Six-Star Sargent

Next to the shooting war in Viet Nam, the spending war against home-front poverty is perhaps the most applauded, criticized and calumniated issue in the U.S. By way of defending his generalship in the Great Society, Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), marched last week on the House poverty subcommittee. He had expected a firing squad but got a bombardment of bouquets instead. The bullets came later.

Shriver's official mission was to present the Administration's request for $1.75 billion in poverty funds for the year beginning July 1. One of Washington's smoothest Capitol Hill performers, Shriver adroitly combined a recitation of OEO's concrete achievements with candid admissions of its faults. His interrogators responded with such phrases as "a great public servant" and "a domestic Westmoreland." Even the abrasive committee chairman, Adam Clayton Powell, oozed approbation. "How many stars do we give the general?" asked Powell. "One, five, six? Let's give him six."

"America Is Winning." With justifiable pride, Shriver pointed to Project Head Start, which has brought a touch of civilization to 600,000 preschool slum children, as OEO's most successful effort. He noted that 300,000 volunteers have enlisted in the poverty war, and that the campaign has "reached more than 3,000,000 poor people directly" with jobs, training and other services. "America," he said, "is winning the war on poverty."

The failures Shriver acknowledged were mostly of a local nature. He admitted that the high-minded notion of electing the poor to local community-action boards had laid a costly egg. In Los Angeles recently, fewer than 1% of those eligible voted, bringing the cost per ballot cast to $22.94. Shriver also conceded that programs in some cities had been delayed because of failure to reach agreement with local officials or plain bad judgement. In Harlem, the OEO spent $40,000 to enable Negro Playwright LeRoi Jones to stage what Shriver described--mildly--as "vile racist plays in vile gutter language unfit for the youngsters in the audience."

Fuddle Factory. Shriver's main presentation over, the storm clouds closed in. The Republicans, though polite enough in the hearing room, were aggressive in presenting their own poverty program on the House floor. Proposing to allocate most of OEO's functions to other agencies, G.O.P. critics denounced Shriver's agency as a "fuddle factory," claimed they could accomplish more with $200 million less. More flak came from an unexpected source, Democratic Representative Edith Green of Oregon, who disclosed that the cost of keeping a single boy in the Job Corps for one year is $9,120--substantially more than previous estimates.

Meanwhile, OEO announced that new criteria for anti-poverty personnel specifically bar persons showing "disloyalty" to the U.S. and those "recently convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude"--a tacit admission that complaints about loose hiring practices (and loose-living workers) had some validity. Then, part of a confidential report by the Powell committee staff that criticized some OEO projects was obtained by the New York Post. The published news story depicted serious troubles at a Job Corps center at New Jersey's Camp Kilmer. An OEO spokesman responded that Kilmer is "one of our better camps," adding lamely: "Some corpsmen get drunk on weekends, but the problem is no more than on a college campus. We had some problems in the sodomy line, but it's expected when men are together. It is part of human nature."

Since it is a considerably more natural instinct, at least for politicians in an election year, to resist cuts in domestic spending, Shriver will doubtless get his $1.75 billion. As Democratic Representative Sam Gibbons of Florida observed, "We used to say we don't want any of that tainted federal money. Now we say 'tain't enough."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.