Richard Boone, poverty warrior, 86

Richard Boone, 86, who helped launch President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and later led private-sector initiatives to improve the lives of the poor, died Feb. 26 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, said his son Wade Boone.

Mr. Boone went to Washington to join the staff of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.

In 1964, after the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity under the leadership of R. Sargent Shriver Jr., he helped conceptualize and lead what became known as the Community Action Programs.

Mr. Boone, who served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, became one of the most forceful proponents of the philosophy that grass-roots efforts - as opposed to top-down initiatives carried out by social workers and other professionals - were more likely to alleviate urban blight and other social ills.

He "was the most radical of the Kennedy Administration poverty fighters, but he was a radical in the Kennedy spirit," journalist Nicholas Lemann wrote in a history of the War on Poverty published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1988. He "saw the War on Poverty as an opportunity to be seized."

Mr. Boone was born in 1927 in Louisville, Ky., and grew up watching his father, a doctor, serve destitute Appalachian communities.

In 1965, Mr. Boone left the government to become executive director of the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty, a group with funding from labor unions and the Ford Foundation.

In 1981, he helped found the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. He continued working as a policy adviser until his death.

- Washington Post