For a program like this to work, Shriver realized, it would have to reach kids before poverty had damaged them significantly; this meant getting them at an early age—before age five, certainly, and if possible at age three or before. The more people he talked to, the more he became convinced that an early-intervention program geared toward preparing poor children for school would be smart policy. Smart policy is not always smart politics—but Shriver suspected that this was an instance where it could be.
He decided to test this hypothesis by bringing it up at noon one December day in the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, where he was having lunch with Eunice and Joseph Alsop, the newspaper correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune. Alsop’s reaction would be a useful gauge of the general political reception, because, Shriver figured, “if anybody would be skeptical and caustic about it, perhaps even cynical, it would be Joe Alsop.” Alsop was, as Shriver put it, “incorrigibly negativist.” “From Joe,” Shriver recalled, “I would find out immediately what kind of negative reaction we could expect if we came out with the idea” as part of the War on Poverty. To Shriver’s surprise, Alsop responded with enthusiasm. “If Joe’s not knocking this idea,” Shriver thought to himself, “it’s not likely to be knocked.”
Alsop’s reaction helped Shriver realize some of the other political advantages of a program aimed specifically at children. Taxpaying voters were naturally reluctant to have their tax money subsidize programs for poor adults. In the South, especially, the idea carried a racial tinge: The white working class didn’t want tax money going to unemployed black people. But there was, Shriver recognized, a natural bias in favor of helping children—and this bias cut across racial lines. Even in regions of the Deep South where Jim Crow had been the strongest and the racial hatred the most bitter, there was among white segregationists a prejudice (albeit patronizing) in favor of little black children. Shriver realized that “it wasn’t until blacks grew up that white people began to feel animosity or show actual violence toward them.” His hope was that building a program for young children into the OEO would help to neutralize some of the race-based antagonism against the agency in the South.
After meeting with Alsop, Shriver hurried back to his office and said to Dick Boone and others, “Look, we’ve got to get a program going, and this is the theory behind it. The theory is that we’ll intervene early; we’ll help IQ problems and the malnutrition problem; we’ll get these kids ready for school.” Shriver knew from his experience on the Board of Education in Chicago that many poor six-year-olds arrived at school utterly unprepared. So, Shriver said, “let’s get these youngsters ahead of time, bring them into school, and ‘culturally’ prepare them for school: for the buildings and teachers, desks, pencils and chalk, discipline, food etc. At the same time, we’ll give them the books ahead of time, show them what they are like, and what you do with books.… We’ll find out if they need shots”—since most poor children had not had their proper vaccinations—“and get their eyes checked.” In short, Shriver said (although the program name had not yet been coined) this will be something to give poor kids a “head start.”
One of the key questions that remained to be resolved was how big the program should be. In December 1964, Shriver discussed the question with Jerome Bruner, a child development expert at Harvard. Bruner was in favor of a program like the one Shriver had in mind, but he thought it would be foolish to attempt anything on other than a very small, experimental scale. Bruner told him that he might be able be find enough qualified teachers to deal with 2,500 students in the first year of the program, but not more than that. Shriver responded that he thought it would be nearly pointless to try to reach only 2,500 kids when there were known to be 6 million under age six in poverty. “We had to devise programs that could have mass application, mass effectiveness,” Shriver said. “I remember being very discouraged after talking to Dr. Bruner.”
He didn’t remain discouraged for long, though, because he had an idea for how to get around the shortage of available teachers. If the program could be put together quickly, in time for summer vacation, then there would be lots of teachers available for the program’s first three months. With schools out of session, there would be empty classrooms and underemployed teachers available for most of June, July, and August. If the program could be launched quickly enough to take advantage of this, Shriver believed that they could enroll up to 25,000 children in the first summer. That was ten times as many as Bruner thought prudent—and one-eighth as many as Shriver would be urging just a few weeks later.
Shriver asked Dick Boone to recruit all the most knowledgeable people on the topic of child poverty, from both inside and outside government, in order to begin putting the program together. One of the first people Boone called was Jules Sugarman, who was head of the Children’s Bureau at HEW. Sugarman became the administrator for this research task force. Shriver then recommended that Boone and Sugarman contact Dr. Cooke. Sugarman and Cooke together took charge of the effort to compose an OEO advisory board on child poverty.
Meeting with Cooke in his Baltimore office, Sugarman and Dr. Edward Davens, deputy director of health for the state of Maryland, came up with a list of experts who might serve on the early childhood education committee, eventually narrowing the list to ten additional names, most of whom were doctors or psychologists, not educators. “We deliberately tried to make it an interdisciplinary effort,” Sugarman recalled, “and I suppose that had a very profound effect on the kind of program Head Start eventually became.”
These thirteen people—in effect, the steering committee for Head Start—met several times a week throughout January and February 1965 in an effort to hammer out a program design that Shriver would find satisfactory. (They were urged on, as one committee member put it, by “the usually helpful pressure of Sargent Shriver.”) On February 19, the committee presented Shriver with what came to be known as the Cooke Report, a seven-page memo outlining all the basic elements of an early-intervention pre-kindergarten program for four- and five-year-olds.
“No sooner had it hit [Shriver’s] desk,” Sugarman recalled, “than we were told, ‘Okay, let’s get it operational.’ ” Shriver said, “I want, by this afternoon, a budget and a program.” A day or two later, Shriver presided over a six-hour brainstorming session to come up with a name for the program. Names like the Kiddy Corps and the Preschool Intervention Program were proposed and rejected. Finally, about two in the morning, Judah Drob, a veteran Labor Department staffer who had been working with the OEO, said, “How about ‘Head Start’?” The enthusiasm was unanimous.
There was still some dispute within the committee about what the initial scale of the program should be, however. Some members were arguing, as Jerome Bruner had, that it was important to try the idea out on a small scale. Shriver responded that there was no time for such caution. As one committee member recalled, Shriver “said he respected us as experts in our fields, but that we were not political realists. If we were to go ahead with the kind of small-scale program we were talking about, it would no doubt be excellent and serve a small number of families very well. But few would know about it, and it could have no lasting effect. ‘We’re going to write Head Start across the face of this nation so that no Congress and no president can ever destroy it,’ he said.”
After “soul-searching” discussions about the risks involved in launching the program on such a grandiose scale, the committee agreed to recommend an eight-week summer program that would serve 100,000 children in 300 communities across the country. Shriver was thrilled. Bruised by the mounting assaults on Community Action and the Job Corps, Shriver was desperate for the OEO to have a political triumph. Head Start seemed to fit the bill. After all, who could be against helping children?
Within a day of receiving the Cooke Report, Shriver presented it to President Johnson. Johnson shared his enthusiasm—and upped the ante. When Shriver described the Head Start concept, explaining that the Cooke committee had recommended limiting the original s
ummer program to 100,000 kids, Johnson replied: “That’s such a magnificent idea. Triple it.” This was music to Shriver’s ears.
Edgar May recalled a meeting held not long after that in the bridal suite of the New Colonial Hotel.
All these child-rearing experts were sitting around. Shriver tilted back in his chair and said, “How many children do you think we can have in Head Start by this summer?” “Well, Mr. Shriver, if everything goes according to plan and our studies are completed and we can put all of this together and there aren’t too many glitches we can probably have 50,000 children in Head Start this summer.” Sarge leaned back and there was a palpably long silence. And then his voice went down about two octaves. You knew there was trouble in River City whenever his voice went down an octave or two. And he said, “Gentlemen, I appreciate everything you’ve done on this project and I would like you to go back and come back here in two weeks and give me a plan for how we’re going to have half a million kids in the program by the summer.”
Now Shriver needed someone to direct the program. In his work for the Kennedy Foundation, Shriver had come across the research of Dr. Julius Richmond, who was chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the State College of New York in Syracuse. Richmond and his colleague Bettye Caldwell had been exploring ways to arrest “developmental decline” in low-income children. They had found that poor children developed normally for the first year of life but after that began declining intellectually relative to other children. By intervening to provide an environment more conducive to learning than these youngsters ordinarily experienced in their impoverished homes, Richmond and Caldwell discovered that they could in fact prevent the usual developmental decline.
Shriver decided he had to have Richmond as his Head Start director. So, as Richmond recalled, “in characteristic fashion, he wanted me to drop everything that day and get down there immediately.” When Shriver laid out the large scope of what he had in mind, Richmond suggested that the program might be better served by someone with more managerial experience. “Well, if I had wanted a bureaucrat, I would have looked for one,” Shriver responded. Within a few days Richmond was installed at OEO headquarters.
Before Richmond could become the founding director of Head Start, the program needed an official launch. Ever attuned to the vicissitudes of public relations, Shriver realized that a program like Head Start, which catered to children, might derive particular political support from women. Thus rather than launch the program in a conventional way, with a presidential announcement, why not announce the program in a more “feminine” way? This might help Head Start get coverage, not only in the political pages of the Washington newspapers and the New York Times, but also in the society pages of newspapers across the country. Shriver proposed this idea to the president, who liked it—and knew that his wife, Lady Bird, would share his enthusiasm. “The Head Start idea has such hope and challenge,” the first lady had written in her diary, after a January meeting with Shriver. “Maybe I could help focus public attention in a favorable way on some aspects of Lyndon’s poverty program. Anyway, Sargent Shriver is a superb salesman.”
So it was that the official announcement of Head Start was made at a White House tea hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. On February 12, 1965, some 400 luminaries, most of them women, stood in the White House East Room to hear Mrs. Johnson lead a discussion of the program. As Shriver had anticipated, the story was covered on society pages and gossip columns in most places. It was a public relations coup. As Jules Sugarman observed, while the Job Corps and Community Action were “being bloodied every day on the front page, Head Start was receiving glowing tributes in the society and community-news pages from local establishment leaders.”
Still, when Richmond began as director of the project in early February 1965, many of his professional contacts were telling him there was no way he could get Head Start running on the proposed scale by summertime. “It’s already too late,” they told him. “You’ll never carry it off.” Even many people within the OEO were skeptical that anything could be done by July. Communities didn’t even know about the program yet—so how could they apply in time for summer? How could all the applications be processed in time? When—and where—would all the teachers be trained?
In early March, Shriver mailed letters to every school superintendent, nearly every community health official, and nearly every welfare director in the country, informing them about Head Start and telling them to send in a response postcard if they were interested in applying for a Head Start center in their community. Soon the OEO headquarters was inundated with response cards, requesting applications.
This flood was a mixed blessing. The OEO staff had only six weeks to process all the applications, disburse the funding, and open the first centers. But whenever Richmond and his deputies wavered in their confidence, Shriver would insist that they simply could not afford to fail.
Head Start applications continued to flow in through May and June. The early popularity of the program surprised everyone. “It was like wildcatting for oil in your own backyard and suddenly hitting a gusher,” Shriver recalled. “Every two or three weeks, it seemed to me, [Richmond and Sugarman would] come to me and say, ‘Look, Sarge, this thing is just exploding and we certainly can’t begin to finance this” with the money initially set aside for it. So he kept increasing its funding from the OEO budget. When money in the Community Action budget began to run short, Shriver moved money from the Job Corps and other programs into Head Start. Julius Richmond recalled that every time he went back to Shriver for more money—to pay for more students, or more teachers—Shriver would say, “Let me talk to the president.” Then a day later he would come back with the money.
When Richmond took charge of Head Start in early February, it had a staff of ten. Within two months, the full-time staff had grown to 400, supplemented by interns and volunteers from other government departments. Once, a courier who appeared at the office to deliver a package was asked if he knew how to type; when he said he did, he was put to work immediately and never delivered the rest of his packages. So relentless was the flow of applications that Sugarman and Richmond resorted to setting up factory-like assembly lines. One observer of this system remarked that he had not seen anything like it since World War II.
In March, while the applications were being processed, Head Start sent out a telegram to hundreds of universities, inviting them to set up training programs—and to the pleasant surprise of the Head Start planners, more than 200 universities agreed to offer six-day training sessions in June, preparing some 44,000 people to work at Head Start centers.
On May 18 LBJ held a press conference with Shriver to announce that at least 2,000 communities would open Head Start programs during the summer. By early July, the OEO had received 3,000 completed applications to serve 560,000 children—nearly half a million more children than the original budget had covered. By the end of the summer of 1965, 580,000 children had spent time in Head Start centers, getting not only preschool instruction but also medical checkups, eye exams, and two nutritious meals a day. The program proved so popular and effective that although it had been conceived as a summer program, it was made into a year-round proposition. One study found that Head Start students saw their IQ scores rise 10 points over the course of the six weeks of the program in the summer of 1965.
Today, Head Start remains the most comprehensive program ever mounted to serve the nation’s economically disadvantaged children and their families. Despite what Head Start advocates say is the chronic underfunding of the program (today it reaches only about 40 percent of the children who are eligible), Head Start has enrolled nearly 20 million children since 1965. Kay Mills, a journalist who has covered social policy for four decades, argues that Head Start—“the major remaining battalion” from the War on Poverty—is “the best investment America has ever made in its youngest citizens.”
But from the time the program was launched, there was debate about whether the measurable gains that Head Start
provided would persist as the children advanced through school. From the beginning, Shriver was very concerned to follow up with Head Start alumni, to measure whether their IQ gains and other intellectual improvements would be sustained several years down the road. Discouragingly, the evidence tended to suggest that these gains eroded over time. This led Shriver to create a supplemental program, called Head Start Follow-Through, whose aim was to provide older poor students with the nurturing intellectual and social environment they had gotten through Head Start.
Although the debates persist today about whether Head Start–induced gains in cognitive development can be sustained as children move through elementary and secondary school, the program retains broad political support, in large part because Shriver and his team always emphasized that the program was about more than just raising IQ. Head Start would prepare poor kids for school, of course, but it also provided their first medical evaluations, eye exams, and in some cases their first nutritious meals. Equally important, it drew the children’s parents into their education and in many cases drew whole families into the larger Community Action network, giving poor people access to a range of health care, job training, and other services never before available to them.
Head Start may be, after the Peace Corps, the most quintessentially Shriverian creation. Partly this was the effect of the culture in which it was hatched. The offices, in the basement of the old Colonial Hotel, were shabby and dilapidated. The pace of work was feverishly intense. The hours were long and draining. Shriver pushed people harder than they had ever been pushed; the seventeen-hour workday was standard throughout the OEO. (Within a year, Julius Richmond would end up in the hospital with tuberculosis, the result of overwork.) The staff was brilliant and opinionated. “OEO has attracted more bright and more individualistically thinking people than almost any federal program that I’ve ever seen,” Jules Sugarman said. “But the result of that was, nobody was willing to accept the authority of anybody else to make a decision. Every issue had to be fought out time and time again.” And, as at the Peace Corps, Shriver’s sense of organization—or lack thereof—drove his employees to fits. “He’s a guy that you admired and couldn’t stand at the same time,” one of his associates said. “Some of his administrative practices made a lot of hair stand on end on a lot of scalps.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 54