ustxtxb_obs_1967_02_17_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

Purcell of Wichita Falls, 17 and 5; Ray Roberts of McKinney, 26 and 6; Olin Teague of College Station, 29 and 6; Richard White of El Paso, 27 and 15; Jim Wright of Fort Worth, 14 and 17, and John Young of Corpus Christi 10 and 29. VI In the Senate Yarborough was one of eight voting for an unsuccessful amendment to the rules that would have prohibited the reading aloud of the Senate Journal to keep a filibuster going. Sen. Tower didn’t vote but he was announced against the change. 100′ Reps. Henry Gonzalez, San Antonio, and Bob Eckhardt, Houston, were the only Texas House members to join in a protest about the planned visit of a U.S. aircraft carrier to a South African port. The carrier made the visit, anyway, in a reversal of a State Dept. policy against U.S. vessels stopping at South Africa, which is racially segregated by national law. Thirty-seven Congressmen joined in the protest. Late last week, one and possibly two openings developed unexpectedly on the U.S. House interstate and foreign commerce committee, and Eckhardt was inquiring about his chances. He has been assigned to the House space committee, but could be switched if difficulties were ironed out. The third installment of Manchester’s book in Look contains no surprises and little new information. Mostly it con cerns a county medical examiner who in sisted state law be followed and an au topsy conducted in Dallas and a local funeral parlor merchant who was worried who was going to pay him for his coffin. The bitterness between the Kennedy and the Johnson groups on board the presi dential plane after the assassination is reviewed, but one receives the feeling that the manuscript, including some of the direct quotes, has been toned down. EI Shriver Says of the Poverty War BIRTH PANGS RECEDING Austin Sargeant Shriver refuses to hoist the white flag in the war on poverty. Despite criticism from detractors, disappointment among supporters, unfavorable publicity, and a tightening domestic budget, the director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity maintained, during an Observer interview, that he still is optimistic about the economic experiment. Nonetheless Shriver concedes that 1967 will be another critical year for his program. “There is no question,” he told the Observer, “that the fate of the program is problematical and will be subject to months of virulent attack by right wing reactionaries.” The O.E.O. has requested, for 1967-’68, $2.06 billion. How much this will be cut by the new Congress, with its increased Republican membership, concerns Shriver. In 1965-’66 he sought $980 million and received $783 million; for 1966-’67 $1.75 billion was asked, 11.13 billion voted. Broader financial and public support are the needs of the poverty war today, Shriver indicated. He believes that, lately, the nagging problems of establishing and operating the program itself are being solved rapidly. “Beginning six to eight months ago,” Shriver asserted, “there has been a significant and dramatic change in the O.E.O. program.” As an example, he cited the Job Corps; numerous incidents were occurring in corps centers, the dropout rate was of concern, and the costs seemed exorbitant. But in the last eight months, Shriver said, there hasn’t been a riot in one of the 113 Job Corps centers “this, despite the fact that many of the kids in the centers are the same ones who are accused of causing riots in the streets.” The cost per enrollee has dropped and is dropping it was about $10,000 per corpsman, now the figure is around $7,400. Results are more apparent; 25,700 Job Corp members are now in jobs earning an average of $1.71 an hour, where before they had been earning about 50 cents an hour if they were employed at all. Another 3,450 are in the military service, young men who couldn’t get in before they joined the Job Corps. At least two former Job Corps members have died recently in Vietnam, Shriver said. Another 4,600 former corpsmen are back in school and a few of them are in college. “Imagine,” Shriver said, “supposed riff-raff in college now!” But what of the community action programs, where the widest latitude for experimentation had been provided, but which has been the source of much disappointment? Are local political power’s still retarding the effectiveness of this phase of the poirerty fight? Is there wider participation by the poor? “A year and a half ago,” Shriver said, “there was a lot of yak-yak-yak about the organizations of community action program agencies such as at San Antonio, for example. I don’t know if this is true in Texas, but certainly it is nationally: 98% of the organizational problems are passed now. We are beginning to see results in C.A.P. programs. For just one example, in St. there has placed more than 3,000 persons in jobs. These are results which people can see.” He said the beginning of the poverty war was bound to involve tangles in getting the program established and running efficiently. It was not a matter of instituting a few innovations and including them as part of an established undertaking, he said; rather, ten utterly unique programs were begun all at once, like “starting ten Peace Corps all at the same time,” as he put it. The birth pains are fading now, Shriver believes hopefUlly. THIS INCREASING success in operating the poverty fight is leading now to appreciation of the effort among influential leaders \( Shriver called them the “more advanced” lawyers, doctors, busiA close follower of U.S. education, Fred Heckinger of the New York Times, not long ago referred to Head Start as “the most significant educational development of this decade.” Orison Marden, president of the American Bar Assn. says the legal aid program is the most significant development in legal circles “in our lifetime.” Dr. Charles Hudson of the American Medical Assn. has expressed similar praise about the neighborhood health centers. The city council at New Bedford, Mass., last May, voted 11-0 to request that the Job Corps center nearby be removed; in December the council reversed itself, 9-2. This turnabout seems significant to Shriver; he said that during that same period between May and December of last year he began to feel better about the entire poverty war, both its function and its acceptance; he believes this feeling is spreading. The Job Corps a year ago was under severe fire by Texas Gov. John Connally, for one, Shriver recalled, but Connally is a Job Corps booster now. He and Shriver shared the platform last week at a conference here of leading U.S. industrialists who support a number of corps training centers. Connally spoke of “the brickbats they’ve been throwing at us in the Job Corps”; he recalled how “I was able to prevail on” industrial and educational leaders to develop the Camp Gary Job Corps center at San Marcos; and phrases such as “our planning” and widespread use of the first person plural pronoun characterized the governor’s remarks. “We couldn’t have held this meeting one year ago,” Shriver said, referring to the gathering of top brass from some of the nation’s largest corporation. This was the first time that executives of the corporations that have been persuaded to support the Job Corps have met all at once. Such firms as R.C.A., International Telephone and Telegraph, Texas Instruments, Lockheed Aircraft, Philco-Ford, Thiokol Chemical, Xerox, Burroughs, Westinghouse, I.B.M., and Litton Industries are involved. “Probably one factor that is leading now February 17, 1967 7