Shriver had another, more personal reason for wanting to retain control of a jobs program. Long before he was tasked with starting the War on Poverty, Shriver had given serious thought to a distinctive kind of jobs program. In the 1950s, when he was president of Chicago’s Board of Education, he had been forced to contend with the problem of large numbers of underachieving youth. What do you do with the students who graduate as unemployable? At the time Shriver had thought, “What we ought to have is a big institution that takes those kids—they’ve already quit the school system because they are permitted to do so when they’re 16, but we will take them, and not force them, but we will try to get them to volunteer to join an institution, which we’ll have right here in the city, which will train them for jobs.” But Shriver was not able to implement this plan before being pulled to Washington by Jack Kennedy. Now, as director of the poverty task force, Shriver had the opportunity to implement the concept on a national scale. There was also clear public-relations value to a jobs program: The image of previously unemployed youths doing tangible work would be political gold.
Once it became clear that Shriver was going to make the big jobs program his own, Wirtz basically withdrew from the task force, delegating responsibility for representing the Labor Department to his ambitious young deputy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan, who had a knack for igniting political controversy, was seen as smart but ineffectual by Shriver and his closest associates, “an impractical intellectual” and “a water-carrier for Wirtz.” Wirtz, for his part, believed Moynihan had been co-opted by Shriver’s people and made into a convert to the cause of Community Action. Playing both sides against the middle, Moynihan got in trouble with everyone. Wirtz blamed Moynihan for losing Labor Department control of the jobs program; Shriver’s people blamed Moynihan, who helped draft the presidential message to Congress that accompanied the poverty bill, for diminishing Community Action in order to exaggerate the role of the jobs program. Several years later, in response to all this criticism, as well as to the general political problems that by 1968 were besetting the War on Poverty, Moynihan would publish a caustic history of the War on Poverty’s launch, titled Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. In the book (parts of which might be described as creatively revisionist), Moynihan casts himself as a lone prophet, warning against the perils of Community Action in 1964.
DRAFTING A BILL
The poverty bill came together with astonishing speed. Within three weeks of the February 2 meeting, a complete bill had been drafted—and most of what went into it had been introduced at least tangentially by February 4. The concepts that would come to fruition as Community Action, Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Upward Bound, and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) had all been discussed by the end of the second brainstorming session at Timberlawn. The seeds that would blossom a year later as Head Start and Legal Services for the Poor had also been planted.
After a task force meeting on February 23, Norbert Schlei, who was an assistant attorney general, composed a first draft of the poverty bill. The draft included a section on Community Action, along with the language that Dick Boone had lobbied for: A “Community Action Organization” would be one “which is developed and conducted with the maximum feasible participation of the residents” where the organization was based. Jim Sundquist later noted that “the clause … relating to participation of the poor was inserted with virtually no discussion in the task force and none at all on Capitol Hill.” No one was aware then of its implications. “It just seemed … like an idea that nobody could quarrel with.”
The draft bill had six parts. Title I contained the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and a work-study program. The Job Corps was aimed at youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who had finished school but could not find a place in the labor market. The bill called for two types of Job Corps programs. The first would be rural camps, modeled on FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, where participants would receive basic skills training and do conservation work on public lands. The second (Shriver’s most cherished part of the whole poverty program) would be urban boarding schools, where kids would receive food, clothes, and medical care, along with basic education and work skills.
The Neighborhood Youth Program was aimed at the same demographic group but did not include a boarding component. In this program, state and local agencies would employ poor youths to do low-skill work. The idea was to give young people an income while instilling a work ethic and teaching them basic job skills. The work-study program, a project that Francis Keppel, the US commissioner of education, had been trying for some time to get legislated without much success, would pay schools or nonprofit organizations to employ low-income students in part-time jobs.
Title II established Community Action. Reflecting the task force’s vague definition of Community Action, the establishing language was quite broad. Community Action would, according to the bill, mobilize public and private resources to reduce poverty; provide services to the poor; draw on the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor themselves; and be administered by a local agency that fairly represented its surrounding community. As the bill’s principal drafter, Norb Schlei, said, “The Community Action program can take on anything and everything.” Community action agencies could develop projects on housing, health care, education, job training, child care, juvenile delinquency, and “other fields.”
Title III, inserted at the insistence of Jim Sundquist and Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, called for the establishment of loans and grants to poor farmers, to help them upgrade their technology and improve their efficiency. Title IV established a program of small-business loans to be administered by the Small Business Administration. Title V called for a work-experience program to provide job training to unemployed heads of family receiving public assistance; HEW would administer it.
Title VI established VISTA, under which volunteers would work in cooperation with state and local agencies to reduce poverty. It was expected that VISTA volunteers would work to further the objectives of Title I and Title II.
The bill, called the Economic Opportunity Act, also called for the formation of a new agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Task force members agreed on the need to create a wholly new umbrella agency; without one, there would be no chance of achieving their stated goal of working around the established welfare bureaucracy. But there remained considerable disagreement over the function of the new agency. Would it merely coordinate the different programs, serving as a liaison among the different cabinet departments? Or would it have actual operating responsibility, directly administering programs itself?
Shriver was of the strong opinion that the OEO should have operating authority. A new kind of war called for a new kind of army with a wholly new command structure. The cabinet secretaries disagreed. President Johnson intervened to effect a compromise. In the end, the Labor Department got control over the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and HEW took charge of health and training programs, but OEO got complete coordinating authority along with operating authority over VISTA and the two major components of the poverty program—Community Action and the Job Corps.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mobilizing for War
The frenetic days of February blurred into the even more frenetic days of early March. Yarmolinsky continued to serve as task force commander, but now the individual programs were beginning to get their own field commanders.
One day in February, Vernon Alden, the president of Ohio University, was lying on the beach in Hawaii when a resort employee told him that the president of the United States was on the line. When the bewildered Alden went inside and picked up the phone, President Johnson told him he needed to get on a flight to Washington right away. Alden asked why. “I’d like to have Sargent Shriver explain that,” the president said. Shriver spoke up. “We want to talk to you about being part of an exciting new program we’re developing.” Alden explained he was on vacation and that he could come
to Washington in a week. “What do you mean, next week?” Shriver said. “We expect you tomorrow.”
Meeting with Shriver and LBJ at the White House, Alden found Shriver’s offer—to chair the group planning the jobs component of the poverty program—compelling. Shriver explained that he wanted this part of the program to have the imprimatur of American higher education; a college president could provide not only the latest educational thinking but also prestige. (“In those days,” Alden says, “people were much more in awe of university presidents than they are today.”) Shriver particularly wanted Alden because he had gone to Harvard Business School and served on numerous corporate boards—Alden, in other words, was not some ivory-tower philosopher but a real manager. The jobs program needed that.
On March 25 Shriver announced Alden’s appointment as chair of the task force subgroup on jobs, and Alden began spending several days each week in Washington, working on a jobs program. Alden would get up at five in the morning, fly to Washington, work all day long, “talk with Shriver until well into the evening,” and then work all the next day before flying back to Ohio late at night.
Several controversies arose. Having worked in the Defense Department, Yarmolinsky knew that the armed forces had two things the Job Corps needed: logistics capability and unused bases. Why not have the military provide retired bases to the poverty program for use as camps? And why not allow the military to put its skill at housing, feeding, and clothing people to good use as part of a domestic social program? Shriver loved the idea when Yarmolinsky proposed it. The Civilian Conservation Corps—which was one of the models for the Job Corps—had relied on military assistance to grow quickly. And Shriver liked the notion of the American war machine being deployed for peaceful domestic purposes. Defense Secretary McNamara also liked the idea, so by the second week of February, memos were circulating that explained what the Defense Department’s role would be.
But the proposed role for the military at these camps provoked “the anguished cries of the knee-jerk liberals,” as Yarmolinsky put it. “We didn’t want the military to get their dirty paws on it,” one liberal poverty planner recalled.
Sure enough, a week later a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in the Washington Post reported the internal debates over how much operational control of the Job Corps should be given to the Defense Department. When “a proposal to put the US Army on the front lines of President Johnson’s War on Poverty … became known,” Evans and Novak wrote, “blood vessels began popping in official Washington.” As Evans and Novak subsequently reported,
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (a rival of Shriver’s for the vice presidency) protested personally to the president. Johnson heard more of the same the next day at one of the liveliest cabinet meetings since the New Deal. The military camp plan was attacked in quick order by Willard Wirtz, secretary of labor; Anthony Celebrezze, secretary of health, education, and welfare; and Orville Freeman, secretary of agriculture. All charged Shriver with adding too many military trappings to the war against poverty. According to one official present, LBJ, playing peacemaker, then told Shriver, “Sarge, we shouldn’t give this thing too much of a military flavor.
Shriver was forced to agree to scale back the military’s role significantly.
Liberals also objected to the role Shriver proposed for private corporations in administering the Job Corps camps. But here Shriver prevailed. He instructed Alden to reach out to the business community to recruit a business advisory board and to find companies that would be interested in running the camps as modest, for-profit enterprises. Shriver was himself a liberal on many issues (it was not for nothing the Kennedys called him their “house Communist”) but because of his own background at the Merchandise Mart he was always much more willing than many liberals to recognize that businessmen offered strengths that academics and government workers lacked.
To help make corporations an integral part of the Job Corps, Shriver hired John Rubel, who had previously served as assistant secretary of defense and was now a vice president at Litton Industries, one of the first large business conglomerates. Rubel’s task force colleagues didn’t quite know what to make of him. His conversations “often left others either bedazzled with the breadth of his knowledge, or uncertain as to what on earth he was trying to say.”
Rubel pointed out that the position of the poverty program in 1964 was analogous to that of the US space program in 1969, when Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon. Manned space flight was an enormously complex undertaking, so the Defense Department and NASA had turned for help to private companies that not only had more “systems capability” than government bureaucracies but also had a broader range of knowledge and technical skill.
The Job Corps, Rubel observed, was in its way as complex as space flight. No one person knew the best way to recruit unemployed dropouts and mold them into productive, employed taxpayers. Private companies would surely have more “systems design and management capability” than the federal government did. Why not ask corporations to bid to run Job Corps centers?
Shriver was enthusiastic; this was “exactly the kind of innovation that appealed to him.” For one thing, bidding out contracts to private companies would allow him to work around the government bureaucracy, avoiding “the stodgy professionalism he abhorred.” Also, involving private corporations directly in the program could help get its graduates jobs: “If industry did the training, industry could hardly refuse to hire the products.”
The reaction to this idea among the business community was favorable. Within the ranks of his own task force, however, it provoked dissension. Offering business the opportunity to make profits from the poor? Appalling, some said. This didn’t deter Shriver, however. He knew a winning idea when he saw one, and three days later he had an extended conversation with Rubel to hammer out the details of how the Job Corps should be structured. In essence, Rubel and Shriver decided that they would experiment with different ways to run centers. Federal employees would run some; universities would run some; and private companies would run some—and over time, the most effective way of running Job Corps centers would become apparent.
“YOU’RE JUST ASKING FOR IT, SARGE”
Just a few days before he was to submit the Economic Opportunity Act to the president for his approval, Shriver visited the Oval Office to brief Johnson on what he could expect. He began by describing the legislation point by point, beginning with Title I. As Shriver outlined the Job Corps and the Neighborhood Youth Corps, it seemed to him that the president’s thoughts were “focused inward.” Shriver imagined Johnson was thinking about the poverty-stricken children he had taught in Cotulla, or about the National Youth Administration programs he’d headed in the 1930s.
But when Shriver began describing Community Action, with its emphasis on “maximum feasible participation.” the president seemed to snap to attention. “He swiveled in his chair, his face darkened, and slapped his hand on the desk,” Shriver recalled. “It was like a storm sweeping across a Texas prairie.”
“No,” Shriver remembered Johnson saying. “You can’t do it! You can’t give federal dollars to private agencies. It won’t work.” The president’s sensitive political radar sensed danger. Let private citizens administer taxpayer money? Unthinkable. “You’re going to be in terrible trouble,” he continued. “You’ll have a helluva thing on your hands. And so will I. It’s going to be just awful. The people will steal the money. The governors and mayors will hate it. You’re just asking for it, Sarge.”
Shriver was shaken by this outburst, but he felt the planning for Community Action was too far along to be turned back now. He explained to the president that the War on Poverty needed to have new weapons to rally Americans’ excitement about it. How could poor people be enlisted in the war if they weren’t provided such a weapon?
Johnson remained unconvinced—his political instincts cried out against this. Shriver worried for a moment that Johnson was about to scuttle the whole thing. In the end, t
hough, he didn’t. The president’s heart and conscience—which told him that reducing poverty in America required unusual methods—overrode his political instincts. Just promise me one thing, Johnson reportedly told Shriver. “I just want you to make sure that no crooks, communists, or cocksuckers get into the program.” Community Action stayed. Several days later, on March 16, 1964—less than six weeks since Shriver had convened the first task force meeting—LBJ sent the $962.5 million Economic Opportunity Act to Congress.
Ultimately, Johnson’s political fears about Community Action would prove well founded. But at this moment, Shriver recalled, “All of us who had worked so hard, learned so much so fast, and assembled so many experimental concepts were convinced that the Economic Opportunity Act would work.” It seemed to him—and to others, as well—that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the impulse toward economic justice that had its source in the New Deal of the 1930s had now coalesced into one propitious moment. To some, it seemed that the torch of John F. Kennedy had been passed.
“HALF A KENNEDY”
Bobby Kennedy did not agree. In his view, which was shared by some of his aides and former aides to President Kennedy, only he could pick up the New Frontier torch. Anyone who claimed otherwise was blind to the usurpation Lyndon Johnson was perpetrating. Johnson had taken a Kennedy program and made it into a Johnson program; he was stealing the glory that rightfully belonged to Jack Kennedy. And Shriver, in accepting command of the poverty program, had become an accomplice in that theft.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 48