Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  With the Quie Amendment now part of the bill, Democrats were able to push the legislation through the House by a narrow margin. The final bill passed by the Senate gave the OEO $1.75 billion, the same as the House bill, and it included the provision that at least 36 percent of all Community Action funds be put toward Head Start. After the joint House-Senate bill was accepted on October 18, appropriations hearings reduced the OEO authorization by $100 million. The OEO’s 1967 budget would be less than one-tenth of what it optimally would have been, nearly one-third smaller than what Shriver had formally requested from the president—and $138 million smaller than what the OEO administrators had deemed the “irreducible minimum” to keep the agency functioning.

  The bill was signed into law on November 8, 1966. Two weeks later, Shriver held a press conference. His usual ebullience was absent. “A triple blow has been struck at our ability to extend the War on Poverty to the poor of urban and rural America,” he stated. If the OEO had been granted the $3.5 billion he had requested, it could have continued to mobilize its coordinated assault on poverty. At $1.6 billion, however, the OEO would have to go into retreat. Eight thousand men and women would have to be dropped from the Job Corps. Summer programs for urban youth would have to be cancelled. Legal Services for the Poor would stall. “In summary,” Shriver said, “congressional action has curtailed the War on Poverty in 1,000 communities of America for fiscal 1967. And hundreds of additional communities, especially in rural America, will be unable to join the battle.”

  Frustrated, Shriver contemplated quitting. “The word is out that I am a political liability to President Johnson,” Shriver told the St. Louis Democrat on November 18. “There have been reports of my resignation ever since I took this job. They have not been true in the past but I am not saying that my resignation couldn’t now come about.” When this article was brought to the president’s attention, he dispatched Bill Moyers to dissuade Shriver from quitting.

  Moyers was able to soothe Shriver, but only temporarily. The budget news from the White House kept getting worse; the Vietnam War was crowding out the War on Poverty. In early December, OEO research director Joe Kershaw was called to the White House for a briefing on the budget. What he heard there, as Shriver later recalled, “was shocking and incredible beyond belief. Decisions had been made to expand Vietnam far beyond anyone’s expectations. The budget deficit was going far over projections. The War against Poverty would become a casualty—not dead, but in deep shock.” To pay for the Vietnam War, the president was proposing to decrease funding for the OEO in 1968. Driving back in the cab from the White House, Bureau of the Budget director Charlie Schultze told a shaken Kershaw that the president meant it this time. “That son of a bitch Shriver isn’t going to get anything out of me,” Schultze reported LBJ had said.

  Shriver had had enough. Friends had for months been telling him to “get out now.” Robert Kennedy had made it clear that the family would be happier if Shriver were out of the Johnson administration. And politicians in both Illinois and Maryland were inviting him to run for office in those states. In mid-December of 1966, Shriver told Moyers he planned to quit. Moyers told him to wait and “think it over.”

  But on December 19, 1966, Joe Califano delivered a handwritten note from Shriver to the president at his ranch. Shriver was resigning. In his explanation to Moyers, Shriver said his reasons for quitting were as follows:

  1. President’s interest and OEO’s in having a new face and new image. 2. Others may think differently, but I have exhausted my bargaining power in the Congress. I am out of IOUs up there. I do not believe I can be as effective on the fourth go-round as I was on the first three. 3. Having been in this job for three years, I believe it is time for a change. There are certain jobs in which your capital is eroded faster than in others; this is one of them. Someone needs to come in with different friends and different enemies than I have.

  As Moyers wrote to the president in a memo, Shriver “said he hopes that his resignation can be handled in a way that does not give the appearance of bad blood between him and the White House. I raised several times the desirability of holding off again for some further thought, but he said he believed this was the time to act.”

  Vice President Humphrey could see what was happening. He understood the political headaches the OEO was causing for the president. But he liked Shriver personally, and he believed that the War on Poverty would work if it were given sufficient funding. “During the past ten days I have given a good deal of time to some of the problems with the OEO—Shriver—and the difficulties centering around the funds for the poverty program,” Humphrey wrote to LBJ on December 17.

  I know that the war on poverty is a subject of considerable controversy, but I do know now that the mayors of our cities are for it. A year ago the mayors of our cities were strongly opposed to the Community Action Programs. Now they strongly support them. The mayors are pouring into Congress their complaints over the cuts and asking that funds be restored. This is true, Mr. President, not only of the United States Conference of Mayors, which represents the big cities, but also the National League of Cities, which represents cities of all sizes.… You will be asking for a supplemental appropriation in order to cover the needs for the war in Vietnam. It would appear to me to be both morally right and politically wise to ask for at least $100 million to cover some of the minimum needs of the War on Poverty. Even then you would be below your budget request for fiscal 1967.… It would be a powerful psychological shot in the arm for those who are waging the war on poverty and clearly put to rest any feeling that we are letting down in our efforts.… It would tell the whole country that we are in fact willing and able to fight both wars: the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty at home. And finally, Mr. President, it will make the mayors and the county officials much happier with the Administration. These local officials are desperately afraid of what is going to happen this summer.… I have given this memo a great deal of thought. I have had mixed emotions, as you know, about what to do. But I sincerely believe now, after the most careful examination of all the circumstances and facts, that it would be highly desirable in every way if you could see fit to recommend a supplemental appropriation for OEO of around $100 million.

  In response to Humphrey’s memo, the president agreed to meet with Shriver, and Shriver agreed to stay on at the OEO, with the understanding that domestic purse strings would soon loosen. But no further money was forthcoming.

  “SAY IT ISN’T SO, SARGENT SHRIVER”

  Another reason Shriver had wanted to quit was that, after a period of relative calm, the CDGM, the Head Start program in Mississippi, had erupted into controversy once again. The tensions over the CDGM had begun to build in early 1966, when the OEO authorized an additional $5.6 million grant to the Mississippi program on February 22. Senator John Stennis said the grant would fund “extremists.”

  On July 7, when the CDGM submitted an application for a $41 million grant to put an additional 30,000 children through a year of Head Start, the OEO rejected it. Head Start associate director Jules Sugarman traveled to Mississippi to explain to the CDGM’s leaders that their grant request was far too large and that, moreover, the OEO’s Office of Inspection had uncovered continuing irregularities in the administration of the CDGM. He gave the CDGM fourteen days to answer a series of questions about, for example, how it was spending its money and why the program still excluded white people (as both staff and clients). The CDGM’s answers, sent to the OEO on August 8, were deemed unsatisfactory. On September 26, after many furious internal debates, the OEO Legal Department concluded that the CDGM could not lawfully be refinanced without a complete overhaul of its operations.

  Shriver was reluctant to shut off a Head Start program serving thousands of children. Also, although he couldn’t say this publicly, he liked the fact that the CDGM served mainly African Americans: To him, that was a strike against Jim Crow. Elsewhere in the South, members of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups were preventing bla
ck children from enrolling in Head Start. But with the OEO’s 1967 appropriation hanging in the balance—and indeed the OEO’s very existence at stake—he couldn’t afford to have one program in Mississippi attracting too much negative political attention.

  On October 1 the OEO mailed a fourteen-page report to the CDGM board, explaining the decision not to continue its funding. The array of problems was substantial. Many tens of thousands of dollars were completely unaccounted for. Thousands more had been spent on ill-advised or unauthorized expenses. Salaries had been paid to people who hadn’t shown up for work. The program, the report alleged, “has been increasingly oriented toward the economic needs of adults rather than the educational and development needs of children.” The report concluded, “Further funding of CDGM would not be in the best interest of a strong, well-managed Head Start program, of the type which OEO intends to see continued in Mississippi.”

  A week later, Shriver announced that the OEO would be awarding new Head Start grants to several colleges and Community Action agencies in the state. In response, more than 3,000 African Americans came together the next day for an anti-OEO rally at the campus of Jackson State University in the state capital. The chairman of the CDGM, Rev. James McCree, declared that he would fight against Shriver’s “political tricks and manipulations” until the group’s funding was restored. McCree brandished telegrams of support from numerous individuals and groups, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the Citizens Crusade against Poverty.

  Shriver wrote back to the Citizens Crusade on October 10, reasserting the OEO’s position and highlighting the CDGM’s failure to run a racially integrated program. “We see every reason in morality and public policy to encourage racially integrated groups in Mississippi,” he wrote. “We intend to encourage such groups in Head Start and other programs.… Further procrastination, after weeks of discussion and review, could only deny vitally needed Head Start services to children in Mississippi.” The next day Shriver announced another large grant, to Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP), for running a full-year Head Start program for 5,000 children. MAP’s board was racially integrated and included many prominent Southerners, including Aaron Henry, the regional NAACP director, and Hodding Carter III, the editor of the Greenville Delta Democrat Times.

  On October 15 dozens of clergymen picketed OEO headquarters in Washington, accusing the agency of “throwing road-blocks in the way of maximum feasible participation of the poor in antipoverty programs.” Shriver met with the protesters and denied that he had bowed to political pressure in cutting off the CDGM’s funding. He reiterated that the program had been cut off because of management and racial problems; if those problems could be rectified he would consider renewing the CDGM’s funding.

  Evidently, his argument was not persuasive. When Shriver opened the New York Times on October 19 he was confronted with an alarming full-page advertisement. “Say It Isn’t So, Sargent Shriver,” screamed the large-point type across the top of the page. Paid for by a group calling itself the National Citizens Committee for the Child Development Program in Mississippi, and signed by dozens of prominent ministers, civil rights leaders, and others, the text of the ad read, in part:

  Awesome political pressures have made Poverty Chief Shriver abandon a Head Start program considered “the best in the country.” 12,000 Mississippi children, and their parents, are praying he’ll change his mind.

  Of all the battles Sargent Shriver has fought to keep politics out of the poverty program, none is more crucial than the campaign to save the Child Development Group of Mississippi.

  At the moment it looks as if Sargent Shriver has given up.

  Although the CDGM was “what Sargent Shriver and his poverty warriors have been battling for all along,” the advertisement charged that political leaders feared “the prospect of a self-emancipated Negro community” and so had pressured Shriver to drop the CDGM in favor of MAP, whose board was more acceptable to the Mississippi establishment. The advertisement deeply upset Shriver. “I’d never really seen him as moved and angry,” Jules Sugarman recalled. “It was a terrible reflection on his personal integrity.”

  Shriver fired back in a letter to the Times. “The Times prints a message entitled ‘Say It Isn’t So, Sargent Shriver,’ dealing with the Head Start grants in Mississippi. For over two weeks I have been saying that it isn’t so, that it hasn’t been so, and that it will not be so. But some people are unwilling to listen. It is shocking to me that any Americans, and especially members of the clergy, should rush into public print impugning the motives of a public official before ascertaining the facts.” Shriver went on to provide a lengthy history of the OEO’s involvement with the CDGM. He explained that he still took “great pride” in the CDGM’s past work and that he had hope for what it might accomplish in the future. “There is no group of individuals in the country which has sought and prayed for CDGM’s success more than we have at OEO,” he wrote. He recounted how the previous February he had given the CDGM one of the largest Head Start grants in the country, “despite problems and loud protests.” But “we could not in clear conscience and under the law ignore findings of payroll padding, nepotism, conflict of interest, and misuse of property. I reject and resent charges that forces outside my agency made that decision—or that I knuckled under to any pressures. I did not.” He also explained that he had not written off the CDGM and would be meeting with its board a few days later.

  Years later, Shriver would recall that

  during that period of turmoil … I became the bad guy in the picture. What my zealous critics really did not understand—and some of them, I presume, still don’t—was that if we had continued financing CDGM in its original form, not only would CDGM have been stopped but the whole War on Poverty might have been stopped. There is no question about that. I was trying to defend CDGM. But those people were so zealous, so religiously dedicated to what they were doing—and not without good cause—on behalf of the black people in Mississippi, that that was all they could see. I was accused of being a political opportunist, of simply trying to curry favor with Congress. My critics thought I was not sufficiently interested in blacks, or in CDGM. They thought I did not understand the situation, or that I was gutless and couldn’t take the political pressure.

  In fact, Shriver says, he knew exactly what he was doing. Yes, he was concerned about what Congress would think, but he was always thinking also about the racial politics on the ground in Mississippi, something many of his critics failed to understand.

  Under pressure from the White House to resolve the situation, Shriver flew to Atlanta to meet with the CDGM board on October 24. Negotiations continued into November, when Shriver was presented with a difficult decision. During this time, the OEO was continuing to issue new Head Start grants on a piece-meal basis to various groups in Mississippi. One of these grants, to a CAA called the Southwest Mississippi Opportunity, Inc., was vetoed by Mississippi governor Paul Johnson, who argued that the group had been infiltrated by former CDGM employees. Under the compromise wording that had been written into the original poverty program legislation, Governor Johnson was within his rights to veto any OEO program in his state—but Shriver, as the OEO director, had the right to override that veto. Up to this time he had rarely invoked this right, in part because few governors ever vetoed federal dollars coming to their states and in part because, when they did, Shriver did not want to antagonize them politically. Sizing up the situation, he determined that there was no reason a new Head Start program shouldn’t be allowed to hire employees from an old one; he also recognized that if he wanted negotiations with the CDGM and its supporters to succeed, here was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate his fealty. He overrode the governor’s veto.

  This seemed to have the desired effect. On December 16, Shriver declared that an “agreement in principle” had been reached between the OEO and the CDGM. The CDGM agreed to bring at least six white people onto its board; to turn responsibility for financial administration over to Ma
ry Holmes College; and to prohibit employees from participating in any political activities during working hours.

  On January 30, 1967, the OEO made a $5 million grant to the CDGM, to enroll 6,000 children in Head Start centers in fourteen counties. The crisis was over. Head Start in Mississippi had survived.

  But the damage had been done. Shriver had been attacked by Congress, undermined by the White House, and assaulted by the poor. As 1966 drew to a close, Shriver’s political standing was the lowest it had ever been.

  At Timberlawn over Christmas, Shriver tried to relax with family and friends. But on the night of December 22, the Shrivers were entertaining Randolph Churchill, the British prime minister’s son, and his daughter when suddenly the sound of Christmas carols rang out in the still, crisp night. “We listened for a moment, smiling, to this lovely reminder of the season,” Shriver later wrote. “Then we realized the words were unfamiliar, harsh, mocking.” As Bobby and Maria Shriver looked on wide-eyed, their father went to the door and found a group of forty or fifty angry members of a group called the Washington Underground, who were upset by the cutbacks in OEO programs. “They had decided to dramatize their discontent by picketing my home,” Shriver recalled. “Waving signs that read ‘Shriver go to Hell; you too LBJ,’ they sang their mocking carols.”

  Oh Come! All you poor folk

  Soulful and together

  Come ye, Oh come ye to Shriver’s house

  Come and behold him—politician’s puppet

  Oh Come and let us move him

  Come and sock it to him

  And send him on his way

  To LBJ

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  King of the Hill

  As 1967 dawned, Shriver had little reason to be hopeful about the new year. For the OEO, in fact, it looked as if it would be even worse than the year before. The agency would have to function with insufficient money to operate its programs properly and would have to close some programs down. And because the legislative and appropriations process had dragged on for so long in 1966, Shriver had no time to rest before beginning his assault on Congress once again, for fiscal year 1968.