After getting banned from the poverty program, Yarmolinsky returned to working for McNamara in the Defense Department. Nobody objected, demonstrating beyond a doubt that he had been an ideological target, rather than a real security concern for the Southerners, a fact that some of them acknowledged explicitly later.
Whether sacrificing Yarmolinsky was necessary or not, there is no question that losing him was devastating to the War on Poverty. It was, according to one OEO veteran, “the most unfortunate thing that ever happened to the poverty program.” Yarmolinsky and Shriver had enjoyed an excellent working relationship; they were perfect complements. As Baker observed, “Sarge was the outside and Yarmolinsky was the inside guy. Yarmolinsky ran a very taut ship, and he made most of the inside decisions.… Sarge was free to go ahead and deal with the legislature and the outside groups and whatnot, and Adam did the housekeeping for him.” When Adam left, Norb Schlei recalled, “I felt that the whole operation began slowly to unravel.” According to Schlei, the problem was that “Sarge is not a good methodical administrator. He works in bursts of tremendous creativity and energy, and then he has to regroup and do his thinking and so on. When he had Adam, the whole operation kept right on going, because Adam administered it and made it all happen and went around picking up the pieces.”
Over the next several years, after Shriver formally took charge of the OEO, he would hire numerous top deputies—Jack Conway, Bernard Boutin, Bertrand Harding—but he never again found that single person in whom he could repose his complete trust, no one to whom he would give full operating authority. This was doubly unfortunate. Not only did the OEO lack a top administrator of Yarmolinsky’s talents, but Shriver was now stretched far too thin, trying at the same time to be the program’s outside salesman, its inside administrator, its principal idea man—and to run the Peace Corps. This was far too much, even for someone with his energy. Within a year of beginning operation, the OEO had legions of critics. Shriver had to deal with attacks from Congress, the White House, newspaper columnists—even from within his own agency. All of this “just kept him so busy he couldn’t possibly” attend to all the operational issues he should have been addressing, Don Baker said. “And I really think if Yarmolinsky had been there, it would have been a much better program.”
Soured by the Yarmolinsky episode, Shriver told LBJ he did not want to serve as OEO director. “As soon as the legislation was passed,” Christopher Weeks recalled, Shriver “expected that somebody else would be selected to head the program, and that would be it.” He was “still very much wrapped up in the operation of the Peace Corps. He still loved the Peace Corps.… He really did not see himself as being head of the poverty program and didn’t seek it, and I don’t think he wanted it.”
Shriver provided the president with a list of a half dozen alternative candidates, which Johnson summarily rejected. Ultimately, Shriver agreed to take the position, for several reasons. First, he recognized that continuity would be very important in the opening months of the program—especially now that Yarmolinsky was gone. It would help to maintain the same commander at the top. Second, although he had been drafted into the task force against his will, in the six months he had worked on it he had become emotionally and intellectually committed to the War on Poverty. Most important, though, Shriver recognized that if he turned down the position, it would likely signal the end of his formal service to his country, at least for a while.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Law of the Jungle
As of October 16, 1964, his first official day as director, Shriver shifted his attention from legislation and budget authorization to setting up the OEO’s operations. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he would begin the official workday by chairing an executive meeting in the “crowded and dilapidated room in the even more dilapidated third-class hotel” where the OEO staff was now concentrated. He ran these discussions as he had run similar ones at the Peace Corps. As at the Peace Corps, these gatherings were not for the thin skinned or weak spirited. Christopher Weeks writes, “To the slow-thinking, the inarticulate, the overly visionary, the diehard but impractical idealist or even just the plain average administrator, no mercy was shown.”
Each meeting would begin with operational summaries from various program heads, who would conclude by proposing action plans for moving ahead. Then Shriver would encourage everyone assembled to “attack these plans … add to them, or even completely destroy them” in an effort to subject the plans of his top staff to “the roughest tests of imaginativeness, feasibility, efficiency, practicality, and political salability” that anyone could devise. Shriver calibrated the pitch of these meetings just so: anarchic, sometimes vicious, but usually couched within a prevailing spirit of camaraderie.
After the November election, which Johnson won in a landslide, the OEO began operations quickly. By November 25, after a meeting with the president, Shriver was able to announce that his office had already authorized 119 separate grants for antipoverty projects in thirty-three states. Shriver continued to announce new OEO grants and programs at a rapid clip through all of December. On December 17 President Johnson announced 162 separate new War on Poverty projects, including the first three urban Job Corps centers, worth a total of $82.6 million. On January 18, 1965, Johnson announced the launch of another round of projects, totaling more than $100 million. “In the first 101 days of this unique national war effort,” he said, “we have brought nearly 400 transfusions of new opportunity to disadvantaged Americans in every part of this land.”
But the Office of Economic Opportunity was under assault from the moment it began spending money in November 1964. The main targets of attack were the two cornerstones of the War on Poverty: the Job Corps and Community Action.
On January 15 the first thirty Job Corpsmen arrived with fanfare at Camp Catoctin, a former Civilian Conservation Corps site located not far from Camp David, the presidential retreat that Dwight Eisenhower had established in rural Maryland. Other camps soon followed. The early press attention was positive. For a brief time, the OEO’s “overworked, undermanned” staff in Washington basked in “a kind of euphoria.” This wouldn’t last.
The Job Corps was supposed to be simple: a straightforward, easy-to-understand program that would take poor youths off the streets and prepare them for the workforce. Unlike Community Action, Shriver thought, which would take several years to affect the cycle of poverty, the Job Corps would have an immediate and observable impact on poor communities throughout the country. He hoped that establishing Job Corps centers—where newspaper photographers could capture images of poor youths learning skills, doing conservation work, or sitting in classes—would help buy the time necessary to build political support for Community Action. But for its first year of operation, the Job Corps program generated terrible public relations for Shriver.
During the spring of 1964, Shriver had talked about how the Job Corps, like FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, would have a momentous impact fast; in June 1964, Shriver promised there would be 40,000 Job Corpsmen within a year. But over the course of the year, as administrative logjams accumulated, he had to downsize expectations—first to 30,000, then to 20,000, and ultimately, as the first Job Corps centers finally began to open in the winter of 1965, to 10,000.
For a while it looked as though even that goal was unrealistic. By the end of April, only 2,000 students had enlisted; by the end of May, only 5,000. “Operation 10,000,” as it came to be called, went into high gear. Shriver demanded that the planners do whatever was necessary, working center by center, to attain his declared goal.
“Operation 10,000” worked. During the last few days of June, 4,000 new Job Corpsmen signed up. At ten minutes before midnight on the final day of June, the 10,000th person was registered for the Job Corps. Shriver, who had gone home to bed, was awakened by a telephone call from OEO headquarters: the entire Job Corps Washington staff raucously singing “Happy 10,000 to You!”
But when the first corpsmen arrived at t
heir assigned campsites and urban boarding schools, as Christopher Weeks recalled, “they found a center still half-finished, an overworked and harassed staff, many of whom were just as new to the Job Corps as the recruits.… They also found out—very quickly—that group living with other Job Corpsmen was no tea party; it was a rough, tough society in which raw power tended to set the pecking order despite the presence of resident workers and counselors in the dormitories.” Job Corps staff, who had generally arrived at the site only three or four days before the recruits, “didn’t know what on earth they were supposed to do,” Weeks said. “They didn’t have the books. They didn’t have the materials. They didn’t have the equipment. They didn’t have the beds, the blankets, the sheets, the towels, the washing machines, any of the things that are needed to get things off the ground.”
Reporters pounced. Even before the 10,000th Corpsman had been recruited, Newsweek and the New York Times were reporting that many of the people (nearly 18 percent by Newsweek’s reckoning) who had signed up for the Job Corps as part of the first wave in January were dropping out. This was not the sort of article that would make the Job Corps the popular anchor for the War on Poverty Shriver hoped it would be.
Dramatic problems at some centers generated more bad press. The most severe incident took place at Camp Breckinridge, in Morganfield, Kentucky. The center, run by Southern Illinois University, had administrative and discipline problems from the beginning. Fistfights and hazing incidents were common. Life in the barracks there ran “according to corpsman law—and that was the law of the jungle.” A group of corpsmen formed an extortion racket, terrorizing other enrollees. In early August a brawl broke out in the cafeteria. The arrival of a fire truck, summoned by camp administrators, instigated a riot that badly injured thirteen people. Fully half the camp took part in the rioting; many of the corpsmen who didn’t participate fled the center to hide in nearby towns. It took the arrival not only of state policemen but also of FBI agents and US marshals to finally settle the disturbance.
Local politicians called Shriver, enraged. “I had the telephone switchboard light up continuously, calling on me to ‘get the goddamned Job Corps the hell out of Kentucky!’ ” Shriver recalled. “The governor called me up. ‘This is creating a goddamned mess out here; the kids in that Job Corps are derelict sons of bitches now they’re getting out of the Job Corps precincts and they’re going downtown and fucking women and everything.’ ”
Two months later, the Job Corps again made the front pages when a few dozen corpsmen at the Custer Job Corps center in Battle Creek, Michigan, got into a brawl with local teenagers that required antiriot police to quell. This was particularly embarrassing for the OEO because Shriver himself had spoken at Custer earlier in the day at the ceremony for the center’s official dedication. Additional smaller incidents occurred at Job Corps centers in California, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, and elsewhere.
It soon came to light that some of the troublemaking corpsmen had prison records. This, Shriver would say, was largely the point of the program: to take delinquents from the culture of poverty and transform them into productive citizens.
George Foreman, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, credits the Job Corps with having done just that in his own case: It saved him from a life of drugs and crime. Growing up in abject poverty in Houston, Texas, Foreman recalls, “the streets were my life.” Foreman’s father had left his mother when George was very little. Teachers wrote him—and the whole deprived culture he came from—off.
You’d go into class and there would be some kids you could tell who had both a mom and dad. And the teachers would automatically gravitate toward them and they would learn. And there would be some of us who would come in and you could tell, you know, there wouldn’t be any socks under the shoes or the pants wouldn’t match or you could see they were hand-me-downs and they saw we were treated like that. I would try to trick the teachers and I would be really friendly with those kids who had families and it looked like sometimes the teachers, before they found me out, would try to act like they were interested in me, but not much. So you go through the whole school system like that where a lot of the teachers are looking at you like, What are you doing here? And I had to experience, I think it must have been in sixth grade, [when] the teacher gave us a speech because we were going to the secondary school or called a junior high then. And the teacher looked at some of us who’d been kept back so long and because of our age we were just shipped to another school and she said, You know, some of you are not going to make it, you’ve got to understand that. I don’t know what’s going to become of you. And she looked me right in the eye.
So Foreman, like many others in his predicament, turned to crime.
A friend of ours showed us how to mug people. It was real easy. You’d watch these guys coming out of beer joints at night. You’d wait until you’d see one stagger a little bit and then we’d roll these guys and take their wallets and run. We’d drink cheap wine to get ourselves in the mood. Just around this time dope was coming onto the streets. The Job Corps saved me before I got into that. And I always think that if I had graduated into the deeper robbing and armed robbing, it would eventually have moved to dope and I would have spent the rest of the days in prison.
One day in 1965 Foreman heard a public service radio announcement in which the football star Jim Brown advertised the Job Corps, explaining that it would teach youths a vocation and help them escape the streets. (Shriver had deliberately sought ways to get word about the Job Corps directly to its potential beneficiaries, and to that end he enlisted as many sports stars, radio disk jockeys, and rock stars as he could to promote the program on radio and television shows.) Foreman “signed up instantly” and was assigned to a Job Corps center in Grant’s Pass, Oregon.
Foreman says the Job Corps was a radical, transformative experience for him—beginning from the very moment he began his trip from Texas to Oregon. “I had never been on an airplane. We didn’t know airports existed. The world really changed before my face, as I got on that airplane, with the stewardesses looking after us. When I got to Oregon, they gave us new clothes—some for working, some for exercising, and a blazer and slacks for dressing up. I’d never had that many clothes in my life. But most important to me were the three meals a day. I’d never had that before.”
At the Job Corps center, Foreman and his peers acquired vocational skills and self-respect. They also, Foreman says, developed a civic sense and learned what it was to be an American. “Before I joined the Job Corps, I thought Lyndon Johnson was the president of Texas. That’s how ignorant I was.” Being in the Job Corps “changed my life. It gave me pride, made me proud to be an American. At the Job Corps, it was the first time I thought to myself, ‘Hey, you’re somebody now.’ The Job Corps teachers—even though I didn’t have a father, even though I didn’t have clothes—they embraced me like I was a rich guy. They taught me how to read. They taught me how to build fences. They taught me how to construct a radio. I was so proud of that.”
Years later, after Foreman had become a boxing champion and international celebrity, he and Shriver became close personal friends. Foreman helped on Shriver’s political campaigns and, later, as a spokesman for the Special Olympics; Shriver helped negotiate contracts for some of Foreman’s biggest heavyweight championship fights. But even before he had ever met Shriver personally, Foreman says, the OEO director was a “celestial figure” to members of the Job Corps.
There was something called The Corpsmen’s Call, a weekly newspaper given to all Job Corps members nationwide that would tell about Job Corps graduates and how well they were doing. And every week there was a section, a statement, by Sarge Shriver. This man to us was the most beautiful fellow in the world. You could see there was a glow to him. There was something special about him, his hair tucked to the side of his head real neatly, and dressed very fancy. Every time he visited a Job Corps center it was like a parade. He was like an in-house hero to us. We used him as a threat w
hen our friends were misbehaving: “If you do this, we’ll tell Sarge Shriver.” All the boys felt that way about Sarge Shriver.
Politicians and the press, however, did not feel that way about him. “You’d think that if we took some felons in and could turn them around, we ought to get the Croix de Guerre with five palms, because that not only saves a life but saves society,” Shriver recalled. Instead, the Job Corps was heaped with opprobrium, because the middle-class taxpayers who made up the bulk of the voting public felt the program was using their tax dollars to subsidize the wild behavior of a (predominantly black) class of delinquents.
With numerous incidents—arson, rape, and more brawls—gracing the nation’s newspapers through the summer and fall of 1965, members of Congress began complaining that the OEO seemed to have no control over the Job Corps centers. Even Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, who was ordinarily favorably disposed toward Shriver’s programs, was troubled. “I do not like admonishing the Job Corps,” Mansfield wrote after a Job Corps recruit shot at a policeman at a bar in the senator’s home state of Montana, “but it seems to me that there is something wrong.” By the middle of 1965, the Job Corps’ survival seemed very much in doubt.
Shriver reacted by terminating contracts with the administrative bodies—usually universities—at poorly run centers and replacing them with corporate contractors, who tended to run the camps more efficiently. Although this elicited an angry reaction from liberals, who objected to what they considered “poverty profiteering,” the change was effective: By the following autumn, there were 30,000 Job Corps members, three times as many as the year before, yet through the summer and fall of 1966 there were no riots or other significant incidents at Job Corps centers.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 51