolina, and asked Fred Hayes, one of the
people running community action, How do you know this one will work? It
doesn't even have an executive director's name on the application. How do
you know they won't pick someone incompetent? "I said, 'You don't know he
won't be an incompetent,'" Hayes says today. "'He may well be. You can't
control the grant recipients, and some of them are going to screw up.'"
Some of them did, indeed, screw up. In Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell
demanded a piece of the action at HARYOU, a project whose guiding spirit
was the black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark; HARYOU became HARYOU-ACT,
Clark resigned in protest, and almost from the moment it received its
first OEO grant, of $1.2 million, in June of 1965, HARYOU-ACT was under
investigation for financial irregularities. Even in Chicago, where Mayor
Daley had been able, through Johnson's intercession, to keep the poverty
program totally under his control, an internal OEO report circulated in
May of 1965 showed that no books were being kept, that a subcontractor was
working without a written contract, and that there was a one-to-one ratio
of clerical to professional employees.
At the Job Corps camps there were several embarrassing incidents of
violence. At Camp Atterbury, in Indiana, one trainee was sodomized by
several others. At Camp Gary, in Texas, five trainees held up and shot two
enlisted men from a nearby Air Force base, and another trainee was stabbed
to death outside a dance at the YMCA. At Camp Breckinridge, in Kentucky, a
recruit shot a woman and then, while awaiting trial, managed to steal a
car and ran into a family of four on the highway, killing them all. It
became a joke among the OEO's lobbyists in Congress that they should tell
every recalcitrant member that if he didn't vote right on OEO bills they
would put a new Job Corps center in his district.
Shriver was a dedicated man who drove himself and the people around him,
but he reacted to the problems of the OEO more by emphasizing his
strength, salesmanship, than by correcting his weaknesses, conception and
administration. He invented citizens' support groups, like Athletes
Against Poverty. He tried to hire Al Capp, the creator of Li'l Abner, to
produce a comic book advertising the Job Corps. He barraged Johnson with
memos, written with the specificity and enthusiasm of a professional
publicist, claiming that the image of the OEO was turning around. In a
typical passage he wrote, "I can't remember hitting five major American
newspapers simultaneously on any program in recent years. An eight-column
head in the Cleveland Plain Dealer certainly marks some sort of high
point." From Shriver's perspective, the great problem of the War on
Poverty was that it wasn't the kind of war he was used to fighting: it
lacked public support, funds, and tolerance for error. Wanting and
expecting to be a general, he found himself instead the operator of an
unpopular social program.
RETREAT AND SHIFTING GROUND
In December of 1965 Johnson's chief aide for domestic affairs, Joseph
Califano, prepared a detailed plan for dismantling the OEO, the first of
several such plans to cross Johnson's desk. Soon afterward Johnson turned
down a request by Shriver for an increase in the OEO budget from $1.75
billion to $4 billion, and Shriver threatened to resign, backing down only
when Johnson told him, "If you quit, we'll quit," meaning he would abolish
the OEO. In 1967 the OEO nearly died when Congress missed the regular
deadline to renew its appropriation. It survived only because of an
amendment to the appropriation bill which gave elective public officials
appointive power over a third of the seats on the community-action boards.
The OEO is the great exception to the political-science maxim that
government agencies are immortal. It never had any powerful friends and
was at the edge of abolition almost from its founding.
Most of the controversies that arose in the field operations of the OEO
had a racial aspect. There were many community-action agencies, urban and
rural, that led a relatively quiet existence; most of the best-publicized
problems of the community
action program involved an agency in a black ghetto. The OEO was intended
to be substantially aimed at the ghettos, but it was founded in ignorance
of changes in the mood of American race relations which would be obvious
within a year of its founding and would affect it deeply.
Martin Luther King's strategy of seeking nonviolent confrontations with
the often violent defenders of legal segregation in the South was not just
morally right, it was a brilliant political strategy that played perfectly
in the press and quickly persuaded white liberals (like the founders of
the War on Poverty) that civil rights was an urgent cause. But black
America--and the movement itself, for that matter--was never as
Gandhi-like as King. Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi chapter of
the NAACP until he was assassinated, in 1963, owned a gun. (Even King
owned a gun during his early days in Montgomery.) John Lewis, the head of
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and now a congressman from
Atlanta, had to be talked out of giving a speech at the 1963 March on
Washington calling for a modern black version of Sherman's march through
Georgia. King himself maintained relations with black-nationalist leaders
like Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, whom whites imagined to be
antithetical to his cause.
Freedom Summer, in 1964, which was portrayed in the national press as a
love feast between white college students and the black movement, was
actually somewhat tense. There was a feeling among blacks who had risked
their lives over the past few years that the whites had swept in, taken
over leadership positions, dominated press coverage, and, in the case of
some white women, stolen men from the black women in the movement. The
summer ended with Johnson's offering to seat only two members of the
delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic
National Convention, an experience that looked to Washington like a great
civil-rights victory and to the civil-rights movement, especially the
leaders of SNCC, like a crushing defeat. By the fall of 1964 discussion
had already begun within SNCC about its becoming an all-black
organization, which it did in 1967.
All this was in the South. In the North church-based protest never had the
galvanizing effect on black people that it did in the South, and ghetto
poverty did not inspire the sympathies of whites in the way that
segregation had. All through the middle sixties there were frustrating
discussions within the movement about how to bring the struggle north and
address the problems of the ghettos. The March on Washington was
officially billed as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and its
chief organizer, Bayard Rustin, was annoyed that King's overpowering "I
Have a Dream" speech effectively switched the focus from economic issues
in the North to segregation in the South.
The final great event of the movement was the Selma-to-Montgomery march,
in 1965. In its wake Johnson said, "We shall overcome" before a joint
session of Congress and proposed the Voting Rights Act. In June, Johnson
in effect moved his rhetoric north, giving a commencement address at
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., in which he called for "not just
equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a
result."
Then, later in that summer of 1965, over the space of two weeks, Johnson
announced the commitment of American ground troops to Vietnam, and the
Watts riots began. From that point on the little cracks and fissures in
liberalism inexorably widened and deepened. The world Lyndon Johnson
wanted to conquer came apart.
Copyright © 1988, Nicholas Lemann.
"The Unfinished War";
The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1988, issue.
Volume 262, Number 6 (pages 37-56).
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