TELEVISION : Turning Eyes to LBJ’s ‘War on Poverty’

On his PBS interview show last week, Charlie Rose recalled having dinner recently with someone who said, “I don’t know of anything government ought to be doing.” So goes the Newting of America.

Besides disclosing that Rose dines with anarchists, what made the anecdote interesting was that the guest to whom he was relating it was departing New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, not only the super tongue of the Democratic Party (although if you think he likes to talk, listen to Charlie), but also someone whose reputation as the nation’s Last Liberal (give or take a few others hiding in their closets) indelibly links him to big government. Cuomo, among the best-known incumbents overcome by the Republican landslide last November, is as unfashionable these days as bellbottoms. To Newtniks, the only thing more insidious than a McGovernik is a Cuomonik.

Responding to Rose’s story, Cuomo ticked off a few things he did think the federal government ought to be doing. But he seemed to be tiptoeing.

Such are the stiff political winds greeting “America’s War on Poverty,” a three-part PBS documentary recalling a time when Big Government was not widely regarded as one of the most vulgar expressions in the U.S. vocabulary.

From Henry Hampton (who gave us “The Great Depression” and those vivid “Eyes on the Prize” ethnologies on PBS), this latest five-hour history looks back at a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s domestic Great Society agenda after his election in 1964: the “unconditional war on poverty” that was bitterly fought simultaneously with the Vietnam war that was ultimately Johnson’s undoing.

Crisscrossed by thick veins of racism, classism and political cynicism, the setting for much of “America’s War on Poverty” is the domestic Third World that Michael Harrington described in his influential 1962 book, “The Hidden America.” Ironically, the growth of a U.S. underclass in the ‘50s and ‘60s was concurrent with surging growth in the economy, a phenomenon that Hampton’s program suggests resulted from a variety of changes sweeping postwar America.

Hampton concludes this history with an hour on that other nasty expletive of the ‘90s, The Welfare System. So nasty that leading House Republicans last week announced a proposal for slashing welfare that’s broader even than the GOP Contract With America favored by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, himself a world-class welfare critic.

In contrast, “War on Poverty” recalls a different brand of debate. “Welfare is a right, and not a privilege,” asserts George Wiley, the Chubby Checkerish director of the National Welfare Rights Organization, in an old clip. Twenty-five years ago, you could say that and not get stoned.

“War on Poverty” offers something to accommodate just about every point of view. The massive Great Society initiatives launched by Johnson during a time of soaring national prosperity--”He loved the idea of it being big and grand with battle cries,” says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin--at times match the negative big government stereotype. Too often the anti-poverty programs resemble a spider with too many legs, tripping over itself while straddling its prey.

“We should do (a war on poverty) again, and do it more frequently,” insists a veteran welfare worker under Johnson.

Someone else argues that Johnson’s umbrella Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created a “sense of dependency” among the poor.

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The program isn’t a strong case either for the Holy Grail of localism that is so zealously pursued by politicians today as a remedy for the nation’s severest ills. Internal government bickering and Washington turf wars are seen as a drain on OEO progress, yet, for example, conservative Mississippi Sen. John Stennis and his white-supremacist boobs back home--not OEO head Sargent Shriver or other insulated big-government bureaucrats--come across in Part 1 as major impediments to the Head Start program created in that state in 1965 to provide poor children with adequate nutrition, health care and education.

“America’s War on Poverty” captures the exhilaration of self-help and also of hope, as expressed in volunteerism by the nation’s young. Energized by social movements of the 1960s, young people become workers for VISTA (a sort of domestic Peace Corps) in the coal mine country of Appalachia, and young lawyers establish networks of rural law offices to help California farm workers led by Cesar Chavez.

As history, these are three nights of valuable, instructive viewing. What the program doesn’t do, though, is go beyond broad generalizations in assessing the long-term results of Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, all but one of which, we’re told, are still in existence despite the dismantling of the OEO.

“I knew if we could get people when they were young,” Shriver says about Head Start, for example, “we could transform their lives.” But there’s no definitive report card for this program or any other.

Nor is there any thought of reconciling the documentary’s parade of noble welfare moms with contrasting assertions that the welfare system (created in 1935 under the “New Deal” Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) has created a class of people, as journalist Daniel Schorr puts it, who are “living on the dole.”

Somewhere in “War on Poverty,” a woman advocates relocating the children of welfare mothers to homes “where someone will care” for them. Sound familiar? And Newark’s underclass blacks, looting and rioting over plans by the city to build a medical school that will displace thousands from their urban homes, call their uprising a “rebellion.”

In effect, “War on Poverty” is at times its own isolated inner city. It squanders opportunities to connect the past and present--ignoring, for example, the possible parallel between that Newark “rebellion” of nearly three decades ago and the Los Angeles “rebellion” (as many called it) set off by frustrations over verdicts in the first trial of four white Los Angeles police officers accused of criminally beating African American Rodney King.

To what extent, moreover, did Johnson’s ambitious anti-poverty war flop, and what were the underlying corrosions? And are we any smarter now about the ramifications of poverty than we were in the ‘60s?

A newspaper cartoon from the past comes to mind here. It shows a line of cops in riot gear facing African Americans protesting their plight outside filthy, ramshackle, roach-infested, uninhabitable tenements. One cop with a billy club growls: “Now get back inside your houses and act like human beings!” As someone says on tonight’s program, “(Some) shacks are better than other shacks. But they’re all shacks.”

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“America’s War on Poverty” airs tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15 and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.