Herbert J. Kramer

Herbert J. Kramer (July 27, 1922 – April 9, 1992) was an American speech writer, author, lecturer, and public relations executive. He served in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration as the Director of Public Affairs at the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) which included programs such as Job Corps, Head Start, VISTA, Community Action Program, Foster Grandparents, Legal Services and Upward Bound as part of the War on Poverty. Kramer established an Audio-Visual division within OEO which was nominated for an Academy Award three times in a row during his tenure, winning the award in 1966. He received bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees from Harvard University in English literature in 1942, 1946, and 1949, respectively, and was an English instructor at Harvard University and the University of California Santa Barbara, until 1951. He received a law degree from the University of Connecticut in 1956. He documented his family life in over 30 hours of silent 16 millimeter film shot between 1944 and 1980. Sometimes the scenes crossed over into his work life, such as when he worked on the Public Service Announcements (PSAs) which used R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars as characters.(YouTube) Once Kramer found evidence in a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that his father Charles had rescued some of the women.

In 1969 Kramer gave the commencement speech at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, in place of Eric Sevareid. His speech was titled "Confessions of an Angry Grandfather". In the speech he listed things about the society that he is angry about, with the hope that "[...] if we could achieve some consensus on just a few [items in the list] we might be able to change the world. Because that is precisely what angry people, united in common cause, can do." In the list Kramer railed against such things as cigarette marketing, harsh punishments for possession of marijuana, racist and other profiling stop-and-search practices by police, and the Vietnam war:

Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)

Kramer was picked by Sargent Shriver to be the Director of Public Affairs for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) which included programs such as Job Corps, Head Start, VISTA, Community Action Program, and Upward Bound as part of the War on Poverty. Kramer made great strides to mend political fences and bring a level of organization to Washington that he was used to seeing in industry.

Scrutiny of OEO and response Kramer's job was a tough one, due to the fact that the OEO was new and was under constant scrutiny from the press. Kramer said: "For the first time poor people, poor youth, black people, people who had heretofore been hidden, were coming up to the surface, and America wasn't liking everything it was seeing about them and about the agency that was doing this." and "We gave black people in this country more power, more opportunity to get on a platform, more opportunity to take positions of leadership, than any other program in the government."

One of the things Kramer did to combat the negative press attention of the war on poverty was to organize a series of five seminars in Washington, D.C., educating members of the press from newspapers around the country on poverty and how to report on poverty. This resulted in a new newspaper section called "Poverty Beat" being published throughout the country. Kramer established direct contact with about 200 newspaper workers throughout America, keeping them apprised of what the OEO was doing from regular letters that he would send out. This was an unprecedented level of transparency from a government agency at the time.

Academy Award and nominations Kramer also established an Audio-Visual division within OEO which was nominated for an Academy Award three times in a row during his tenure, winning the award in 1966 for a VISTA program recruiting film. Kramer noted that the Special Olympics had allowed parents to be proud of their intellectually disabled children - something that wasn't the norm in 1968.

Sargent Shriver Having worked under Sargent Shriver at the Office of Economic Opportunity, Kramer was involved with Shriver in a number of other capacities, including his run for Vice President in 1972, and maintaining notes for Shriver's memoirs .

"We Called It A War" Kramer assisted Sargent Shriver with his memoir "We Called It A War". The memoir remained unpublished for many decades until it was unearthed in a box of Kramer's old work documents. The story of the discovery is documented in the foreword to the book and in an Athol Daily News article from June 2026. In the article Lucy Di Rosa, executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute, is quoted as saying “From all the evidence we have, it appears that Mr. Kramer recorded the interviews with Sargent Shriver about his time working on the War on Poverty [...] and then helped him shape them into a manuscript.”

Illness, death, and book After being diagnosed with Prostate Cancer Kramer wrote a book with his second wife Kay entitled "Conversations at Midnight", documenting the process of coming to terms with dying.