(2 of 10)
Focus on the Future. So rapidly have programs multiplied that fragmentation and lack of coordination are chronic. The inevitable consequence has been a withering fusillade of criticism aimed at the Great Society. Democratic Governors complained to Johnson that his programs had sown confusion in their states by gorging them with cash and concepts that they were simply not prepared to handle. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has urged the 90th Congress to conduct a "top-to-bottom" re-evaluation of Great Society programs to repair "rough edges, overextensions, overlaps, and perhaps even significant gaps." Congress seems more than willing to oblige.
Can the Great Society, in fact, be built—and managed? John Gardner, who bears more responsibility than any other official save the President for answering the question, is confident that it can. A tall, trim (6 ft. 2 in., 175 Ibs.), handsome man with deep-set brown eyes and a classical nose that, according to his mother, acquired its Roman cast by getting broken in a high school football scrimmage, Gardner remains imperturbable in the midst of the tempest. As president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation for ten years before joining the Government, Gardner has long been accustomed to focusing on the future rather than on passing squalls. Thus he sees the uproar over the Great Society as nothing more than "whitecaps on a very deep sea." And he has gone right on probing beneath the surface.
Besides, Gardner has a commitment to the ideal of the Great Society that antedates even Lyndon Johnson's. In 1961, three years before the President's now-famous speech at Ann Arbor, Mich., Gardner wrote in a provocative essay called Excellence that Americans "long, long ago were committed, as free men, to the arduous task of building a great society—not just a strong one, not just a rich one, but a great society."
Last week alone, he and HEW were embattled on half a dozen fronts in their efforts to achieve that vision. The department:
> Threatened to cut off $95.8 million in federal welfare funds for Alabama unless the state complied with desegregation guidelines by Feb. 28. Alabama authorities had plainly doubted that Gardner would leave some 200,000 welfare recipients without funds, but he felt that he had no choice. "If we don't move," he said, "our policies with the other states are a hollow shell."
>Warned the board of education in Chicago, where only 13% of the city's 500,000 pupils attend integrated schools, that it too may face a cutoff in federal funds. At the same time, HEW teams were studying patterns of segregation in 45 other cities, a signal that Gardner may be preparing to take action in the hypersensitive area of defacto segregation.
> Urged New York and New Jersey to adopt more stringent controls over what one HEW official described as "the worst, most critical" air pollution in the U.S. The air is so foul, said a Public Health Service official, that "if it were subject to the pure food and drug laws, it would be illegal to ship it interstate because it's unfit for human consumption." Or for anything else, in fact: a study showed that Cleopatra's Needle, a stone obelisk in Manhattan's Central Park,