Shriver still believed Community Action could work—but only if it were given enough time and if it were supplemented by other, more ambitious approaches. At a meeting at the LBJ ranch in mid-summer of 1965, Shriver suggested boosting OEO funding from the proposed $1.75 billion for fiscal year 1966 to $10 billion within several years, with the bulk of that additional money going to fund an income-maintenance program. Shriver was convinced that this plan, in conjunction with an expansion of some other OEO programs, could all but completely eliminate poverty. When LBJ responded that there was no way he could commit that kind of money, Shriver persisted. “If you want to wage war on poverty,” he said, “this is how to do it.” Johnson responded, as Shriver recalled, “Congressional elections are coming up. After that we’ll be out of this Vietnam thing, and I’ll give you the money.”
But more than Vietnam and fiscal caution lay beyond Johnson’s stalling. The president’s paranoia about RFK led him to see Shriver’s grandiose proposal to eliminate poverty as part of a Kennedy plot. When Shriver sent a follow-up memo to Johnson on October 20, outlining a plan “to end poverty in the United States, as we know it today, within a generation,” the president worried that Shriver planned to leak it to the press, to demonstrate that Shriver and the rest of the Kennedy family were willing to commit more resources to fighting poverty than Johnson was. In reality, Shriver had no such intention. The OEO director’s loyalties lay more strongly with the cause of fighting poverty than with either party in the LBJ-RFK feud.
SHRIVER VERSUS THE WHITE HOUSE
By the end of 1965, as an early OEO staff member recalled, every
mayor had a gripe [about Community Action]; congressmen were plagued by visiting delegations from two, three, even four local factions; governors were irritated at mayors; social workers and many other professionals resented intrusions both from the politicians and from the poor; liberals who wanted local programs to shake up the established politicians were upset at the amount of accommodation the OEO required; and established politicians wished they could run their own anti-poverty programs, with their own trusted friends among the poor, rather than negotiating compromises with more vocal and militant local groups and individuals.
In short, by the end of 1965 every conceivable Community Action constituency—including the poor themselves—felt somehow alienated by the program.
The heat on President Johnson to do something about Community Action was rising. But he still held out hope that the War on Poverty could be the signature achievement of his presidency. At a cabinet meeting in July 1965, Johnson is reported to have said to each cabinet head in turn, “You save money on your programs” and then, “You-all give it to him,” pointing to Shriver.
But LBJ’s support for the OEO became increasingly erratic. That fall even as he continued to publicly avow his support for Shriver and for Community Action, Johnson secretly authorized efforts by his White House staff to rein in the OEO. Charlie Schultze, who had replaced Kermit Gordon as White House Budget Bureau director, wrote a memorandum to Johnson lamenting all the strife Community Action was producing among Democratic mayors. “We ought not to be in the business of organizing the poor politically,” Schultze wrote with italicized urgency. If the OEO continued to antagonize local political officials by establishing Community Action agencies that threatened their authority, Schultze warned, the administration may lose the support of local Democratic machines for the midterm elections in 1966. When Johnson read Schultze’s memo, he scrawled a note across the bottom of it: “O.K. I agree. L.”
Schultze took Johnson’s note as authorization for changing the OEO’s policy on Community Action. On November 5, the New York Times reported that, according to a “high government source,” the Bureau of the Budget had instructed the OEO to place less emphasis on policy planning by the poor themselves. The Times’s anonymous source—which turned out to be Schultze—also said that the Budget Bureau had “suggested” that the OEO reduce its direct funding of Community Action projects by $35 million. But when Shriver, visiting CAAs on Indian reservations in Arizona, was asked by a reporter about this shift away from Community Action, he vehemently disagreed, and in a speech that day he emphatically disputed any assertions about a changing conception of the role of the poor in Community Action. “No such change in OEO’s policy has been directed or ordered by anyone in the administration. Our policy is today and will remain exactly what it has been from the very beginning.”
“It is a serious misunderstanding of fact and policy to conclude that there has been or will be a decreased emphasis on maximum feasible participation of the poor,” Shriver continued. “There will be no retreat from our earlier policies and no slackening in our effort to press for vigorous and creative compliance with that requirement.” Shriver was declaring in no uncertain terms that in the battle between elected politicians and local CAAs he stood with the CAAs. As Shriver recalled, “I didn’t bother to clear my statement with anyone. I was simply not going to be kicked around. If the White House had intended to order a retreat, this bugle call to advance would head it off.” The dispute between the OEO director and the budget director ended up being reported on the front page of the New York Times.
Johnson was furious to see this internal squabble end up as front-page news, and he dispatched his domestic policy aide Joseph Califano to tell both Shriver and Schultze to cease and desist. Each, in turn, responded by writing heated memos to the president. In his memo Schultze accused Shriver of trying to gain unfair advantage in an internal policy debate by deliberately leaking stories to the New York Times in order to arouse the ire of the OEO’s liberal supporters and its growing grassroots constituency among the poor. Shriver accused Schultze of leaking stories to undermine the OEO, and he insinuated that the president himself was seeking to undercut him. “It was overwhelmingly clear,” Shriver wrote to the president, “that serious harm would be done to your War against Poverty unless a forceful clarification was issued.” Shriver had made his public statement to the press, he continued, because the original New York Times story had “seriously impinged upon, even threatened, important features of the programs for which I am responsible. [Since] I had had no personal indication of any dissatisfaction from you or anyone else close to you … I can only conclude that a large part of this gossip is malicious and intended to injure your programs. Those programs needed an explicit defense.”
According to Califano, there was solid basis for Shriver’s accusation of Schultze’s leaking—but LBJ himself may have egged Schultze on. Johnson recognized that the OEO’s continued practice of mobilizing the poor against local politicians threatened the president’s support among rank-and-file Democratic officials—and LBJ viewed Democratic victory in the midterm elections of 1966 as essential to further consolidating the liberal consensus that his landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964 had established.
Grafted onto LBJ’s legitimate concerns about the political impact of Community Action was his knowledge that some of Community Action’s most ardent partisans (Dick Boone, Dave Hackett, and Frank Mankiewicz) within the OEO were “Bobby’s people.” Johnson suspected that Shriver planned to turn the OEO into a de facto election apparatus for Robert Kennedy in 1968, an organizational base within the executive branch from which the New York senator could mount a campaign to unseat the president.
On its face, this suspicion was preposterous. Despite the hardships LBJ was imposing on him, Shriver remained loyal to Johnson—in fact, Shriver’s manifest loyalty to the president remained a sore spot with Bobby and his associates. The problem was that as the president’s distrust of RFK metastasized, the premium he placed on loyalty within the executive branch grew. To Johnson, everyone was a potential mole—especially anybody with ties to the Kennedy family. Johnson’s anxiety about Robert Kennedy fed his ambivalence about the OEO.
Although Shriver and Robert Kennedy rarely spoke outside of family gatherings and Senate hearings, they shared a belief in the power of Community Action as a to
ol of public policy and social justice—and in LBJ’s mind this amounted to the two brothers-in-law making common cause against him. In December 1965 Johnson’s fear that the OEO would become a clandestine Kennedy political vehicle in 1968 led him to ask Califano to explore the possibility of disbanding the OEO and distributing its constituent parts among the various cabinet departments. The plan must be drawn up “in strictest confidence” and must require no legislative action, the president explained, in order to avoid a “bloodbath on Capitol Hill.”
Califano sent plans for a proposed reorganization of the OEO to the president on December 18; Califano had consulted with Nicholas Katzenbach (Kennedy’s replacement as attorney general), who concluded that the dissolution of the OEO could be accomplished without legislative action. Califano’s plan called for Shriver to delegate all OEO programs and functions to the cabinet departments. Supervision of the Community Action programs, for instance, could be given to the secretary of the new Department of Housing and Urban Development. As a political face-saving measure for Shriver, Califano proposed that the president name Shriver the founding secretary of HUD. Califano advised Johnson that the “reorganization of the War on Poverty” made “good organizational sense,” but he warned that it could end up being “the most politically explosive act the administration could take.”
Johnson had the Justice Department draw up all the necessary papers for dissolving the OEO—but in the end he declined to take final action to do so. Terminating the OEO might have made some Democratic mayors happy, but it would have led to politically damaging fights within his administration. Johnson felt that to maintain a broad coalition of support for his social programs, he needed to keep the Left under the Great Society’s tent. Moreover, the president did not want to give Kennedy and his liberal allies more grounds than they already possessed for saying that he was sacrificing the needs of the American poor on the altar of the Vietnam War. Oddly, however, given his fears about a Shriver–Bobby Kennedy axis, Johnson’s decision to spare the OEO seems motivated as much by his desire to retain Shriver as a bulwark against RFK as by his appreciation for Shriver’s loyalty. Johnson told Shriver that he was “pretty disgusted at” his cabinet officers for circling like vultures looking for the OEO carrion to prey on. “Sarge,” Johnson said, “you’re the only one that’s not letting me down. The rest of them are just fighting—the party, the programs, the senators and everybody—I’m just glad somebody is looking out for what they believe in.”
Some who worked closely with Shriver at the OEO were struck by the irony of Johnson’s occasional doubts about his loyalty. It was plain to them how actively Shriver tried to maintain his loyalty to the president, and at what cost to his personal standing within the Kennedy family. “Shriver,” one former aide recalled, “was trying to be extremely careful not to be viewed as disloyal or being part of a Kennedy plan.” Although Shriver had started life in the Johnson administration as merely “the token Kennedy member,” he eventually “came to have a genuine commitment [to the Johnson administration], and a personally tortured commitment, because he understood that he was going to be using up all of his personal and political capital.” But Shriver stayed on. For better or for worse he felt duty bound to keep himself lashed to the OEO ship, even if at times it seemed sure to sink. Shriver’s “stubborn idealism,” as the newspaper columnist Charles Bartlett described it, won out over his own self-interest.
When colleagues—watching him get pulled in so many different directions, attacked from without and undermined from within—would ask him why he didn’t simply leave, he would reply that it was out of loyalty to the War on Poverty. “Somebody has got to hang in there,” he would say, “and I can’t figure out anybody who’s got more credibility with Congress and more political capital and who would be willing to go to bat to keep this program alive in Congress, because it’s so controversial.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Head Start
As Shriver tried to navigate the OEO through its turbulent first year of operation, he was helped tremendously by the development of two programs that had not been mentioned in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Neither Head Start nor Legal Services for the Poor was part of the original poverty bill—because they weren’t even conceived until after the OEO was operational—but they were the two most politically successful and enduring programs the War on Poverty produced. Without Head Start, it’s unlikely that the OEO would have survived through 1966.
In the late fall of 1964 the Bureau of the Budget produced some pie charts that Shriver had requested earlier in the year, breaking down all of America’s poor into demographic categories. They showed, for instance, what proportion of the poor lived in rural areas versus urban areas, what proportion of poor families were headed by single mothers, what proportion of the poor were elderly. The idea was that this information would allow the OEO to craft programs for the demographic groups that most needed help.
When he looked at these charts, what struck Shriver was how many of the poor were children. “My God, look at that,” Shriver remembers saying to himself. “Fifty percent of all the poor people are children.” Seventeen percent of the nation’s poor children—about 6 million of them—were under the age of six. That 6 million young children lived in poverty in a prosperous society seemed to Shriver to be an appalling moral failure on the part of the American people and the federal government. He quickly concluded that the OEO needed to be doing more for young children.
But how? In 1964 Shriver had been working closely with Eunice at the Kennedy Foundation for nearly a decade, traveling the country to talk to researchers about the mentally retarded and providing Kennedy Foundation funding to those projects deemed most worthy of pursuit. One of those grants had gone to Susan Gray, a psychologist at the George Peabody Teacher’s College (now part of Vanderbilt University) in Tennessee. In 1962 Gray and her colleagues had used the grant to conduct a study of mentally retarded children living in poor areas around Nashville, to see if intensive intervention at an early age could in any way “cure”—or at least diminish—retardation. To the surprise of many, the Gray study found that changing the social and intellectual environments of retarded children under the age of six could actually raise their IQ scores.
Eunice followed Gray’s research with interest. One day in 1964, as Eunice recalled, while the Shrivers were sitting in their living room at Timberlawn, she described Gray’s work to Sarge. He was intrigued but skeptical, so she proposed that Sarge go to Tennessee to see the results for himself. “So we flew down to Gray’s research institute,” Eunice remembered, “and we visited retarded children at three different sites. Gray and her team had elevated the childrens’ IQ so much that some of them were now able to participate in regular classes at their schools.” As Eunice had predicted, Sarge was impressed; his skepticism dissipated.
“I was dumbfounded,” Sarge recalled. “Like most Americans, I thought that one was born with a certain IQ, as one might be born with black or red hair, and that in fact it was impossible to change the genetic make-up that determined IQ.” But Gray’s study showed convincingly that the IQ scores of even congenitally retarded children were not immutable. Furthermore, Gray showed that it wasn’t just analytical intelligence that could be increased by early intervention; social development could be improved, too.
Eunice now reminded her husband of another Kennedy Foundation–funded study, by Philip Dodge, who was the chair of pediatrics at Washington University Medical School, in St. Louis, which had researched the effects of nutrition on mental development. Dodge and his collaborators found that poor nutrition could in fact lead to lower IQ scores, as well as to arrested social and emotion development.
“On the airplane on the way back to Washington, Sarge turned to me and said, ‘If they can do this for the retarded, then maybe we can do it for other poor kids.’ ” Eunice seized her opportunity, telling him, as she recalls, “Sarge, if you do start an early intervention program for poor kids, make sure
you set aside some of that money for the mentally retarded.” In retrospect, Eunice says, this was only fair. “If it hadn’t been for the mentally retarded, there never would have been a Head Start. The mentally retarded sparked the idea.”
For his part Sarge remembered that he was driving home to Timberlawn one evening, thinking about the Gray and Dodge studies, when everything suddenly clicked into place in his mind: “If we, through the Kennedy Foundation, could effectively change the IQ of retarded children by early-childhood intervention, could early intervention have a beneficial effect on the children of poor people?”
“It was not primarily an IQ idea,” Shriver recalled. “It was an idea of intervening early in their lives to … help them become more capable of going to school, which is normally the first hurdle outside the home a person faces.” Shriver began asking doctors and psychologists whether they thought an early-intervention program for poor children would do any good. Dr. Robert Cooke, the Johns Hopkins physician who had worked extensively with both Sarge and Eunice at the Kennedy Foundation, told Shriver he thought an early-intervention program was a fine idea. So did Dr. Joseph English, the child psychiatrist who was serving as Peace Corps medical director.
After discussing this idea informally with these and other doctors, Shriver came to the conclusion that “a lot of poor kids arrive at the first grade beaten or at least handicapped before they start. To use an analogy from sports, they stand 10, 20, and 30 feet back from the starting line; other people are way ahead of them. They don’t get a fair, equal start with everybody else when they come to school at age six.” Attacking the cycle of poverty before first grade would require overcoming the many handicaps that plagued poor children: poor housing, poor nutrition, poor access to books and other educational materials, not to mention absent or abusive or alcoholic or illiterate parents. So Shriver began to ask: “What can we do to help these youngsters? How can we help them to arrive at the starting line even with other children?”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 53