Oral history transcript, David L. Hackett, interview 1 (I), 4/15/1980, by Michael L. Gillette

Title:

Oral history transcript, David L. Hackett, interview 1 (I), 4/15/1980, by Michael L. Gillette

Number of Pages:

40

Description:

Insights gained from Hackett's work with the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime; giving grants to nineteen cities that wanted to develop a plan for addressing delinquency; pressure to speed up the planning process and start programs; what the Committee looked for in creating a new anti-delinquency program; Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT) programs; the Lower East Side experiment; increasing local involvement in planning and implementing programs in an effort to decrease conflict with the federal government; Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964; emphasis on a planning process rather than specific programs; the goal of establishing a federal-level mechanism for responding to local-level plans; working with the Bureau of the Budget; federal programs that were ineffective, such as vocational education and Employment Service; the problem that community action was never well-defined and local government leaders did not know what was expected of them; involving the private sector and local residents in developing plans for their own neighborhoods; the recommendation that cities would present comprehensive plans to a cabinet-level committee for review; LBJ's and Sargent Shriver's lack of support for the Committee's recommendations; misconceptions about community action and the Committee's intentions; Sargent Shriver's plan to run programs from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), bypassing departments related to the programs; Shriver's work as head of the War on Poverty; congressional support for programs with immediate results; Hackett's belief that problems addressed by the OEO would have been better served by a coordinated federal effort involving more than one department; the President's Task Force in the War Against Poverty; the concept of maximum feasible participation; Title II problems; the necessary components of the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime Committee's plan; Adam Yarmolinsky's role on the task force; how OEO Community Action Programs differed from what was intended; competition versus coordination among program and agencies; the Urban Areas Task Force; getting community action legislation passed; poverty-related programs and the budget from the 1960s to 1980; intentions to involve as many local citizens as possible in the process of solving problems in their communities.

Contributor:

Hackett, David L., 1927-

Collection:

LBJ Library Oral Histories

Collection Description:

Go to List of Holdings

Series:

Transcripts of LBJ Library Oral Histories

See Also:

See all online interviews with David L. Hackett

Relation:

Go to Interviewee bio page

Rights:

Possibly copyright restricted: see deed at end of transcript for details