The Last Patrician (20 page)

Beyond the Welfare State

H
E HAD ONCE
uncritically accepted the Stimsonian idea that an Enlightened government could sweep down, deus ex machina, and improve the conditions of peoples and nations. By the spring of 1966, however, Bobby was ready to challenge the conventional Stimsonian wisdom. “The inheritance of the New Deal,” he declared, had been “fulfilled.”
49
He did not talk, in the esoteric language of the Stimsonians, of the ability of bureaucracies and programs to transform the “structural” conditions that “caused” poverty in America; he instead worked strenuously to recover the older and more compelling language of Emersonian self-reliance, a peculiarly American moral code that emphasized the importance of liberating the talents and energies of ordinary men and women by giving them the self-confidence to realize the “divine idea” that each of them represented. Bobby had at last reconciled himself to the Emersonian idea that our streets, our houses, our communities are not a reflection of “structural” economic conditions, they are the mirror of our souls. If we would heal the melancholia of the ghetto—if we would transform dreary streets and decaying neighborhoods into something more and something better—we must first transform the melancholy souls, the stagnant intellects, the sagging spirits, the underconfident selves of the people who inhabit them. We knowing moderns can't quite believe
that;
schooled in Freud and the horrors that are present in even the most innocent minds, we cannot put our faith in a world that mirrors the confident soul. Emerson no doubt exaggerated the beneficial effects of self-confidence. But he did not exaggerate the terrible effects of its absence.

What distinguished Bobby from the typical Stimsonian of his day was his desire to solve the problem of urban poverty in a manner consistent with “the shaping traditions” of American life and thought, in a manner consistent with the character and genius of the American people. The welfare state, with its emphasis on centralized planning, centralized control, and a vast centralized bureaucracy, was not a characteristically American institution; its intellectual origins are to be found not in American traditions of self-reliant individualism, but in eighteenth-century French theories of rational planning and nineteenth-century socialist theories of economic oppression. Those theories had been conceived with the political and social conditions of highly centralized, highly stratified European states in mind, and they were bound to have a pernicious effect in the very different moral climate of America. Bobby did not call for the wholesale dismantling of this alien welfare regime; however unfortunate it in many ways was, it could not be done away with in an instant without causing great hardship. But he didn't
like
it; he hoped that over time its importance would diminish, as individuals began to work themselves out of poverty and despair. He was certain that if the peculiarly American solutions he proposed to the problems of the ghetto were adopted, if the Emersonian rebuilding projects he envisioned were conscientiously carried out, self-confidence would grow, dependency would diminish, crime would decrease, and urban neighborhoods would become once again aesthetically pleasing places in which to live.
50
The welfare state would, in time, wither away.

It is one thing, of course, to make Emersonian speeches about the importance of self-reliance and self-confidence. It is quite another to give people that confidence, to help them find the will to begin rebuilding their lives and their neighborhoods. By the spring of 1966 Bobby realized that any genuine solution to the problems of the inner city must involve giving its inhabitants confidence in themselves and their abilities. But how was this to be accomplished? Could it indeed be accomplished in a manner consistent with American traditions of individual liberty? He understood the problem, but in the spring of 1966 he was still groping for a solution.

11

On a cold, cloudy February afternoon in 1966 Bobby came to Bedford-Stuyvesant.
1
Because Bed-Stuy would become the site of one of his bolder attempts to reverse urban decay, it is tempting to think that his experience that day, as he toured the dismal streets, was a somehow critical one, a transformative experience, a dark afternoon of the soul from which illumination and insight proceeded. The more prosaic reality is that Bobby had for some time been casting about for a suitable venue in which to launch an urban renewal program, and he and his advisers had discussed a number of possible sites. Political and tactical considerations were as important as any in the final selection of Bedford-Stuyvesant; there was no miraculous epiphany that day, no blinding revelation.
2
The visit, in fact, wasn't even a particularly successful one. At the YMCA Bobby was chewed out by residents demanding to know where the hell the swimming pool they'd been promised was. By the time he drove back to Manhattan, he was in a foul mood. “I could be smoking a cigar down in Palm Beach,” he said. “I don't really have to take that.”
3
He would, however, get them the swimming pool.

His initial efforts in Bedford-Stuyvesant appeared to signal a retreat from the revolutionary ideas of the January speeches, a reversion to old dogmas and discredited ideas. The months that followed his visit to Bedford-Stuyvesant saw him on Wall Street, knocking on patrician doors. It was almost a parody of the Stimsonian technique: summon the Wise Men. Half a decade earlier, his brother Jack, in forming an administration, had scoured the Street for recruits: Lovett, McCloy, Gilpatric, Dillon, etc., had all been approached and offered jobs. Now Bobby turned to the same people in order to create a council to revive Bedford-Stuyvesant. He asked old friends and sailing companions like Thomas J. Watson, Jr., of IBM for help. He called on William Paley, the chairman of CBS, and asked for his assistance (Paley was the stepfather-in-law of one of Bobby's own bright young men, Carter Burden). He talked to Douglas Dillon, who had left the Treasury and was back at Dillon Read. He sought out Benno Schmidt, Sr., the legendary J. H. Whitney banker and father of a future president of Yale. André Meyer of Lazard Frères was approached (at the time Meyer was Jacqueline Kennedy's investment adviser), as were George Moore of the National City Bank, J. M. Kaplan of Welch's Grape Juice, and Ros Gilpatric, who had recently returned to Cravath. McGeorge Bundy received a long letter from Bobby: could the Ford Foundation see a way to advancing funds?
4
It was a perfectly Stimsonian method of operation: gather the best and the brightest; together they would solve the problems of the slums.
5

The Stimsonian architecture of the Bedford-Stuyvesant project was, however, deceptive, was in many ways a mere facade. In contrast to Stimsonian ventures in places like Vietnam and the Tennessee Valley, the role of the Wise Men in Bedford-Stuyvesant was sharply limited. The voice of the community's own citizens, under the leadership of Judge Thomas R. Jones, was to be the decisive one in the project; the patrician advisers were to defer to the citizens of Bedford-Stuyvesant in all matters of significance.
6
Government was to play a much smaller part than was typically the case in New Deal and Great Society programs.
7
The success of the project would turn primarily on the ability of the community to attract private enterprise and private capital. The capitalist system, Bobby asserted in the January speeches, was not the enemy of the ghetto, the oppressor of the underclass; on the contrary, the businessman was a potential friend.
8
Bobby called for the “active participation” of the business community in every facet of the revitalization efforts.
9
Later he would propose a variety of tax incentives designed to stimulate private investment in the inner city, a proposal that anticipated the various “empowerment” and “enterprise” schemes more recently championed by Jack Kemp and Al Gore.
10
For the time being, the best he could do was ask the Wise Men to lend their names and their Rolodexes to the cause.
11

Restraining the Wise Men

I
T IS A
wonder—and a testament to the tenacity with which Bobby and his aides insisted on the principle of community control—that the Stimsonians did not take over the project entirely. The Wise Men whom Bobby summoned to Bedford-Stuyvesant were accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed; how would they suffer the leadership of a plebeian board? The Stimsonians' protégés in academic and legal circles had names to make and careers to build; they were always looking for an opening, a break, a chance to make a simple idea more complicated, a chance to get a crack at federal funds, a chance to build a bureaucracy. Bobby and his aides received dozens of letters from such academic and legal hustlers. The letters do not make for edifying reading: there can be few things so unctuous as the tone of a professor on the make, pimping his pet theories and ideas. “Just a note,” one Yale Law School professor wrote Walinsky in January 1967, “to let you know that I am presently working with an embryonic inter-disciplinary group involving architects and planners who are thinking of putting together a proposal relating to the Bedford-Stuyvesant project.” The mind recoils; what sort of baroque bureaucratic scheme was such an “interdisciplinary group” of “planners” likely to evolve? The professor observed that Walinsky's “influence” was “pervasive indeed” in the little academic orbit in which he moved; he said that he himself was particularly “intrigue[d]” by Walinsky's “sale and lease-back” ideas.
12
After more demeaning flattery of this kind—the professor claimed to be “awed” by Walinsky's “familiarity with the tax laws” and wondered how he had ever been able to “learn it all”—he pleaded for “any further tidbits” Walinsky might be able to give him; Washington's table scraps were never enough to fill the insatiable academic maw.
13
Walinsky kept his distance.

There was no shortage of expertise available to Bobby and his aides; the difficulty lay rather in preventing the experts from ruining the project by introducing needless complexity. It is true that Bobby could, when necessary, play the Stimsonian card as well as anyone; he knew how to massage Stimsonian egos with blather about their extraordinary qualities of prescience and vision. His proposal to McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation is a textbook example of how to get a Stimsonian to open his checkbook. In most of his statements about Bedford-Stuyvesant Bobby took pains to emphasize the importance of community leadership; in his Bundy proposal, however, Bobby made it seem as though the
Stimsonians
would be the dominant force in the neighborhood. Bobby's staff described the Bedford-Stuyvesant project to Bundy as “the first time the leaders of the American business community” had “assumed the
primary responsibility
for dealing with the problems of the ghetto.”
14
The proposal compared the project to the TVA, the Marshall Plan, and the Manhattan Project.
15
This, of course, was nonsense. The community board, headed by Judge Jones, possessed primary responsibility for solving the community's problems; it was, so to speak, the sovereign entity in the project, a mechanism that provided for “the full and dominant participation” of the residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
16
The Stimsonian board, the board on which Paley, Dillon, Watson, and Schmidt sat, would have to content itself with a secondary role. The project as a whole was conceived not as a variation on a New Deal theme, but as an alternative to government-sponsored programs like the TVA. The point of Bedford-Stuyvesant was to ensure that solutions were “not imposed from the top” on an indifferent community.
17
Bobby, however, knew his man; he realized that nothing was more likely to appeal to the biographer of Colonel Stimson than the prospect of brilliant philosopher-kings “educating the community” and solving “in new ways” problems that had heretofore “defied solution by all other effort.”
18
The “potentially catalytic combinations” of genius and talent that such men could generate, Bobby assured Bundy, would inevitably “suggest new techniques and new approaches” to the problem of urban poverty.
19
Nor was the “deeper value” inherent in the project to be overlooked, the value of “exposing” the elite “to frontier social problems.”
20
As Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein introduced high society to the Black Panthers, so Bedford-Stuyvesant would introduce Mac Bundy to the ghetto. This was, after all, the age of radical chic; there was no better way of drawing attention to oneself than to be seen in a Park Avenue drawing room with the Panthers, or in a Wall Street boardroom with Judge Jones and the good citizens of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
21
The social and intellectual nobility was only too happy to respond to Bobby's summons. I. M. Pei, who among other things was busy designing the Temple of Kennedy that now graces Boston Harbor, took charge of creating so-called “super blocks” for the neighborhood; Cravath, Swaine & Moore agreed to provide legal counsel; Mrs. Astor and the Astor Foundation supplied valuable funds; and Bundy's Ford Foundation underwrote a generous grant of capital.
22

Beyond Radical Chic

T
HERE
WAS
A
radical chicness to it, and at times Bobby seemed almost like a Robin Leach in reverse, a rich and famous person trying desperately to learn about the lifestyles of the miserable and obscure. But Bobby carried his concern beyond radical chicness. He left Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, nibbling at hors d'oeuvres with Eldridge Cleaver, in the dust; his own pilgrimages, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to the Mississippi Delta, to the slums of South America and the shanties of South Africa, amounted almost to a new medievalism. Even if it were impossible to change the world, one nevertheless had an obligation, Bobby believed, to expose oneself to its sufferings, to don an intellectual hair shirt, as penance for its pains. In the Mississippi Delta he came upon “the dirtiest, filthiest, poorest” houses imaginable, houses that stank of “mildew, sickness, and urine.”
23
Charles Evers, who in addition to being Medgar Evers's brother was himself active in the civil rights movement, remembered that the “odor was so bad” that visitors “could hardly keep the nausea down.”
24
And yet Bobby went into these hovels; in one of them he sat upon a foul bed and cradled a little black boy in his arms. The child was covered with “open sores” and his “belly was bloated from malnutrition.” Bobby rubbed the boy's grotesquely distended stomach.
25
“I wouldn't do that!” Marian Wright Edelman later said. “I
didn't
do that.”
26
But Bobby did. It was a ritual he acted out, with slight variations, over and over again. In Brazil, in the slums of Salvador, he crouched to speak to barefoot children in a street “where the open sewers and humid heat combined to create a stench so foul” that the Brazilian security police deserted their senatorial charge in order to “find sanctuary in their closed cars.”
27
In rural New York he found migrant workers living in abandoned buses that reeked of filth, and to his horror found the workers' children covered with unhealed scabs and putrefying sores.
28