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Weekends, he walks or sits in the backyard, always shifting to stay in the sun, and puts down his thoughts in a clear hand on the ever-present yellow pad.
Up the Mountain. In his 18 months in office, Gardner has taken hold of HEW with markedly greater determination and sureness than any of his five predecessors. The effect is being felt not only around the capital, but out in the regions as well. Jim Bond, a multimillionaire Dallas businessman who, atypically, is HEW's regional director for a five-state Southwest area (and who annually donates more to charity than he makes at his $22,500-a-year job), concedes that in the past, "I haven't always been as enthusiastic as I should have. But John Gardner is something else. He believes in working your way out of a bad situation, not just spending your way out. And he wants to run these programs from the community involved, not from Washington."
Often the praise becomes extravagant. "The 18th century produced a lot of men who had a truly universal approach—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, and that's what I see in John Gardner," says Old Neighbor Dean Rusk. "The future is his business. His object is to anticipate the problems of tomorrow and help people to become prepared for it."
Equally unstinting in praise is the President. "He has dreams," says Lyndon Johnson. "He can take you up on the mountain and show you the promised land. And what's more, he can lead you there." Frequently he compares Gardner with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. "I thought for some time we ought to take McNamara and move him over to run HEW," says the President. But Viet Nam intervened, and then Gardner came along and proved that he was, in Johnson's words, "a can-do man." Gardner, says the President, "could hold any job in Government."
There are those, inevitably, who think that he is also eminently suited for Lyndon Johnson's job. But Gardner, who describes himself as "a remarkably non-political kind of person," dismisses such a notion as unrealistic.
Major Departure. When asked what he considers his chief accomplishment, Gardner places HEW's wide-reaching advances in civil rights at the top of the list. "For this nation, justice for the Negro is the social problem," he says, and his determination to attach tough guidelines to health and education programs is helping, however slowly, to solve it. It took a decade after the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision to get 2.5% of the Deep South's Negroes into previously all-white schools. Thanks to HEW's pressure, that figure soared to 12.5% in the past two years. So far, some 45 school districts and 35 hospitals have had federal funds suspended or cut off for refusing to comply with the guidelines.
In the long run, however, Gardner's efforts to reshape relationships among the various levels of Government, universities, corporations and private groups may prove an equally important development to the U.S. Dartmouth Historian Harry N. Scheiber has written: "The American