Dart’s Defiance : Taking on the Bureaucracy, Justin Dart Jr. Lost a Job but Gained a Following

Blue-blazered and white-shirted, wearing a blue tie with tiny American flags, Justin Dart Jr. seems more the patriotic professor than the combative advocate for the handicapped.

Forced late last month to resign as commissioner of rehabilitation services after harshly criticizing Education Department management, he seems more like a man who just got liberated than one who just got fired.

He wheels his chair next to a flag that dominates a wall in his apartment near the Education Department Building in Southwest Washington, obliging a photographer, then tells a visitor of an outpouring of calls and letters from people who are angry that he was fired.

“Many have called to indicate their moral support and want to know what they can do,” he said. Others have written and telephoned Congress, the White House and the department.

Thus, in losing the job to which he was appointed in September, 1986, Dart has gained a cause. His firing is focusing unprecedented attention on problems in the Education Department and on his personal 20-year battle for the rights of the nation’s estimated 35 million handicapped.

Such is the contradiction woven through the life of Justin Whitlock Dart Jr.

His father, the late Justin Dart Sr., was the wealthy California industrialist who raised huge sums of money for the Republican Party and helped persuade Ronald Reagan to enter politics, in the process becoming a charter member of Reagan’s California “kitchen cabinet.”

But until he switched parties in 1972, the younger Dart, who is 57 years old, strongly supported Democrats, attending the inaugurations of both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

“There were some years we didn’t meet at all,” Dart said of his father, who died in January, 1984. “He was so intense about his politics, and I was so intense about mine.”

Despite their early political differences, Dart said, his father--known for his blunt views in unrefined language--”never tried to intimidate me to support his ideas.” He called his father “a great man,” adding: “He taught me a lot. He was straightforward. He was a person who held very high standards for himself and for me and others. He expected us to do whatever we did with a passion and with a conscience.”

Dart said, “We did agree on one thing: the importance of democracy and the democratic process. He told me to participate in the democratic process as if your life depended on it because it does.”

They became closer toward the end of his father’s life, said Dart, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering polio in 1948. He has a brother--also a polio victim--three half-brothers and a half-sister.

Problems With Paternalism

Explaining his rejection of the Democratic Party, he said: “I gradually came to appreciate the importance of independence and liberation from too much paternalistic central government.”

Yet it was his charge of Republican paternalism that drove the Reagan Administration to demand his resignation, which he submitted Nov. 25. It becomes effective Dec. 15.

The simmering problem boiled over at a congressional hearing on Nov. 18, when Dart set aside testimony the Education Department had approved, delivering instead what he called a “statement of conscience,” a stinging condemnation of the system in which he worked--a system he said was characterized by “paternalistic central control.”

Paternalism was so bad, Dart told The Times later, that whenever he wanted to send anything by Federal Express, he was required to get advance approval from his boss, Madeleine Will, or a “high member of her staff.”

In his testimony before the House Education and Labor subcommittee on select education, Dart said his program, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, was “afflicted . . . by profound problems in areas such as management, personnel and resource utilization.” The program, budgeted at $1.5 billion a year, makes grants to states, helping them provide training and education that will make handicapped people employable.

Dart’s remarks were too much for the Administration to swallow. Choosing between Dart and Will, the wife of conservative columnist and Reagan ally George Will, the Administration asked Dart to leave.

‘The End of Justin Dart’

Loye Miller, spokesman for Education Secretary William J. Bennett, said Dart was fired from his $72,500-a-year job “because he stood up and attacked his boss in a hearing. When he attacked Madeleine Will, he attacked Bill Bennett. And that was the end of Justin Dart.”

Not quite.

On the first of this month, Dart made public his resignation. Then, the letters to President Reagan began.

“We were shocked, profoundly saddened, and even angry at this great loss of opportunity and waste of talent,” wrote the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation.

The National Rehabilitation Assn. wrote: “The unwise decision to force Justin Dart to resign was not in the best interest of the rehabilitation program, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, the Republican Party, the Reagan Administration or more importantly the millions of American men, women and children with disabilities whose lives hang in the balance.”

Many of the letter writers have urged the President to allow Dart to remain commissioner, but Dart has discouraged this effort.

It is understandable that Dart is not begging to stay; he was not exactly enthusiastic about taking the job in the first place. He says he knew that its narrow scope, combined with the slow pace of progress in the bureaucracy, could prove unbearable. Also, he questioned his own qualifications.

“I meditated about that but felt that one could not rightfully turn down the President of the United States,” he said.

Wife Opposed Appointment

In saying yes, Dart went against the advice of his wife of 19 years, Yoshiko. She said: “I opposed (his accepting the appointment) because I thought the federal bureaucracy would get him.”

His 54-year-old brother, Peter Walgreen Dart, describing his brother as “a person of intense dedication to principle,” speculated that his brother may be like himself, mixing with bureaucracy “like oil and water.” But he added: “In his position I would have taken the job too, even knowing it was going to be hell on Earth.”

This is not the first time Dart has taken on the bureaucracy. Back in the 1950s he started the first “integration club” at the University of Houston, where he earned a graduate degree in U.S. and Texas-Mexico history in 1954. The club’s five members did not integrate the university, Dart said, but he showed he was “a human rights person.”

He quit law school to go into business in 1956, opening a bowling alley in Austin. During the 1960s he ran Japan Tupperware Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the family Rexall drugstore chain. According to his biography, he quit in 1965 over a “disagreement with parent company in regard to management policy.”

He then began to travel and study, focusing more on issues involving the disabled. “To rehabilitate disabled people, we had to rehabilitate our own minds,” Yoshiko said.

They left Japan in 1974, living in Seattle for four years and moving to Texas in 1978. He has served in dozens of policy and advocacy groups, receiving countless awards for his efforts. In 17 years, the Darts have opened their home to 77 foster children, many of them disabled.

When Reagan appointed him last year, Dart had come to Washington from his home in Fort Davis, Tex., to work for three months on the National Council on the Handicapped, an independent federal agency that analyzes federal laws and recommends policies to the government.

A Crushing Workload

The Education Department appointment was so sudden and the workload so crushing, Dart said, that he and his wife never went back to Texas to move. They bought most of the furnishings for their two-bedroom apartment from the Door Store, he said.

Dart still wears cowboy boots, and over his kitchen door hangs a sign the credo: “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell Out of the Way.”

While he wears boots and claims a Texas temperament, Dart appears unwilling to get down in the political mud, an activity that many in the nation’s capital seem to relish. “Justin’s too nice for Washington,” one acquaintance said.

Dart said, “I don’t like to criticize anyone personally; it’s against my principles.”

As a Reagan-appointee family, the Darts have always been somewhat unusual, showing up at black-tie events in their 3-year-old beige Nissan pick-up.

A Hard Worker

But by all accounts, he was a hard worker, conducting research in all 50 states and five Indian nations. Working from his wheelchair, Dart inspired people with disabilities and encouraged their advocates in the struggle for handicapped people’s rights.

His firing, said Charlotte Bly-Magee, director of the Southern California Projects With Industry, is “going to look like the Administration is letting the handicapped down.”

In Seattle, Paul Dziedzic, president of the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation, declared that Dart has “amplified the problems” of the handicapped, adding, “If people thought they were going to muffle him by firing him, then it backfired.”

Both views are accurate.

Many people are complaining that Dart’s firing made the Administration look villainous. But Dart certainly has not been muffled.

Winding down his chores at the Education Department, Dart still goes to the office, but his work at home has intensified since he resigned. Rising by 7 a.m., sometimes as early as 5, he churns out letters on a computer and conducts telephone conferences across the nation.

In the future, he said, he will help organize efforts to broaden civil rights laws covering handicapped people in areas like employment, public transportation and housing. Currently, he said, such laws apply mostly to federal activities and those supported by federal funds.

Rights, Responsibilities

“We will never accomplish any of our goals fully until we can communicate (to) this nation and (in) law and everyday life that people with disabilities have the same rights and responsibilities as other people and that disability is a normal characteristic of the human process,” Dart said.

He likened his own efforts to those of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Mahatma Gandhi, speaking passionately of the world’s estimated 500 million handicapped people, whom he called “the largest disadvantaged minority.”

Often, Dart seems a man tugging against himself.

Even as he skewered Will’s administration of the program he headed, he praised her as his “distinguished colleague advocate.”

Similarly, in his resignation letter to Reagan, who presumably acquiesced in his firing, Dart declared that he remained “profoundly respectful of your personal endorsement” of the idea that handicapped people should have independence and equality.

One long-time associate said, “I watched him struggle with divided loyalties. He has come out unfettered.”

But not uncriticized.

It is bad enough to be a former Democrat, but even worse to battle so openly with Republican bosses. In addition to the embarrassment he has caused it, the Education Department may be investigated by the General Accounting Office because of Dart’s charges.

All this has angered some Republicans. Said Dart: “I’ve heard that people have suggested that I might be happier in the other party, but nobody said that to my face.” He said he is not going to switch back, noting that both Reagan and Education Secretary Bennett are former Democrats.

“I believe people with disabilities need to be strong in both parties,” he said. “There are good people in both parties.”

Dart is enjoying his new freedom of speech and the attention his dismissal has brought to handicapped people. “I’m not proud that I got fired,” he said, “but this is the work that I’ve dedicated my life to--quality opportunities backed up by quality services.”