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"This program," said Minnesota's Republican Congressman Albert Quie, "could become not just a national disgrace, but a national catastrophe." The House G.O.P. leadership has described it as "a churning Disneyland of administrative chaos." "The war on poverty," Richard Nixon said recently, "has been first in promises, first in politics, first in press releases—and last in performance."
The outcry over the Johnson Administration's much-ballyhooed poverty program is by no means limited to Republicans. In city after city, outraged Democratic mayors have protested that Washington is subsidizing wars of civic subversion by insisting that the poor be given a voice in dispensing the manna that has traditionally been a city hall prerogative.
Among the most vociferous critics are the poor and the leaders of the poor. Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin has condemned the campaign as "a bag of tricks." Professional Organizer Saul Alinsky has blistered it as "a prize piece of political pornography." There have been countless charges of nepotism, malfeasance and administrative fiddledeedee, of demeaning interagency squabbles in the capital and squalid scandals in the boondocks.
This cataract of criticism is aimed at an idealistic program without precedent in hope or scope. In less than two years the assault on poverty has cost $2.3 billion, directly reached 3,000,000 of the poor, and generated a spectrum of social-welfare commitments unmatched by any previous Administration in U.S. history. It was first envisioned by John F. Kennedy, who set the crusade in motion six months before his assassination, convinced by a spate of studies that the U.S., for all its easy affluence, still harbored stubborn depths of deprivation and despair.
The condition that so aroused a President's concern has become the concern of an entire nation. Since his succession to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson has repeatedly limned the plight of those he has called, paraphrasing Disraeli, "that other nation within a nation—the poor—whose distress has not captured the conscience of America." Enthusiastically embracing the assault on poverty as "my kind of program," Johnson in his first State of the Union message pledged allegiance to those who "live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both." Vowed the President: "This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditioned war on poverty in America."
Noisy, Visible, Dirty. The war is grandiose in scope and often extravagant in its claims, and it has inevitably invited a massive crossfire of criticism. In the face of its palpable failures to date and the formidable problems it faces in the future, detractors of the war on poverty have every reason to ask: Can it be won?