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The creation of the federal Head Start program in 1965 put the needs of young children from poor families on the national agenda. Head Start was inspired both by research suggesting the promise of early intervention and by the politics of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which required that it be launched quickly and on a large scale, and that it bypass the structures of local government. Local programs varied widely in how they prioritized Head Start's different goals, making it difficult to assess the program's success. By drawing national attention to the promise of preschool for the poor, Head Start also spurred interest in preschool for other children, leading to the expansion of public kindergartens, private nursery schools, and the television show Sesame Street.

This chapter begins with a description of Sargent Shriver's efforts to convince Adlai Stevenson to accept Jon F. Kennedy as his running mate in the upcoming presidential election. It examines the legacy of Al Smith—the first Catholic to run for president on a major party ticket in 1928, who was trounced in the general election supposedly because of his religion. It discusses how Kennedy's Catholicism was the largest roadblock on his path to the Oval Office.

This chapter recounts how segregationists’ political pressure led Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) Director Sargent Shriver to back away from the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) and support a rival Head Start program, Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP). In funding MAP, Shriver preserved Head Start in Mississippi and appeased powerful political leaders. Shriver won the support of key black and white leaders in Mississippi including National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Aaron Henry and Greenville newspaper publisher Hodding Carter III. CDGM parents and staff, however, refused to accept MAP. Their resistance demonstrated CDGM’s empowering nature.

Following the paths of development workers and discourses as they returned home, the fourth and fifth chapters argue that the Peace Corps and modernization theory guided the vision and strategy of 1960s U.S. social movements, particularly in the later sixties as those movements attempted to become more internationalist and explicitly ideological. Tracing the connections between the War on Poverty, of which Sargent Shriver was the founding director, and the black liberation movement as it transformed from civil rights to Black Power, chapter 4 investigates how the civil rights and Black Power movements were influenced by liberal modernization theory and the ideal of heroic development work.

This chapter traces the pro-life movement’s conservative shift in the late 1970s. After Roe v. Wade, pro-life organizations made a Human Life Amendment their top priority, but most nationally prominent Democrats, who did not want to alienate feminist allies, refused to support it. The chapter analyzes the alienation of pro-lifers from the Democratic Party during the 1976 election by exploring the presidential campaigns of Sargent Shriver (a longtime pro-life ally who angered pro-lifers in 1976 by refusing to endorse their constitutional amendment) and Ellen McCormack (a New York pro-life activist who ran for president). The chapter then analyzes the role of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in pushing the Republican Party to endorse an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in 1976. Reagan’s additional outreach to pro-lifers in 1980 solidified the movement’s commitment to the GOP.

The Peace Corps was founded in 1961. The first problem faced was whether any country would ask for volunteers. To address this problem, Sargent Shriver, the first Peace Corps director, traveled early on to Africa to encourage requests and met Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who asked for engineers, and the second group of volunteers to arrive overseas landed in Tanzania in 1961. Tanzania became independent from Great Britain in 1961. The journey to independence, how it was governed in 1966 at the time of the Kinsey case, and relations between the United States and Tanzania are examined, with a discussion of the roles of Julius Nyerere, Paul Bomani, and Lady Marion Chesham. The case presents a potential international disaster for this country, still in its infancy, at a time when there are already strains over Nyerere’s “African socialism” and America’s role in the Congo.