Promising Shriver another job if the poverty program ever failed—perhaps secretary of defense, if McNamara ever were to step down—Johnson concluded by saying, “Now don’t go trying to figure out who opposed you.” This was a clearly disingenuous message: Human nature dictated that trying to figure out who had opposed him was precisely what Shriver would do.
Two hours later, evidently concerned that he had been too harsh on Shriver earlier, the president called back and read him some of the positive press his appointment had been receiving. However, Johnson still tried to stoke Shriver’s animosity toward the Kennedy camp by mentioning that “incidentally,” Ted Sorensen continued to think it was a terrible idea for Shriver to continue on at the Peace Corps while taking charge of the antipoverty program. When Shriver failed to take the bait, the president launched into one of his classic perorations.
Now you’ve got to see how in the hell you’re going to administer this thing. Then, you’re going to have to get that bill and that message together. And you got to get on that television and start explaining it. Let’s find out any dollar that’s appropriated, how we can use it for poverty.… And you’ll have more influence in this administration than any man in it. You’ll have a billion dollars to pass out. So you just call up the pope and tell him you might not be in time every morning for church on time, but you’re going to be working for the good of humanity.
The sky’s the limit. You just make this thing work, period. I don’t give a damn about the details. And anybody you want us to meet with, we’ll do it on our spare time, when we get a night off. Because this is number one on the domestic front. Next to peace in the world, this is the most important. Get all the damn publicity you can, get on all the televisions you can, as soon as you know enough to talk about it.
And then another quick shift, another turn to flattery. Did Shriver know that Moyers had been lobbying on his behalf, urging LBJ to select him as running mate for 1964? Shriver, in turn, asked the president if he had seen a recent Associated Press report. (“I’m not running for anything,” Shriver had told the AP, adding that Bobby Kennedy would be a “terrific” vice president.) “Yeah, I saw that you eliminated yourself from the race completely,” Johnson said wryly. “We’ll get you back in it, though.”
“That’s all right,” Shriver said.
“Yeah, that’s all right,” Johnson said. “I think that a man runs for vice president is a very foolish man. Man runs away from it’s very wise. I wish I had run farther away from it than I did. And I never was a candidate for it, I’ll tell you that. And don’t you ever be a candidate, and don’t let anybody else be a candidate.” Bobby Kennedy’s name floated unspoken in the air here. “Tell them anybody ever runs for it never gets it.”
“I’m with you till the end,” Johnson continued, with Bobby Kennedy still the unnamed presence hanging over the conversation. “Death do us part. We’re not going to let anybody divide us, so just bear that in mind. And when everybody else has quit you and gone and through with you, I’ll still be standing there by your side.”
In appointing Shriver head of the poverty program, Johnson had carried out a brilliant coup. Although all the Community Action proponents were based in Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, they would now be answering ultimately to Shriver. With Shriver at the helm, the general public would perceive the poverty program to be an “official” Kennedy project—meaning that it would be hard for Bobby, or any of his close associates, to criticize it publicly. Meanwhile Johnson was calculating (wrongly, for the most part) that Shriver resented being treated as a hired hand of the Kennedy family and that he resented implications that he lacked Kennedy “toughness.” “Believe me,” Bobby’s aide Adam Walinsky said, “Sarge was not a close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.”
In one fell swoop, Johnson had satisfied the public’s demand for a Kennedy imprimatur on the poverty program; inoculated the program against public criticism from the Kennedy camp; solidified the connection between the Oval Office and the one person in the Kennedy family he felt he could trust; and deepened the wedge between the two brothers-in-law. And by installing Shriver on turf that Bobby perceived to be rightfully his, Johnson was angering Bobby, who was powerless to do anything about it.
Of course, Johnson had nobler reasons for appointing Shriver, as well. He liked Shriver’s ability to think unashamedly in the big, sometimes grandiose terms that he did. Shriver also had demonstrated that he was capable of starting a new program from scratch. More important, he had shown he could get legislation through Congress. “I think he forced the job on me,” Shriver said, “because he thought it was going to be difficult to get it through Congress and he thought I could help get it through.”
Shriver’s ability to work with Congress was important, because Johnson wanted the program legislated and operational extremely fast. Johnson had a certain amount of carte blanche to carry out Kennedy’s ostensible policy priorities, but it would not last forever. He needed to push the program through Congress in the next session. Shriver had gotten the Peace Corps up and running in no time at all—now Johnson wanted him to do the same with the War on Poverty. “The president had asked for immediate action,” Shriver recalled. Thus he went to bed that night knowing that “the next day, Sunday, was to be my first working day in the War on Poverty.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Beautiful Hysteria
Shriver didn’t have much to work with—a rough draft of the antipoverty statute that Walter Heller and Kermit Gordon had hastily drawn up at the LBJ ranch in December and a rough draft of the message to Congress, written by Ken Galbraith, that would accompany LBJ’s presentation of a poverty bill to Congress. That was it; that was all there was to the president’s unconditional War on Poverty. Shriver had not even had forty-eight hours to think about the problem—and now he was expected to conceive, design, administer, and push through Congress a brand-new, billion-dollar program. And the president had indicated he wanted all of this done within two months.
Shriver’s only consolation was that he had once before done as much with even less. At its inception, the Peace Corps had a far less concrete mandate than the War on Poverty now did. In 1961 President Kennedy had not even given him a draft bill; all Shriver had had to go on were a few sentences from a couple of campaign speeches.
But the stakes were higher now—ten times higher in budgetary terms. And incalculably higher in political terms. President Kennedy had launched the Peace Corps almost as an afterthought; he needed to demonstrate he was following through on a throwaway campaign promise that had garnered him unexpected plaudits. It had started small and paid off big. But the poverty program, relatively speaking, was starting off big. Moreover, it was not to be some ancillary program but rather the core of President Johnson’s legislative agenda, and of his election campaign, for 1964. And the whole enterprise was vexed by the political tensions between Johnson and the Kennedy old guard, led by RFK. Shriver would have to lead any antipoverty army he could recruit through a dangerous minefield.
On Sunday, Shriver read through the sparse materials he had been given and called a meeting at his Peace Corps office with the most brilliant advisers he could recruit on short notice. Johnson wouldn’t let him take Moyers, so Shriver turned to Adam Yarmolinsky instead. Yarmolinsky had demonstrated his brains and effectiveness working in the Civil Rights Section and during the Talent Hunt; in those days, his sharp organizational skills had helped balance the sometimes dilettantish enthusiasms of Shriver and Harris Wofford. Yarmolinsky had since gone to work as a special assistant to Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, where he had developed a reputation as “one of the most brilliant of all the brilliant young men in the Kennedy administration—someone who worked ceaselessly and got things done.” Yarmolinsky was also known for his prickly, even caustic relations with people whose judgment he found wanting—he would “demolish people with sarcasm,” one colleague recalled—and Shriver was aware that conse
rvatives had on occasion attacked Yarmolinsky for his allegedly left-wing background. But if Yarmolinsky had passed muster at the security-conscious Defense Department, then surely it wouldn’t be a problem for him to work in a domestic policy agency. Yarmolinsky became Shriver’s top deputy.
Shriver also turned to Frank Mankiewicz, his Peace Corps representative in Peru. Serendipitously, Mankiewicz had just arrived in town to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about what the Peace Corps was doing in Latin America. On Sunday morning, just as Mankiewicz was reading the Washington Post’s article about Shriver’s appointment as head of the poverty program, the phone rang. It was Shriver, asking if he knew anything about poverty. As it happened, Mankiewicz was a friend of Michael Harrington’s and had read a fair amount about poverty. He was also, of course, a champion of community development work in Peru and elsewhere. The two men talked for a while. Later that afternoon, as Mankiewicz was working on his congressional testimony, Mary Ann Orlando called and told him Shriver wanted him to attend a six o’clock meeting.
That Sunday evening, in a conference room on the fifth floor of the Peace Corps building, Walter Heller, Kermit Gordon, and members of their staffs briefed Shriver, Yarmolinsky, Mankiewicz, Mike Feldman, Warren Wiggins, and some Peace Corps assistants on all the work the Budget Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers had done so far. Charles Schultze, assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, described the Community Action concept and explained that both the CEA and the Budget Bureau believed that Community Action should form the basis of the War on Poverty. The program, Schultze explained, should be designed to get at the “root causes” of poverty, not simply to mitigate its effects. This would not be an income-transfer program but, rather, one that sought to improve education and family living environments, so that residents of poor neighborhoods would develop the skills and self-assurance to lift themselves out of poverty. The pioneering experiments conducted by the PCJD and the Ford Foundation were cited as examples of how Community Action would work. The Heller-Gordon team proposed that President Johnson’s entire budget for the poverty program ($500 million) be spent on building a nationwide network of Community Action agencies.
Shriver and his team listened politely to the presentation. Shriver already had a good understanding of how Community Action worked; it was, after all, what many Peace Corps volunteers were already engaged in, especially in Latin America. He recalled later, “Community action—which the people in Community Action thought was so revolutionary—was something we had been running in the Peace Corps for four years before it ever got into the War on Poverty. So I thought Community Action was absolutely sort of normal.” He appreciated how effective the Community Action concept could be in empowering the poor to work for their own civic and material improvement. And he strongly agreed that making Community Action part of the War on Poverty could be effective, both as politics and as policy. Politically, it would allow program administrators to emphasize two important facts that would play well even in the conservative South. First, it emphasized local control rather than central planning; this was not creeping socialism but a way of giving control to local communities. Second, Community Action wasn’t just “hand-outs” or a perpetuation of public assistance; its goal was to induce individual initiative.
But when Shriver and Yarmolinsky ran into each other in the men’s room during a break in the presentation, they just looked at each other and shook their heads. “It’ll never fly,” Shriver said. “From the day it was handed to me,” Shriver said later, “I knew damn well that Community Action could not be the sole thing in the War on Poverty.” In his view, there were several related problems with making Community Action the exclusive focus of the poverty program. First, it wasn’t broad enough. Community Action was designed for urban communities; it might not work effectively in rural areas. Second, Community Action couldn’t by itself generate jobs—and what good was a program that prepared poor people for jobs that didn’t exist? The antipoverty legislation, Shriver felt, needed to have some kind of jobs component. Third, and most important, the president needed the War on Poverty to produce results fast: Community Action wouldn’t do that.
The Heller-Gordon team thought that Shriver simply wasn’t hearing what they had to say. “Sarge’s focus that night was … to repeat the political success of the Peace Corps,” Bill Cannon recalled. “He wanted something glamorous, something easily understood, apparent in its workings, and which you could succeed at.… He was just not listening to us, as hard as we kept trying to sell him.”
In the days and weeks after this initial briefing, there was talk of deploying Bobby Kennedy to convince his brother-in-law of Community Action’s virtues. There were even rumors of a conversation in which Bobby had managed—by force of logic or by threat—to bring Shriver around to support Community Action. Shriver emphatically denied that such a conversation ever took place. “That’s just false,” he said. “The reason why it’s false is that, with all due respect to the people who were interested in Community Action, I think I knew more about Community Action than they did.… We’d been running community development in the Peace Corps for three years before it ever started … in the War on Poverty. My wife and I had started the program on juvenile delinquency in the Department of Justice [in 1947]. So there wasn’t anything new that anyone had to sell to me.” Shriver believed the hard-core Community Action supporters were being politically obtuse. “I did play down the idea that Community Action could be the totality of the War on Poverty.… I still think that decision was correct, to make Community Action an essential part but not the whole of the War on Poverty.”
In the days of the Peace Corps task force, Shriver had made his suite at the Mayflower Hotel into an ongoing seminar whose purpose was to generate as many good ideas from as many brilliant minds as possible. If chaotic brainstorming had worked for the Peace Corps, then why not for the War on Poverty? To begin generating ideas on how to broaden the assault on poverty, Shriver called for a series of meetings at Timberlawn. The meetings commenced on Tuesday, February 4, just two days after Shriver’s initial briefing, and continued more or less continuously for twelve days.
A great deal of intellectual firepower was present at these meetings. Shriver, Yarmolinsky, and Mankiewicz were joined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a rising star in the Labor Department; most of the gang from the PCJD (Dave Hackett, Dick Boone, Lloyd Ohlin); Michael Harrington, the Other America author; Paul Jacobs, another writer, who had recently traveled the country pretending to be a derelict, to understand better how the poor lived; Walter Heller; William Capron, a member of LBJ’s Council of Economic Advisers; Lane Kirkland, second in command at the AFL-CIO; Charlie Schultze; Paul Ylvisaker from the Ford Foundation; Louis Martin; Harris Wofford; John Kenneth Galbraith; Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz; Under Secretary of HEW Wilbur Cohen; Donald Petrie, the CEO of Avis Rent-a-Car; Richard Goodwin; and dozens of other cabinet secretaries and under secretaries, academics, foundation officers, business executives, college presidents, and mayors.
As the task force members surveyed the world around them, it seemed that the prospects for liberal social change were, if anything, greater than they had been at the dawn of the New Frontier, greater in fact than at any time since the New Deal. The Democrats had controlled Congress for years. Eisenhower’s eight-year Republican presidency seemed to have been merely a brief interregnum in a period of solid liberal consensus. The New Deal was an accepted part of the political and policy landscape. The economy was strong, making social beneficence more affordable than in the past. And for Shriver and his generation, which had seen the federal government end the Depression, defeat Nazism, and help produce an era of great American prosperity, it was an article of faith that government could solve big social problems. Now they had been offered a golden opportunity to solve one of the most persistent problems themselves. “For the proponents of social legislation,” Yarmolinsky recalled, “this was our Camelot.”
Almost a
ll of the current knowledge about American poverty was gathered in that room—and it still wasn’t very much. Robert Lampman had provided a complete bibliography of every worthwhile book or article on poverty; it was less then two pages long. Even the presence of Michael Harrington, the person most responsible for putting poverty on the political map, didn’t help much. Harrington was more radical, and more pessimistic, than most of the other meeting participants; his view was that Johnson’s proposed budget for the poverty program, large though it may have seemed in political terms, was way too small to even begin to dent poverty. You’re not going to end poverty by spending “nickels and dimes,” he told Shriver. “Oh, really, Mr. Harrington,” Shriver replied. “I don’t know about you but this is the first time I’ve spent a billion dollars.”
Shriver knew he didn’t have much time; Johnson had told him he wanted a comprehensive plan as soon as possible, so that both houses of Congress would have time to pass legislation before their adjournment and the campaign season in the fall. The only clear piece of direction Johnson gave him came through Moyers. “You tell Shriver, ‘No doles,’ ” LBJ said. But despite the time constraints, Shriver made a determined commitment to trawl widely for new ideas. He recalled, “I decided that in the brief time we had, we would read everything that had been written about poverty; listen to anyone who had anything to say; accept advice from any source.”
He recruited anyone he thought might have something to contribute. Edgar May was a reporter for the Buffalo Evening News who had recently written a series of articles on poverty and welfare that had won him a Pulitzer Prize and who had just published a book called The Wasted Americans. May was working late one Friday night when Shriver, whom he had never met, called him on the phone. “My name is Sargent Shriver, and I’m down here in Washington with the Peace Corps, and we’re trying to put together a task force to do something about poverty,” he said. “I read your book last night, and I just want to know, how long are you going to criticize this stuff, and when are you going to do something about it.” Several hours later, May was on a flight to Washington. He would work by Shriver’s side for the next ten years.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 46