Fundamental Rupture

In his 2 1/2 years as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John Gardner has proved one of the ablest Cabinet officers in a generation. It was he more than any other man in the Administration who presided over the initial construction of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Last week, Gardner, 55, resigned, in a fundamental rupture with the President over the programs whose once-bright hope had lured him to Washington in the first place. For the President, his departure was perhaps the most damaging blow yet to the withering vision of profound, creative social change.

Gardner came into the Administration when the Great Society -- a phrase he himself had used three years earlier --was little more than a slogan. With a rare combination of executive ability, intellect and idealism, he transformed the great social enactments of the 89th Congress--among them Medicare and the 1965 school act--into viable administrative programs. During his tenure, HEW's spending (excluding social security and other trust programs) nearly doubled, to $13 billion; the Government, for the first time, took a major role in the financing of elementary and secondary education and, after more than a decade of inaction, Washington began to enforce meaningful desegregation of Southern school systems.

Like Mother. In the process, Gardner gave HEW a sense of purpose, turning what Johnson had called an unmanageable "hodgepodge" into a well-ordered, efficient department. The Secretary, the President observed last year, "does the same thing McNamara does, but in a compassionate way. He does it like Mother would do." Unlike Robert McNamara, whose primary loyalty was to the President he served, rather than to the Defense Department, Gardner was devoted to the realization of a better, healthier, more equitable life for the American people.

There was no conflict between the two loyalties during the expansive days of 1965 and 1966, when Congress and President were committed to an eradication of domestic ills. The 90th Congress, which is far less inclined toward constructive action, brought a different mood to Capitol Hill, and Johnson appeared ready to bend with the prevailing breezes of caution and negativism. While the President pointedly avoided ringing the alarm bell after last summer's riots--or indeed doing much of anything at all--Gardner, always the most candid man in the Administration, eloquently voiced his own concern.

Order or Repression. "A Government of unprecedented power," he said, "appears to be impotent in the face of the threat of social disintegration and the promise of social justice." By wintertime, when it appeared certain that his department would not get anything like the money he thought it needed, Gardner seemed convinced that neither the President nor the nation had the will to respond. "No society," he said at year's end, "can live in constant tumult. We will have either a civil order in which discipline is internalized in the breast of each free and responsible citizen or, sooner or later, we will have repressive measures designed to re-establish order."

Increasingly unable to communicate with the President and disappointed by the priorities that the new budget showed--with HEW's requests being cut back as much as road and space programs--Gardner was even more frustrated by Johnson's State of the Union message, which to his mind sloughed off urban unrest and indicated that the President had not come to grips with the nation's predominant domestic crisis. The address catalyzed Gardner's feelings. Concluding that his usefulness was at an end, he did not take time to find a new post commensurate with his talents. He accepted a job as an urban consultant to the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation, whose president he had been until 1965.

Deep Trouble. His leaving can only spell a major political setback for Lyndon Johnson in an election year. Gardner was Johnson's prize appointment, and his defection--over policy rather than personality--dramatized the Administration's continuing loss of topflight talent. The President cannot easily find a Clark Clifford to take his place. As Johnson himself said, Gardner "could hold any job in Government, including the presidency."

Johnson might, however, go back and read a few of the departing Secretary's speeches. "The human misery in the ghettos is not a figment of the imagination," Gardner said in December. "We are in deep trouble as a people. And history is not going to deal kindly with a rich nation that will not tax itself to cure its miseries."

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