Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Between 1961 and 1963, Hackett disbursed money to seventeen communities across the country so that they could develop “comprehensive” plans for combating juvenile delinquency. The PCJD was still a small program in the scheme of the federal budget, but it became the only government agency that dealt directly with the urban ghetto.

  At first Bobby Kennedy was head of the program in name only; he left operational decisions to Hackett. Over time, however, as he accompanied Hackett on his trips to Harlem ghettos, Kennedy grew increasingly attuned to the “bottom-up” approach to urban problems advocated by academics like Ohlin. He believed that the residents of poor communities should decide for themselves how to use the federal aid given to them. The process of making these decisions would “empower” poor citizens.

  The government program that provided the closest analogue to what Ohlin and Hackett were advocating could be found in the Peace Corps, where many volunteers in Latin America had been assigned to practice what had come to be called “community development.” Frank Mankiewicz, the Peace Corps representative in Peru and later the director of Peace Corps operations for all of Latin America, was the staunchest advocate of this revolutionary tactic. “The ultimate aim of community development,” he wrote, “is nothing less than complete change, reversal—or a revolution if you wish—in the social and economic patterns to which we are accredited.” The basic idea was to combat apathy: to get villagers involved in decision making and help them grasp the power of collective action to solve problems.

  Through the first two years of the Kennedy administration, even the most ardent practitioners of Ohlin’s “opportunity theory” approach could never have imagined that their work would soon become the centerpiece of an ambitious federal initiative. A series of events beginning under Kennedy in 1962 helped produce this unlikely outcome.

  The first event was the publication, in March 1962, of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America. Harrington had grown up as a conventional, upper-middle-class Midwestern Catholic, attending Holy Cross College and Yale Law School. But Harrington’s opposition to the Korean War and to Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts had radicalized him. Living in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, he joined Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement and became a socialist, a labor organizer, and a left-wing social critic. In 1958 Harrington accepted an assignment from Commentary magazine, which at the time was a liberal publication, to write about the persistence of poverty in the United States.

  In his article for Commentary, Harrington looked at data from the Federal Reserve Board and the Commerce Department and concluded that between 40 million and 60 million Americans (out of a total population of 180 million) lived in poverty. The idea that the rate of poverty was declining, Harrington wrote, was a “myth.” “As many as 50 million Americans continue to live below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, clothing, and health.” More striking than the sheer number of people in poverty, however, was poverty’s persistence from generation to generation. Poverty existed, Harrington wrote, as a “separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” The idea of a “culture of poverty” is commonplace today, but in 1958 only a few sociologists and anthropologists had advanced the concept, and it was not understood by middle-class America. “The poor are not like everyone else,” Harrington wrote. “They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.” It was not enough simply to lift incomes or provide jobs, Harrington wrote; the whole “slum psychology” needed to be changed.

  Harrington began expanding his writings on poverty into a book not long after Kennedy was elected, in the hope that he could impress on the American people the scope of poverty and suffering in their midst. The Other America was respectfully reviewed in the New York Times and other mainstream press outlets, but it sold only modestly in the first months after publication and did not seem to have any impact on the thinking of government policymakers nor, certainly, on the general public. Several months later, however, the New Yorker commissioned the influential critic Dwight Macdonald to review Harrington’s book. The piece Macdonald wrote, “Our Invisible Poor,” turned out to be the longest (at fifty pages) and possibly the most influential review the magazine had ever published. Macdonald called The Other America a “most important” book and concluded that it made a convincing case for a direct federal approach to reducing American poverty. “The extent of our poverty,” Macdonald wrote, “has suddenly become visible.” Harrington’s book sales jumped from fewer than 10,000 to more than 100,000; The Other America became, in the words of one historian, “a minor American classic of the stature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

  President Kennedy’s adviser Ted Sorensen was one of those who read and was affected by Macdonald’s article; Walter Heller, the chair of Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was another. Both men passed copies of the New Yorker article, which appeared in January 1963, to President Kennedy, who was clearly struck by it. He was also struck by a series of articles by the reporter Homer Bigart that appeared in the New York Times about this same time, describing the dismal lives of rural coal miners in eastern Kentucky. What Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle had been to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, provoking him to create the Food and Drug Administration, these articles were now to John F. Kennedy’s, leading him to consider making poverty a major priority of his administration in 1964.

  Kennedy began by asking Heller to look more deeply into the problem. Was what Harrington was saying true? To help explore the question, Heller hired Robert Lampman, an economist at the University of Wisconsin. Lampman had been a protégé of Heller’s at Wisconsin; he had also conducted statistical studies of poverty at the behest of Senator Paul Douglas several years earlier. Heller now asked him to condense and update his study on the president’s behalf. Lampman did so—and the results, forwarded to the president on May 1, 1963, were distressing.

  Heller discovered a “drastic slowdown in the rate at which the economy is taking people out of poverty.” This was a disturbing finding, given how rapidly the gross domestic product had grown during the postwar period. In 1963 Kennedy was trying to push a tax cut through Congress. The hope was that by cutting taxes the government could help the economy grow and reduce the unemployment rate, putting more of the Americans who had lost their jobs in the recession of 1960–1961 back to work. But the tax cut, as Kennedy and his advisers understood it, would increase the jobs available for primarily middle-class workers. If 50 million Americans were not only poor but mired in a culture of poverty (as Harrington argued), and if the economic growth since 1957 had been pulling fewer and fewer people out of poverty (as Lampman’s statistics showed), then there was a real question of how far a tax cut could go in reducing the number of American poor. A tax cut might create jobs, in other words, but it wouldn’t prepare chronically poor people to fill them. Kennedy began to think differently about poverty: Maybe, rather than merely investing in industry and tinkering with macroeconomics through a tax cut, he should be investing in “public services and human beings.”

  Kennedy asked Heller to explore further and Heller pressed onward, convening what came to be known as “the Saturday group.” On Saturday afternoons during the spring and summer of 1963, representatives from various cabinet departments would gather in a small conference room in the Executive Office Building, hoping to come up with a program or programs that might fruitfully complement the president’s tax cut.

  At first, the meetings were not terribly productive. The economists and the sociologists fought with one another. (The economists argued that poverty could be reduced easily; the sociologists were more pessimistic.) When some of Kennedy’s political advisers were brought into the meetings, they were appalled at how diffuse the discussion was. Late in the summer Sorensen told Heller that he needed to focus and come up with a few simple antipoverty proposals that the president might be able to make part of his reelection campaign in 19
64.

  Lampman, convinced that no real program could emerge from these meetings, returned to Wisconsin for the fall semester. Heller replaced him with a CEA staff economist named William Capron, who had taught at the University of Illinois and worked for the Rand Corporation. In October Capron delivered a list of the 150 different proposals the various cabinet agencies had put forward. The list was a mess. “Go back and do some more homework,” Sorensen told the task force.

  Capron and Heller were now beginning to panic, “badly in need of the public-policy equivalent of the cavalry riding to their rescue.” The cavalry arrived in the form of Bobby Kennedy’s juvenile delinquency committee. Bill Cannon, who was representing the Bureau of the Budget on the interagency task force, was a friend of Dave Hackett, and he had kept Hackett abreast of the turmoil in the task force, urging him to get Bobby Kennedy to alert the White House that plans for a comprehensive poverty program were failing to come together. In early November, Cannon persuaded Heller to meet with Dave Hackett and his colleague Dick Boone, who had come to PCJD from the Ford Foundation. “Community action appealed to me immediately,” Heller recalled. He could see that the origins of juvenile delinquency and the origins of poverty were more or less the same—and a “comprehensive neighborhood approach,” as Hackett put it, might help to reduce both. By the end of the meeting, Heller had decided to make PCJD’s concept of Community Action the “organizing principle” for a more full-blown antipoverty program.

  On the evening of November 19, three days before Kennedy’s fateful Dallas trip, Heller had an audience with the president. “Yes, Walter,” Kennedy told him as two-year-old JFK Jr. scampered around the Oval Office. “I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty in my program. I don’t know what yet. But yes, keep your boys at work, and come back to me in a couple of weeks.”

  The evidence suggests that Kennedy was serious about attacking poverty. During his last cabinet meeting, on October 29, the president had scribbled the word “poverty” half a dozen times on his yellow pad, circling and underlining the word amid the soybean prices and the picture of sailboats he had sketched on the pad. And in a conversation with Arthur Schlesinger in November about January’s upcoming State of the Union address, Kennedy had said, “The time has come to organize a national assault on the causes of poverty, a comprehensive program, across the board.”

  The day after his meeting with the president, Heller flew with six other cabinet members to a meeting in Japan. On the way back, they learned that the president had been shot. For the remainder of the long flight across the Pacific, as the cabinet members tried to deal with their shock, they speculated about what kind of a president Lyndon Johnson would be. Kennedy’s antipoverty program was not actively discussed, but it surely occurred to everyone that under President Johnson—who was generally thought to be more conservative than his predecessor—any plans for an aggressive attack on poverty would be left to wither on the vine.

  Back in Washington on Saturday night, November 23, as Shriver and others scurried around the city preparing for Monday’s funeral, Heller was summoned for his first audience with the new president at 7:40 p.m. At the meeting, which lasted about forty minutes, Heller briefed Johnson on what the Council of Economic Advisers had been working on recently—in particular the Kennedy tax cut proposal and research on a poverty program. As Heller recalled, “I told him very early in our conversation that the very last substantive conversation that I had had with Kennedy was about a poverty program.” “That’s my kind of program,” Johnson said. “I’ll find money for it one way or another. If I have to, I’ll take money away from things to get money for people.”

  Heller was surprised by the evidently sincere enthusiasm Johnson expressed. Then Johnson went further. Heller recorded what happened next in his notes of the meeting. As Heller opened the door to leave, Johnson pushed it gently shut and pulled the CEA chairman back into his office. “Now, I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress,” Johnson said. “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.”

  Thus began a competition between LBJ and the associates of the late President Kennedy to claim the “more liberal” mantle. In the coming days, Schlesinger and other Kennedy advisers began trumpeting their late boss’s support for a bold “national assault on poverty.” Even Sorensen, who had recently expressed his ambivalence about the idea of an antipoverty program, now joined the chorus of support for it. It was as though the “Kennedy liberals” were laying down a gauntlet: You may claim to be liberal, Lyndon Johnson, but you’re not as liberal as John Kennedy was. The Kennedy people, the journalist Nick Lemann has observed, changed the stakes of the poverty program after Kennedy died. “The question, instead of being whether Johnson could take over what had been a small, stagnating Kennedy idea and make it his first major initiative without appearing to be one-upping the dead President, became whether Johnson could possibly be as fully committed to fighting poverty as Kennedy had been.” Johnson feared that if he appeared to waver in his support for an aggressive antipoverty program, he would bring down on himself “another hail of sophisticated liberal contempt.”

  Johnson’s political strategists warned him that launching a poverty program might be a political time bomb, blowing up his support among the lower middle class in particular. But Johnson’s “powerful conviction that an attack was right and necessary blotted out any fears that this program was a political landmine,” he later wrote. Also, he was terrified of being attacked from the left by the Kennedy faithful. At a press conference in December, he announced that a poverty bill would be “high on the agenda of priority” in his requests to Congress for 1964.

  Despite Johnson’s bold public pronouncements about an antipoverty program, there was still no consensus—not even a general idea—of what a poverty bill would contain, or how much it might cost. Johnson himself provided little direction. Remembering his own work during the Depression on FDR’s National Youth Administration, LBJ seemed vaguely to imagine that a poverty program might involve, as Heller recalled, young people working outside. “Bulldozers. Tractors. People operating heavy machinery.” The Kennedy liberals associated with the PCJD, meanwhile, ardently supported making Community Action the centerpiece of a Johnson antipoverty program. As a project overseen by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, it seemed the surest way to impose a Kennedy imprint on the program.

  On December 20 Heller outlined his conception of the poverty program in a memo to the White House. In his memo, Heller wrote that Community Action should be a significant component of any antipoverty legislation, and he agreed with Dave Hackett that Community Action programs should start with small “demonstration” projects in maybe ten cities. But to satisfy Johnson’s desire for boldness, Heller proposed that the program’s overall budget be $500 million per year, and that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) be given much of that money to administer another dozen or so antipoverty miniprograms under its auspices.

  It was unclear, as yet, whether there would be a new poverty agency that would run antipoverty programs or if the existing cabinet departments would simply add antipoverty programs to the programs they were already administering. The fights were intense. Community Action advocates wanted a new agency; the Labor Department and HEW were strongly opposed. Labor secretary Willard Wirtz stormed out of a meeting on December 20, muttering that there was no need for “any more damn new agencies.” Bill Capron, who was advocating a new agency, suggested in a memo that either Abe Fortas, a prominent Washington lawyer, or Sarge Shriver might be an effective salesman for an antipoverty bill in Congress.

  Over the Christmas holidays, whi
le Shriver prepared to leave for the Middle East, Heller and Gordon flew to LBJ’s ranch in the hill country outside Austin, where they outlined their proposal. As Johnson recalled,

  I walked from the main ranch house to a little green frame house we call the “guest house,” a distance of about 200 yards. Inside, seated around a small kitchen table, were Walter Heller, Budget Director Kermit Gordon, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti. The table was littered with papers, coffee cups, and one ashtray brimming over with cigarettes and torn strips of paper. Just a few feet away from the window several of my white-face Hereford [cows] were grazing placidly and a little noisily. It was an incongruous setting for Gordon and Heller, those two urbane scholars. I sat down at the table to talk about the program they were preparing.

  According to LBJ, Heller and Gordon presented their plan for a limited number of “demonstration projects” that would employ the principles of Community Action and measure whether they could be effective. Johnson’s first response was that the program, to attract the national following necessary to propel a bill through Congress, couldn’t be a mere demonstration. “It had to be big and bold and hit the whole nation with real impact.” In his memoir, Johnson said that although Community Action was presented to him as something “new and radical,” it struck him as being based on a traditional American principle—local self-determination. The idea of Community Action, Johnson wrote, also resonated strongly with him because of his experience in the 1930s as a schoolteacher in Cotulla, Texas, where he had formed a parent-teacher association that was not unlike a Community Action agency. Johnson also recalled, from his time as a regional director of the National Youth Administration, that programs that the poor were involved in designing were more successful than those designed by bureaucratic fiat.