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* The War on Poverty has often been rather loosely defined. Technically, the antipoverty programs were those programs included in the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act. For the purposes of this article, that is how I will use the term. However, President Johnson, his administration, and critics of the antipoverty initiative have often conflated several Great Society programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and education reform into the term "War on Poverty." For example, the president himself in his often-cited 1964 State of the Union address, stated that the proposed cut in income and corporate taxes were the main weapon in the struggle for more jobs and less poverty. In the concluding paragraph of the third section of the speech--the real crescendo of the War on Poverty message--he declared: "Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land." See Lyndon Johnson, State of the Union, 8 January 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents.
When President Johnson first declared a war on poverty in January 1964, he had neither a concrete battle-plan nor a firm commitment from anyone to run the future program. Just over seven months later he signed the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), making the fight against poverty a national commitment enshrined in statute. The act created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), a new operational agency based in the Executive Office of the President; a set of legislative titles and programs to fight poverty; and invested in the director of the OEO (Kennedy in-law and head of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver) the authority to coordinate and direct federal resources in the national antipoverty effort.
The president had high hopes for the program, describing it as "a new day of opportunity" and "a new era of progress . . . opening for us all."1Together with combating disease and ignorance, the War on Poverty was central to Johnson's own vision of "fighting man's ancient enemies" and creating the Great Society.2
But poverty was never defeated. Instead of leading the fight on poverty, the OEO, its staff and its programs had to fight annually for their very...