“It would be my earnest hope that […] we reaffirm our determination to fight poverty, to destroy injustice, to guarantee education, to end discrimination, to lift the quality of life for all—not by diminishing our rhetoric to match the inadequacy of our will, but by increasing our effort to equal the enormity of our task. We called it a war. We have only now begun to fight it. But if, as a nation, we ever do, it will prove to be the greatest victory in the history of humanity.”
Our Quote of the Week is Sargent Shriver’s aspiration for all of us: to commit, once and for all, to ending poverty. This aspiration is expressed in his posthumous memoir, We Called It a War: Lessons Learned from the Fight to End Poverty, which is available for pre-order today.
In 1968, Sargent Shriver ended his tenure as Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the post he held as the leader of the War on Poverty. At the time, President Lyndon Johnson asked him to serve as US Ambassador to France during a tense time for US-Franco relations caused by the US’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Shriver took on the role of diplomt as he undertook everything else, with energy, determination, and creativity. But he continued to reflect on his experiences leading the most sweeping anti-poverty effort in US history. Working with his OEO colleague, Herbert Kramer, Shriver recorded his memories of the War on Poverty, and those recordings were transcribed into a memoir, We Called It a War, which was never published—until now.
Of the many fascinating finds from the SSPI archives, We Called It a War is the most exciting. It is at times poetic, beginning and ending with Shriver reflecting on the War on Poverty in the midst of a student protest on the streets of Paris in the spring of 1968. It is both simple and eloquent, brilliantly capturing his inimitable communication style and his aptitude for storytelling. It is matter-of-fact and personally revealing, a record of Shriver’s inimitable combination of traits: his pragmatism, his respect for institutions combined with his aversion to bureaucracy, his creativity, his belief in leadership as service, and last but certainly not least, his profound sense of justice. It documents Shriver’s accomplishments, his political struggles, and disappointments. And even though it is a record from the past, of a seemingly distant moment when a president declared his inten-tion to abolish poverty in the United States, it is our hope that it opens up discussions about the present, and the future, of anti-poverty work.
You can pre-order We Called It a War today and find it at your favorite online bookshop on Tuesday, April 21.
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