Nation: An Indictment of the War on Poverty By a Man Who Helped to Plan It

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN is the best-known practitioner in the U.S. of that new specialty called ur-banology. As the recently appointed head of Richard Nixon's projected Cabinet-level Council on Urban Af fairs, he will have a hand in reshaping the nation's existing antipoverty programs. Judging from a book to be published by Macmillan in February, it will not be a gentle hand. In a searing indictment of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, Moynihan contends that the much ballyhooed effort was oversold, underplanned and seriously "flawed" in execution. Writes Moynihan in the opening words of the book: "In his first weeks in office the President had proposed 'unconditional' war on poverty; in short order that whole range of metaphor had become embarrassing if not, indeed, obscene." The program quickly became a quagmire, and "men of whom the nation had a right to expect better did inexcusably sloppy work."

Moynihan, a liberal who has no qualms about attacking liberal shibboleths, titles his book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding—a takeoff on the phrase "maximum feasible participation," which refers to the goal of involving the poor in planning and executing the programs that are to affect them. The phrase was especially applicable to the "community action" projects that were supposed to become the centerpiece of the whole anti-poverty effort. The trouble was, says Moynihan, that the Government never really comprehended what community action was all about and "did not know what it was doing."

As groups of the poor sought in city after city to elbow aside mayors and established agencies and take over the programs, Johnson came to fear that he had created a political monster. At one point, Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley became "mightily upset" because the federal poverty project was becoming a "champion grabber and distributor of antipoverty funds." Daley relished that role for himself, and he let Washington know that he did not like the competition. According to Moynihan, Johnson told OEO "to keep community action programs as quiet as possible."

Adulterated Efforts. As an Assistant Under Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration and author of the controversial Moynihan Report, which infuriated many black leaders with its study of the Negro family's plight, he played an important role in creating programs that were adopted by the Great Society. Unhappy with what has become of them, he charges that the efforts were all too often adulterated by politicians, "middleclass professional reformers, elite academics and intellectuals."

Among Moynihan's main points:

> Key decisions in the White House were made by lawyers, none of whom proved "especially familiar with the social-science theory on which the various positions were based."

> Despite the poverty program's strong emphasis on ghetto blacks, "at no time did any Negro have any role of any consequence in [its] drafting."

> Former OEO Chief Sargent Shriver tended to "oversell and underperform," particularly in handling the Job Corps and community action.