Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver by Scott Stossel

Author:Scott Stossel [Stossel, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political, Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail, JFK
ISBN: 9781590515143
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Published: 2011-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

Shriver was forced to agree to scale back the military’s role significantly.

Liberals also objected to the role Shriver proposed for private corporations in administering the Job Corps camps. But here Shriver prevailed. He instructed Alden to reach out to the business community to recruit a business advisory board and to find companies that would be interested in running the camps as modest, for-profit enterprises. Shriver was himself a liberal on many issues (it was not for nothing the Kennedys called him their “house Communist”) but because of his own background at the Merchandise Mart he was always much more willing than many liberals to recognize that businessmen offered strengths that academics and government workers lacked.

To help make corporations an integral part of the Job Corps, Shriver hired John Rubel, who had previously served as assistant secretary of defense and was now a vice president at Litton Industries, one of the first large business conglomerates. Rubel’s task force colleagues didn’t quite know what to make of him. His conversations “often left others either bedazzled with the breadth of his knowledge, or uncertain as to what on earth he was trying to say.”

Rubel pointed out that the position of the poverty program in 1964 was analogous to that of the US space program in 1969, when Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon. Manned space flight was an enormously complex undertaking, so the Defense Department and NASA had turned for help to private companies that not only had more “systems capability” than government bureaucracies but also had a broader range of knowledge and technical skill.

The Job Corps, Rubel observed, was in its way as complex as space flight. No one person knew the best way to recruit unemployed dropouts and mold them into productive, employed taxpayers. Private companies would surely have more “systems design and management capability” than the federal government did. Why not ask corporations to bid to run Job Corps centers?

Shriver was enthusiastic; this was “exactly the kind of innovation that appealed to him.” For one thing, bidding out contracts to private companies would allow him to work around the government bureaucracy, avoiding “the stodgy professionalism he abhorred.” Also, involving private corporations directly in the program could help get its graduates jobs: “If industry did the training, industry could hardly refuse to hire the products.”

The reaction to this idea among the business community was favorable. Within the ranks of his own task force, however, it provoked dissension. Offering business the opportunity to make profits from the poor? Appalling, some said. This didn’t deter Shriver, however. He knew a winning idea when he saw one, and three days later he had an extended conversation with Rubel to hammer out the details of how the Job Corps should be structured. In essence, Rubel and Shriver decided that they would experiment with different ways to run centers. Federal employees would run some; universities would run some; and private companies would run some—and over time, the most effective way of running Job Corps centers would become apparent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.