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> Called on tobacco companies to print the precise amounts of tar and nicotine in their cigarettes on every pack and in every advertisement as well.
>Announced the establishment of a special Center for Community Planning designed to link the frequently fragmented efforts of HEW and other departments such as Housing and Urban Development "in a total program for human betterment" in U.S. cities.
For all that activity, Gardner would be quick to concede that the Great Society's gravest problem is not a lack of financing. "The need for money is less acute than the need for new ways to use it," says Gardner. "We vote billions into old channels. If we are going to get the job done, the money should be used to find better ways of doing it."
Among the Many. Gardner has probably devoted as much energy to seeking new channels as any man in the Government. He is well aware that a strong central authority is necessary in a nation as vast as the U.S. At the same time, among the aphorisms that he has been collecting for the past 36 years, there is one from Thomas Jefferson that he particularly cherishes. "No, my friend," said Jefferson in a letter, "the way to have good and safe Government is not to trust it all to one, but, to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to."
What is needed, as Gardner sees it, is the development of an entirely new series of relationships in the name of "creative federalism." Already, he says, "the Federal Government has established a wide array of partnerships—not just with state governments, but also with local governments, with universities and hospitals, with voluntary agencies and professional associations, and with the whole of the business world." Under Medicare, an extraordinary partnership has been forged involving 6,750 hospitals, 2,500 nursing homes, 250,000 physicians, 107 Blue Cross and Blue Shield programs, 26 private insurance carriers, all 50 state health agencies and several branches of HEW.
To Gardner, the great weakness in the complex, interlocking chain is the fact that "most state and local governments do not have the vitality and competence to play their role in an effective partnership with the Federal Government." In all 50 states, no more than a handful of education commissioners are regarded as good administrators; nearly half are elected politicians. For men of superior talents, the glamour is in Washington, not in Albany or Austin; the money is in business, not in a city council or a zoning commission.
Unproductive Clichés. One key to the ultimate success of this process of partnership and interpenetration is the business community. Only recently, a paranoid distrust poisoned relations between the private and public sectors of the nation. There remain quite a few holdouts in both camps, but the instances of cooperation between the two are growing, notably in the space program and in the development of new educational tools.
The biggest role for business may lie in the future, when the U.S. sets out in earnest to reinvigorate its deteriorating urban centers. "In improving our cities,"Chase Manhattan