Word: oeo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cuts across every federal department and involves every program that in any way relates to the environment that perpetuates poverty. Last week Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner created the new post of family-planning coordinator to give fresh impetus to birth-control programs-a field that the OEO has treated gingerly despite evidence that the poor have the most children, and grow poorer as a result...
Sargent Shriver sees his agency as the leader in the assault on poverty. "The programs of the OEO will cost the taxpayers only 1? out of every tax dollar," he says, "but this 1? provides the cutting edge of all our efforts. Because our 1? is directed at selfhelp, self-motivation, education and local community action, all of our programs are designed ultimately to end poverty...
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...
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...
...second day. He had been warned to expect hostility, and rewrote his speech to prepare for it. "I know you have got the grill," he began, "and I'm the hamburger, freshly ground yesterday and ready to be cooked today." He met the opposition head on, detailed OEO's considerable accomplishments, and expressed his own impatience with not being able to do more faster. He likened the poor to labor-union members, who must sometimes settle for less than their full demands. "The American society can't afford wildcat strikes in the industrial area; even less...