WE CALLED IT A WAR

A lost memoir from the man behind the 1960s War on Poverty, offering a close-up look at its moving parts.

At the time, Shriver was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite appointees, and he was just beginning to recover from the assassination of a man who filled many roles in his life: boss, friend, brother-in-law. Appreciative of the way Shriver oversaw the Peace Corps, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, gave him a formidable task: Defeat poverty. Thus begins this book, penned some 50 years ago and stashed away in a box. In a narrative edited by attorney Birenbaum, Shriver provides painstaking details of how a hardworking negotiator and administrator charmed Republicans and Southern Democrats and hammered out the many elements of the War on Poverty, the centerpiece of Johnson’s Great Society. It’s easy to admire Shriver while wishing this noble effort had a little more verve. The dramatic episodes, including the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, are among the shortest in the book—although Shriver uses them adeptly to demonstrate how the urban unrest left both sides of the war debate unhappy: liberals, who felt not enough money had been appropriated; and conservatives, who argued that the rhetoric surrounding the war fomented violence. While it feels unfair to take to task the man behind Head Start, Job Corps, and other significant social and economic programs, the text becomes a tiresome journey that leaves no bureaucratic “i” undotted. The main tension in the book involves the conflict between Shriver’s ideals and the bear trap that would eat Johnson alive: the Vietnam War. Despite this outsized guns-or-butter dilemma, many War on Poverty initiatives outlasted Johnson—and many were dismantled by Reagan. Though there is useful information here for scholars to further analyze, readers looking for a livelier story should try Scott Stossel’s epic biography Sarge (2004).

An accomplished idealist leaves us with a slog of a memoir.