When the congressional hearings on the OEO’s reauthorization began in the spring of 1966, the Job Corps was still on politically shaky ground—and hardly the gold mine of political capital Shriver had hoped it would be. But for the moment, it had survived.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Political Pornography”
The problems of the Job Corps were small compared with those that confronted Community Action. The important idea behind the Community Action concept, repeated endlessly in the OEO literature, was that the community, rather than the state or federal government, was supposed to determine the best use for antipoverty funds. The federal government, through the OEO, would provide 90 percent of the funding and impose some guidelines. But local groups—existing organizations like YMCAs, educational institutions, or nonprofit agencies formed expressly for the purpose—would choose how to spend the money, and they would be charged with administering the program. Funds could be spent on education, housing, health care, job training, delinquency programs, child care—anything the designated Community Action agency (CAA) deemed appropriate in fighting poverty.
The problem was, as soon as new federal funds were offered up for grabs, Community Action inevitably became inextricably bound up with local politics. The OEO founders were surprised by the intensity of the political squabbling Community Action produced. As Shriver recalled,
We weren’t quite prepared for the bitterness and the antagonism and the violence that accompanied an effort to alleviate poverty. There were an awful lot of people, both white and black, who had generations of pent-up feelings. I believe that when you take the cork out of a bottle like that, it’s likely to burst forth because of a long period of compression. As result, when we went into communities or when we took youngsters out of communities, like for the Job Corps, there was a lot of acrimony and wild activity, such that the placid life of most middle-class Americans was stunned, shocked, by all this social explosion. There was a lot of animosity revealed in the explosion, and then a lot of fear came into the hearts and minds of a lot of middle-class people—not only fear, but then real hostility.
Applications for CAAs had begun arriving at OEO headquarters in the fall of 1964, usually from groups of local civic leaders led by a mayor. Community Action director Jack Conway, Shriver, and the small Community Action staff would invite these groups to Washington and interrogate them about how involved the poor had been in putting together the grant proposal. Usually the answer was, “Well, not very much but about as much as was feasible.” Eager to get CAAs into existence fast, the OEO would generally approve these applications but with the condition that these “mayor’s committees” expand the involvement of the poor as they moved ahead to set up the agencies. “It was a wild sort of operation in those early days, making the first grants,” Don Baker recalled. “We didn’t have any guidelines and didn’t have the time really to draft them to start out.” The program applications would be taken “en masse to Sarge, who sat around with the program people, and he explored and tested the decisions that were made.”
As early as November 1964, “an avalanche of telegrams of protest” from local chapters of civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League began to arrive on Shriver’s desk, arguing that the residents of the area had not been consulted by the mayors, as Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act required. Protests from these moderate civil rights organizations were often soon followed by more strident objections from radicals and militants in the community, often associated with black churches, accusing the mayor’s committees of being too “establishment oriented.” Sometimes the militants would organize themselves into a group that would submit its own CAA application to compete with the mayor’s.
Hoping to avoid divisive public debate, the OEO would invite all the local factions (the mayor’s committee, the moderate civil rights groups, and the anti-establishment radicals) to the negotiating table in Washington, in an effort to bring them to some kind of consensus. This was usually a mixed success. The mayor would invite the leading protestors to join his committee, and a new application reflecting a broader base of community support would be submitted to the OEO—but elements further out on the anti-establishment fringe would form a new protesting committee that would accuse the protestors that had joined the mayor’s group of having “sold out.” In most cases, a CAA grant would eventually be made, but the process of achieving consensus would take months. During this time, the local newspapers would be filled with headlines about “delays” at OEO headquarters and about the political “mess” in the community. And any group that felt it had been left out of the process would go to the press and to local members of Congress to complain, creating more flak both for the OEO and for local politicians.
The mayors began to fight back. On January 20, 1965, President Johnson received a confidential letter from the mayor of Baltimore, Theodore McKeldin, complaining that “your plans are being hindered at the federal level by individuals who insist on unrealistic requirements”—the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor—“and who do not understand the problems and requirements of local government.” McKeldin said the mayors of St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia shared his complaints.
Richard Daley of Chicago was by far the most powerful Democratic mayor in the country. He considered himself, with some justification, personally responsible for having made possible the New Frontier and the Great Society. As Johnson’s aide Joseph Califano recalled, “Daley was critical to the success of the Great Society. A call to Daley was all that was necessary to deliver the fourteen voters of the Illinois congressional delegation. Johnson and others of us had made many calls to the mayor and Daley had always come through.” Thus Daley was not someone President Johnson was keen to anger. But when Daley submitted a grant proposal for a comprehensive CAA in 1965, it lacked any involvement of local residents or the poor; in effect, it was a grant request for the Daley machine operation. The Budget Bureau’s Bill Cannon was dispatched to Chicago to explain to the mayor the “maximum feasible participation” provision. The meeting was a disaster. “It was clear that there would be no poverty program [in Chicago] without Daley running it,” Cannon recalled.
When the OEO continued pressuring Daley to open up the program beyond his patronage machine, Daley went directly to the president to complain. Bill Moyers remembered a call he got from Daley. “What in the hell are you people doing?” Daley demanded. “Does the president know he’s putting M-O-N-E-Y in the hands of subversives?” According to Moyers, the president’s conversations with Daley soured him on Community Action. “The clearest picture Johnson got of the bad image of OEO was from Daley,” Moyers recalled. Daley “really began to rage at Johnson. That began to form a dark cloud in Johnson’s mind.”
By the late spring of 1965, more and more mayors were adding their complaints to the chorus of those already coming from Chicago and Baltimore. Governors, senators, and members of Congress from both parties were beginning to write angry letters to the president. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, dispatched by Johnson to serve as intermediary between Shriver and the mayors, warned the president in March that “there are numerous problems … developing.”
In May 1965, at the annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, Los Angeles mayor Samuel Yorty and San Francisco mayor John Shelley—both Democrats—drafted a resolution attacking the OEO. The OEO, and the “maximum feasible participation” provision of Community Action in particular, created needless “tensions” at the local level. “Maximum feasible participation,” Yorty and Shelley argued, failed “to recognize the legal and moral responsibilities of local officials who are accountable to the taxpayer for expenditures of local funds.” “Mayors all over the United States,” Yorty said, “are being harassed by agitation promoted by Sargent Shriver’s speeches urging those he calls ‘poor’ to insist upon control of local poverty programs.”
If the mayors’ draft resolution had been
adopted by the conference, it might have spelled the end of the War on Poverty. Shriver could no longer have denied that there was direct, open conflict between two entities—the OEO and city governments—where at least the appearance of cooperation was essential for success. Recognizing this, President Johnson dispatched Vice President Humphrey to the mayor’s conference to head off disaster. Humphrey persuaded the mayors to shelve the resolution by assuring them that he would represent their point of view to Johnson and Shriver. “I can tell you now that your important role is assured in this program,” Humphrey said. “I’m your built-in Special Agent to make sure that you are represented in this program twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. I’ve been hired for you.”
Shriver dealt with the growing controversy over Community Action grants by demanding that every grant application be subjected to careful internal scrutiny by several OEO departments and that no grant be disbursed until he had personally approved it. Each application that survived a preliminary screening process would be presented at a meeting by an OEO field representative. Then, with Shriver presiding over the often rambunctious proceedings, the OEO’s legal division, its civil rights staff, and its Office of Inspection would take turns criticizing the application, forcing the field representative to make the best possible case for it. If the application was deemed to pass muster by all the various staffs, Shriver would give his approval. One OEO staffer compared the “minute attention” given to each grant to “woodcarving.”
This process was time consuming, but the rigorous cross-examination tended to produce improvements in the CAA programs. As one OEO staffer recalled, “Shriver’s sensitive political antennae—his awareness that at any minute his phone might ring, with some congressman or senator or mayor or county commissioner or civil rights leader complaining about a particular program—corrected many deficiencies that might have been embarrassing later.”
Still, programs that turned into major, near-fatal embarrassments did slip through the filtering process. One of the most damaging Community Action grants went to the Syracuse Community Development Association (SCDA), in Syracuse, New York.
The Syracuse grant revealed Community Action’s built-in conundrum: How far should the federal government go in helping local poor residents fight their own elected officials in city hall? Early in 1965 the OEO had awarded a $315,000 grant to SCDA for the purpose of training community organizers. The idea, as the planners at OEO headquarters imagined it, was to teach the poor how to become engaged in their communities and to help them figure out what civic issues (sanitation, for example, or day care) needed attention and how to get those issues addressed.
It didn’t take long for the political conflicts this invited to emerge. One reason the conflicts emerged so acutely in Syracuse was the presence of the radical political organizer Saul Alinsky, whom SCDA had retained as a consultant. Shriver was friendly with Alinsky from their work together on civil rights in Chicago. More recently, however, Alinsky had taken to issuing rhetorical broadsides at the War on Poverty, accusing it at various times of being underfunded, politically cowardly, and a pork-barrel operation in liege to local political machines.
Under Alinsky’s direction, SCDA employees from Syracuse University were mobilizing the local poor for direct social action: Syracuse residents began demanding improved garbage collection, lower rents, protection from unjustified evictions by landlords, and better recreational facilities for poor kids. These demands did not make the Syracuse municipal government happy; they could only be construed as an implicit criticism of how that government was functioning.
Worse, though, than the implicit criticism was the explicit mobilization of political forces against the local Syracuse government. The SCDA was organizing sit-ins and protest marches against the Syracuse mayor, William Walsh, and had launched an effective voter registration drive. In some sense the SCDA was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: energizing the poor to affect their community and infusing them with a feeling of civic empowerment. But Mayor Walsh, a Republican, watching as the voter registration drive boosted Democratic Party enrollments in poor neighborhoods, saw this as a partisan operation—one funded by the federal government. Walsh complained to reporters that Alinsky’s people “go into a housing project and talk about setting up a ‘democratic’ organization—small ‘d’—but it sounds just the same as Democratic—big ‘D.’ In a close election it could be decisive.”
On April 12 the commissioner of the Syracuse Housing Authority wrote to President Johnson. The OEO’s grant to SCDA, he alleged, was financing “activities which do no good and will ultimately cause serious trouble in our community if allowed to continue.” When the New York Times reported this story, James Rowe, a prominent Washington lawyer and New Deal veteran who was a staunch Johnson ally, wrote to LBJ warning him that it seemed to him that “high minded … innocents” at OEO headquarters were funding political training for militant black radicals. “The political implications of using public funds,” Rowe wrote to Johnson, “to instruct people how to protest are quite obvious.” This clearly worried the president: He forwarded Rowe’s letter to Bill Moyers with a note that said, “Bill—for God’s sake get on top of this and just put a stop to it at once.”
In Syracuse the mayor and several other city officials joined forces with the city’s old-line welfare agencies to form the Syracuse Crusade for Opportunity, which applied for and was granted a Community Action grant through the OEO. The two conceptions of Community Action represented by SCDA and the Crusade for Opportunity were diametrically opposed. Whereas the Crusade envisioned the local government as the mechanism for delivering social justice to the poor, the SCDA sought to fight against the local government to achieve justice for the poor.
On November 30, 1965, the OEO announced that all of SCDA’s future funding requests would have to be made through the Syracuse Crusade for Opportunity, which the OEO was now designating the “umbrella” CAA for Syracuse. The leaders of SCDA erupted in anger and forced a meeting with Shriver on December 8. They accused him of allowing the local government machine to co-opt the local War on Poverty—the very thing that Community Action was supposed to guard against. Alinsky called the War on Poverty “the greatest boondoggle and feeding trough that’s come along for the welfare industry for years.”
In the battle between city government and community activists, the city government had won. This was a victory for Lyndon Johnson—it helped temporarily to get the mayors off his back—and it enhanced the OEO’s political viability. But it was a blow to some of the harder-core advocates of Community Action on the OEO staff, and it contributed to the defection later in the year of Dick Boone, Jack Conway, and others from the War on Poverty.
ROBERT KENNEDY AND THE FORCES OF HISTORY
Although part of the problem with Community Action lay in its ill-defined nature, and in grants that should never have been awarded, the bigger problem may have been timing. The summer of 1965 was when history turned on a dime; no one knew it then, but July saw the cresting of the Great Society. At the time, President Johnson called the last week of that month “the most productive and historic legislative week during this century.” The Voting Rights Act was in conference between the House and Senate, on its way to passage; Medicare and Medicaid had been passed into law; Social Security benefits had just been increased by 7 percent; and the Housing and Urban Development Act, which would create a new cabinet department, was on its way to becoming law. Tom Wicker wrote in his New York Times column that “the list of [LBJ’s] achievements is so long that it reads better than the legislative accomplishments of most two-term presidents.” Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield even went so far as to tell the presidential historian William Leuchtenberg that “Johnson has outstripped Roosevelt, no doubt about that. He has done more than FDR ever did or thought of doing.”
Yet in this same week Johnson was planting the seeds of his own undoing by committing 100,000 more American troops to Vietnam. (He had committed the first
ground troops there in April.) In August a police incident in the Watts section of Los Angeles ignited five days of rioting that killed thirty-four people and injured thousands. The net effect, ultimately, was to destroy “the mood of triumphant liberal comity” on which the Great Society had been built. “At a stroke,” the historian Gareth Davies has written, “the fragility of President Johnson’s cherished consensus became apparent,” as its ideals were attacked from both left and right. Conservatives now argued that the Watts riots demonstrated that the poor “did not deserve the War on Poverty’s largesse”; liberals argued that the riots demonstrated that the poor needed far more. This left the OEO, as one poverty planner recalled, “attempting to reach community consensus at a time when race, politics, and poverty were pulling the community and the nation apart.”
Complicating matters still further for the poverty program, Shriver found himself directly caught up in the Shakespearean conflict between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. As the tectonic plates of history shifted beneath him, LBJ became increasingly obsessed with “the Bobby problem.” He believed that Kennedy—who had won election to the Senate from New York the previous November—was planning to run for president in 1968. For Johnson, the notion that his presidency might turn out to be nothing more than a five-year interregnum between Kennedy administrations became a consuming preoccupation.
In the summer of 1965, Johnson’s hatred of Robert Kennedy was becoming such a major distraction that one of his aides wrote him a memo asking him to stop opposing productive pieces of legislation just because RFK happened to support them. The aide added, too, as tactfully as he could, that the president should not spend so much time worrying about whether various cabinet members were more loyal to him or to RFK. Although Shriver remained unwaveringly loyal to the poverty program, that wasn’t enough for the president. As Joe Califano observed, even as Johnson continued to use Shriver as a Kennedy family hostage, the president “couldn’t look at Shriver without trying to see whether Robert Kennedy was in the shadows behind his brother-in-law.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 52