Word: oeo
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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...
...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...
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...
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...