May 1, 1968
Page 11158
THE JOHNSON LEGISLATIVE PROGRAM AND THE FUTURE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, under the leadership of President Johnson, the Nation has enjoyed some of the most productive legislative years in history. More than 300 bills have been passed by Congress that directly affect the lives of our people.
How effective is such legislation? Where do we go from here?
What should be the next steps toward improving the new programs now being tested?
These are some of the key questions that will be confronting Congress and the American people in the months and years to come.
On April 23, President Johnson's principal aid on domestic programs, Special Assistant Joseph A. Califano, Jr., confronted these issues during an address before the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University.
Mr. Califano finds that–
The great social programs of the past several years affect people, but they also affect institutions. And in so doing, they have raised questions which go to the very roots of our society.
Among some of the questions he raised:
Should the Nation's public school system be revamped to begin, for everyone, at the age of three?
Railroads and businesses merge for efficiency – will States someday?
Should the powers of mayors be strengthened and their jurisdiction extended? How – and by whom?
If Presidents are to be held responsible for planning our economy, shouldn't we give the authority to go with that responsibility?
These questions grow out of the problems raised by effective implementation of new legislation programs. And while there are no easy and quick answers, there seems to be little doubt that Mr. Califano has focused on many of the most difficult issues confronting American life. For at the heart of his message lies a fundamental truth: It may not be enough to instill progress through programs; progress may well demand a reshaping of our basic political institutions and, most important, a reshaping of our thinking about them.
I ask unanimous consent that this thoughtful and penetrating address by Presidential Assistant Joseph Califano be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE DIALOGS OF IMPATIENCE, INVOLVEMENT AND INQUIRY
(Remarks of Joseph A. Califano, Jr., before the Nieman Fellows, Harvard University, April 23, 1968)
As Nieman Fellows you have put aside the reporter's pen to take up the scholar's mantle. This sabbatical gives you the opportunity to reflect on events in a broader perspective – free from the pressure of the daily deadline.
Through this perspective, I hope you will write about the remarkable changes in our society and in our attitudes over the past few years. That story has largely been obscured by the conflict in Vietnam and clouded by the disorders in our cities.
But change – deep and dramatic – has occurred. I believe that history will show the Johnson years cleared the old liberal agenda and in the process have opened up a new range of questions and issues. For the liberal programs shaped by the ideals of our parents are on the books. But they are not wonder drugs to cure all of society's ills. And they have had some unforeseen side effects.
The issue of government insurance to pay medical bills of the elderly once sharply divided our parents. "Socialized medicine" now pays their hospital bill and in its present form helps aggravate a typically capitalistic problem, inflation.
Just, a few years ago many of our liberals said our objective for Negroes should be equal treatment, but stopped there. Now some of our more conservative leaders insist that preferential treatment, in education, in training and in jobs, is essential to make up for years of disadvantage.
Long range economic, fiscal and budgetary planning designed to adjust our economy, is now an integral part of Presidential responsibility. Today, an Administration which failed to engage in the most comprehensive economic planning would be charged with negligence.
Cries of anguish about federal aid to education now center on the charge that we are not providing enough. The traditional primacy of property rights in homes, in hotels and in restaurants has been balanced by the assertion of human rights of equality and justice, through civil rights legislation that was filibustered out of our national legislature just a few years ago.
Few liberals would have believed these changes could have occurred in just a few years. Even fewer could have foreseen the enormous impact and unpredictable effects they would have on our society. Lines are blurred as never before; old labels no longer suffice. Our people are more impatient for quick solutions than ever. Enormous programs designed to do things that many thought only the Federal Government could do have served to emphasize the importance of involving the private sector. Perhaps most significant, searching questions have been brought to the surface about our society itself.
Today, some conservatives would move as quickly as possible to a guaranteed family income, while some liberals contend that this could be as debilitating as the present welfare system.
Some conservatives have urged that we place young children in day care centers and take mothers away to train for jobs, while liberals express concern about this intrusion of the State – this "sovietization"in American family life.
Some conservatives who for years have preached the doctrine of local control are now saying we should have less community action, while some liberals are now apprehensive about big government and press for more local control and community involvement.
When a group of America's leading industrialists petitioned the Congress to enact the Model Cities Program, James Reston observed that their words sounded as if they had been written by George Meany or Walter Reuther.
All of this reflects ferment in our Society and change in our attitudes. The result is a series of new dialogues – of impatience, of involvement and of inquiry.
The dialogue of impatience centers on the clamor for the quick solution and the quick answer. It is too often a quest for some new remedy, even before we know how the social programs of the past few years will fare.
The dialogue of impatience is understandable enough. A hundreds years ago, Alexis De Tocqueville recognized this aspect of the American character. De Tocqueville's words are worth repeating this afternoon:
"The sufferings that are endured patiently as being inevitable become intolerable the moment that it appears there might be an escape. Reform then only serves to reveal more clearly what still remains oppressive and becomes now all the more unbearable. The sufferings, it's true, have been reduced, but one's sensitivity has become more acute."
But much of the dialogue of impatience is possessed of an air of unreality. Too often the quest for the new is in reality the quest for the easy. It fails to recognize that hard work will be required. It reflects frustration as we discover how difficult the job is.
Many new programs have been started. And many others will evolve from them. But passing a Poverty or a Manpower Training Bill is not enough. The task is to make them work, and to experiment and to change until the right combination appears.
There is usually a substantial lag between the time a Federal program is passed and the time it becomes fully operational. Comparable action by State legislatures is often required. Washington and field staffs have to be assembled. Counterparts at State and local levels have to be hired. The programs passed in 1965 and 1966 were started from scratch.
For the most part, there has not been sufficient time to test fully their effectiveness. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Executive Branch to obtain the funds needed to evaluate these programs.
Today's dialogue of impatience tells that we should have a bigger housing or job or poverty program supported by much more massive funding. The money answer is easy and beguiling – but alone it is illusory. Unquestionably additional, funds can be fruitfully spent in many areas.
But money is simply command over resources. If the particular resources we need – in the form of good teachers, or medical workers or builders – are not there, or if our political institutions block their use, then money alone will simply raise the price of scarce talent, not put it to work in the urban ghetto.
Men must be motivated to work, before you can spend more money to provide the basic skills they lack. There is no point in building schools faster than we train good teachers. Technology, the structure of our capital markets and the availability of professional talent prescribed the outer limits of the President's ten-year housing program – not some politically inspired fear about asking for too much money.
Moreover, substantial funds have already gone into the Johnson programs. The curve rises sharply from 1963 to 1969:
From $258 million to $2.1 billion for job training.
From $5 billion to $16 billion for health.
From $4 billion to $12 billion for education.
The money syndrome of the dialogue of impatience tends to focus on a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when the Vietnam war ends. But, despite America's enormous productivity and wealth, we will never have unlimited resources for social programs. If history is any guide, most of the money freed by ending the Vietnam war is not likely to be turned over to domestic programs. A Congress that is so reluctant to raise taxes to help pay for the war or demands cuts in social programs as the price of a tax increase is at least as likely to repeal taxes when the war is over as it is to invest more money in domestic programs.
The dialogue of impatience has its problems. But along with the Johnson programs, it is leading us to a more constructive dialogue – the dialogue of involvement.
The core of that dialogue is about people and their role in society. It draws on Woodrow Wilson's notion that democracy is the force that can "release the energy" of every human being. During the Johnson years it has begun to translate President Kennedy's charge, "ask what you can do for your country," into a national happening.
The dialogue of involvement recognizes that it will take more than programs and money to conquer poverty or rebuild the wasteland of the slums. It reflects the critical fact that unless all sectors of society deeply involve themselves in helping to solve these problems, the effort will take far longer, the burdens will be far heavier, and indeed the problems will never be solved.
We now have over 400 programs – more than half of them passed in the last three years. $78 billion in Federal funds are devoted to our domestic problems. With this surge of government activity, has come an increasing realization that the Federal government, and indeed the Federal, State and local governments combined, cannot solve the problems alone.
The private sector of our society must get to work. This is the first level of the dialogue of involvement. There is another, more important level. A few years ago, Gunner Myrdal, in his "Challenge to Affluence" asked why America "with the world's most generous and best organized private charity" was "so reluctant to more concretely recognize all the poverty at home."
The answer to Myrdal's question may be that most Americans would not "recognize all the poverty at home" because they had never seen it.
When the Nation's concern in the late 1950's was to overcome a recession, our purpose was to find a job for the skilled worker, not to salvage the high school dropout. But now the unparalleled prosperity of the past few years has given us that opportunity. Today many of our programs are designed with the thought that men of good will who see poverty will become involved in trying to eliminate it – if they have the opportunity.
Traditional concepts about the role of citizens and companies, universities and unions, indeed the poor themselves, in helping to solve the Nation's social problems, are changing. Out of this dialogue of involvement has come concrete action – the anti-poverty worker in a community action program, the union that sponsors a rent supplement project, the National Alliance of Businessmen trying to put thousands of hard-core unemployed to work, the creation of the Urban Coalition.
But on a more profound level, the dialogue of involvement helps open the hearts and change the attitudes of individual Americans.
When a corporation trains and hires Negroes who never held a steady job or when a VISTA volunteer helps to hold a slum family together, the impact on the corporate executive or the Ivy League volunteer may be as significant for himself and our society, as the change in the life of the person he is trying to help.
The dialogue of involvement recognizes that people must not only provide energy and insights, but human contact. It seeks to replace indifference with compassion.
This is the point of so much that the President is trying to convey. Indeed, I believe this is precisely the much misunderstood central point of the Kerner Commission Report. The battle is in the hearts of individuals and there it must be won by each of us for ourselves. For America is one nation, and we must recognize that we are all neighbors.
Large scale rebuilding of the ghetto may simply push up land prices unless suburban America is willing at the same time to remove its formal and informal restrictions against Negro home buyers and renters. Training Negroes as skilled workers will lead to bitterness instead of jobs if racial restrictions on job opportunities stay in effect.
Clearing the liberal agenda has not only whetted our appetite for faster action and quicker solutions. It has not only focused our attention on the inability of the Federal government to do the job alone and the need to involve local government and the individual citizen. Clearing the liberal agenda has brought a host of new problems and issues. It has set off a dialogue of inquiry.
The great social programs of the past several years affect people, but they also affect institutions.
And in so doing, they have raised questions which go to the very roots of our society.
Head Start pioneered a new concept in preschool education for the disadvantaged. But the basic principles that inspired the Head Start program apply to all children. Should the Nation's public school system be revamped to begin, for everyone, at the age of three?
Government-sponsored medical research has provided major breakthroughs, including an enormously expensive artificial kidney machine. The lives of thousands of Americans could be saved and extended, if a judgment were made to expand the production of this machine, extending its presently limited availability beyond the very wealthy and relatively few who qualify under certain Federal laws. Is it a wise allocation of resources to increase vastly the production of these machines? If not who should receive its benefits? And who should make that determination?
The work of building a Nation and serving a people continues through a maze of channels at the Federal, State and local level. Over 400 Federal grant programs are administered by 150 separate departments, agencies, bureaus and offices in Washington, through over 400 regional and field offices, all assisting 50 States and thousands of cities.
The new water and air pollution programs must cope with the problems of our environment on a river basin and air shed basis because those problems transcend political boundaries. Economic development is now handled on a regional basis. The problems of the Negro ghetto in Harlem surely had some roots in the rural poverty of Alabama.
What is the value in 1968 of the State line that Pilgrims drew in the 17th Century? Railroads and businesses merge for efficiency – will States someday? Or will there be different mergers for different purposes – one set of boundaries for water pollution, another for regional development, still others for urban transportation and the administration of local school districts.
Today most Mayors have too little authority over the cities they are responsible for. They have no authority over the suburban areas which are their city's economic and social satellites. Several cities have populations larger than most states. Should the powers of Mayors be strengthened and their jurisdiction extended? How – and by whom?
The Office of the Presidency deserves the most penetrating examination of the dialogue of inquiry. The conventional wisdom expresses concern about the increasing power of the Presidency. But perhaps the greatest irony of the programs of the past three years is that they show how limited Presidential power really is. Even a President with the legislative acumen of Lyndon Johnson has been unable to eliminate obsolete programs as new legislation provides better and faster solutions. Virtually all the social programs depend upon State and city governments, and when they are weak, Presidential initiatives will inevitably be blunted.
Yet, increasingly, the American people hold the President responsible for the economy, for the condition of our cities, for the health and education of their children and for security in their old age.
If Presidents are to be held responsible for planning our economy, shouldn't we give them the authority to go with that responsibility? At least the power to raise or lower taxes within a specified range – say five percent – so that we can quickly react to fiscal emergencies?
Should the President, for example, be given special powers and funds to deal with domestic problems? If there is a breakthrough in one program, should the President have a multi-billion contingency fund to exploit that breakthrough promptly and efficiently? Or at least authority to move funds from one program to another?
A wise man once said that "convention is like the shell to a chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through." The dialogue of inquiry can break through that shell of convention and can lead us to greater wisdom.
These, then, are the dialogues of 1968 – of impatience, involvement and inquiry.
In this election year our responsibility is particularly heavy – to get behind the promises and proposals into the reality; not to accept at face value but to question and probe.
For if we are satisfied merely with the dialogue of impatience, we may find that we have been tilting at windmills.
If we see only the events of the dialogue of involvement without testing their effect on the minds and hearts of individuals, then we will become lost in superficialities.
If we accept the dialogue of election year rhetoric when we should demand a penetrating dialogue of inquiry, then we fail in our responsibility to help make a free society work.
The success and the viability of our society depend upon the constructive involvement of all of its people in all of its problems. Professors and priests, union officials and corporate
leaders and indeed every individual citizen bear that responsibility. This is the lesson of our time.
It is the heart of the dialogue of involvement. It is the central truth of the dialogue of inquiry.
Democracy's progress rests on an open mind and a free discussion. I hope I contribute to a little bit of each this afternoon.