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The first problem was what to call the new agency. "War on Poverty" had to be dropped because it formed an acronym offensive to Italians; the pallid OEO was adopted instead. To avoid a recurrence of New Dealish alphabet-soup titles, programs were given catchy names rather than initials. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) was an exception, and so was CAP (Community Action Program). At the local level, though, it was acronyms aweigh. Detroit opened TAP (Total Action Against Poverty). New York insisted on BEST (Basic Essential Skills Training) and QUEST (Queens Educational and Social Team). There was PROP (Portland Regional Opportunities Program) and DWOP, which sounds like a mispronunciation but represents Denver War on Poverty. A less felicitous coinage was the name given a privately financed program at Haverford College: Broadening Opportunities.
The new agency's enthusiasm—"the beautiful hysteria of it all," as one aide put it—only honed outsiders' skepticism. Hadn't the nation heard this sort of talk before? Hadn't Herbert Hoover, just a year before the great collapse of 1929, proclaimed: "We shall soon, with the help of God, be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation"? In Louisville and Manhattan, bumper stickers and lapel buttons proclaimed: I'M FIGHTING POVERTY. I WORK. Louisiana Congressman Otto Passman complained that the ballyhoo was damaging the U.S. image abroad, averring solemnly that a family in his district had even received a CARE package from worried relatives in Europe. On Ed Sullivan's Sunday night television show a comic announced: "I joined the war on poverty—I threw a hand grenade at a beggar."
Whipcracking Impatience. Ignoring the guffaws, Shriver brought to the task of shaping programs the same idealism and frenetic urgency with which he infused the Peace Corps. At the suggestion of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime friend of the President's who was then a Washington lawyer, OEO was set up as a separate executive office with direct administrative control over three of the war's eight major programs (Community Action, the Job Corps and VISTA) and supervisory responsibility for others at the federal, state and local levels.
It proved a mighty mandate. The U.S. welfare system is an all but impenetrable labyrinth of overlapping, interlocking, and often competing programs. Some 200 federal projects administered by 21 federal agencies are involved in the poverty war. In the area of manpower and development alone, seven federal departments have their own programs. When it wrote the poverty bill, Congress had a chance to streamline the machinery and thereby spare Shriver some of the interdepartmental bickering that has plagued him. But Congress muffed the opportunity—in part because of Lyndon Johnson's whipcracking impatience to get on with the Great Society.
Among the major OEO programs that were created: