It was the ambitious program started by LBJ in 1964.  From his speech before the joint session of Congress:

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.

We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.

We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.

We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.

We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.

We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.

We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.

We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.

We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas.

We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them.

We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee’s working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or reapeated illness.

We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family.

We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them.

Above all, we must relase $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land. . . .

As I have said, an ambitious program indeed, but over the years many have called it a failure…….well it was!  Not because of the program itself, but rather because before it had a chance to show signs of success it was systematically dismmantle by every incoming president from 1964 to the present.

You see the American voter bought into the con job of a smaller government was a better government.  How has that worked out so far?  The country can spend billions on foreign aid but the mere mention of helping Americans is taboo.  And the only answer that Washington can give is…Tax Cuts.  And we see just how well that piece of crap has worked out, haven’t we?

The War On Poverty can NEVER be successful…as long as we ignore the existence of poverty and its causes.  (Read page entitled, “Why Poverty”)