After the 1968 election Ted Berry knew that the Community Action Program, the agency of which he had been director for four years, would be changing and he didn’t want to be a part of it. President Richard Nixon had made clear his intentions for the War on Poverty from the beginning – calling the Office of Economic Opportunity a colossal failure throughout his presidential campaign. Appointing former Republican congressman Donald Rumsfeld as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and later Dick Cheney as special assistant, put the last nail in the coffin of many anti-poverty programs. Two weeks before President Nixon’s inauguration , on January 6th, 1969, Theodore Berry drafted a letter to the President, indicating his wish to resign his office at the President’s convenience. President Nixon officially accepted his resignation effective August 31st, 1969.
Theodore Berry's farewell party from the OEO. Right photo pictures Theodore N. Berry, Johnnie Mae Berry and Theodore M. Berry, August 1969
Berry's letter of resignation to the President and President Nixon's letter accepting Berry's resignation.
During his campaign for the presidency, Nixon was extremely critical of the Office of Economic Opportunity. However, during his first year or so he seemed surprisingly supportive of the programs if not the agency and immediately recognized the value of programs which had been founded by the OEO’s Community Action Programs – Head Start, Upward Bound and Legal Services chief among them. In fact, he and the rest of his administration felt that the OEO had been so successful in developing new and innovative projects through CAP’s Research and Demonstration department that he transferred administration of those already successful programs to other agencies in order to allow the OEO to focus on such development. In so doing, Nixon effectively took the day-to-day operations of those programs away from the purview of local Community Action Agencies, which were run by and for the poor in the community, and put them in the hands of federal government agencies run from Washington, D.C. Those programs also took their funding with them to the other agencies and left the OEO to cope with the inevitable hazards and confusion of a complete reorganization from the federal level on down to more than 1,000 local CAAs, as well as the political pressure of creating completely new and successful programs with less than half of its previous budget.
Donald Rumsfeld and Thomas Broden at an OEO award ceremony, 1969
Upon his resignation from CAP, Berry submitted an unsolicited twenty-seven page report to the President detailing the successes, shortcomings, and recommendations for the program. In his report, Berry cited CAP’s inadequate funding due to a lack of “congressional commitment to the policy ‘to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty.’” He stated that the OEO had been put on the defensive by its critics and that “throughout its history CAP has had to contend with continued sniping – in Congress, from the press, and from state and local officials – at both its real and imagined failures. It has had to live with a ‘double standard’ that demands of programs for the poor a degree of administrative excellence never demanded from programs serving more affluent special interests.”
After Berry left the OEO, President Nixon continued to make the Economic Opportunity Act more “politically palatable” by distributing its authority and funding among other agencies. In 1973 he ordered newly appointed OEO director Howard Phillips to dismantle the agency and discontinue the CAA funding which Congress had allocated for the fiscal year. Fortunately for those agencies, the Federal District Court in Washington D.C. ordered the funds to be sent out. Phillips was later ordered to resign his office because his appointment had never been confirmed by the Senate.
Although the Office of Economic Opportunity is long gone, we can still see its effects in action today. Community action agencies, some public and some private, are still going strong across the country and they continue to promote self-sufficiency through the administration of anti-poverty programs like Head Start and job training programs.
In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a $61,287 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the Archives and Records Administration to fully process the Theodore M. Berry Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library. All information and opinions published on the Berry project website and in the blog entries are those of the individuals involved in the grant project and do not reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NARA.
