David L. Hackett, Led Efforts on Poverty and Juvenile Crime, Dies at 84

The cause was complications of diabetes, his son-in-law Kevin Ellis said.

Mr. Hackett, a close friend of Robert F. Kennedy’s since their prep school days at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, was executive director of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime from 1961 to 1964. The committee was created by President John F. Kennedy in May 1961 after Mr. Hackett accompanied Robert Kennedy, then the attorney general, on a shirt-sleeve tour of poor New York neighborhoods, interviewing members of street gangs.

President Kennedy declared a five-year “total attack” on juvenile delinquency. With Mr. Hackett as director and an initial budget of $10 million, the committee provided grants to state, local and private agencies for programs offering counseling to juvenile offenders, connecting them to job opportunities and training youth counselors.

In an interview on Tuesday, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Robert Kennedy’s eldest son and a former Massachusetts congressman, said Mr. Hackett’s work had far-reaching impact.

“The outgrowth of that effort was the establishment of over a thousand agencies across the country,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Every major city and many rural communities now have community action agencies that began with the juvenile delinquency program and grew into the broader mission of fighting poverty.”

In 1962, Mr. Hackett was also chairman of a study group calling for the creation of a National Service Corps, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. That concept contributed to the establishment two years later of Volunteers in Service to America, or Vista, as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty.

After leaving government service, Mr. Hackett was director of the R.F.K. Memorial, a nonprofit organization established after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which focused on poverty and human rights issues. In that capacity he created the Youth Policy Institute, which tracked federal spending and policy on youth issues, family planning and job training and also published an influential monthly newsletter. It now runs more than 100 programs around the country, with the goal of lifting families out of poverty.

David Low Hackett was born in Dedham, Mass., on Nov. 12, 1926, the fourth of five children of William and Louisa Haydock Hackett. His father was a prominent Boston banker.

Mr. Hackett is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Judith Williams; two sons, Christopher Hackett and Robert Hackett; three daughters, Louisa Hackett, Kimberly Hackett and Victoria Hackett; and 11 grandchildren.

“Dave was my dad’s best friend,” Joseph Kennedy said.

Mr. Hackett and Robert Kennedy met at Milton Academy in 1942, where David was a star on the hockey, football and baseball teams.

“R.F.K. could have remained an outcast” but for that friendship, Evan Thomas wrote in his 2000 biography, “Robert Kennedy: His Life” (Simon & Schuster).

Milton’s “tone and culture were High WASP,” the book says, “unwelcoming to Catholic new money.” And yet the “schoolboy god” — David — embraced the shy newcomer, who was taken by his new friend’s renegade antics.

In the summer of 1943, Mr. Hackett spent six weeks taking courses at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. There he befriended a budding author, John Knowles, who in 1959 would write the coming-of-age novel “A Separate Peace.” One of the main characters — Phineas, a carefree athlete whose leg is broken in a fall from a tree — was modeled on David, Mr. Knowles said. After prep school and service as a paratrooper in Europe during World War II, Mr. Hackett attended McGill University in Montreal, where he played hockey. He was selected for the United States Olympic hockey team in 1952 but could not compete because of a broken ankle.

In 1960, after a stint as editor of The Montrealer magazine in Canada, Mr. Hackett joined John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, serving as its director of correspondence and manager of “the boiler room,” the operation that tracked the leanings of delegates before and during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

In 1968, he ran the boiler room for Robert Kennedy’s presidential bid and was in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Mr. Kennedy was assassinated. Mr. Hackett was a pallbearer at his friend’s funeral.