What May saw when he joined the task force was “vintage Shriver”: a “diverse and sometimes exotic group of people, most of whom had done something that had made a headline, whether they were Davis Cup tennis players or downhill skiers or left-handed pool shooters or Pulitzer Prize winners,” all of them woven together by the magical “chemistry” that Shriver’s collaboratives rarely failed to generate.
Shriver gathered together people who otherwise would likely have had no occasion to meet. Shriver was always eager to get the perspective of the business community, because he believed they were often better “problem solvers” than academics or government bureaucrats. As one task force participant recalled, “There were all kinds of millionaires popping in and out for a day at a time.” Radicals like Harrington, Paul Jacobs, and Saul Alinsky sat alongside businessmen and industrialists.
Shriver’s method of operation was the same as it had been when he ran the Peace Corps task force. He would encourage debate and “wild brainstorming.” Yarmolinsky recalled the meetings as being like “a college seminar.” Hyman Bookbinder was a labor lobbyist who joined the task force and who later became an associate director of the OEO. He recalled, “Shriver would bring down people. He’d sit them on one side of a conference table and … would say, ‘The president has given me an assignment to eliminate poverty in this country. What would you do if you had to eliminate poverty in this country? Where would you start? Give me some ideas.”
Those who hadn’t known Shriver before were struck by what seemed to be the apparently naive simplicity of this method. Jim Sundquist, the deputy under secretary of agriculture who had been dispatched by the Agriculture Department to participate in the task force meetings, told the journalist Murray Kempton, “I’ve never known anyone as open to ideas as Shriver is. If a man came in with an idea, he would seem to accept it right away, and if you objected, Sarge would say, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ and the burden of proof would be on the one who objected instead of the one who suggested the idea.” Others were less charitable: Shriver was, one observer said, “a dilettante with a propensity for schoolgirl enthusiasms.”
There was truth to acid comments like these, but Shriver knew how his own mind worked. That’s why he tapped Yarmolinsky to be his deputy. He had used men like Moyers and Wiggins to rein him in at the Peace Corps; now he used Yarmolinsky as a check on his enthusiasms on the poverty task force. Yarmolinsky was not always popular among the task force members, but his aggressiveness was necessary to “thin the ranks of both antipoverty warriors and their nostrums.”
Shriver was also more discerning than he let on. As Sundquist observed, “Nothing ever seemed very systematic, but there may have been more system in it than appeared on the surface.” Shriver initially kept the floodgates wide open to make sure he captured every possible proposal, and plenty of bad ideas were injected into the mix. But the ideas that ultimately made it into the poverty program were for the most part smart ones, both as politics and as policy—and almost every one of those ideas emerged, in concept if not in name, within the first several days of his freewheeling brainstorming sessions.
Shriver was better versed in the ways of the federal government than he had been when launching the Peace Corps three years earlier, but his seat-of-the-pants management style still prevailed. For the first few weeks after Shriver’s appointment, the poverty task force operated exclusively out of his Maryland living room and his fifth floor Peace Corps offices at 806 Connecticut Avenue. He borrowed staff from the Peace Corps and elsewhere in the government, and he held meetings late at night, sometimes at midnight, because so many of the task force participants had other jobs. When the swell of people grew too large for the fifth floor to accommodate, they expanded into vacant offices on the twelfth floor. When the burgeoning program outgrew its space in the Maiatico Building, staff members spilled out into “three or four nooks and crannies around Washington, most of them within walking distance of the Peace Corps.”
The poverty program spent its first months of existence migrating from place to place. First, there was the beautiful old Court of Claims building, originally constructed as an art gallery and later used as a barracks by Union soldiers during the Civil War before being adapted for use as a courthouse and then abandoned. Alas, this building turned out to be structurally unsound: When construction began on a nearby site, 200-pound chunks of the court’s ceiling started falling from 30 feet above. Engineers determined the building was near collapse and everyone was forced to evacuate on two hours’ notice, carrying all their files and possessions with them. The task force split up and moved into two spaces: a temporary office in the basement morgue of a condemned hospital and an old, abandoned hotel that in an earlier incarnation had been a “second-class whorehouse.” Poverty agency officials claimed old hotel rooms as their offices. Secretaries worked out of adjoining bathrooms. Bathtubs served as file cabinets. There were far more toilets than desks.
The logistical challenges were enormous. Every time the staff moved, everyone would be assigned new telephone numbers, so no one ever knew how to reach anyone else. The otherwise simple task of requisitioning paper clips or stationery became almost impossible. Eventually, task force administrators learned to do what the early Peace Corps employees had done: make guerrilla raids on other agencies to steal their supplies. Movers were constantly losing boxes of files, or delivering them to the wrong place. Sometimes, important working papers went missing for weeks.
Bill Kelly, the former NASA official who had helped bring administrative order to the Peace Corps, was called in to do the same for the poverty task force. At first, he couldn’t even figure out how many people Shriver was employing in the task force because they were scattered all over town, “squatting” in other people’s office space. No money had yet been appropriated for a poverty program; all Shriver’s task force had was $30,000 from the president’s contingency fund. In effect, lack of money made the poverty planners—as one of them would later put it—“warriors without guns.”
Despite these challenges and the generally frenzied environment, the task force enjoyed “excellent esprit de corps,” according to Kelly and many others. The atmosphere, Robert Lampman noted, was like being in the hotel lobby of a national political convention: fun, full of energy and excitement, a sense of high stakes, with people running back and forth and yelling at one another at all hours of the day and night. Another participant described the task force period as a “beautiful hysteria.”
Even Lyndon Johnson was affected. In his memoir, the president discussed the “contagious” excitement generated by Shriver’s task force. “I followed closely the work of those men over the next few weeks [in February and March]. They went at it with a fervor and created a ferment unknown since the days of the New Deal, when lights burned through the night as men worked to restructure society.”
“MAXIMUM FEASIBLE PARTICIPATION”
The creative ferment LBJ and others observed was in some ways remarkably productive—from this hopeful chaos the contours of an antipoverty program began to emerge, and many enduring social programs were born in an astonishingly short time. Yet as one task force participant reported to the New York Times, the in-fighting was so bitter “sometimes the walls dripped with blood as the empire builders clashed with the empire wreckers.” In the early months of the Peace Corps, too, there had often been “blood on the floor.” But at the Peace Corps most of the early wounds quickly healed; this time many did not, and the political damage they caused was substantial.
Beginning at the initial briefing meeting on February 2, there were disputes over Community Action. Community Action had lobbyists in two separate camps. The first was Bobby Kennedy’s gang from the PCJD—the “Guerrillas,” they called themselves. The second were the economists in the Bureau of the Budget who had become convinced that Community Action was the most economical way to wage war against poverty.
But even without having had time to study the matter, Shriver instinctively fel
t that the poverty program would be a political failure if Community Action were the sum total of what it offered. So although Community Action was not completely taken off the table at the first all-day brainstorming session on February 4, Shriver presented it as merely one component of what the poverty program would become.
This did not sit well with some of the Community Action advocates, especially because they believed that Shriver was diminishing their idea. Community Action’s academic supporters had an opposite concern—that the War on Poverty was irresponsibly inflating the concept, transforming it from a small-scale, demonstration project in a limited number of areas into a large-scale, nationwide program. Better to take it slow, the academics advised, to spend the time to see if Community Action works before deploying it nationally.
Won’t work, Shriver said. An “unconditional war,” he said, could not be fought on a demonstration basis. Not only must the War on Poverty be more than just Community Action, he insisted—Community Action itself had to be bigger and bolder than the cautious academics imagined it. When Paul Ylvisaker was asked to draw up a proposed budget for Community Action and came up with a figure of $30 million, Shriver told him to add another zero.
The concept of Community Action, at this point, seemed to mean different things to different people. To practical-minded people in the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers, it was merely a planning and coordinating mechanism, a way of bringing together all the disparate institutions—such as the federal government, the state government, the city government, the school system, and neighborhood organizations—involved in dealing with the poor. For the academics and foundation executives, it was a way to encourage social experiments—a “way of attempting to test out a variety of solutions to the poverty program,” as Adam Yarmolinsky put it. For Bobby Kennedy’s PCJD Guerrillas, Community Action was a hybrid of political mobilization and “social therapy.”
At times, competing factions within Shiver’s task force would both be talking about Community Action but meaning completely different things. Rather than settling on a single, narrow definition at this point—which might have pushed disagreements over its meaning to the breaking point—the task force left Community Action’s meaning fuzzy, allowing it to withstand a broad range of interpretations. This worked well in the short term, but it prevented the task force from ever thinking clearly about Community Action’s political explosiveness.
A few early conversations did hint at political explosions to come. The most significant was over the question of exactly how involved the poor should be in planning and administering their own Community Action programs. One point that just about everyone in the task force agreed upon was that the “board ladies” and “bureaucrats” who populated the current welfare-services delivery system were hidebound and ineffective. The antibureaucratic spirit of the Peace Corps task force, which had bridled at the notion of being absorbed into the old-line foreign aid bureaucracy, carried through now into the poverty task force. The “old-line” welfare system didn’t work—so Community Action would work around it, by going outside of the usual bureaucratic chain to give money to locally based organizations. This, it was thought, would have the salutary effect of compelling the old welfare services operations to reform themselves.
But how much control was it necessary to give the poor in order to give them “ownership” of their program? There was general consensus that the poor had to have some input in the planning and some direct involvement with administration in order for the assault on the old-line bureaucracy to work. But there was little agreement about exactly how much control and how much input. Some thought the involvement should be minimal, at the level of having one or two poor people on the boards of local Community Action agencies, to ensure that the voice of the poor was being heard. “My conception of what it meant was that you involved poor people in the process, not that you put them in charge.” Adam Yarmolinsky recalled. Bobby’s Guerrillas at the PCJD thought the poor should have much more active control and involvement. The phrase that came to represent this latter viewpoint was “maximum feasible participation” of the poor.
Dick Boone, Dave Hackett’s deputy at the PCDJ, seems to have been the first person to use it. At the first meeting at Shriver’s house, Boone repeatedly insisted that Community Action had to have the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. Finally, Yarmolinsky turned to him and said, “You have used that phrase four or five times now.”
“Yes, I know,” Boone replied. “How many more times do I have to use it before it becomes part of the program?”
“Oh, a couple of times more,” Yarmolinsky said. Boone did—and “the maximum feasible participation” of the poor was written into the requirements for Community Action.
One of the biggest supporters of Community Action—and of “maximum feasible participation”—was presumed to be Bobby Kennedy. Yet he was conspicuously absent from the task force meetings. As a champion of Community Action, Bobby might have been expected to attend these meetings. But he was still consumed with grief. More to the point, perhaps, he was bitter that the president had made Shriver head of the task force. Bobby felt that by rights he should be running the poverty program; he was a real Kennedy, and therefore better suited to carrying the Kennedys’ antipoverty torch. Shriver, in Bobby’s mind, had inappropriate dual loyalties—to the Kennedys and to LBJ.
Shriver was aware that Bobby and some of his associates perceived anything he did for LBJ to be a betrayal of the Kennedy family. “The disgust of Bobby and his people was blatantly visible,” Shriver recalled. “I’d get reports from various people or criticism from various people for doing this or that. But that didn’t matter to me. I had been given responsibility by the US president to develop the best possible programs for the poor people. I didn’t care whether these programs had originated with John Kennedy’s followers or Bobby Kennedy’s followers or Lyndon Johnson’s followers.”
“I never heard anything directly from Bobby,” Shriver continued. “He never uttered a word to me. But I knew that Bobby and those friendly to Bobby were complaining about the way I was organizing the poverty program. Bobby thought that everything done in the poverty program should be credited to Jack. But my opinion was that Lyndon Johnson’s administration was putting up the money; I never thought that he was trying to steal credit. Also, I didn’t think that just because Johnson got credit that Jack Kennedy lost credit. To me, it didn’t matter whether Lyndon Johnson or John Kennedy or Joe Smith had thought of it. My job was to get the poverty program started.”
“I never heard anything from Eunice, either,” Shriver added. “If people bitched to her, she never said anything to me.” Former JFK advisers, Eunice recalled, “were upset about anybody working for President Johnson. Sarge felt a real loyalty to the programs. I agreed with him. What was the alternative? I think Sarge has terrific talent and great concern for people who are underdogs. That’s not something he came upon when he married me or when he went to work for the Johnson administration. It was part of the very core of his being. If you take that out of somebody’s life because you think he’s being ‘disloyal’ to a man who is dead, well, I just didn’t think it made sense.”
Although Bobby did not attend the Timberlawn meetings, his presence was palpable. “What would Bobby do?” was the question that governed the thinking of many of the participants at Shriver’s meetings. At least once, Shriver and some associates made pilgrimages to Bobby, to seek his blessing on the evolving poverty program. “We went to see him early on,” Frank Mankiewicz recalled. “Sarge and I, maybe Harrington, Moynihan, Dave Hackett, and Dick Boone. He looked awful. He just sort of sat there. He was still in shock. He asked if what we were doing was what President Kennedy had in mind, and Hackett and Boone assured him it was. He said, ‘Fine.’ ”
TURF WARS
The fights over bureaucratic turf were even more heated than the arguments about Community Action. The main instigator in these fights was Willard W
irtz, the secretary of labor, whom Shriver had recruited for Kennedy’s cabinet from Adlai Stevenson’s law firm in Chicago. Wirtz, like Shriver, felt there had to be more to the poverty program than Community Action. At the first all-day meeting at Timberlawn he strongly advocated making a jobs program the centerpiece of the War on Poverty.
Both Shriver and Lyndon Johnson agreed with Wirtz instinctively: A jobs program could be a valuable complement to Community Action programs that provided training and neighborhood services. But Wirtz angrily dismissed the idea of anything but jobs programs. When Walter Heller released the first CEA report recommending Community Action, Wirtz “violently attacked” it and tried to suppress its publication.
Shriver was prepared to give Wirtz a receptive hearing. He, too, believed that a jobs program must be an integral part of any War on Poverty. But Wirtz sabotaged himself by proposing a massive jobs program that would cost between $3 billion and $5 billion per year. As policy, this may have been a good idea. But as politics it was absurd—President Johnson had already said he would be asking for a total of only $1 billion for all antipoverty measures. Moreover, Wirtz made his argument seem completely self-serving and therefore non-credible by arguing that this multibillion-dollar program be run under his auspices at the Labor Department. “If Wirtz had had his way,” Shriver recalled, “the War on Poverty bill would simply have been a vehicle via which long dormant or suspended programs would get pushed through Congress. Once we had fought the legislation into law, the individual programs would be peeled off and handed to the bureaucrats in Labor, HEW, or (eventually) the new Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The new poverty agency would have become just a hollow shell without money or authority to run anything.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 47