Word: shriver
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Acronyms Aweigh. As far as Congress was concerned, the most compelling argument for the anti-poverty program was that it could ultimately transform chronic "tax eaters," in Johnson's phrase, to new taxpayers. Even before it received congressional approval, Shriver had started gathering staffers and ideas. "How in the hell do you fight a war on poverty?" he asked everyone within earshot. "What do you do?" Laboring up to 16 hours a day, the anti-poverty warriors were shunted all over the capital, found themselves at one point in the basement morgue of an ancient hospital, at another...
...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...
...Sargent Shriver Jr., 50, who as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity has been generalissimo of the war from its start, the answer is simple: It must be won. Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who had previously nursed the Peace Corps from dubious birth to wide acclaim, admits that the anti-poverty campaign has been and will continue to be "noisy, visible, dirty, uncomfortable and sometimes politically unpopular." He argues, nonetheless, that if it should fail, the loss would be crucially damaging...
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...