John Gardners Crusade to Save the System
Knoll, Erwin
John Gardners Crusade to Save the System by ERWIN KNOLL If you haven't heard from John W. Gardner recently, you are likely to be hearing from him soon. A million Americans or more—the kind of...
...Von Hoffman has called Gardner "the good Wasp . . . the Wasp who cares, who's involved, who's committed to the general welfare...
...They want effective law enforcement...
...Gardner is more philosophical: "It's perfectly healthy for them to raise this question," he told me...
...After earning his doctorate, he taught psychology at Connecticut College for Women and at Mount Holyoke...
...He is a superb intellectual and a beautiful human being...
...He speaks as he writes, in thoughtful, carefully polished phrases...
...It's just as exciting, just as vital, as running for office...
...Nice guys," said Leo Durocher, "finish last...
...Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York was the prime mover in formation of the Coalition, and its directorate included—and includes—a dazzling array of prominent public officials, corporate executives, labor leaders, and civil rights spokesmen—the kind of "extraordinary diversity" that Gardner holds in high esteem...
...But we will uphold the public interest against all comers, whether they are bureaucratic obstructionists or ambitious politicians or industrial interests or self-seeking professional groups...
...His first Government service came during World War II, as an administrator at the Federal Communications Commission, a captain in the Marine Corps, and a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS...
...They do want decent housing, and this isn't just the low income classes...
...Inevitably, the question arises about Gardner's own availability as a Presidential candidate...
...We want weak public officials to know they will be subjected to criticism...
...He tries to avoid the dirty, tough, angry confrontations that take place on immediate issues," says Francis Keppel, who served as Assistant Secretary of HEW and Commissioner of Education under Gardner...
...We want people watching and influencing every move that government makes/ " He insists, too, that Common Cause is "a third force, not a third party," but he concedes that a new party, to the left of the Democrats and Republicans, could eventually take form among the membership of Common Cause...
...it could lead to following "Common Cause is 'a third force, not a third party . . / " demagogues...
...Why is he setting up another bureaucracy...
...Before he accepted the Cabinet post, Gardner told me in a recent interview, "I had the amiable belief that if you simply made clear the need—if you were analytically clear about what had to be done—people would act to bring about change...
...I believe that the opportunity for such reform and revitalization exists, and we are going to tackle it...
...Gardners letter calls for an end to the Vietnam war "on a scheduled timetable," "a major reordering of national priorities," a renewed attack on "the problems of poverty and race," and "new solutions" in housing, employment, education, health, consumer protection, environment, family planning, law enforcement, and the administration of justice...
...The appearance of controversy surrounds many of these substantive issues on which there is really a good deal of consensus," he said in a television interview this fall...
...He understands what's wrong with America, and he can make other people understand...
...it could lead to massive refusals to vote...
...He's a very benevolent guy who tries to get the best out,of everybody...
...A lot of people who should have been thrown out on their asses weren't...
...But it lays down no detailed program for Common Cause, and Gardner's fifteen-point "agenda for all Americans," though it refers to these and virtually all other issues of public concern, is equally short on specifics...
...Gardner's friends agree—though many believe he is outstandingly qualified...
...Find a program and go to work on it...
...Perhaps the outstanding achievement of his tenure was the financing and dissemination of a series of major studies of American education by James B. Conant, the former president of Harvard...
...At fifty-eight, he can look back on a long, distinguished career of thinking, writing, and speaking out—and he is convinced that this is not enough...
...It isn't just the people you identify as discontented, but middle-class people, reasonably affluent people are also discontented...
...You can get a certain kind of unanimity on changing structure, because everybody wants better structure...
...In the first two months after the formation of Common Cause was announced in August, some 20,000 members signed up—a response that "exceeded anybody's expectations," according to a Common Cause spokesman...
...On the other hand, the Post's resident iconoclast, columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, predicts that Common Cause "is likely to become something like the common scold or the common cold, a minor irritant in the respiratory tract of the body politic...
...Generalities are, of course, essential to the process of consensus politics...
...He was a champion swimmer at Stanford, where he studied literature, tried to write fiction, gave it up, and majored in psychology...
...They resent it when reporters bring up the question...
...I have closed the door to that possibility," he says...
...He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation and of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 1955 to 1965 and built a growing reputation as a serious and stimulating commentator on public affairs...
...It will serve, his letter says, as "a true 'citizens' lobby'—concerned not with the advancement of special interests but with the well-being of the nation...
...We're trying to lead that in a constructive direction...
...We already know what this group can and can't do...
...The name of Gardner's crusade is Common Cause, and he describes it as "a new, independent, nonpartisan organization for those Americans who want to help in the rebuilding of this nation...
...Nonetheless, Broder believes that Common Cause could turn out to be "a movement, not based on the quicksand of the college campuses, that can free the nation from the trap of Vietnam and turn its energies to the urgent unsolved problems at home...
...Francis Keppel has called him "the best Eighteenth Century-style essayist in the Twentieth Century...
...We want strong and concerned representatives to know their efforts are appreciated...
...However, the Coalition's lobbying arm, the Urban Coalition Action Council, has been "astonishingly effective," Gardner says, in promoting urban, welfare, and civil rights measures on Capitol Hill...
...A million Americans or more—the kind of Americans who care, who join organizations, who work in campaigns, who read The Progressive—are receiving a four-page "Dear Friend" letter over Gardner's signature inviting them to join his latest, most ambitious crusade to save the system by reforming and revitalizing it...
...Don't waste your energy in being mad at people who hold different views," he told the United States Jaycees at their annual convention last June...
...And go to work on it in a way that knits the community together rather than plunging it deeper into divisiveness and anger...
...Gardner once set a goal of 100 local Coalitions in major cities, but fewer than half that number have actually been established...
...They want better schools...
...In another time and another place, John Gardner would be a philosopher-king," says one friend and admirer...
...Newsweek recently referred to him as "the quintessential liberal Establishmentarian...
...Interviewers find him reticent about his personal life and eager to turn the subject back to his public concerns...
...The basic premise of Common Cause is that the requisite push can be provided by a broad-based alliance of concerned citizens—an alliance encompassing rich and poor, young and old, black and white, business and labor, conservatives and liberals—who can reach agreement on what Gardner calls "convergence issues...
...It could lead to a splintering of the parties...
...Why is he selling tickets to a rally...
...Friends recall no "human interest" stories, no funny anecdotes about John Gardner...
...Gardner's father, an English immigrant who sold real estate in California, died when John was still in his infancy, and he was reared by three stepfathers—one of them a gold prospector...
...Gardner hopes that at least 100,000 citizens—and perhaps as many as 400,000—will join his crusade, will pay $15 to become members of Common Cause, will commit themselves to its program - of "positive action," will "keep at it until we build a new America...
...He is diffident almost to the point of shyness...
...Nonetheless, its efforts to organize local affiliates have been plagued with difficulties and dissension, particularly in such large cities as Cleveland, Boston, and Washington...
...He listens to everybody...
...We will not—for now—support individual candidates in elections," Gardner insists...
...Though he has been in public life since he assumed the presidency of the Carnegie Corporation a decade and a half ago, Gardner remains a very private public man...
...I think that things have become so bad that a lot of people are ready to move—ready to act constructively...
...James Reston of The New York Times describes him as "probably the most articulate critic of American society today . . . the calmest voice and the coolest mind in American public life...
...These are not things that are black or white or old or young...
...The prediction now is that the 100,000 goal will be met by early 1971...
...John spent several summers panning for gold in Placerville...
...The question is likely to persist, though Gardner has done his best to lay it to rest...
...The middle income groups are hurt very badly today by the shortage of housing...
...They want decent employment...
...Somebody has to step aside and say, 'All right, I'll devote my time to making the process work.' That's not some lesser task...
...They may save the system yet...
...Gardner believes, of course, that Common Cause entails much more than setting up another bureaucracy or selling tickets to a rally...
...We want phones to ring in Washington and state capitols and town halls...
...A sympathetic observer, political columnist David S. Broder of The Washing-ton Post, has noted that "most of the successful mass-membership groups stay in business by focusing sharply on the special interests of their constituents—whether they be higher veterans' pensions, farm supports, or minimum wages...
...It plans to establish state offices or state committees, although no decision has yet been made on whether to charter local chapters...
...John Gardner is one of America's most decent men, and many decent men and women are likely to make common cause with him...
...It is probably the only organization encompassing such unlikely teammates as John Lindsay and Richard Daley, Julian Bond and George Meany, the president of the United Auto Workers and the president of Aluminum Corporation of America...
...We want public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move they make," he says in the letter soliciting members for Common Cause...
...Whether Common Cause can meet its larger goals—whether it can "shake up and renew outworn institutions . . .alter the national mood for the better . . . change things that need to be changed . . ."—is a more troublesome question...
...When Gardner left the Johnson Administration early in 1968, embittered and disillusioned because the Vietnam war had eroded his Department's Great Society programs, he carefully refrained from publicly attacking the President or his policies...
...These are concerns of the average citizen...
...ERWIN KNOLL is Washington editor of The Progressive...
...People get so used to everybody having an angle...
...The 1972 Presidential race will be "immensely important," he added, "but what's the use of continuing to feed good men into political and governmental processes that aren't working...
...He lost his cut at the Cabinet table, but he kept talking about what we were going to do...
...He was nibbled to death by the HEW bureaucracy...
...But change is so difficult, it imposes so much discomfort, it inflicts so much pain when people are imbedded in rigid structures...
...They want efficient administration of justice...
...Still nominally a Republican, though he has been estranged from the Party's leadership for most of the past decade, Gardner says: "I believe that the preferred strategy is revitalization of the two major parties...
...The institutions alter, but never fast enough, and those who seek change are bitterly disappointed...
...The Cold War had not begun when he helped channel Carnegie funds into the founding of the nation's first Russian Research Center at Harvard...
...If John Gardner gets 100,000 members each paying $15 he can do so only by drawing from the same pool of people who're already supporting the League of Women Voters or the local foreign policy council or some such, the traditional cadres of upper middle class reform...
...But an aphorism comes to mind that probably has no place in Gardner's collection...
...Gardner's phraseology...
...He speaks eloquently but softly, without flair...
...Similarly, he foresaw a need for African experts, and before the Russians launched Sputnik, Gardner had launched a study that would lead to the development of the "new math...
...He should be thinking, writing, speaking out...
...There's no doubt in my mind that there is an electric charge out there in the country, of discontent, concern...
...We want people watching and influencing every move that government makes...
...He probably would not greet this development with much enthusiasm...
...The White House takes the question seriously enough to have opened a file on Gardner as a potential challenger to President Nixon in 1972...
...When the war escalated," says a former HEW official, "Gardner didn't understand how it was undermining his programs and his budget...
...The President, who had heaped praise on his Republican Cabinet member in 1965, shed no tears when Gardner resigned in January, 1968...
...There are those, including friends and admirers of John Gardner, who believe that his new crusade is bound for bitter disappointment...
...The press takes the question seriously enough to have it dominate every news conference Gardner has held since he announced the formation of Common Cause...
...From the Cabinet, Gardner went to the chairmanship of the Urban Coalition, a non-profit organization formed at an "emergency convocation" after the summer riots of 1967...
...it can make significant contributions but it isn't going to revitalize the system and shake up the political processes and institutions of this country, to use Mr...
...The conviction came to him during his unhappy tenure, from 1965 to 1968, as Lyndon B. Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare...
...And it is the Action Council that forms the nucleus of Common Cause...
...Gardner's only avocation of record is one he embarked on in his adolescence—the collection of proverbs and aphorisms...
...President Johnson was impressed, and appointed him to the rapid-turnover post of Secretary of HEW...
...Most Americans want the same things...
...The stage is set," Gardner said in a speech last June, "for the most familiar confrontation of modern life—between people who demand change and institutions that resist it...
...At the outset, Gardner says, Common Cause will concentrate on the "classic means of lobbying...
...The quest for consensus and the avoidance of conflict may also prove to be fatal flaws in Common Cause...
...I really think that we are in a very bad situation today, and I think the American people are beginning to understand that serious situation...
...In a statement that seems inherently inconsistent, but that is completely consistent with Gardner's style, he has said of Common Cause: "We do not regard ourselves as adversary to anybody...
...The Coalition's slogan, occasionally sported on self-conscious businessmen's lapels, is "Give a Damn," and its theme song, featured in a famous television commercial, is "Let the Sun Shine In...
...I have no political ambition...
...By coalescing around the convergence issues, Gardner says, the discontented can provide the nation with what it has never had before—a citizens' lobby large enough and strong enough to press effectively for reforms...
...Gardner's goals are in the category of 'common goods,' and his target list—ranging from ending the war to providing annual sessions of state legislatures—is so diverse as to risk serious dilution of the members' enthusiasm...
...The Great Society had already passed its peak, but for a long time Gardner's optimism prevailed over his judgment...
...In 1965, Gardner attracted much notice as the chairman of the White House Conference on Education...
...institutions don't change unless you give them a very, very hard push/ " Another former HEW associate says Gardner was "a marvelous spokesman for the Department, a great idea man, but a lousy administrator...
...He joined the Carnegie Corporation of New York when the war ended, and quickly established a reputation as a trend-spotter...
...I learned that institutions don't change unless you give them a very, very hard push...
...It eroded his credibility in time, and when he realized what was happening, he resigned...
...The quest for consensus and the avoidance of conflict are central tenets of Gardner's faith...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
