QUESTION: Political leadership, in other words, is capable of working with the poor community?

COLES: I find that people like Kevin White and Bobby Kennedy can reach across and obtain the alliance of both poor Negroes and poor whites. But not that of the intellectual community. Students are ready to jump on Kevin White without comprehending the enormously complicated job this man has got. Boston is a city that voted 47 per cent for Louise Day Hicks. White is trying to deal with the needs of a predominantly lower middle class community which has been led into the same trap the white southerner has been led into, the trap of bigotry as a means of avoiding social and economic realities.

It's curious to me that I can find support for Bobby Kennedy from the poor in Appalachia, where Harry Cardill called him the greatest man since Franklin D. Roosevelt; I can find support for him in lower-middle-class, and particularly so-called backlash regions, in Boston. But again--we have McCarthy. I don't think this is just an idle, irrelevant distinction. It ties in with the estrangement I spoke of between the white upper-middle-class intellectual liberal, and even radical, community, and the very people whose lives they want changed, but changed from the distance of their analysis -- rather than through any real communion, the kind of communion that people like Agee and Simone Weil have talked about, the communion that goes with living with people and being a part of them.

Coles as Anti-Ideological

Coles' effort to adopt the point of view of the people he studies is the effort of a man who concedes he is a "romantic" and who perhaps has a more-than-ordinary admiration for people trying to cope with poverty. Since he began working in the South ten years ago, he has shaped his work around that point of view.

Since 1964, with a foundation grant and an appointment as a research psychiatrist at the Health Services, Coles has been working with the group of parents who first started bussing their children from Roxbury to white schools -- the Boardman Parents Group. He has since extended the study to include other black and white families in Roxbury.

In the following section he evaluates his own outlook and work:

COLES: I am in favor--I want to emphasize this--of a large measure of the social and economic analysis of America that the student radicals have made. But I suppose my loyalties as a person and as a worker are with the immediate lives of the people that I work with, and in that sense I suppose I am not ideological. I want the police to protect these families from fires, from sniping, and I want the children that I know in Roxbury not to be killed by a burning building or by bullets.

I don't recommend this as a political program, and I think this is frankly the limitation of my kind of thinking and my kind of work. I'm neither a political scientist nor a political leader. I'm working with people who are terribly caught up in a country they love--and they do love America, this is not romantic talk--a country they both love and want more from I want these people to have the kinds of lives they want to have. I don't want to impose my idea of the Good Life on them.

QUESTION: Don't you think this view can be paralyzing if you want to eliminate poverty?

COLES: Well, you're right. In the section I taught in Professor Erikson's course a couple of years ago this same theme came up again and again. The students accused me of being anti-ideological and a romantic, and I suppose they're right. My heroes are not the New Left heroes, and this is the problem, I guess. My heroes are Bernanos and Agee and Orwell and Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy--and Reinhold Niebuhr. And I would add within my own profession Erik Erikson and Anna Freud.

Now none of these people have ever stormed a barricade, none of them have ever formulated large-scale political programs. If you look at some of these people politically, you can imagine what emerges. But I don't care. And I suppose I respect the right of someone to say, "You are a frivolous Western liberal who for all your involvement is never fundamentally going to change this society."

Well, here we get into a very complicated issue. We've seen enough in this century to make us suspicious of people like me, but also to make us suspicious of people who say, "You cannot look at particular human beings and their needs when you're out to change society." This latter viewpoint can be used as a rationalization and justification for the most mean and cruel and inhuman political acts imaginable.

Problems of Organized Action

I suppose I'm interested in certain kinds of spiritual changes in life, changes that may be obtainable by any program.