Just so. The Howard speech was playing for high stakes.

The fact was that the civil-rights movement was beginning to think in these terms....

In other circumstances, the Howard speech and even the report might have served to give direction to this developing attitude. Yet just the opposite, occurred. The reasons are no doubt many, but an important one seems to have been the war in Vietnam. The political Left that had been associated with and indeed was part of the movement now began turning on the President and all his works. Thus, Ramparts published an editorial written by Marcus Raskin, evincing great concern that I seemed to think more Negroes should be in the armed forces (I do); and indicting me further as a lackey of the "social welfare monopolicy--with its cop and spying attributes" that now proposed to force decent proletarian Negroes to live like the white bourgeoisie and to "torture" them with birth control. I had become a most suspect person indeed in the ranks of SNCC and CORE, and the Presidential initiative suffered accordingly.

The real blow was Watts. It threw the civil-rights movement entirely off balance. Until then, theirs had been the aggrieved, the just, the righteous cause. In the South and old game had been going on with a new rule, imperfectly understood by whites, that the first side to resort to violence--lost Now in the North the Negroes had resorted to violence, in a wild destructive explosion that shattered, probably forever, the image of nonviolent suffering. And within hours of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The same new rule applied. The civil-rights movement could not explain Watts, and could not justify it. Then, of a sudden, the report on the Negro family was being used to do so. Watts made the report a public issue, and gave it a name. Or rather the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak did in their column of August 18, which began:

Weeksbefore the Negro ghetto of los Angeles erupted in violence, intense debate over how to handle such racial powder kegs was under way deep inside the Johnson administration.

The pivot of this debate: the Moynihan report a much suppressed, much leaked Labor Department document that strips away usual equivocations and exposes the ugly truth about the big city Negro's plight.

The report, said they, had raised, as indeed it had, the explosive question of preferential treatment, "a solution far afield from the American dream."

I had by this time left Washington for New York politics and was not at all involved with what was then going on in the capital, but it does appear that after Watts the report gained no oriety as an explanation of the internal problems revealed by the riots, and in that measure angered and repelled just those Negro leaders who had been on the point of turning to just such problems. Before long I was being denounced, for example, by James Farmer, in terms not at all consistent with his staff memorandum of April 3: "We are sick unto death," he wrote in a syndicated column, "of being analyzed, mesmerized, brought, sold, and slobbered over....Moynihan has provided a massive academic copout for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we stop sleeping with our wife's sister and buying Cadillacs instead of bread....Nowhere does Moynihan suggest that the proper answer to a shattered family is an open job market where the 'frustrated' Negro male can get an honest day's work." (The gist of the report was, if I may, that full employment, while indispensable, was no longer enough.)

No Moynihan

Watts also threw off the White House, which found the moment for the conference "To Fulfill These Rights" almost upon it, but with no adequate preparations for a full-scale meeting. It was decided to hold first a small planning session. This met in November in an atmosphere of near frenzy over the report, which was all the militants seemed able to think of: indeed, at one of the plenary sessions the secretary to the conference felt called on to announce, "There is no such person as Daniel P. Moynihan."

The collapse had been presaged just before the planning session met in November. A "Pre-White House Conference on Civil Rights" was convened in New York by the Office of Church and Race of the Protestant Council in cooperation with the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. A distinguished group of religious leaders, including Catholics and Jews and a scattering of liberal professors, was in attendance. The key figures were Dr. Robert Spike, Executive Director of the Commission on Religion and Race which had been established in 1963 in the midst of the Birmingham crisis, and Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, a young Negro sociologist and minister, then with the New York Protestant Council, and who a month later succeeded Spike in the national post. The larger purpose of the meeting was to propose that an "Economic Development Budget for Equal Rights in America," to cost $32 billion per year, be placed on the agenda of the White House Conference. But the real heart of the gathering was in the demand "that the question of 'family stability' be stricken entirely from that agenda."

This demand was supported by a paper written by Dr. Payton analyzing the report....Dr. Payton's main assertion was that the report had declared that the employment and income gap between Negroes and whites was closing (where, in fact, the report had said exactly the opposite)....

In truth, the Payton paper bordered on the psychopathological. (Although perhaps not: it was broadcast by the hundreds at the time, and achieved its objective brilliantly. But when Rainwater and Yancey recently asked to reproduce it in their book, Payton declined.) Charles M. Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White, called it "the most blatant distortion that I can remember seeing in a long time." In a letter to a Presbyterian minister he wrote:

Moynihan's whole emphasis is on the crucial role of unemployment in understanding all of the problems of Negro pathology: he presents one statistical correlation after another, showing that illegitimacy, desertion, and all the other symptoms show an unbelievably high correlation with changes in Negro unemployment: he marshals an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating--completely contrary to Payton's allegations throughout his essay--that Negro unemployment is very much more serious than the unemployment statistics indicate.

And so on. The Presidential assistant most directly responsible for civilrights matters, a devout Protestant layman, described Payton's paper as "the apotheosis of a big lie." But somehow a nerve had been touched in Liberal Protsetantism and there was no undoing the effects. Given the national prominence and the position of the persons who convened the Payton Spike meeting, and given the absence of any protest or correction from with in the church community, it had to be taken as the voice of American Protestantism. The issue of the Negro family was dead....

No Miracles

The Conference, when it met, was a lifeless affair. The Council submitted a long report of unflinching orthodoxy, that missed entirely the import of the Howard speech. It reflected throughout what Rainwater has called "the services strategy," as against an income strategy in dealing with problems of poverty. Thus, the section on public welfare proposed, "There should be a sharp reduction of the number of clients served by each case worker." This is a common enough American approach to social problems, but there is perhaps a special significance in this particular area: a quite disproportionate number of middle-class Negroes, and of whites involved in civil-rights activities, are themselves members of the service professions. It is too much to expect that such persons will be oblivious to the advantages that might accrue to them from bidding up the demand for their services. A more cynical person might describe the strategy as one of feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses. The Education section proposed that public expenditure per pupil be increased from $532 to $1000. This would reflect an increase of tax outlay per Negro family of $104, or 37.5 per cent of average Negro family income. But almost every last penny of this increase would go to middle-class persons whose salaries are already well above the poverty level. The thought of giving the money directly to the Negro family in the form of a family allowance is not even suggested in the report, a document in any event destined for instant obscurity. The delegates were bored from the outset, and contented themselves with passing resolutions of no greater political realism than the report itself: "That J. Edgar Hoover be fired," "That the President ask for $2 billion to enforce Civil Rights laws." The President spoke briefly and warned his hearers not to expect miracles....

The administration was, and is, as much committed to the goals of the Howard speech as when it was delivered. But it lacked the resources of time and political capital to force the issue. (Remember that at this point, the civil-rights militants, Negro and white, were also bitterly attacking the war in Vietnam. The White House had to placate them, and in this instance all that was asked, ironically, was that it not move forward on the report it had committed itself.) The most that could be hoped for was that the businessmen and liberal leaders on the President's new Council should stick by the Howard thesis and press the matter. They did nothing of the sort. In retrospect it is clear that civil rights had become for them a cause that could no longer stimulate or inspire them to take any grave risks. Their strategy now consisted of appearing to take an "ad