“Time is of the essence,” Shriver continued. The excuse that the volunteers needed “further training” before being sent was becoming “threadbare.” “Communications from India indicate clearly that there is a growing suspicion that the United States might, in fact, be using the Peace Corps as another tactical weapon. If foreign nations get the idea that the Peace Corps is the same as everything else—the Department of State—the foreign aid program—then its mission will surely be jeopardized.” Shriver warned that if Johnson continued to use the Peace Corps as blackmail, he would be giving credence to Soviet allegations that the Peace Corps was merely a political tool rather than “people-to-people” assistance.
Evidently convinced, Johnson relented. The volunteers went to India.
On November 2, 1965, the Peace Corps threw a massive anniversary party at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, where John F. Kennedy had first spelled out his vision for this novel foreign aid program five years earlier. Four years into the program’s existence, there were 10,200 volunteers serving overseas, 2,100 in training to go abroad, and 6,500 returned volunteers back in the United States. The political problems that were dogging Shriver in his role as OEO director seemed not to carry over to his role as Peace Corps director. A Louis Harris Poll completed in December 1965 found that 77 percent of Americans believed the Peace Corps to be a “useful” or “very useful” instrument of US foreign policy, while only 2 percent of those polled believed the program did more harm than good. At times, Shriver wished he could simply erase the OEO experience and return full time to the Peace Corps, where his legend remained untainted.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The OEO in Trouble
For the Great Society, the year 1966 began on a delusional note: President Johnson’s “Guns and Butter” speech to the American people. The United States, LBJ declared in his State of the Union address on January 12, “was strong enough to pursue our goals in the rest of the world”—in other words, Vietnam—“while still building a Great Society at home.” But within just a few months it would become apparent that Johnson had not spoken the truth. Guns would increasingly displace butter, and limits on domestic spending growth would greatly constrain the OEO.
Shriver had begun to apprehend the new budgetary realities as early as the summer of 1965. Although LBJ had decided not to implement Califano’s plan to dissolve the OEO, the president concluded that he would need to hold the line on domestic spending in order to prosecute the war in Vietnam. In discussions with Johnson over the summer, Shriver argued that a tenfold increase in the OEO budget could substantially reduce poverty within a decade. When Johnson told him this was politically unrealistic, Shriver submitted a more modest budget request of $2.5 billion, not quite double the original year’s funding. Even that was too high for the president’s liking; just before Christmas, 1965, the Washington Post reported that “informed sources” were saying that the Bureau of the Budget planned to cut the OEO request to $1.5 billion. It looked as though the War on Poverty would be the first domestic casualty of the war in Vietnam.
Frustrated, Shriver demanded an audience with the president. As Shriver recalled:
We sat in his office face to face for the first time in months. I was reminded of the last time I had been with him, discussing Community Action, and he had told me we were in for it. Now he was deadly serious, drained, drawn. He told me about his troubles in Vietnam. We had to live up to our obligations. We couldn’t lose there. It would take American boys and arms to turn it around. Looking at him, feeling some measure of his burden, I hated to ask him for anything more. I felt I had already been responsible for causing him grief, but I had to tell him what would happen if he did not demonstrate his faith and continuing support of the War on Poverty by increasing his budget request even by as little as a quarter of a billion dollars. That would give us some room to grow. If we didn’t grow, the poor would justifiably lose all hope. That would only hurt him, and the country. Finally, he sighed and said he’d change the request to $1.75 billion dollars. We would all save face that way. I’d been with him about twenty-five minutes, and as I left he said, “Sarge, you can tell your children it cost the president $10 million a minute to talk to you.”
Shriver had won a small victory—but by the spring of 1966 the OEO was already spending money at an unsustainable rate. Programs would surely have to be cut. This was a blow to Shriver’s aspirations for the agency. Political logic demanded that a new initiative like the War on Poverty sustain momentum. But Shriver’s only option was to try to do more with less for as long as possible and to hope that more funds would be forthcoming in the future. The Vietnam War would not last forever, Johnson told him; when it ended, the fiscal floodgates would open. In the meantime, however, Shriver and company had somehow to defuse the inevitable frustration that would well up when OEO services that had been promised to communities, based on the expectation of a larger budget, failed to materialize.
AN “ABSENCE OF LOYALTY”
On top of this, Shriver had to deal with an exodus among his top staff people. Otis Singletary, who had replaced Vern Alden as head of the Job Corps, returned to North Carolina, where he was a university president. Ted Berry, director of Community Action, fell ill and went on leave. Gillis Long, who had headed the OEO’s Congressional Relations Department, went back to Louisiana and ran for Congress. Holmes Brown, a top public affairs officer, returned to the private sector. Sanford Kravitz, who had been the first head of Community Action research, returned to academe. Bill Haddad, the head of the OEO Office of Inspection, who had been by Shriver’s side since the early days of the Peace Corps, returned to New York City to work in journalism and politics.
Most damaging of all were the departures in late 1965 of Jack Conway and Dick Boone. By late 1965, both Conway and Boone felt that the original conception of Community Action was in danger of being lost; in accommodating the demands of local politicians, the needs of the poor were being forgotten. Boone decided that what Community Action needed was an outside advocacy group, an entity that could, by serving as a mouthpiece for the poor, help counterbalance the pressure to place Community Action under the control of City Hall. So Boone joined forces with Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO to found the Citizens Crusade against Poverty, with money coming from organized labor and from the Ford Foundation. Conway, who went back to a job with the AFL-CIO, also became a leader of the Citizens Crusade.
“I was perplexed and somewhat hurt by the absence of loyalty I had experienced in the Peace Corps,” Shriver recalled of this dark period at OEO.
At the Peace Corps, we could have the most violent arguments about what we should be doing and where we should be doing it—but once our positions were argued out within the organization and the director had made the decision, the whole organization swung behind him and made it work. The intellectual exchange would often be loud and bloody, but the wounds were never mortal. Everyone recognized this was a form of natural selection, in which the best ideas were the ones that survived. At OEO, too, we could have a knock-down, drag-out fight about some issue leading to a decision on the part of the director—but instead of regrouping behind his decision, the losers would leave the meeting outraged, take their story to the press, and generally either ignore the decision completely or do their best to subvert it. Having lived a sheltered life in the Peace Corps, I was not used to this kind of treatment.
The rapid turnover in the OEO’s upper ranks invited scrutiny not only by the press and by Congress but also by the president. In the fall of 1965 LBJ appointed a team of investigators, headed by Bertrand Harding, deputy director of the Internal Revenue Service, to look into problems with the OEO administration. Harding had a reputation as a top-notch administrator, and by the spring he had produced a 200-page secret report, with hundreds of recommendations for improving management. Harding was rewarded—“a verb that may not be well chosen,” as one OEO colleague observed—with the deputy directorship of the OEO in June 1966, and in 1968 he succeeded S
hriver as director. (Sandwiched between Conway and Harding was Bernard Boutin, who served as Shriver’s deputy for eight months; Shriver and Boutin did not get along well, and Boutin soon moved on to head the Small Business Administration.)
Although Harding’s investigation ultimately gave Shriver himself a relatively good accounting, the damage was done. The perception of administrative chaos under Shriver produced a series of major newspaper articles recounting power struggles and back-stabbing at the OEO. As Herb Kramer, Shriver’s top speechwriter and public affairs officer reported, “from the very beginning, with Mr. Shriver dividing his time for two years with the Peace Corps—spending three days a weeks [at the OEO], two days a week at the Peace Corps, trying to run both operations and without a strong deputy of his own choosing—the program suffered greatly. Internecine warfare was permitted to be carried out—assassinations in the middle of the night, cloak-and-dagger activities—and [there was] a general failure, I think, really to subject programs and procedures to hard evaluative judgments.” Another high-ranking staff member suggested that “‘Maladministration’ may be too harsh a phrase” to describe what plagued the OEO during this time. It was more the case that “Shriver just wasn’t interested in administration.”
Shriver had had to contend with the occasional negative article while at the Peace Corps and during the OEO’s first year, and he was accustomed to political attacks from his opponents. But this was the first time in his life he was forced to endure a protracted run of bad publicity. Shriver recalled that during this period, “driving to work in the morning, reading the paper, I felt as if I were on my way to a perpetual court-martial.”
Suddenly, too, his touch with Congress seemed to desert him. When the House Labor and Welfare Committee hearings on the poverty program began in March 1966, the criticisms of him and his program were much harsher—and more bipartisan—than before. Shriver had to compromise from the outset of the negotiations, agreeing to impose stricter federal controls on CAAs and to limit their “administrative” costs.
Even formerly supportive Democrats on the Education and Labor Committee believed that for the 1967 bill to be passed, Shriver would have to agree to accept significant restrictions on his administration of the OEO, and in particular of Community Action. The Democrats caucused secretly to come up with a plan, with one of them telling the New York Times that something had to be done because the “participation of the poor” had led to “ugly problems of the political establishment.” When the bill was reported out of committee in mid-May, the budgetary authorization was the same as what the president had requested—$1.75 billion—but the revised bill placed rigorous specifications on how the OEO’s Community Action funds could be spent. The wide latitude that Shriver had enjoyed in budgetary administration was clearly diminishing.
In the Senate, Robert Kennedy was the staunchest supporter of increasing the OEO’s funding. In April 1966 Kennedy declared that OEO’s meager appropriation for 1967 was “unfortunate” and “disturbing”; in September he proposed that the Senate raise the government’s debt ceiling, so that the president could spend more money on antipoverty programs. Shriver welcomed Kennedy’s support of the OEO. Kennedy had become progressively more liberal on many issues, and he now believed strongly that more needed to be done to help the poor. Kennedy also perceived that because the president remained distracted by Vietnam—and because he was increasingly giving only cursory attention to his erstwhile pet program, the War on Poverty—LBJ was vulnerable to political attack from the Left. Coming out strongly in support of the OEO was a way for Kennedy to establish that his position on poverty was more liberal than Johnson’s—thereby confirming what Johnson had been trying for two years to disavow: that the Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party was more liberal than he was.
This tactical alliance between Kennedy and Shriver, albeit undertaken without any coordination between the brothers-in-law, fed Johnson’s paranoia about the poverty program, which he increasingly perceived as a stomping ground for his liberal enemies. He told HEW secretary Wilbur Cohen that he distrusted everyone from the OEO, and that he wouldn’t bring anyone who had worked there into the White House. He started pretending that he couldn’t remember the OEO’s name, calling it only “Shriver’s group.” Once, after reading a newspaper clipping that praised Kennedy and Shriver for their liberal stance on poverty, Johnson sent a note to his political aide Marvin Watson. “Marvin: Start keeping a file on these two.”
But despite Johnson’s waning support for the OEO, Shriver remained loyal to him, espically since by 1967 the political dynamics within the Kennedy family were changing. As Harris Wofford has noted:
Robert Kennedy was passing Sargent Shriver on the left, as the director of the War on Poverty staunchly defended the soundness of the programs he had started and the senator from New York sharply questioned their adequacy. For Shriver, who had endured the slings and arrows of his young pro-McCarthy brother-in-law during the fifties, when Robert and his friends considered Eunice’s husband too liberal (“the house Communist”), the switch in positions was difficult to take.
Meanwhile, the attacks on the OEO continued. In mid-April, Walter Reuther, Jack Conway, and Dick Boone organized a national convention at the International Inn in Washington for their newly formed Citizens Crusade against Poverty. On the first day of the convention, a woman named Unita Blackwell, who hailed from a poor region of the Mississippi Delta, spoke angrily about the false expectations of empowerment the OEO had raised. In Mississippi, she said, the local CAAs were under the control of the police and the mayors, who would beat African American citizens and deprive them of their civil rights.
Shriver was the keynote speaker at the luncheon the next day. When he said, “Negroes are now on the boards of Community Action programs working with white people,” a hail of boos and catcalls rained down upon him from the audience. “Where?” they demanded. A group of poor people in the audience crowded toward him, and it seemed for a moment that he might be in physical danger. He tried to continue his speech, but his voice was drowned out by shouts of “You’re lying!” and “Stop listening to him.” He finished his prepared remarks looking “strained and upset” and declined to take questions afterward. “I will not participate in a riot,” he said as he made a quick exit, visibly shaken.
Shriver had never before endured anything like this. For a man who had dedicated the last five years to trying to help the poor, this was a hurtful blow to absorb.
What had caused this disaster? According to Bayard Rustin, the socialist civil rights leader who was also a speaker at the conference, it was the disjuncture between the sunny picture of the War on Poverty that Shriver presented and the reality of life as most of the assembled poor still lived it—untouched (at least in any measurably positive way) by any OEO program—that had caused them to erupt in anger.
Shriver refused to believe that the attack had been spontaneous. The shouting, he argued later, was led by a group of “anti-establishment” militants who viewed the OEO as part of the “establishment.” But Jack Conway told the press that Shriver was partly to blame for the eruption. “Shriver was trying to overwhelm them with success statistics,” Conway said. “They released their anger and deepest frustrations at not seeing results.”
This was a key moment in the history of the OEO. The event signaled that the group that should have been the OEO’s strongest constituency—the poor themselves—could be as antagonistic to the program as the most cantankerous urban mayor or the most racist Southern politician. It also demonstrated the growing rift on the Left: a burgeoning New Left, angry and militant, had splintered off from the liberal alliance of civil rights spokesmen and labor leaders, portending the dissolution of LBJ’s liberal consensus. And it was the first time that Shriver’s vaunted charm and ebullience had failed him in a public forum—and not just failed him but was flung back in his face. From this point forward, fighting for the OEO in Congress, never an easy task, would be much more difficult.
Deliberations on the House bill stalled over the summer, as a power struggle erupted between Shriver and House Education and Labor Committee chairman Adam Clayton Powell. (Angry that a pet project had had its OEO funding rescinded, Powell demanded that Shriver resign as head of the poverty program.) When the bill finally arrived for debate on the House floor, the Republicans smelled blood. They attacked Shriver in scathing terms and introduced more than twenty-five amendments designed to restrict the OEO’s operating authority or to eviscerate it altogether. Democrats aligned with the Johnson administration were able to muster the votes to defeat the most crippling amendments—such as those that would have given Head Start and Upward Bound to HEW, or the Job Corps to the Labor Department—but they were unable to block an amendment by Minnesota Republican Albert Quie that officially codified, for the first time, what “maximum feasible participation” meant. According to the Quie Amendment, one-third of each CAA board had to be composed of representatives of the poor, chosen by the poor themselves. This rule of one-third was already serving as an informal guideline for Community Action administrators, but the Quie Amendment made it a statutory requirement, thereby depriving the OEO of flexibility to adapt programs as it saw fit. The White House was chagrined, recognizing that the GOP had scored a potent hit: LBJ and the Budget Bureau had wanted to de-emphasize the administrative involvement of the poor, since they were getting so much grief from local politicians about it. Quie, with his amendment, was ensuring that local politicians would remain antagonistic toward the White House.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 58