There is no question that as Community Action evolved, it moved away from the vision that task force members like Dick Boone and Frank Mankiewicz had initially conceived: empowering the poor to agitate against the local political structure for institutional reform. This tempering of the program’s radicalism is evident, too, in Shriver’s changing rhetoric about Community Action; in the context, some tempering of the more radical original premise of Community Action was politically necessary. In truth, though, Shriver’s view of Community Action never changed much—and it certainly changed far less than many of his colleagues’ views did. From the very beginning, he had viewed Community Action to be more a collaborative project than an antagonistic one. Like Boone and Hackett and others, he wanted to agitate the poor into political consciousness. But such was the nature of Shriver’s optimism that he always believed that however “agitated” the poor might become, they would still be working in concert with—rather than in opposition to—local government. His optimism in this regard was not groundless: In the Peace Corps, volunteers raised poor citizens’ political consciousness and taught them about civic engagement but also provided various services in conjunction with the local ruling authority; these activities were not mutually exclusive.
It is a measure of how acutely controversial the program had become that when Shriver presented the administration’s bill it was attacked harshly from two opposite directions. Community Action’s original supporters attacked it as “a sellout” to the establishment; members of Congress attacked it for still having “too much Alinsky in it.” Oregon representative Edith Green was the most relentless attacker from the latter camp. “The original legislation did not intend to create a new governmental structure of powerful political bodies with the luxury of millions of federal dollars to spend and none of the responsibilities of raising any of that money,” she said. To rectify this, she proposed an amendment that would require the ruling authority for any CAA to be the state or local government. This, Green said, would ensure that although CAAs would still operate under “broad federal direction,” their immediate administrators would be locally elected “commanders” who would provide “home rule.” Also, the preceding year’s legislation had included the stipulation that one-third of the CAA board be drawn from the ranks of the poor; Green’s new amendment would require that one-third of the board be elected public officials and one-third be representatives of business or civic groups.
The ensuing debate over Green’s proposed amendment lasted for more than two full days. Some of Green’s Democratic colleagues strenuously objected to the new stipulation. The OEO issued a statement saying that the Green Amendment, if adopted, would result in a “drastic revision” of Community Action’s original mandate to encourage the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. But just before midnight on October 18, the Education and Labor Committee voted to approve the Green Amendment.
In its official statements, the OEO continued to object vigorously to the Green Amendment, arguing that it would destroy the essence of Community Action if it were not removed from the final bill. Privately, however, Shriver and his colleagues were grateful for the amendment—in fact, the OEO’s congressional liaison George McCarthy even helped Green to draft it. The amendment provided the OEO with the necessary political cover to get the bill approved by those critics—the states’ rights Southern Democrats, city mayors, and congressional representatives from urban districts—who felt threatened by their local CAAs. (For this reason, Republicans attacked Green’s proposal as the “bosses and boll weevil amendment,” in reference to the groups it would appease.) With the Green Amendment now giving them effective control over the CAAs’ activities, politicians could hardly object to the federal money the agencies brought in.
There was another problem though: the strong pressure, not only in Congress but within the executive branch, to spin the War on Poverty’s constituent parts off into other cabinet departments, as a means of dissolving the OEO. LBJ’s adviser Harry McPherson proposed junking Community Action altogether—or at the very least “saving what is worth saving and renouncing the rest.” Other Johnson advisers were more emphatic than McPherson and proposed moving all of the OEO into the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Secretary John Gardner. As always, Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress were eager to spin off Head Start and the Job Corps in particular, as this would effectively castrate the OEO. Shriver knew that once the War on Poverty’s most popular programs were spun off, all that would be left would be Community Action—in other words, “nothing but trouble.”
The OEO’s congressional lobbyists responded with a deft bit of political jujitsu, asking Southern Democrats if they really wanted to see Head Start under the control of Office of Education director Harold Howe—who was anathema to Southerners because he kept trying to force the integration of their schools—or if they wanted to see the Job Corps under the control of the Labor Department, which was enforcing antisegregation policies in the workplace.
George McCarthy, the OEO congressional liaison, recalled going to Mississippi senator James Eastland about the proposed amendment to spin off Head Start.
“Senator,” McCarthy said. “There’s going to be an amendment coming up.”
“An amendment on OEO!” Eastland said. “You know I can’t help you on that OEO business. I can’t support that program.”
“I know that, Senator.” McCarthy said. “I’m not asking you to vote for OEO. What I’m doing is asking you to stop a part of the program from being administered by Doc Howe.… They want to transfer a good portion of the program over to Howe’s administration.”
“George,” Eastland said. “I wouldn’t vote to give a red turd to Doc Howe.… When that amendment is coming up, you call me, because I want to be on the floor to vote against that amendment, and I’m going to get all my Southern friends to vote with me.”
Conversations like this were repeated numerous times between Shriver, his deputies, and Southern Democrats, with the result that support grew among the Southern bloc for keeping all the War on Poverty’s programs under the OEO. The coup de grâce, however, may have been delivered when Bill Kelly and several other Shriver deputies wrote a speech for Louisiana congressman Joseph Waggoner, which Waggoner delivered on the House floor. “I don’t want OEO broken up,” Waggoner declaimed. “I want to keep that trash in one pile.” Because Waggoner was known to be opposed to the poverty program, this speech had the effect of consolidating the Southern Democrats in defense of keeping the OEO intact. And once Republicans lost the support of these Southerners, the GOP drive to kill off the OEO by amendment fizzled.
From a legislative perspective, the OEO’s tactics worked. Satisfied that their major concerns had been addressed and struck by the recent outpouring of support for the War on Poverty, Southerners and big-city Democrats came around to support the OEO bill. Republican members of Congress fought bitterly to the end, and they added many other amendments restricting CAAs, but the end result was astonishing.
According to Don Baker, the OEO’s general counsel, “The fact of the matter is, nobody with any responsibility or knowledge … in the House of Representatives expected the ’67 bill to pass. [Speaker of the House] Carl Albert told Sarge Shriver and me a week before the bill went to the floor that he just didn’t see the votes; and when we showed him a list of our canvass, he just went down the list, ticking off the ones that he doubted.” Just a few days before the vote, Albert was still saying “We can’t possibly pass that bill” and suggesting that the Democrats strike a deal with Congressmen Goodell and Quie to pass a modified version of their “Opportunity Crusade” bill. Even Phil Landrum, the OEO’s original sponsor in Congress in 1964, had lost faith in the OEO; he declared that “the legislative program being proposed is doomed to failure.”
Yet the final bill that was voted on actually placed less overall restriction on the OEO and gave it more flexibility in how it spent its money than the original bil
l drafted by the White House. Moreover, the bill provided a two-year authorization, rather than just one, meaning that for the first time since the agency’s founding, the OEO’s top staff could focus on policy and planning rather than on battles with Congress. The amount of money ($1.78 billion) Congress ultimately authorized was, Shriver said, the absolute minimum the OEO needed to carry out its operations, but it was an increase over the previous year. The final bill, passed just before the winter holidays, was like an early Christmas present for Shriver: Against all expectations, it passed by a larger margin in both houses than any previous OEO bill. Given that for most of the year the OEO had seemed on the verge of extinction, this seemed almost miraculous—a political triumph of the highest order. Working Congress as hard as he ever had, Shriver had overcome all the obstacles thrown in his way to once again prove himself king of Capitol Hill.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
What Next?
Early 1968 should have been a time of celebration for Shriver. He had accomplished what many informed observers had said was impossible. Not only had he managed to get a hostile Congress to reauthorize the poverty program but he also had persuaded the legislature to increase the OEO’s budget above what President Johnson had proposed for it. The newspapers hailed Shriver’s triumph as a masterpiece of congressional salesmanship; subsequent historians have called the OEO reauthorization President Johnson’s most significant legislative victory of 1967. Shriver’s political star, which had been dimmed to near-darkness only a year before, was flickering brightly once again over Washington.
But the shower of political accolades obscured the fact that the OEO was still not on a healthy fiscal footing. Funding was still well short of what was needed to deliver promised services and programs. The grandiose projections Shriver and Johnson had made about substantially eliminating poverty by 1976 were hollow in light of the insufficient funding the OEO was receiving. Shriver knew this. His staff at the OEO knew it. President Johnson knew it. And although Shriver remained committed to preserving and expanding the programs he had created, he could no longer muster the conviction required to run an “unconditional War on Poverty.” He simply did not have the resources to wage such a war. And he could no longer convince himself that such resources would be forthcoming anytime soon.
President Johnson, once the OEO bill of 1967 was passed, gave rote avowals of support for the poverty program, but it was clear he no longer placed much hope in it, either as a vote-getter or as a policy tool; his mind was elsewhere, on Vietnam and the 1968 election. In previous years, LBJ had signed the OEO bills with great fanfare; in 1967 he signed the bill with no fanfare at all. In fact he signed it, appropriately enough, while on a flight to Vietnam.
Johnson, watching Bobby Kennedy’s camp with anxiety for signs of a Democratic primary challenge in the spring, was as suspicious of Shriver as ever and seemed to resent the rising of his political star. The OEO itself had become an emblem of shame for Johnson, a symbol of expectations raised but not met by his Great Society. As more and more Democrats opposed LBJ’s Vietnam policy, and more and more liberals attacked him, the OEO was like an albatross around his neck, reminding him constantly that, after all his protestations to the contrary, he had done just what the liberals had always said he would: failed to build on the domestic aspirations of President Kennedy. Never mind that this charge was unfair, that the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, not to mention the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid—all achieved before the Great Society’s oxygen was sucked up by Vietnam—had made Johnson a more accomplished domestic president than Kennedy had been. Liberals, angry at Johnson over the war in Vietnam and over the fiscal starvation of his domestic programs, perceived the charge to be true—and Johnson, with his radar-like ability to detect slights, felt their perception acutely.
This unhappy context framed the discussions Shriver and Johnson had about the OEO budget in early 1968. Shortly after New Year’s Day, Shriver flew down to the LBJ ranch to meet with the president. The president told him that in his State of the Union address, on January 17, he would be announcing a large new job-creation initiative and an emergency riot-prevention program for summer. The plan sounded like a good one to Shriver until the president told him where the money for the new initiative would come from: the OEO budget. Shriver protested that this would be extremely damaging; the OEO was already having to scale back some of its badly underfunded programs. Additional cuts now would be devastating. The president explained that he needed to start these programs and that, with the budget squeeze caused by the war, there was nowhere else he could turn.
Shriver flew home and wrote a memo to Johnson, saying that he was beginning to cut back OEO programs as instructed. He also said, however, that he wanted to be sure the president fully understood the impact of the cuts he was demanding. Some 13,000 children would have to be dumped immediately from Head Start. Some 170,000 teenagers would have to be dropped from the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Legal Services would have to try 60,000 fewer cases per year. Sixteen Job Corps centers would close. Ghetto residents who had been employed by these programs would have to be let go. Shriver’s question for Johnson was all but explicit: Are you sure this is what you want? There was no response from the White House.
In his State of the Union address a few days later, Johnson barely mentioned the poverty program but spoke at length about his new, three-year job creation program. After that, the bitterness at the OEO began seeping out into the press. On February 1, 1968, an OEO source told United Press International that Johnson’s proposed cutbacks could lead to a “mass resignation of top officials” in the poverty program. “I would not be surprised at all to see most of our top people leave if things continue in this way. You can bet that if Sarge were to leave tomorrow, a lot of us would walk out with him.”
The president was furious when he read this, and he forwarded a copy of it with a memo to Joe Califano on February 4. “Tell Shriver to trace this leak and accept the resignation of this man and any others responsible for it so he will not agonize any further. I consider [Shriver] head of this organization and therefore responsible for it.” Yet the very next day an even more damaging report appeared in the Washington Post. The article, by J. W. Anderson, included a description of Shriver’s angry memo to Johnson about the effects of the OEO cutbacks. Anderson took the memo and the budget cuts as evidence of a larger phenomenon: “The real impact of this budget lies in the drastic cuts in presidential hopes and purposes,” Anderson wrote.
Each of President Johnson’s historic new social and educational bills was originally designed to operate on a far larger scale than it ever achieved. All over the country there are mayors, city councilmen, and school boards full of wrath because the Federal end of the partnership did not live up to its expansive promises.… The cumulative effect of this repeated cycle of Great Society promise and default has been a growing distrust of the Federal Government. This new distrust is most marked among precisely those people who, five years ago, put the greatest faith in the idea of large new Federal social programs: those people who are, or were, the urban liberals.
It was becoming clear that Shriver could not profitably stay much longer at the OEO. Johnson seemed not to trust him any more; no matter what Shriver did to demonstrate his loyalty, the president always thought he could see the Kennedys standing behind Shriver’s shoulder. The agency, having survived its birth and tumultuous infancy, was ready for a less unorthodox administrative hand. Shriver himself, bruised by the political battles of the previous two years, was tired of the fight. He was ready for a new challenge.
The whispering that Shriver was about to resign to run for office in Illinois became audible nationwide as early as Christmas of 1967. Otto Kerner, the Democratic governor of Illinois, was no longer popular with voters and had fallen out of favor with Democratic kingmaker Dick Daley, who was looking for someone to replace him. Shriver’s Illinois friends and Washington
supporters kept throwing his name into the mix.
But the situation in Illinois was complex, because Republican senator Everett Dirksen was also up for reelection in 1968. Dick Daley, naturally, wanted to find a Democratic candidate to unseat Dirksen. The complicating factor was that in early 1968, Dirksen was one of the staunchest supporters of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy in the increasingly unfriendly Senate—so it wasn’t entirely clear that it was in Johnson’s best interest that this particular Republican be unseated.
Still, the race with Richard Nixon—who looked likely to become the Republican nominee—would assuredly be much closer than Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory over Goldwater had been. Some experts were predicting the race would be as close as in 1960, when Jack Kennedy’s slender margin of victory in Illinois (7,700 votes) had been the difference between the presidency and defeat. Illinois, in other words, would be crucial to Johnson’s reelection chances. This meant that running a strong Democratic slate in that state was essential.
As the Democratic Cook County Central Committee prepared for its first meeting of 1968, the talk among the committee members was whether President Johnson would pressure Daley to run Shriver against Dirksen. There were at least two reasons why Johnson might choose to do this. First, a Shriver candidacy might help neutralize Robert Kennedy; putting Shriver on the Illinois slate along with LBJ might have the effect of “locking in” RFK behind the president. It would be awkward for Bobby to be criticizing the president’s record from New York while his brother-in-law was running on that same record in Illinois. Second, it would surely help the whole Democratic slate in Illinois, including LBJ, if the Kennedys came out to campaign for Shriver.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 61