Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  On Thursday, before the vote could begin, Harold Cooley, a Democratic representative from North Carolina, led the entire delegation from his state up to the podium on the House floor. North Carolina, at this point, had more Democratic votes still uncommitted than any other state. Shriver wondered what Cooley would say. Which way would North Carolina go? Cooley began a lengthy harangue against, of all people, Adam Yarmolinsky. If that “dangerous radical” has any role in the new agency, Cooley declared, then the North Carolina delegation would vote against the bill. Shriver was horrified. If North Carolina’s support was lost, then the votes he had spent so much time assembling from the rest of the Democratic South might begin to evaporate. The entire Southern bloc might disappear. The vote would be lost.

  How had this happened?

  Several days earlier, on Monday, Shriver had found himself in the House office of Porter Hardy, a conservative Republican from Virginia, who was a strong critic of the Johnson administration. He and Shriver agreed on very little politically, but they enjoyed each other’s company. “Sarge,” Hardy had said to him, “what’s this about some fellow in your organization with a Russian-sounding name who is some sort of a way-out liberal or socialist?” Shriver replied that he had no idea what Hardy was talking about. “You know,” Hardy persisted, “some wild-eyed radical with a Russian sounding name.”

  “You don’t mean Adam Yarmolinsky, do you?” Shriver said.

  “That’s the guy,” Hardy said.

  “Porter,” Shriver said. “Let’s get this straightened out right now. Adam is operating as deputy director of this task force. He’s been McNamara’s top assistant at the Pentagon. I myself brought him into the Kennedy administration and I have the highest personal and professional regard for him.”

  Shriver had gotten to know Yarmolinsky during the Kennedy campaign and Talent Hunt and had found him to be not only brilliant but also a highly effective administrator. Shriver and Yarmolinsky were an unlikely pair: the Catholic, patrician, New Frontiersman and the Jewish, intense, cerebral policy wonk. Yet Shriver thought as highly of Yarmolinsky as he did of anyone he had ever worked with. Thus when Robert McNamara had been looking for people of high caliber to help him at the Pentagon, Shriver had recommended Yarmolinsky, and McNamara had hired him as a special assistant.

  In origin and appearance, McNamara and Yarmolinsky were about as far apart as could be. McNamara looked the part of the cold, calculating CEO, his slicked-back hair parted at the center. Yarmolinsky was short, even runty, with fierce eyes, his hair arrayed in uncoiffed spikes around his head. If Robert McNamara was a Soviet cartoonist’s stereotype of the American corporation man, Yarmolinsky was a reactionary’s caricature of a wild-eyed Bolshevik. A friend of his in Congress observed that “Adam looks like he’s got a bomb in his back pocket, ready to throw.”

  Back in 1961, when McNamara told Shriver he wanted to hire Adam, Shriver told him to check his file first; there were some things about Yarmolinsky’s family background that the defense secretary would want to know before some Republican congressman confronted him with them. McNamara called FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to send the file over. When it arrived, McNamara was alarmed to see that it was “as thick as a Manhattan phonebook.” But when he read through it, he saw nothing that suggested Yarmolinsky was unfit, disloyal, or anything other than a man of great sympathy and conscience. He did see, however, that his new assistant’s background could invite criticism from political opponents. So he had Roswell Gilpatric, his deputy defense secretary, read the file to make sure he concurred that there was no cause for alarm (Gilpatric agreed there wasn’t) and then warned Gilpatric that he would have to be prepared to serve as de facto Pentagon defense counsel when questions about Yarmolinsky’s background arose.

  In truth, there was nothing sinister in that background. Yarmolinsky’s father, Avram, had for decades been in charge of the Russian collection at the New York Public Library, and he had translated all the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for the Modern Library series. His mother was a poet of minor repute and an espouser of liberal causes. In short, they were typical liberal, Russian-Jewish New York intellectuals. Adam himself, while a Harvard undergraduate, had been an early supporter of American intervention in World War II, and he had been a leader in the fight to wrest the Harvard student government from the control of doctrinaire Soviet sympathizers. After the war, he had graduated from Yale Law School, clerked for Stanley Reed on the Supreme Court, worked in the law firm of George Ball (now Johnson’s under secretary of state), and served as a consultant to major New York publishing houses and foundations.

  But Yarmolinsky did rub many people the wrong way. He could behave with a peremptory nastiness toward those he considered stupid; he became known at the Pentagon for his brazen interruptions of presentations by top military brass. “Stop rambling and get to the point,” he would demand. This made some people, even colleagues and political allies, dislike him intensely. But even those who disliked his style admired his intellect and competence.

  Once installed at the Defense Department, where he received a full security clearance, Yarmolinsky was indispensable in helping McNamara achieve firm civilian control over the military. He also was instrumental in forcing several military bases—in North Carolina, as it happened—to become racially integrated. Naturally, this did not endear him to certain individuals in the military. Soon, rumors began percolating in the Senate Armed Services Committee about the background of the man who had put them under a civilian yoke and who had accelerated the integration of the armed services. In 1962, during hearings of an armed services subcommittee, Gen. Edwin Walker testified that “Communists had bored into the heart of our defense establishment.” Without saying directly that Yarmolinsky was himself a Communist, General Walker implied that he had Communist connections. This was preposterous. Just a few years earlier, Communist publications had been attacking Yarmolinsky as a “Red-baiter” for trying to purge the American Veterans Committee of Soviet sympathizers.

  Sensible people dismissed Walker’s charges as the ravings of a paranoid military officer who felt his prerogatives had been threatened by civilian authority. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, a legacy of the McCarthy era, researched Yarmolinsky’s background and found nothing to suggest he was anything other than a loyal American. But among right-wing circles the rumors lingered. The Un-American Activities Committee received so many requests for information on Yarmolinsky from conservative members of Congress that the committee’s staff director eventually printed up a form letter, which he sent out in response to all requests. “A search of our files has disclosed no information showing Adam Yarmolinsky to have been a member or sponsor of any organization or entity which has been cited as subversive by this committee or any other Federal authority. Moreover, there is no reference to his name in any of the public hearings and reports of this committee.” Yet fringe conservatives clung obsessively to the idea of him as a subversive. “Since the New Frontier did not produce a legitimate Alger Hiss or even a facsimile,” the political columnists Evans and Novak wrote, “the Far Right designated Yarmolinsky as a substitute.”

  Shriver’s conversation with Representative Hardy on Monday had alarmed him, but only mildly. After all, the rumors about Yarmolinsky were old—and thoroughly discredited—and Hardy himself, as a Republican, would not have been expected to vote for the poverty bill anyway. But at breakfast on Wednesday with Democratic members of the North Carolina delegation, Shriver’s alarm grew when they demanded that Yarmolinsky be excluded from the OEO. Shriver tactfully offered what seemed to be a compromise: He promised that Yarmolinsky would not be head of the Job Corps, a position that would have put him directly in charge of thousands of unemployed youths—ripe fodder for anyone wanting to agitate subversive activity. The congressmen asked if Yarmolinsky might end up with a position higher than Job Corps director. Shriver tried to leave that ambiguous, explaining that he did not have the authority to make hiring decisions
for the OEO itself.

  Shriver had thought the matter settled. Yet on Thursday the North Carolina delegation was declaring it would vote against the bill if Yarmolinsky was associated with it.

  Sensing a crisis, Speaker of the House John W. McCormack called for a meeting in his office, just off the House floor. As debate over the bill continued on the floor, Shriver, Cooley, and Mendel Rivers, a South Carolina congressman, joined McCormack, who took up his customary position in a high-backed leather rocking chair behind his desk. Twenty Democratic deputy whips, the regional vote counters, looked on. Please be reasonable, McCormack implored the Carolinians in his rich, South Boston brogue.

  Cooley said the matter was simple: If Yarmolinsky were to be associated with the program, the North Carolina delegation would oppose the bill. Rivers concurred; the South Carolinians would also vote against it unless Yarmolinsky were jettisoned.

  “Now, Mr. Chairman,” Shriver said calmly, addressing Cooley, who was the chair of the House Agriculture Committee. “I can’t say who the president will appoint [as deputy director]. I can’t even say whether he will appoint me [as director].”

  “That’s not what you told three of my colleagues at breakfast yesterday,” Cooley shouted. “You told them Yarmolinsky is going to be one of the presidential appointees. That’s what you told them.”

  “Oh, no,” Shriver objected. “I can’t speak for the president.”

  McCormack spoke up. “Well, now, Harold,” he said. “Doesn’t that satisfy you?”

  “No,” Cooley yelled. “That’s not what he told my colleagues at breakfast yesterday. Whom do you believe? Your colleagues in Congress or Shriver?”

  The argument continued in this vein, steadily escalating. Cooley kept trying to get Shriver to commit to axing Yarmolinsky; Shriver kept refusing.

  The Democratic whips looked on in astonishment. At one point, Massachusetts congressman Torby Macdonald turned to a colleague and said, “It looks like a kangaroo court.” Hale Boggs, the House majority whip, who as a Louisiana congressman was himself a Southern Democrat, tried to explain that repeated checks of background files had never uncovered anything improper about Yarmolinsky. Cooley erupted in rage.

  There was silence for a moment; there seemed no way around the impasse. Finally, McCormack said, “Harold, would you be satisfied if Sarge gave assurances that he would not recommend Yarmolinsky for a high post in the program?” Before Cooley could answer, Shriver interjected again that the recommendation was not his to make—the president had not vested him with the authority to staff the program. Well then, Cooley suggested, why don’t we get the president on the telephone?

  Shriver and McCormack retired to a small anteroom off McCormack’s office. The Speaker placed the call and explained the situation to President Johnson: The entire North Carolina delegation wanted a guarantee that Adam Yarmolinsky would not have a job with the OEO; without that guarantee, both Carolina delegations would bolt, take many wavering Southerners with them, and imperil passage of the poverty bill.

  “Who the hell is Adam Yarmolinsky?” Johnson thundered. He asked McCormack to put Shriver on the line. Whose decision is it whether Yarmolinsky is made deputy director? the president asked. “That’s your responsibility, Mr. President,” Shriver said. “I think Adam Yarmolinsky is eminently qualified to be deputy director of the program. But I’m not proposing people for jobs.”

  “What’s the situation over there?” the president asked.

  Shriver explained that the debate—both in the Speaker’s office and on the House floor—was becoming acrimonious. The vote count was desperately close. In Shriver’s estimation, which was corroborated by the Democratic vote counters, if the Carolina delegations defected, the bill would not pass. It seemed to come down to this: Sacrifice Yarmolinsky in order to pass the Economic Opportunity Act and follow through on LBJ’s national commitment to eliminating poverty. Or stand on principle—and refuse to submit to extortion—and risk seeing the War on Poverty go up in smoke.

  In later years, Shriver thought about what he could have said to the president but did not: “Mr. President, this is a moral issue. If you back down on Yarmolinsky I will quit right now and go home.” “I would have been morally justified in saying that,” Shriver reflected in the 1990s. “But I didn’t feel I had the right to. At that moment, my belief was that the bill would never pass unless the president settled the issue right then and there, while the North Carolina delegation stood in the Speaker’s office. I believe the president felt the same way.” Not standing up for Yarmolinsky at the moment was, Shriver says, “the hardest decision I ever made in my life,” but it is one he would have repeated if put in the same situation again.

  The president authorized Shriver to tell the North Carolinians that he would not appoint anyone to the poverty program that Congress did not think was qualified. Shriver went back into the Speaker’s office, where he delivered the news to Cooley. The sacrifice of Adam Yarmolinsky had been consummated. Shriver felt, he recalled, “like an executioner,” or “like a general who, in order to win a battle, must sacrifice a division under the command of his best friend.”

  The next day, Friday, August 7, Ohio Republican William Ayres, an opponent of the poverty program, read aloud on the House floor a memo Yarmolinsky had written. Ayres implied that Defense Department funds were already being used to build Job Corps centers, before the bill had been passed. Phil Landrum stood up and said, “First … so far as I am concerned, this gentleman, Mr. Yarmolinsky, will have absolutely nothing to do with the program. And second, I wish to state that I have been told on the highest authority that not only will he not be appointed, but that he will not be considered if he is recommended for a place in this agency.”

  Another Democratic congressman asked, “What is the ‘highest authority’?”

  “The president,” Landrum said.

  As Job Corps deputy director Christopher Weeks would later write, “the Southern Democrats had asked for and gotten their pound of flesh—assurance that the abrasive, intellectual Jew of Russian extraction who had roughed up the military rank and file in the Defense Department … would be barred from any job in Johnson’s poverty agency.”

  The next afternoon, the House voted on the Economic Opportunity Act. Most of the North Carolina delegation voted in favor. The bill passed, 226–184, a larger margin than expected. That evening, more than a hundred members of the poverty task force celebrated late into the night at a victory party in Georgetown.

  On August 20, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the act, and the War on Poverty became law. “Today is the first time in all the history of the human race a great nation is able to make and is willing to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people,” Johnson said.

  This was a political triumph for the president and a great accomplishment for Shriver. For the second time in three years, he had created a large new federal agency from scratch and changed Americans’ attitudes about a social issue. The War on Poverty was, as Jim Sundquist has observed, “the boldest national objective ever declared by Congress—to do what no people had ever done, what the Bible says cannot be done—to eliminate poverty from the land.”

  Yet sacrificing Yarmolinsky had wounded Shriver deeply. It was, he said, “the most unpleasant experience I ever had in the government of the United States.” He felt “as if I ought to just go out and vomit, it was such a despicable proceeding.”

  On Thursday evening, after the colloquy in the Speaker’s office, Shriver had immediately sought out his deputy. As Yarmolinsky recalled it, Shriver came into his office and said, “Well, we’ve just thrown you to the wolves. This is the worst day of my life.” Shriver could see that Yarmolinsky was badly hurt by the news. Not only was he being publicly slandered but the project to which he had dedicated body and soul for the last eight months was being yanked away from him. But Yarmolinsky kept his composure and said, as Shriver recalled it. “Under the circumstances, Sarge, you did what you had to in order to save the p
rogram.” Shriver hoped Yarmolinsky believed his own words.

  Shriver went back to his own office and put his head down on his desk and wept. According to several close colleagues, it was the only time anyone has ever seen him cry.

  Was the sacrifice of Yarmolinsky necessary? It’s impossible to say. The margin of victory in the House was bigger than expected—big enough that the bill would have passed even without any of the Carolina votes in its favor. In the eyes of many liberals, Shriver had sold out. Even some of his colleagues were surprised and disappointed. Although it was President Johnson who had wielded the axe, people tended to blame Shriver for the execution. “There was a lot of feeling on many people’s part that Shriver stood for certain ideals, and political execution was something that Shriver would not tolerate,” Christopher Weeks said. “Yet I think it was pretty clear that in this case Shriver certainly didn’t come out with any laurels on his head.”

  Still, the Democratic vote counters had told Shriver that if he lost the North Carolina delegation, he might lose the entire Southern bloc. In this case, the final margin of victory does not accurately reflect what would have happened if Yarmolinsky’s role had been preserved. Don Baker, who was working as a Senate staffer on poverty when the vote took place and later became OEO general counsel, says that any criticism of Shriver in this regard was unfair. Shriver, he says, was just doing his duty by the president. “I came as close to Sarge as anybody on the real tough issues. And one of the things that was always remarkable to me is that in this sort of thing in which the White House was involved, he never complained. Whatever the press was saying, he never said, ‘The White House told me to do this,’ or ‘Somebody told me to do that.’ He always took the responsibility … like a good loyal soldier.”