That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such
as ours is embarrassing and intolerable. So declared
Richard Nixon in May 1969 in his now widely forgotten
Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Program to
End Hunger in America. In that document, he summoned the
country to a new level of generosity and concern and laid out a
series of strong legislative steps and executive actions,
including a significant expansion of the food-stamps program.
While campaigning for the White House in 1968, Mr. Nixon did not
focus on the existence of a serious hunger problem. His
conversion came as public calls to do something about hunger rose
driven, in part, by Senator Robert Kennedys highly
publicized trip to Mississippi in 1967 where he encountered
nearly starving children and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.s focus on hunger as part of the Poor Peoples
Campaign.
During the 70s, another Republican leader, Senator Bob Dole
of Kansas, forged a partnership with George McGovern, the South
Dakota Democrat defeated by Mr. Nixon in 1972. They helped pass
legislation to improve the accessibility and antifraud provisions
of the food-stamps program. For example, it eliminated a
requirement that recipients buy food-stamp coupons, a prohibitive
burden for the lowest-income Americans.
That kind of dedicated bipartisan commitment to ending hunger was
light-years ago in American politics before President
Ronald Reagan and, later, Speaker Newt Gingrich made attacking
food stamps a prime Republican obsession, and certainly before
moderate Republicans, a disappearing breed, lived in fear of
making any move that might provoke a primary challenge from a Tea
Party-supported candidate.