How Chip Carter Got His New Job
Kurtz, Howie
How Chip Carter Got His New Job by Howie Kurtz A few vears aao Bill Milliken was just another socii1 activist, trying to raise some money to help ghetto students in Atlanta with their...
...And Walling became the point man assigned to prying the money loose from the departments...
...It’s not a new idea,” Milliken concedes, “but our institutions have become so big that we’ve lost the human scale...
...Maybe that’s idealistic, but if every part of government and the private sector doesn’t make it work, then it will fail...
...Carter should not think he’s making much progress on this terribly complex problem by pushing one small program through the bureaucracy...
...This proved to be an understatement...
...But cheerleading and clean-up squads are not what federal officials had in mind when they agreed to fund the program...
...Not directly,” says Bruce Spraggins, a program worker at Julia Richmond...
...Carters, and as a result his fortunes soon took a sharp upturn...
...Milliken bristles at the suggestion that he hired Chip Carter for his White House influence or as a return favor to his father...
...What these kids need most is male role models,” he says...
...It took him less than half an hour to convince Carter to give him $5,000 from a contingency fund and a letter of recommendation that helped Milliken raise $100,000 more from such prominent Atlantans as Philip Alston and Anne Cox Chambers, now both ambassadors...
...The LEAA, which had once almost cut off funding for Cities in Schools in Atlanta because it felt it did little to reduce juvenile crime, wanted more specific objectives from the program...
...I can’t rememberI may have said the President wants better coordination of these services...
...In other words, the counselors at Julia Richmond are dedicated to helping...
...Every agency deals with one fragmented part of a person...
...We don’t place them in actual jobs, no,” says Judd Gordon, another program official at Julia Richmond...
...It was very vague and unstructured...
...My husband introduced him to Governor Carter...
...He admitted that he already had staff people in place and wanted the money to pay their salaries...
...After the inauguration Mrs...
...The Labor Department was primarily resistant...
...reporter for Jack Anderson...
...As one knowledgeable federal official put it, “This is an operation that is making a living by shaking down the federal government in the President’s name...
...Milliken says he had nothing to do with any pressuring of the agencies...
...The President’s son didn’t want to work in Atlanta, so Milliken agreed to let him stay in Washington full-time...
...One official who claimed he had developed relationships with several local businesses “was asked for the names of those companies several times but failed to answer the questions...
...The goal is to create a supportive environment in the one place where ghetto youngsters can be reached before they drop out of society-the school...
...Baroni arranged for a division of HUD to contribute $100,000 to evaluate the program...
...who provides tutoring...
...1 said it was a program that the President and the First Lady knew about and thought was a good idea...
...He says he sees “at least three or four such groups a day, but they don’t all have such good connections...
...and Jim Parham (since moved to HEW), who met Milliken when he was Carter’s commissioner of human resources in Georgia...
...Over at ACTION, officials were initially reluctant to contribute because Cities in Schools didn’t fit their volunteer orientation, but later decided to provide it with 16 VISTA volunteers...
...There aren’t many jobs he feels he can take...
...It’s going to be a slow process...
...At the Community Services Administration, Bill Allison, the deputy director, had been a big booster of the program since his days as a community worker in Atlanta...
...which is on the East Side of Manhattan but draws its students from East Harlem, and Public School 114, an elementary school in the Bronx...
...He later began working in Atlanta at a “postal academy,” one of Postmaster General Winston Blount’s pet projects for urban youth...
...Anytime someone in the White House talks to them, they’re bound to pay some additional attention...
...We’re beginning to move in that direction...
...HEW recently awarded a $373,000 contract to a private firm called the American lnstitute of Research to develop a blueprint for an evaluation of Cities in Schools...
...The pressure was sustained by a written plea from the President himself...
...During the last year of the Ford administration, Milliken repeatedly flew to Washington to try to get some federal funding...
...But it doesn’t take an experimental program to discover that pouring money into run-down schools will yield better results...
...If that happened, it’s wrong...
...The President himself began a stepped-up effort to help Milliken by sending a letter to every department head...
...Two of the New York schools where the program is being tried are Julia Richmond High School...
...The main duties of two other job counselors, the audit said, were “disciplining children in the classes, keeping reports and records on each child...
...Milliken began trying to raise private and local government money...
...He “hustled some bucks,” as he put it, from the Urban League and other groups to send Harlem dropouts to school in Newark...
...He’s made a commitment to us until he puts on his political hat again in the next campaign...
...Milliken became friends with the President and the First Lady back in Georgia, when they were occupying the goverhr’s mansion...
...and they’ve started a student council and a clean-up squad to sweep the streets...
...Once you get that involved in something, it’s difficult to take a totally hands-off attitude...
...There has been no job development as described in the contract,”an internal Labor audit said...
...A third official concurs: “Heavyhanded tactics were used...
...He happened to meet Richard Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff, at a banquet in Baltimore, and before the dinner was over he managed to win Cheney’s friendship and support...
...Jimmy Carter was elected because he seemed to realize what was wrong with running Washington on a who-knows-who basis...
...But I don’t see anything wrong with it, unless he has some motive other than thinking the program is a good idea...
...Milliken was with Carter the night he announced for the presidency...
...Not long afterward, the First Lady and Bert Lance, then still in office, were kind enough to host a breakfast where Milliken solicited the support of 230 prominent businessmen...
...Jody Powell, the White House press secretary, says he sees nothing wrong , with Carter’s efforts to push Cities in Schools...
...But Jack Watson called and said we had no choice...
...In addition to soliciting money from corporations, Chip will be visiting Cities in Schools projects in other cities with the idea of eventually helping to set up one in Washington...
...Lowerlevel bureaucrats were being resistant...
...They didn’t think they should participate unless it had a direct manpower connection...
...Carter is very interested in this...
...The Carters helped bail out Milliken’s Atlanta program, and since the 1976 election they have been at the center of an effort that has gotten Milliken $2.7 Howie Kurtz is an investigative...
...But at the same time, Milliken’s sudden success, like most good fortune in the Washington non-profit world, came his way more because of his high-level connections than the merits of his program...
...He visited a project in the Bronx with me and got turned on by it...
...That was my job: to get them to participate...
...It’s as part of the effort to line up that broad involvement that Milliken has enlisted Chip Carter, who, says Milliken, “will help me raise money in the private sector...
...Nevertheless, Milliken is busy laying plans to expand into Washington, Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Hartford, and Fayetteville, North Carolina...
...his assistant, Jane Hansen, who worked in other Atlanta youth programs and also knew Milliken...
...This official finally told Walling, “The bottom line is we probably won’t be able to support you...
...Labor spanked their hands on that...
...By a year later, however, Labor had reluctantly given the program another $1 million...
...Preliminary Indications How good an idea is Cities in Schools...
...Meanwhile, Milliken had been keeping in touch with his friends the Mrs...
...and that it’s heartening to see the Carters’obvious concern about the plight of these schools...
...As those who want money from the federal government often do, Milliken hired a well-connected Washington consulting firm, Koch and Associates, to shake loose some funds for him...
...Gordon says that the students do get some career guidance, but that its main thrust is just giving personal attention to youngsters who have had a lifetime of failure...
...Does the program help find jobs for students...
...in another sense it’s an illustration of the tradition that money generally flows in the direction of a President’s friends...
...The place where pressure was applied-I’m not saying pressure was Labor,” Walling went on...
...But it’s not in my or the President’s nature to push people where they don’t want to go...
...When the smoke cleared, seven agencies ha9 kicked in a total of $2.7 million to Cities in Schools...
...They really needed a lot of help...
...On March 30, 1977, I approved the proposal...
...There was tremendous resistance among the agencies...
...The people who raised the money deny that they used undue pressure in doing so...
...By Christmas Milliken was making the pilgrimage to Plains to sell the president-elect on the notion that his program needed substantial federal funding...
...Some people would just One official remembers Walling saying, You prob ably are going to have to support us, because the President is very interested in this and Mrs Carter is very interested in this‘ assume that’s pressure...
...For a group of 40 disadvantaged students, five staff members, in close cooperation with social agencies and businesses in the surrounding community, are supposed to provide remedial tutoring, family counseling, and vocational training...
...Each class of 40 students has four Cities in Schools staff members: a “supportive educator...
...His repeated efforts to pry some money loose from the federal government had, as late as November 1976, gotten virtually nowhere...
...Instead, it used Labor’s money for general operating expenses...
...The task was later given to one of Lance’s special assistants...
...As it turned out, Cities in Schools didn’t hire all ten of those job counselors in New York...
...Although the auditors told the Labor Department to demand its money back, Labor officials decided to overlook theviolations...
...From his early successes in Georgia, Milliken tried-with mixed results-to expand...
...They are Wib Walling, who worked in the Atlanta postal academy and has known Milliken for 19 years...
...Workers in the program, who share Milliken’s enthusiasm and dedication, say the grades and class attendance of - students they have worked with in Atlanta have improved substantially...
...Milliken is undoubtedly sincere in his zealous desire to help the poor, and Carter seems to genuinely believe in the program’s potential...
...He had lunch and dinner at the White House...
...He remembers Walling replying, “You probably are going to have to support us, because the President is very interested in this and Mrs...
...Maybe someone did twist a few arms,” he says...
...How Chip Carter Got His New Job by Howie Kurtz A few vears aao Bill Milliken was just another socii1 activist, trying to raise some money to help ghetto students in Atlanta with their problems...
...At HUD, another old acquaintance from Atlanta, Dick Fleming, took Milliken to see Geno Baroni, an assistant secretary who also knew Milliken and his work...
...She spent several days giving the Cities in Schools people advice but then told her boss that “this is not an appropriate role for the Office of Management and Budget...
...They wanted to rescue older students who are on the verge of becoming mired in drug and crime problems and dropping out of society...
...Then Jimmy Carter was elected President and everything changed for Bill Milliken...
...they work with parents in the community...
...Koch and Associates devised a “strategy” to sell Cities in Schools to seven federal agencies, but it soon bowed out because, its president, June Koch, says, “they had sufficient interest at the presidential level and no longer needed our help...
...Buzz Words and Gobbledygook “It was all so nebulous,” says one official from a government agency that Walling approached...
...At Julia Richmond, which is in the program because Milliken is friendly with some of its officials, Cities in Schools has randomly selected 120 ninth-graders for counseling help, leaving the rest of the school’s 5,000 mostly black and Puerto Rican students untouched...
...I certainly wanted them to participate...
...Bert Lance wants you to do this.’ Walling even admitted at one point that this integration of services idea is a bunch of junk...
...By the end of the sixties Milliken was exhausted, and he retreated to Koinonia, an interracial commune in South Georgia that Hamilton Jordan’s late uncle, Clarence, founded...
...It was really screwed up,” Marcy says now...
...It’s too bad that he’s now succumbed to that temptation himself...
...Furthermore, there , was no contact with outside social agencies, as Cities in Schools had promised...
...The success of Cities in Schools is so obviously a product of its presidential patronage, rather than of its merits, as to cast doubts on whether the taxpayers should be spending their money on it...
...There’s no question that inner-city pubIic schools are in desperate, depressing shape...
...Walling achieved considerable success in steering federal money Milliken’s way by working through a closeknit network of Georgians in the departments and agencies...
...Bert Lance, meanwhile, helped out by assigning one of his staff members, Kristine Marcy, to give Cities in Schools some fund-raising guidance...
...He sent her memos on his progress nearly every week...
...Chip and I really hit it off,’ he says...
...and working with welfare recipients...
...So far the program has received $885,000 from private donors-among them, General Motors, Atlantic Richfield, the Lilly *The consulting firms, predictably, are lining up to study whether the program succeeds or fails...
...At the elementary school in the Bronx, an assistant principal describes Cities in Schools’ role this way: “They’re doing some guidance and tutoring...
...An engaging man with an evangelical sense of mission, he carried his message to anyone who would listen-local businessmen, state oficials, philanthropists-but he had to scrounge for every dollar...
...but they aren’t providing the “integrated services” that have been Cities in Schools’ main selling point in Washington...
...It was also obvious there was an interest on the part of the President...
...He often let drug addicts crash in his $32a-month apartment in Harlem...
...He says he didn’t even know who was governor of Georgia at the time, but a prominent minister he knew arranged for him to meet with Jimmy Carter (incidentally, at least five people have since claimed credit for introducing Milliken to Carter...
...as an experimental effort aimed at developing an integrated system of human service delivery,” Carter wrote...
...Many of the federal agencies who have recently funded Milliken were strongly opposed to helping a program they viewed as vague and unworkable...
...They said, ‘The President wants you to do this...
...I appreciate your assistance with the proposal...
...and a “programmatic person,” who takes the students to cultural activities in order “to broaden their conceptual base...
...Foundation, and the Hartford Corporationand Milliken has persuaded several businessmen to serve on his board of directors, whose members also include Anne Cox Chambers and Ruth Carter Stapleton...
...When Chip Carter got the job earlier this year, he had just returned to the White House from the family peanut farm in Plains, looking for work and trying to find himself, so the timing was fortuitous...
...Does the program work with any social agencies in the city...
...Because the President’s son is no doubt a hard man f o r corporate executives to say no to, Chip Carter ought to be able to help Cities in Schools reach its goal of one-third private funding...
...Consumed With Fervent ODtimism Bill Milliken began his career in a Christian volunteer program nearly 20 years ago, wearing the same work shirt and blue jeans-and consumed with the same fervent optimism and evangelical spirit-that he does today...
...Indeed they were, and blunt phone calls to recalcitrant agencies soon came in from Jim Parham and Jack Watson, the secretary to the Cabinet...
...But that’s the problem-everyone wanted to fund only the part they were concerned with...
...Chip and I really hit it off,” he says...
...It was quite natural for Milliken to come to me,” says Allison...
...If the blueprint is approved, the firm will get an even bigger contract to actually evaluate the program...
...That’s still on the drawing board...
...This money was used to launch a program now popularly known as Cities in Schools, though in Atlanta it has been titled both Exodus and Project Propinquity...
...A White House receptionist answers the phone, “Cities in Schools...
...Cities in Schools is an approach that can’t be copied on a nationwide scale unless the President is prepared to push for a huge aid program for ghetto schools...
...This is something the White House should be doing...
...Jack Watson would not return phone calls on the matter, but Jim Parham also maintains that “no undue pressure was put on anyone...
...Then Carter added three people to the White House staff to shepherd Cities in Schools through the bureaucracy...
...He added with a chuckle: “You know, he could have ordered these people to do things, instead ofjust suggesting it...
...We have no relationship with business...
...for job counselors...
...Obviously he is not going to see every possible program...
...It takes a little leverage from someone up above to make it work...
...Carter took up the cudgel for Milliken, arranging private audiences for him with the secretaries of Commerce, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health, Education, and Welfare...
...The complete answers to those questions will be some time in coming, but there are some preliminary indications from the program in New York...
...The program’s aim is to help ghetto students with their social and academic problems by concentrating a variety of social services in the schools they attend...
...I did not try to throw around the President’s name, but people were aware of it...
...they help us during lunch period...
...I don’t blame people for getting their noses out of joint...
...and a month before the election he had a long talk with Rosalynn Carter at the Atlanta airport...
...I tried not to emphasize the White House support,” says Walling, “but everybody knew about it...
...Does the program cooperate with local businesses...
...He has launched major ventures in New York, Atlanta, and Indianapolis, and is planning to expand into seven more cities...
...The staff also helps out on hall patrol and is starting a cheerleading team...
...But according to reliable sources, high White House aides pressured several officials in the agencies into backing the program by insisting that President Carter was demanding their support...
...Whether the idea can work on a large enough scale to have a substantial effect on the lives of poor young people-without tremendous expenseis still an open question...
...He visited a project in the Bronx with me and got turned on by it...
...Carter has asked the Office of Education to provide all the federal money-$] .5 million-for Cities in Schools next year-an idea Milliken doesn’t like...
...If the President sees a program that looks good to him, he tries to get support for it,” Powell says...
...The Labor Department, having had problems in its previous contract with Milliken, was at first recalcitrant...
...Milliken bristles at the suggestion that he hired Chip Carter for his White House influence or as a return favor to his father...
...The President told him the program was meeting resistance and asked Milliken to draw up a detailed plan explaining how it would expand nationally...
...He struck up a friendship with Richard Lugar, then the mayor of Indianapolis, now the junior senator from Indiana, who became a convert and helped launch the program in Indianapolis...
...I understand that discussions with you and other members of your staff already have taken place with regard to your agency’s participation...
...When a kid has a fourthgrade reading level, his employability prospects are not that good...
...Another official remembers it this way: “The message came down from the White House that you’ve got to give them some money, period...
...that we need many more people willing to commit themselves to solving the problem the way Milliken has...
...ln one sense the story of Bill Milliken is the story of one idealistic program’s heart-warming success...
...The funding for postal academies was abruptly canceled in 1972 after Blount left office, and Milliken began a desperate search for money...
...Parham became chairman of a special inter-agency committee whose job was to oversee the program (which meant all seven agencies had to assign at least one staff member to attend meetings and work out the financing...
...The official name of Milliken’s non-profit firm is the Institutional Development Corporation...
...I would just say it is a fact that the President wanted to try this experiment...
...This is no better than thousands of other programs, and they haven’t done it more efficiently, either...
...It got us off to a bad start at Labor...
...And how well can it work on a national scale...
...There were a lot of buzz words and gobbledygook about integration of support services...
...For several months, only six to eight of the ten DOL-funded positions have been filled,” while two others “are not performing any of the duties...
...The New York officials of the program, Milliken now admits, “didn’t understand the guidelines properly...
...a “youth worker,” who chases after students playing hooky and takes the kids to basketball games and movies...
...he helped out in little ways during the campaign...
...One member of the firm, Tom Phelan, used to work in the Labor Departmentand Labor, in Recember 1976, gave Milliken $200,000 for ten job counselors in Atlanta and ten more for a new program in New York City...
...Carter took up the cudgel for Milliken, arranging private audiences for him with the secretaries of Commerce, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health, Education, and Welfare...
...Milliken recently returned the favor by hiring the President’s son, Chip, in a $26,500-a-year job in Washington...
...We’re in the embryonic stage at this point...
...million in federal funds...
...Attorney General Griffin Bell assigned a special assistant to help the program, but the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was resistant about providing it with funds...
...It’s not my program, it’s everybody’s program,” he says...
...This project would not be getting any federal money if Bill Milliken was not the President’s friend...
...Our program is weak in terms of jobs...
...Milliken and the three new White House staff members were given their own office on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building...
...We don’t have any job counselors...
...a social worker, who makes house calls and helps with family problems...
...He insists he doesn’t want any more federal funding after three years, but even if he holds to that, it’s a safe bet that the local schools, private groups, and government bureaucrats who benefit from the program will be back in Washington to plead for continued support...
...Ron Thomas, who heads the Cities in Schools effort there, adds that his group works with police, sanitation, and park officials in the community...
...I’ve known Bill Milliken for years,” ACTION’S deputy director, Mary King, explains...
...But Cheney could not convince the bureaucrats in the agencies and departments to back the program financially...
...We’ve tried to create a small environment where people can have an eyeball-toeyeball relationship with these kids...
Vol. 10 • June 1978 • No. 4
