It also politicized that generation. “We saw ourselves,” Kantor recalled, “as part of this larger, almost revolutionary movement in America. Real change was happening: the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, dealing with the issues of poverty and deprivation. It was a terrific time, an inspiring time, and Sarge Shriver was the epitome of where America was going.”
Kantor recalls that Donald Rumsfeld, who headed the OEO under Nixon in the early 1970s and would later serve as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, lamented half-jokingly that Legal Services was cultivating the future leaders of the Democratic Party. Rumsfeld was right: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Kantor himself, and other leaders of today’s Democratic Party either worked in or were inspired by the Legal Services program. At one point during the Clinton administration, the secretary of transportation (Federico Pena), the secretary of commerce (Kantor), the governor of Maine, and the governor of South Dakota were all former recipients of the Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship, which was awarded by Legal Services to the most promising young poverty lawyers each year.
With Legal Services, Edgar Cahn recalled, Shriver “bought into a whole mess of trouble. And he stood by it. He was putting his personal capital on the line. And all the credibility he had built up with the Peace Corps and his own reputation from the private sector.” Yet despite all the attacks Legal Services invited—most notably from California governor Ronald Reagan, who wanted to know why the federal government was funding the “left-wing” lawyers who kept suing California’s government agencies—Shriver stuck with it. “He was very clear that this had to be one of the National Emphasis programs, that this had to stand out along with Head Start as one of the major thrusts of the War on Poverty,” Cahn said. “He was a fighter. He never backed away.”
Shriver once reflected that of all the programs he started at the OEO, he was “fondest of Head Start because I was in a sense its father,” but he was “proudest of Legal Services because I recognized that it had the greatest potential for changing the system under which people’s lives were being exploited. I was proud of the young lawyers who turned down fat, corporate practices to work for the poor, and proudest of them when they dared to challenge state and federal procedures and win.”
NEIGHBORHOOD HEALTH SERVICES
A small but important part of the War on Poverty was the Neighborhood Health Services program. By the 1960s, many studies had demonstrated that poverty and illness were mutually reinforcing: Sick people tended to be poor; poor people tended to get sick more often. So in the spring of 1965 Shriver put together a small staff in Community Action’s Office of Program Planning and asked them to explore what kind of health care program the OEO might set up under the research and demonstration component of Community Action. Lisbeth Bamberger, the OEO’s acting chief of health services, who had been active in LBJ’s fight for Medicare legislation, and Sanford Kravitz, who ran the OEO’s Research and Demonstrations Division, recruited doctors, experts, and consultants from elsewhere in the government and across the country. Julius Richmond, because he was already working on health care through the Head Start program, was an integral part of the early planning. So was Dr. Joe English, the medical director of the Peace Corps.
As English recalled it, the OEO’s Neighborhood Health Services program was hatched on Bastille Day, 1965, at a fancy French restaurant called Le Bistro, where Shriver had invited English and Richmond to lunch. “We’ve got to go into health,” Shriver said over a bottle of expensive champagne. “We’re going to go into health in a big way. And I want you guys to do it.” As Shriver recalled, he and English and Richmond “talked about the relationship of health and poverty. The statistics were terrifying—three times more disabling heart disease, twice as much infant mortality, five times more mental illness, retardation, and nervous disorders, four times the chance of dying before age thirty-five.”
Out of that luncheon came the idea of the neighborhood health center: walk-in clinics that, following the model of the neighborhood legal services office, would be located in inner-city neighborhoods, where poor people could have easy access to them. Many poor people had never been to a physician’s office. The Neighborhood Health Center program aimed to change poor people’s attitude toward the medical profession. English recalled, “We wanted to make the centers an entry point into the health care industry—an industry that we knew was going to grow like crazy because it was apparent that President Johnson was going to pass Medicare and Medicaid legislation, providing lots of public money.”
Bringing the burgeoning health care industry into poor regions was a way not only of improving the health of poor citizens but of providing them new employment opportunities. “There was no better way to solve the problem of poverty than to give people jobs,” English said. “So we would take neighborhood people, we would get them a high school equivalency degree, then get them trained as registered nurses, and so within five years we had some of these people scrubbing up to help with open heart surgery. And some went to medical school.”
Shriver and company decided to research two kinds of programs: rural and urban. In June 1965 the OEO issued a health care demonstration grant to fund one of each. The rural demonstration took place in North Bolivar County in Mississippi; the urban one, at the Columbia Point housing project in Boston. Within a few months, it was apparent that both programs were successfully providing medical care to the indigent. By the end of the year, Shriver had authorized seven additional demonstration grants, and by the end of 1966 twenty-five Neighborhood Health Centers were in operation across the country. (Today, there are more than a thousand.) In April 1966 Shriver established the OEO Office for Health Affairs, naming Richmond as its director and English as his deputy.
There was a problem, though. The OEO’s authorizing legislation had provided no explicit funding for community health centers. With the OEO budget being squeezed by the war in Vietnam, and most of its individual components already underfunded, there was nothing left over for this new initiative. So Shriver and English decided to use one of their allies in the Senate: Ted Kennedy. In August 1966 English persuaded Kennedy to tour the demonstration program at Columbia Point in Boston. The senator spent three hours at the facility, talking to the doctors and OEO staffers who ran it. “What impressed him most,” according to his biographer Adam Clymer, “was seeing women in the waiting room in rocking chairs, where they could look after their children or nurse their babies. He thought that recognized the patients’ dignity.”
“What happened after Kennedy’s visit could not happen today,” Clymer writes. “It probably could not have happened in any year after 1966. But Democrats still had overwhelming control of both houses of Congress. The budget deficit was … not a big worry. Most of all, the New Deal idea that government could solve problems had been revived. So within a couple of months, Kennedy got money for a program of community health centers through Congress.” According to Clymer, Kennedy’s visit to the Columbia Point facility was also the experience that pointed him to the cause—health care—that would ultimately distinguish him in the Senate.
Kennedy’s amendment to the 1966 OEO bill authorized an additional $100 million in the poverty program budget to create fifty more centers across the country. The amendment was enthusiastically adopted by the rest of the Senate and then accepted (although reduced to $50 million) by the House-Senate conference. By June 1967, the OEO had established forty-one Comprehensive Health Services Programs—or Neighborhood Health Centers, as they became colloquially known—across the country.
As with the Legal Services program, there was some wrangling with the national professional association—the American Medical Association (AMA)—which worried about maintaining health standards and about threats to its doctors’ fees. In fact, the AMA had on principle opposed every federal health initiative before 1965. So Sarge, with the help of Eunice, Joe English, and Ted Kennedy, set out to bring that organization around. At one point, Sarge invited Dr. Charles Hudson, the presi
dent of the AMA, out to Timberlawn for breakfast. When Hudson arrived, he discovered that Ted Kennedy and some of his staff were also present. Partway through breakfast, Eunice made a choreographed entrance. “Dr. Hudson,” she said. “Very nice to see you. And I am so delighted that you are here, because I think the American Medical Association ought to be helping on developing good health care for the poor. And I have to warn you that if you don’t, my brothers will, and they don’t know anything about it.” Evidently, the ploy worked. Hudson came out in support of the program, and, in general, doctors proved more immediately amenable to the OEO’s plans than the lawyers in the ABA had initially been.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Double Commander-in-Chief”
From February 1964 until March 1, 1966, the fifth anniversary of his official first day at the Peace Corps, Shriver served as director of both the Peace Corps and the OEO. Through these two years Shriver endured a grueling schedule. By all accounts, he averaged an eighteen- to twenty-hour workday between 1964 and 1968, when he stepped down as the OEO director. His family rarely saw him. “When I look back now,” says Sarge’s eldest son, Bobby, “I think to myself, ‘Wow, I never saw my father for the whole 1960s.’ ”
During the week, Shriver carried five briefcases (two for the OEO, two for the Peace Corps, and one for the Kennedy Foundation and other matters) everywhere he went, and whenever Richard Ragsdale, the Shriver family driver and jack-of-all-trades, would drive him from Timberlawn to the Peace Corps, or from the Peace Corps to the OEO, or from the OEO to Capitol Hill, Shriver would open one of his briefcases, take out some work, and begin reading and writing. Colleagues marveled that he rarely seemed tired. Shriver recalled:
As the War on Poverty moved into high gear, I began the schizophrenic routine I would follow for the next year. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday on OEO business. Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday at the Peace Corps. When I complained to the president about my double responsibility, he said, “If you can’t handle a little $100 million program over there in addition to the OEO, I’ve overestimated you and so has Bob McNamara.” He went on to explain that as secretary of defense, McNamara had dozens of individual $100 million programs within his massive department. If he was capable of managing them all, why couldn’t I? I tried to tell him why operating two distinctly separate agencies was different, but he was totally convinced he was right and generously autographed a picture of the two of us, “To My Double Commander-in-Chief.”
But the two jobs stretched Shriver too thin; this was obvious to colleagues at both the Peace Corps and the OEO. Stretching Shriver thin may have been LBJ’s intention. In February 1965 LBJ’s aide Marvin Watson wrote to the president, “Sen. Joe Tydings has a campaign under way to entice Sargent Shriver to run as the Democratic nominee for governor in next year’s Maryland election. While my immediate reaction is that no good can come to us from this, I don’t think we either could or should attempt to take any action other than maybe keeping Shriver so busy on the Poverty and Peace Corps projects that he has little time to think about anything else.” By 1965 Harris Wofford observed, “the chief problem for the Peace Corps was Shriver’s consuming new anti-poverty assignment, which should have taken, and almost did take, all his time. Johnson overestimated even Shriver’s executive abilities and energy.”
For at least the first six months that Shriver was running the War on Poverty, it was obvious that his heart remained with the Peace Corps; he had been pried away from it unwillingly by LBJ. The week after President Johnson announced his nomination to head the poverty task force in February 1964, Shriver had addressed 450 employees at Peace Corps headquarters. “One of the things I am most interested in making clear,” he said, “is the fact that I am still very much in love with the Peace Corps, and that I do not want anything on the Poverty Program to interrupt my allegiance to or interest in the Peace Corps both here in Washington and around the world. I have always felt that way about the Peace Corps, but right now I am especially captivated by it.”
Slowly, however, he was drawn heart and soul into the War on Poverty, despite its many difficulties. Edgar May worked part time for both the Peace Corps and the poverty program after being summoned to Washington by Shriver in February 1964. “It was fascinating to me in those early days,” May recalled. “Sarge loved the Peace Corps as much as he loved his mother. The Peace Corps was everything. He used to give what we called the ‘flip-card’ speech: Half of it would be about the Peace Corps and the other half would be about the poverty program. In the early days, you could hear his voice change when he got to the poverty program. That fire would go out. It was clear to me, since I wrote both parts of the speech, that there was a change in commitment.”
“But then,” May recalled, “we started to travel. We went to some of the real ghettos in this country. He already knew about West Virginia. (Every Kennedy knew about West Virginia.) But we went to Harlem, we went to the South Side of Chicago, we went to slums in small cities. And once he absorbed all that in his pores and his cranium, the issue had reached him and, one day, there was no longer any difference in emphasis, in tone, in fire, in commitment, between the two halves of the flip-card speech. It was an interesting metamorphosis. And at the end, the Peace Corps was merely an add-on.”
President Johnson continued to give his strong support to the Peace Corps. Early in 1965, he asked Vice President Hubert Humphrey to convene a conference of returned Peace Corps volunteers in March 1965, so that they could meet with American leaders and discuss the volunteers’ “role in national life.” Over three days in March, more than 1,000 returned volunteers met with 250 leaders of American society to discuss national issues. To Harris Wofford, this was a “high-water mark of the Peace Corps,” as well as “the last large occasion I know about when the spirit of Kennedy’s New Frontier seemed alive and strong, despite the assassination.” The moment was, Wofford wrote, “the last time the spirit of the Kennedy era would be joined with Johnson’s call to a Great Society, a call that still in the spring of 1965 seemed full of promise.”
The conference’s opening event was a buffet held in the diplomatic reception rooms of the State Department. The event was quintessentially Peace Corps: “the most informal as well as the liveliest gathering ever to have taken place in the ungainly pile of concrete in the heart of Foggy Bottom,” as Richard Rovere wrote in the New Yorker. The volunteers impressed everyone. They were “sharp, independent, and confident critics of American society,” Rovere wrote, and “most of the observers went away persuaded that the Peace Corps’ impact on American life may be an immense one.”
The day built to a magnificent crescendo, ending in a packed State Department auditorium where Shriver, Humphrey, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Harry Belafonte all linked arms onstage and belted out a stirring rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
Shriver was not shy about telling the president when he felt the Peace Corps’ basic principles were threatened. Several months after a coup in the Dominican Republican had produced a crisis over whether to the evacuate Peace Corps volunteers (they stayed), India and Pakistan declared war on each other over perennially contested land in Kashmir. At the moment war broke out, the Peace Corps had been about to send 176 volunteers to India, the first of what was supposed to be a wave of 1,500. But President Johnson declared that all US aid to both India and Pakistan would be suspended until hostilities ceased, so the volunteers were dispatched instead for “additional training” on Guam and subsequently on an Israeli kibbutz. In September 1965 the UN brokered a ceasefire and Chester Bowles, who had replaced Ken Galbraith as US ambassador to India, told Shriver to send the volunteers as soon as possible.
But President Johnson refused to let him, saying that he would not restore the flow of US aid to India until that country renounced its claim on Kashmir. As the weeks passed, the volunteers got increasingly antsy; among other things, they were forgetting the Hindi they had lear
ned. Bowles repeated his calls for volunteers, pointing out that if they were not sent soon, the Peace Corps would gain a reputation as “a tool for political blackmail.” Still, the president refused to yield.
Warren Wiggins, fearing damage to the Peace Corps’ reputation, approached McGeorge Bundy and asked him to explain to the president why the volunteers must be dispatched. “Warren,” Bundy said, “If you knew the mood the president was in you wouldn’t ask me to do that.” Bill Moyers concurred: LBJ had made it clear he didn’t want any more advice from “Hindu-lovers” like Bundy and Moyers and that he wouldn’t release volunteers to India until Prime Minister Nehru kissed his boot.
In response, Shriver sent a blistering memorandum to the president, reminding him of the role Johnson himself had played in 1961 in keeping the Peace Corps “independent” of foreign aid and not “tied into” the operations of the State Department. (“Without your intervention,” Shriver wrote, “President Kennedy might well have decided to make the Peace Corps a part of the regular AID program.”) Johnson’s petulance toward India threatened to undermine everything. “The independence of the Peace Corps has been the strongest single thing going for us in the rest of the world.” Shriver wrote. “The fact that we are not an instrument of diplomacy has contributed immeasurably to the trust and confidence placed in us around the world. It would indeed be unfortunate if other countries get the notion that we now are treating the Peace Corps the same way we treat military assistance and foreign aid.” Shriver argued that in foreign policy crises, the Peace Corps’ nonpolitical nature had been a useful “talking point,” through which to demonstrate the benign attitudes of Americans toward foreign peoples.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 57