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To R. Sargent Shriver Jr., 50, who as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity has been generalissimo of the war from its start, the answer is simple: It must be won. Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who had previously nursed the Peace Corps from dubious birth to wide acclaim, admits that the anti-poverty campaign has been and will continue to be "noisy, visible, dirty, uncomfortable and sometimes politically unpopular." He argues, nonetheless, that if it should fail, the loss would be crucially damaging to the U.S.
Troughmanship. Starting at scratch, Shriver's OEO has launched a dozen complex programs, recruited quite a few able people to run them, and in most instances moved swiftly to excise abuses. By contrast with the Peace Corps, which got one twenty-fifth as much funds in its first two years and operated mostly in areas remote from domestic scrutiny, the war on poverty has probably suffered most from President Johnson's hankering for Instant Utopia. "It's like we went down to Cape Kennedy," says Shriver, "and launched a half-dozen rockets at once."
Enough have left the pad to convince members of the House Education and Labor Committee that the program should be granted $250 million more than the $1.75 billion that the President requested for the anti-poverty budget in 1967. The committee chairman, Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell, is all for the increase—though not long ago he was a bitter critic of the program, complaining that big-city mayors were turning it into "giant fiestas of political patronage" and, mixing metaphors, that they were feeding "political hacks at the trough."
Shriver's OEO is a direct spiritual heir of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, which was organized in a period of national convulsion, when 15 million Americans were out of work and distress was the norm. Shriver's war, though conducted in an era of less obvious urgency, is actually more complex, more challenging and more ambitious. For, unlike Depression-era make-work programs, it aims not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but also to cure its causes as well. "It will be impossible to end completely the culture of poverty until opportunity is equal for all," says Shriver. "The programs of this agency are designed to alleviate permanently the conditions that have so long kept the poor 'in their place.' "
Seldom articulate and usually all but invisible, America's poor are the losers in what Connecticut's Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff calls "the lotteries of parenthood, skin pigmentation and birthplace." In a society and an age that demand ever higher skills and more sophisticated minds, the poor, simply by standing still, are caught up in a kind of geometric regression. For the most part, they are those whom the welfare state never brushed, a residual minority tucked away in rural backwaters and urban ghettos: the Cumberland's dirt farmer, the Mississippi cotton chopper, the migrant farm worker in California's Imperial Valley, the illiterate Harlem dishwasher. They exist, as Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America, "beyond history, beyond progress, sunk in a paralyzing, maiming routine."