Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  In January 1964 the President fired his big guns. The Economic Report was published with Lampman’s chapter on poverty. In his budget message he asked for $500 million specifically for poverty and $1 billion more under existing and proposed legislation for local community action programs. Most memorable was this passage in the State of Union address of January 8, 1964:

  Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

  This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join me in that effort.

  It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.

  Everything about this statement was remarkable. An issue which had lain shrouded in silence for generations and only in the past few years had interested a limited group of writers and scholars was suddenly elevated to one of the most pressing questions facing the nation. When he spoke, Johnson had no proposed legislation and his advisers remained sharply divided over what such a law should provide and how it should be administered. What was he making an unconditional commitment to? Lampman had estimated that, if the government simply bought out the poor by giving all of them the cash needed to bring them up to the poverty lines, the cost would be $11 billion a year. But the President at the outside was asking for only $1.5 billion and, in fact, it turned out be less than $1 billion. This was not unconditional warfare; it was a skirmish. In fact, those who had been working on the program had already agreed that the elderly poor would be passed over, that the benefits would go to the young. The hollowness of the President’s promise would plague the poverty program.

  In late January the controversy within the administration intensified. Wirtz resumed his plea for jobs. Poverty, he argued, was a lack of income, and income came from work. Community action would create few jobs aside from summer and part-time work for students. While improvement in the health and education of the poor was desirable, their impact on income was indirect or remote. Moreover, the Labor Department’s basic programs, like the minimum wage and manpower training, were not adaptable to the community action approach. Heller and Gordon, according to John Bibby and Roger Davidson, found it difficult to counter this argument. In addition, there was disagreement over administrative responsibility for the poverty program. HEW wanted it, but none of the other departments or agencies approved. The alternative was to create a new, independent agency with a poverty “czar” reporting directly to the President. There was another reason for putting a new boss in charge immediately. There would be, Sundquist pointed out, “an enormous lobbying job” with Congress and neither the Council nor the Budget Bureau was capable of that.5

  It did not take Lyndon Johnson long to make his choice: his big forefinger pointed straight at R. Sargent Shriver, the Director of the Peace Corps. He was chosen, Shriver thought, primarily because “it was going to be very hard to get that program through Congress” and he had “extremely good rapport with Congress.” He had gone up to the Hill every year for the Peace Corps and had enjoyed extraordinary success. He thought this was because he liked and respected the members of Congress. “I honestly believe that the principal reason why President Johnson wanted me to do it was that a large proportion of the congressmen and senators trusted me.”

  There could have been secondary reasons as well. At the time jurisdictional conflict between departments was bubbling up and Shriver’s appointment would help prevent it from boiling over. He was a member of the Kennedy family by marriage and he was not among those who regarded Johnson as a usurper. “I came down to Washington to work for the President of the United States. I was not opposed to Lyndon Johnson; it wasn’t his fault that he became President as a result of my brother-in-law’s death.” The fact that Bill Moyers, Johnson’s fair-haired boy, had worked for Shriver in the Peace Corps and much admired him could have done his candidacy no harm.

  There was another factor in Shriver’s favor of which the President was probably unaware: he had a lifelong interest in poverty. His family had suffered severely during the Depression and that made “a very strong impression on me,” much like being “a victim of a natural catastrophe.” A Catholic, Shriver as a teenager had worked with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement with the poor in New York. He read the works of that champion of the poor, St. Francis of Assisi, and joined the Third Order of St. Francis. In Chicago he became a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and visited weekly those in poverty on the near North Side. As the head of that city’s board of education, he worked hard to improve ghetto schools.

  On January 31, 1964, Shriver came to the White House to report on “a remarkable trip” around the world that he had just concluded. The President had sent him off with many letters to heads of state and he had a good deal to say. Johnson took Shriver for a walk around the Rose Garden and the driveway. “You know,” Johnson said, “we’re getting this war against poverty started. I’d like you to think about that, because I’d like you to run that program for us.”

  Shriver had trouble thinking about it. He had a huge pile of catchup work at the Peace Corps and his wife was still in a state of shock over her brother’s assassination. The next morning the phone rang at 10 o’clock. “Sarge, what do you think about that war against poverty?” Embarrassed, Shriver admitted that he had not thought about it. “Sarge, I’d like to have a press conference today at noon, and I’d like to announce you as the head of my new program.” Shriver protested and said there was plenty of time. At 11 the phone rang again.

  Shriver said that he needed a week to consider it; he was very happy with his job at the Peace Corps; there were more qualified people for the poverty program; and so on. Johnson said, “You think about it.” At 11:30 he called back and spoke in a low voice:

  Sarge, this is your President speaking. I’ve interrupted a meeting going on right now in the Cabinet Room. … There’s nobody that can see the whole picture like the President can. I need you to do this job, and I’m going to announce you as the director of the war against poverty at the news conference at twelve o’clock.

  Shriver could hear the phone click.

  At the news conference the President announced that Sargent Shriver had agreed to serve as his special assistant “in the organization and administration of the war on poverty program.” This suggested that Shriver would draft the legislation, that a new agency would be established, and that Shriver would be its head. “Mr. Shriver,” Johnson added, “will continue to serve as Director of the Peace Corps.”

  As Shriver started to think about his new undertaking, he realized that, as he put it, “nobody really knew how to fight poverty.” He would have “to pick the brains of any qualified—and many unqualified—Americans.” He would need to assemble the pickees in one place and that called for the formation of a task force.

  Adam Yarmolinsky, the brilliant and acerbic special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, had worked for Shriver on the presidential campaign in 1960 and on the talent search to staff the Kennedy administration. He had been associated with Paul Ylvisaker at the Ford Foundation and was familiar with community action in its Gray Areas form. On February 2 Shriver invited Yarmolinsky to the first meeting of the task force. Shriver’s plan was that he would be the outside man and Yarmolinsky would handle the inside. At the task-force stage, therefore, Yarmolinsky would be responsible for drafting the bill and Shriver’s job would be to push it through Congress. Later, when the new agency was established, Shriver would play the public role and Yarmolinsky would administer the program. Since Yarmolinsky would be giving up a “permanent” job at the Pentagon for the uncertainty of becoming deputy director of the poverty agency later, he asked to be made a deputy special assistant to the Pr
esident. Johnson agreed, but, shortly, Bill Moyers came by to say that the President had changed his mind. Yarmolinsky would be deputy head of the task force and, when the legislation was signed, nominated as deputy director of the administrative agency. Though annoyed, Yarmolinsky did not quit because he knew that Shriver trusted him.

  Shriver’s style in running the poverty task force was the same as he had used three years earlier in putting the Peace Corps together. He gathered an extraordinary group of people, 137 altogether, during the month and a half the task force existed; he gave them an electric sense of being in on the creation; and he established a mood of excitement and exhilaration that sometimes turned to exhaustion and chaos. One participant called it a “beautiful hysteria.” Even the quarters in which they met were consistent with this style:

  The Task Force began its work at the Peace Corps building. Later, it was to move to the old Federal Court of Claims building; then to the basement of the unused Emergency Hospital; then to the New Colonial Hotel; and finally to the newly constructed Brown building. … The move from the Court of Claims was forced; one afternoon an engineer notified the planners that there was a crack in the structure (excavation was under way next door), and that everyone had to vacate within two hours. Eighty people, who had crammed into the building on an ad hoc basis, went streaming out, arms flowing with folders and papers. … The Task Force was [then] implanted in the Emergency Hospital in what had been the basement morgue.

  Shriver called the first meeting, a small one, on February 2 in the Peace Corps conference room. He and Yarmolinsky knew only that the Heller-Gordon team had developed a new approach to the poverty problem and that $500 million had been put in the budget. Schultze outlined the premises: existing government programs were too diffuse. New projects must concentrate on the “neighborhoods” and must be coordinated at the federal, state, and local levels. The primary responsibility must be state and local. Community action was the instrument for the attack on poverty. The experiences of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and the Ford Foundation supported these conclusions.

  The participants took a break and Shriver and Yarmolinsky adjourned to the men’s room. Shriver said, “It’ll never fly.” Yarmolinsky agreed immediately. The latter wrote later that community action was attractive, but was not sufficiently broad to encompass the many different groups in poverty. Further, it would take at least a year to develop plans, longer in rural areas. “Community action would not be able to produce the kind of concrete results in a foreseeable time period … to satisfy the Congress.” Thus, it was necessary to make changes to the program in order to yield “visible results” during the first year.

  There was another problem. Johnson had told Shriver that he would have $500 million for that year. He phoned an old friend from Yale, Dick Lee, now the mayor of New Haven, to ask how much he would have to spend on community action if he “took the rubber band off the bankroll.” Projecting from that city to the nation came to half a billion dollars. Shriver concluded that he could not possibly commit so much to one program. Thus, the appropriation demanded programs beyond community action.

  The operation of the task force stretched government procedures. As Shriver put it, “We didn’t have any situs, any home, any authority.” “If you’re not authorized, it’s just like being a bastard.” Yarmolinsky said there was a “theoretical” budget of $10,000, which was ridiculous. “We operated by borrowing people from government agencies and nongovernment agencies and getting volunteers. We had a lot of people who just worked for free. We borrowed secretaries and we borrowed services.” They even snitched stationery from the White House, which got them into trouble.

  Shriver, who spent most of his time on the Hill, was present only intermittently. Yarmolinsky was in charge most of the time. They kept the President informed through Moyers, but Johnson showed almost no interest in the task force substantive proposals.

  There was a group of more or less regular attendees from departments and agencies with a direct concern for the program: Heller and Capron from CEA, Gordon and Cannon from Budget, Cohen and Harold Horowitz, the associate general counsel, from HEW, Wirtz and his assistant, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, from Labor, Sundquist from Agriculture, Hackett and Boone from Justice, and Interior Secretary Udall, who was responsible for Indian affairs. From time to time experts offered advice on their specialties. Ylvisaker, Mayor Lee, and Sviridoff from New Haven, Governor Sanford of North Carolina, and Mayor John Houlihan of Oakland discussed their experiences with community action. Yarmolinsky brought in experts on logistics from Defense to deal with encampments for the Job Corps. When the thinking had crystallized, Shriver invited Assistant Attorney General Norbert A. Schlei, who was an expert on legislative drafting, to join. He put together a team consisting of Horowitz, two of his own assistants, and a lawyer from Labor. Yarmolinsky and Schlei had been friends at Yale.

  Shriver was eager to get new ideas. “Shriver,” Yarmolinsky said, “carries around in his head a list of interesting people whom he likes to call on.” He invited input from Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, Paul Jacobs, a left-leaning champion of the opposite side, and Frank Mankiewicz of the Peace Corps, who had developed community action in Latin America. James Sundquist read their memoranda carefully but was convinced that the task force was reinventing Roosevelt’s New Deal. “We had recreated in a single act the CCC, the NYA, the WPA, and the Resettlement Administration.” The only superficially new idea was community action, and it was “a new idea only in an organizational sense, not in the program sense.” One really new idea, expressed in hundreds of letters, which the task force did not know how to deal with, was to make birth control part of the poverty program.

  Inevitably, the Shriver task force addressed only a small aspect of poverty. Although the final budget the President sent up was $962.5 million, it was still less than 9 percent of the estimated cost of eliminating poverty for one year. With Lampman’s figures of 33 to 35 million poor people, this meant that the needs of only about 3 million would be addressed. Lyndon Johnson’s promise to wage unconditional war on poverty was pie in the sky. Harrington complained to Shriver that “you’ve been given nickels and dimes for this program.” “I don’t know about you, Mr. Harrington,” Shriver replied, “but this will be my first experience at spending a billion dollars, and I’m quite excited about it.”

  The President sought to impose another restriction on the program. He wanted to help, as Schultze put it, “the deserving poor” by improving their education, skills, and access to the growing number of jobs in the labor market. He wanted “handups,” not “handouts.” The government already provided about $15 billion annually in assistance to the poor, through an array of programs to supply either cash assistance or goods and services to those in need. Johnson accepted them reluctantly; for him the operative word was “opportunity.” The new law would be called the Economic Opportunity Act. In his message to Congress proposing the legislation he wrote: “The war on poverty is not a struggle to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others. It is a struggle to give people a chance. It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities. … ”

  The Shriver task force did not even seriously discuss what Yarmolinsky called “the burning sociological issue” of Oscar Lewis and his culture of poverty except for a few passing references. If Lewis was right, there was probably nothing the government could do for the underclass, those at the very bottom.

  As for those the program could help, many were black and lived in urban ghettoes, even though Lampman had estimated that 78 percent of the people in poverty were white. Shriver’s probings on the Hill quickly demonstrated that he would need conservative southern votes to pass the bill. Members of Congress from the South would not support heavy assistance to the black poor, particularly those concentrated in the central cities of the North. And once the bill passed, the task force predicted, the rights of poor blacks in the South to access to the program in discri
minating towns, counties, and states would have to be protected.

  The task force did not foresee the potential conflicts that the encouragement of “maximum feasible participation” by the poor in their cities’ community action programs would cause. Shriver thought there might be battles between mayors and the poor aligned together against the “ladies bountiful,” that is, the traditional social agencies. But, Yarmolinsky wrote, “the possibility of major conflict between the organized poor and the politicians in city hall was simply not one that anybody worried about.”

  More serious, no one anticipated that Lyndon Johnson would go into Vietnam the next year and that the real war would destroy the political base for the war on poverty. When Yarmolinsky was asked 16 years later what he would have done differently about poverty, he responded, “I would have called off the war in Vietnam. That’s number one.”6

  Yarmolinsky and Schlei crafted a bill with two basic parts for the major programs and a third part consisting of the lesser programs and the administrative features. Title I was called youth programs and consisted of the Job Corps, work-training, and work-study; Title II was the community action programs (CAP); five other titles followed. Of the $962.5 million budgeted, $412.5 million (43 percent) was for youth programs, $315 million (33 percent) for community action, and $235 million (24 percent) for the others.

  The Job Corps, which was allotted $190 million, was directed at males aged 16 to 21, that is, those beyond mandatory school age who had not yet found a place in the labor market. A large proportion were out of work, poor, and into drugs and crime. Young women were omitted because they remained in school longer and found jobs more readily. Secretary Wirtz pointed out that male youth unemployment in June 1963 was 21 percent, “the highest point since records have been kept.” During 1963 the nation had not created “a single job” for youth. The near future could be worse because “the baby boom is just now rolling into the work force.” There would be two Job Corps programs: rural camps—modeled on FDR’s extremely successful Civilian Conservation Corps—in which corpsmen would receive basic education and experience in conservation work on public lands, and urban boarding schools—Shriver’s idea, from his days as board of education director in Chicago—training centers in which youngsters from the ghetto would be placed into the insulated environment of a “boarding school.” They would receive good housing, food, medical care, and, as Shriver put it, “an educational program, with a work component.”