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VERNON E. JORDAN, JR.

and the skills to compete in the job market. It helped them

achieve basic survival needs denied them by the operations of an imperfect market system.

We see the results of the Great Society programs today: in the

marked improvement in reading test scores among black children

in poor neighborhoods, in longer black life expectancy, in black sheriffs and mayors, and in campaigns by George Wallace or

Strom Thurmond in black precincts.

The problems with the Great Society were not that they made

us dependent or enlarged government, but that they were too

limited, were underfunded, and too short-lived to amount to

more than a beginning.

Senator Daniel Moynihan, who served under both Lyndon

Johnson and Richard Nixon, has written: �śThe social reforms of

the mid-decade had been oversold, and with the coming of the

war, underfinanced to the degree that seeming failure could be as-cribed almost to intent.”

The War on Poverty amounted to little more than a skirmish.

It gave way to the real war�"the war in Vietnam�"which increas-

ingly absorbed America’s resources and energies.

If the Second Reconstruction did not achieve its goals of racial equality and an end to poverty, it did leave a lasting, positive mark on America and its people.

First, it restored the rule of law and the rule of the Constitution to the South�"with far-reaching social and economic results.

Second, it enlarged personal freedom and civil liberties for all, and most especially for black citizens whose constitutional rights had been persistently violated.