Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  His five-year love affair with Congress seemed finally to have ended. The congressional hearings of the previous year had been more rancorous by far than anything he had experienced in the past—and the animosity generated in 1966 was sure to be amplified in 1967. Worse, 1966 had been a disaster for Johnson and the Democrats at the voting booth: The Democrats had lost fifty seats in the House and three in the Senate. Seen as a referendum on Johnson’s Great Society, the 1966 election results could only be interpreted as a repudiation. For Shriver, this meant that getting the 1967 OEO bill passed would be harder than ever. The combination of weaker Democrats, more aggressive Republicans, and unmet expectations had created a political nightmare for the poverty program.

  The support of the president that had been so crucial to the OEO’s launch in 1964 was now scarcely in evidence—and in any event, that support would now be of questionable value. Johnson was chastened by the 1966 election results. His approval ratings were in decline. The Vietnam War, far from nearing resolution as he had hoped, had become a quagmire. Riots had raised questions about the president’s ability to maintain social comity and order. He looked as if he had aged ten years in the last two.

  LBJ’s State of the Union address on January 10, 1967, augured poorly for the OEO. Johnson did speak about the poverty program, although not in any way resembling the forceful, positive manner he had in previous years. He called for more programs and more money—but the tone of these requests was subdued, almost desultory. He now stressed the difficulties in fighting poverty, rather than the possibilities, comparing the War on Poverty to the war in Vietnam. The fight against poverty was “not a simple one. The enemy was difficult to perceive, to isolate, to destroy.” There would be as many setbacks as advances; weapons that didn’t work would need to be discarded. All in all, it was hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of the OEO’s efforts. Indeed, it seemed as though LBJ were capable of viewing domestic programs only through the prism of Vietnam.

  The president’s support seemed so tepid that rumors began to circulate that he planned to defer to Republican criticism and dismantle the OEO, moving control of Head Start to HEW. On February 16 Joseph Califano held a press conference to rebut these charges. Califano said that the president planned to “fight for [OEO] with everything he’s got.” Califano added, “I might say that the stuff in the newspapers over the last several months about the president not fighting for the poverty program is just a lot of hogwash and trash. It’s just not true. I think he spent as much time working with Sarge on putting together this program as he did on any program that’s going up there [to Capitol Hill] this year.” This statement temporarily dispelled the rumors about the OEO’s impending demise—but coming from Califano, who barely more than a year earlier had himself proposed the effective dissolution of the OEO, it hardly reassured Shriver.

  Shriver and his colleagues began preparing for the political battle of their lives. He gathered his most loyal men and women around him. As he recalled, “Cutting through the agency’s organization chart, I brought together a group of people I knew were loyal to me, devoted to the program, and thoroughly able to handle themselves in the clinches of a tough, rough and tumble fight. For an entire year of our struggle with Congress, this group was to meet in my office at nine o’clock each morning. The nature of our strategy was ‘us against them.’ ”

  These meetings, which many of the participants have described as the most stimulating experience of their life, would begin with the OEO inspector general Edgar May talking about trouble spots. Then Herb Kramer would describe press coverage. Hyman Bookbinder would report on private organizations. George McCarthy would report on the vagaries of Congress. “In that room,” Shriver recalled, “we discussed ideas, strategies, and personalities in terms that could have had us jailed, committed, or fired. But not one leak—not one betrayal of a confidence—ever emerged from those sessions. Phil Hardberger [the OEO executive secretary] would produce action lists, and things would get done.”

  Early in the House committee hearings, Shriver threw down the gauntlet, declaring that the “single basic issue” before them was whether the OEO would be allowed to continue as “the central command post of the war on poverty.” Now that the first two years of the program had put poverty on the national agenda and raised the hopes of the poor, Shriver asked, was Congress prepared “to tear out the engine which powered the progress?”

  The general thrust of the bill the White House submitted to Congress was to temper the OEO’s ability to innovate and to create new programs. The president requested $2.06 billion for the OEO, a 25 percent increase over what Congress had authorized the previous year. Most of the OEO’s existing programs were to receive only slight funding increases or none at all.

  Worn down by three years of attacks by mayors and political machines and weakened by the 1966 elections, the White House decided to grant ample concessions to local political establishments. Henceforth, the 1968 draft bill decreed, CAAs would be required to give key administrative roles to local elected officials—in other words, “maximum feasible participation of local politicians.”

  Supporters of Community Action attacked the administration’s bill. The president, they argued, was caving in to mayors who viewed CAAs as independent power bases that threatened City Hall, and to legislators who feared that CAAs would produce rivals for their congressional seats. The net result, critics alleged, was to shift Community Action’s emphasis away from its core principle: the participation and empowerment of the poor. If the administration’s bill passed, the New Republic editorialized, Community Action could be pronounced dead.

  Carl Perkins, the laconic Kentucky Democrat who had replaced Adam Clayton Powell as chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, introduced the administration’s poverty bill in the House on April 10. Four days later, Pennsylvania Democrat Joseph Clark introduced an equivalent bill in the Senate. The Senate bill got a boost in June when a four-month investigation chaired by Clark concluded that the OEO, although it continued to have administrative problems, was proving on balance to be effective. “Great expectations have been aroused in America for the poverty program, and those great expectations have largely been aroused by the work of the OEO and its dynamic director, Mr. Shriver,” Clark said. “The poor are participating in their own programs, sometimes clumsily, sometimes ineffectively, but these expectations have been aroused, and in my judgment they will not be satisfied until many more significant victories have been won than have been won so far.”

  But on June 8 Albert Quie of Minnesota and Charlie Goodell of New York introduced a bill in the House of Representatives proposing a Republican alternative to the OEO, called “the Opportunity Crusade,” which would have transferred all of Community Action, along with other programs, into HEW. Although the Opportunity Crusade actually proposed to increase both antipoverty funding and the participation of the poor, its primary goal was to terminate the OEO and call off the War on Poverty.

  Congressional hearings on the OEO dragged on endlessly through the summer. Altogether, there were seventy days of hearings, with more than 500 witnesses testifying. Shriver himself spent a staggering amount of time on Capitol Hill. “Like the poor,” one congressman joked, “we have Shriver always with us.” He spent forty-one hours testifying before the House Committee on Education and Welfare and the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty.

  For a brief period in July, Shriver saw a glimmer of hope. The outpouring of public support for his agency was turning out to be much greater than anyone had anticipated. Testifying before a House Committee that month, he said, “The question at which you have taken a long, hard look is this: Should there be an OEO? Of the ninety-seven public witnesses who have appeared before you, sixty-four have addressed themselves to this question in their testimony. Of these, only one has called for the elimination of OEO.”

  Beyond the Capitol Hill hearing rooms, deeper historical forces were rumbling: The civil rights movement and Comm
unity Action had uncorked years of repressed frustration. In Newark, New Jersey, on the evening of July 12, 1967, the arrest and alleged beating of a taxi driver triggered a week of rioting. Over the following month, 164 violent riots erupted in twenty-seven cities across the country, killing dozens of people, injuring hundreds, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage. At times, the country seemed on the brink of a full-scale race war. The social fabric, it appeared, was coming undone.

  For the OEO, the riots were a catastrophic development. Politicians and reporters accused antipoverty programs of fomenting the riots. Hugh Addonizio, the mayor of Newark, said that riots in his city had been “fueled by the rash of wild and extremist statements and behavior of the past ten or twelve weeks” by antipoverty workers at local CAAs. Politicians from Texas, Illinois, and elsewhere similarly alleged that OEO programs had helped cause the riots.

  These allegations were not entirely baseless. In some cases, the OEO clearly had given money to black militants. For instance, the Black Panther Party, the most famous black nationalist group, was founded in the Oakland CAA where Bobby Seale held an administrative job. (Hired to teach black history, Seale was introduced to several of his future Black Panther associates through the poverty program. “I was able to meet a lot of the young cats who would later become lumpen proletarians,” Seale later wrote.)

  Shriver immediately took action, instructing Edgar May’s Office of Inspection to launch a thorough investigation of every single riot or disturbance in a city where the OEO had a program. On July 20, after the first week of rioting, Shriver sent a message to all his regional directors, declaring that OEO funds would immediately be withheld from any program deemed to have tolerated behavior that contributed to civil disorder. On July 31 he appeared once again before the House Committee to explain the OEO’s official policy on the uprisings. In his testimony, Shriver struck a balance between a call for law and order and an understanding that the root causes of the violence lay in the impoverished conditions of urban ghettos. “After the riots began,” he said, “voices of reason and order swiftly announced: ‘We will not tolerate violence. We will not permit lawlessness.’ And they are right. But there are voices that say, ‘We cannot, as a nation, tolerate the conditions that produce violence and lawlessness.’ And they are right, too.” The uprisings, he continued, were a result of the “explosive store of discontent” that lay beneath the surface of the American ghetto, “waiting for a random spark to ignite it.”

  Shriver disclaimed any OEO responsibility for the riots and decried “attempts to create doubt and fear about the role of the War on Poverty” as smear tactics by the poverty program’s opponents. In truth, it is hard to measure what kind of contribution Community Action made to the spirit of revolt that seized the nation in the late sixties. Undoubtedly the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor politicized—and indeed radicalized—many formerly docile ghetto residents. And it is also surely the case that the high expectations that the War on Poverty generated and then failed to meet contributed to the frustration felt by ghetto denizens.

  Yet after examining the results of Edgar May’s investigations, Shriver could truthfully say that “in almost every one of the 1,050 communities where Community Action exists, there is ample evidence that the CAA is calming fears and frustrations, bridging the communications gap between the poor and the rest of the community.” Shriver was able to produce testimony from dozens of mayors, police chiefs, and other local officials to the effect that antipoverty workers had done a great job of calming communities down in the aftermath of the riots, helping police and firemen, providing food and shelter, and cleaning up the rubble.

  The Senate agreed with Shriver. In the House, however, longtime critics of Community Action seized on the allegations of links between antipoverty workers and rioters. Oregon Democrat Edith Green said that she had grave misgivings about a federal program that financed political disturbances. Green stated ominously that Congress would be scrutinizing the new OEO bill very carefully that year.

  The riots continued throughout the summer. It seemed as though every one of the OEO’s nine o’clock meetings began with Shriver asking, “Ed May, where do you anticipate next week’s riots are going to be?” Shriver hoped that by expanding programs on an emergency basis in areas where riots seemed imminent, the OEO might be able to prevent unrest before it happened. To a degree, this plan seems to have worked. But the policy generated controversy on Shriver’s staff: The fear was that once people figured out that to get more emergency federal money all they had to do was prepare to riot, they would manufacture unrest where there would otherwise have been none.

  May’s office continued its inspections through mid-September, at which point it released a more thorough report, surveying mayors and police chiefs in sixty-four cities. The message these officials sent was clear: They wanted to keep the OEO administration and programs in place.

  But this favorable accounting seemed at first to have no effect on Congress. A series of amendments proposed by Republicans would have cut the OEO’s budget by nearly 50 percent. Then, on October 11, the House delivered its most stinging blow by adding an amendment to the federal pay raise bill, declaring that the OEO would be the only agency in the government whose employees would not be given pay raises.

  Meanwhile, the OEO had run out of money to administer its programs. The previous fiscal year had expired on June 30, and the next year’s appropriation still hung in the balance. This in itself was not unusual. In its three years of existence, the OEO had never yet gotten its new appropriation authorization before its previous one had run out; this was true of many other federal programs, as well. Ordinarily, it would not be a problem; Congress could just pass interim “continuing resolutions” for agencies that had run out of funds, so they could keep operating normally. This year, however, Congress dragged its feet in passing continuing resolutions that would have extended the OEO’s spending authority. The OEO seemed to have been placed last on Congress’s list; every other agency and bureau would be attended to first.

  The agency was able to pay its employees through August. But when summer ended without the passage of an authorizing bill or continuing resolution, the situation became dire. The Treasury Department cut off the OEO’s credit line. Travel expenses were denied. No new employees could be hired. The agency was barred from ordering supplies or entering into contracts with other government bureaus. By November 9, 1967, Shriver no longer had a single spare dollar to spend on his programs: as a result, three Job Corps contracts lapsed and several CAAs were forced to shut down for lack of funds. It looked as though the OEO would die of fiscal starvation before Congress voted on the new bill.

  As he had a year earlier, Shriver threatened to quit over the decreased funding. In an interview with CBS reporter Daniel Schorr on November 6, he said, “I think it would be a gross deception to delude the American people that something substantial is being done about problems here at home such as lack of education, lack of health, lack of justice, lack of housing, lack of opportunity, to delude them that something is being done about it when you appropriate so little money that you can’t do anything substantial about it.” When Schorr asked him if he would continue as the OEO director if he were not given sufficient funds to run the War on Poverty effectively, Shriver said, “No. I’ve just said that I think it would be a delusion of the poor. It will be a deception to the general public and therefore I don’t think it would be advisable to continue a fraud.”

  But at precisely this moment, when it seemed the War on Poverty was sputtering to an ignominious demise, a groundswell of support for the program welled up from the grassroots. When the OEO stopped being able to fund local CAAs, other entities—state and municipal governments, foundations, and even wealthy individuals—stepped in with the money to keep them afloat. When people saw communities working together to keep the OEO’s programs functioning—there were stories, for instance, of local VISTA workers being put up in co
unty jails by local sheriffs so they wouldn’t have to pay for housing, and of CAA employees working for nothing—they expressed a new public sympathy for the War on Poverty. Middle-class voters were outraged when the OEO, alone among government agencies, was denied the right to issue pay raises. The OEO, it seemed, had had a strong, if latent, constituency after all—and not just among the poor. Congress was flooded with letters from prominent Americans—especially businessmen and industrialists, whom Shriver had personally rallied—and ordinary citizens, demanding that the OEO be funded. Shriver and his inner circle also successfully launched what they called “Operation Republican Mayor,” in which they got twenty-one Republican mayors to sign a strongly worded letter in support of the OEO. “The programs are a positive force in lessening social tensions in our cities,” the mayors declared. “All of us are confident that they will continue to improve and are so meaningful as to give our less fortunate citizens a new hope in life.”

  Succumbing to public pressure, Congress authorized a temporary spending resolution on November 28. The OEO was back in business.

  This allowed the OEO to resume normal operations, but only temporarily; the authorizing bill for 1968 still hung in the balance. Indeed, while the OEO had been struggling to stay afloat, Shriver had been mired in debates in the House, where Republican representatives were doing everything they could to prevent the reauthorization of the program. Both Shriver and LBJ knew that if the OEO bill were to have any chance of passage, it would have to include significant concessions to the program’s critics. So the Johnson administration’s bill included a new requirement that, in each locality, the highest-ranking elected official (normally the mayor) automatically be given a role on every CAA board. Some people, Shriver conceded, would perceive this new stipulation as a “sellout to the establishment.” But “the truth is that in nearly all cases locally elected officials already have representation.” Community Action worked best, he explained, where the poor and the local public officials worked together—not in opposition.