The Nation's Pulse / The Death of the Jackson Wing
Barnes, Fred
THE NATION'S PULSE THE DEATH OF THE JACKSON WING by Fred Barnes Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale is not exactly a stalwart of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the hawkish,...
...Why has adopting the Jackson stance appealed to no presidential candidate's opportunism...
...I don't know why . . . . What Pat is doing now is politically damaging to him...
...Normally, it is individuals in politics who get press attention, not ideologies...
...Harrison Salisbury claimed for Comrade Yuri a knowledge of English and a keen familiarity with American culture...
...A mythology arose around Andropov's putative tastes in fiction (Jacqueline Susann) and music (Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee...
...Yet by sounding slightly less dovish than usual, Mondale managed to elicit words of praise from CDM leaders last November...
...If Moynihan abdicated, Abrams and others who gavethe Jackson wing THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 27 much of its intellectual strength pulled out...
...In the 1970s, Moynihan was a more forceful and persuasive spokesman for the 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 Jackson viewpoint than Jackson was, and many assumed that Moynihan's drift to the left was temporary and prompted only by re-election concerns in 1982...
...Rather than invade, Reagan should have used events on Grenada, particularly the murder of Cuban-backed leader Maurice Bishop, as grounds for making overtures to Fidel Castro, he said...
...More recently, several book-length studies have demolished what remains of the early version of Andropov as a liberal, reform-minded Soviet leader...
...It was the ideological tradition begun by Franklin Roosevelt and championed by Harry Truman, John Kennedy, ,and Lyndon Johnson...
...The reason it's unattractive is that Jackson couldn't make it work...
...Caddell is right...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...
...People like Wattenberg and Abrams have never considered Glenn part of the Jackson wing...
...While in some matters of fact and interpretation there may be dispute, among Andropov's biographers there is virtual unanimity on one matter-that he is nothing if not a ruthless and capable operative...
...That trend, now practically played out, is the decline and fall of the Jackson wing of the party...
...The Jackson-CDM grouping, says Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell, "isn't a wing...
...He can't be...
...It did not help that he was not charismatic...
...And Glenn's first wave of campaign TV commercials played on fears of nuclear war--one showed a shrinking nuclear explosion--and cast him as a peace candidate...
...Liberals are a dime a dozen...
...For six of the eight (except McGovern and Jesse Jackson), their only concession to the hard-line approach is support for a small increase irl defense spending, one which would amount to a sharp reduction from Reagan's expenditure level...
...THE NATION'S PULSE THE DEATH OF THE JACKSON WING by Fred Barnes Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale is not exactly a stalwart of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the hawkish, anti-Communist, aggressively pro-Israel faction in the Democratic party...
...and George McGovern, hard-line and accommodationist, tugging on the candidates during nomination struggles...
...The Washington Post's Charles Fenyvesi and Sovietologist Jerry Hough staked a claim for Andropov as a closet liberal and active proponent of d~tente, Hough characterizing Andropov's climb to the top as "one of the most favorable developments to have occurred in the Soviet Union in recent years...
...Glenn lacks the pro-Israel credential...
...But leave out the operational side of the KGB--the naughty things they allegedly do...
...When he came to the Senate [in 1976], he was viewed as the natural heir...
...Asked in Iowa last December if he favored deployment of Pershing missiles in West Germany, Glenn whispered hastily that he did, then launched into his plan for reneging on the commitment to deploy cruise missiles in Europe as well...
...He is said to be suffering (alternatively or simultaneousAdrian Karatnycky is research director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and associate editor of Workers Under Communism, a quarterly journal...
...All seem t o blame Reagan more than the Soviets for the lull in arms control talks...
...The distinction Moynihan makes is that the Grenada invasion was not sanctioned by the Organization of American States while the activity of the contras is permissible under international law as a respons e to the export of revolution by the Sandinistas...
...On becoming first secretary of a local Young Communist League, he "assisted in the administration of a province, half of which could be regarded as a Russian Auschwitz, minus the gas chambers...
...So he backs continued aid to the contras...
...Moynihan endorsed the nuclear freeze, and said his re-election amounted to a mandate for pursuit of the freeze...
...Elliott Abrams, a one-time Senate aide to Moynihan and now the assistant secretary of state for human rights, attributes the demise of the Jackson wing to two factors: "Senator Jackson is no longer with us and Senator Moynihan is no longer with us...
...The most scrupulously documented of the recent Andropov biographies is Arnold Beichman and Mikhail Bernstam's Ant~ropov: New Challenge to the West, ' a wellspring of insight particularly on the early Andropov...
...Jackson simply has no heir at all, candidate or otherwise, and this is important...
...The problem with Glenn is that he simply isn't enough of a party man...
...EMINENTOES THE SICKNESS OF Recent assessments of Yuri Andropov's first year in power have read remarkably like obituaries...
...A major factor in this leftward tilt is the makeup of the Democratic electorate in the caucuses and primaries...
...said Joshua Muravchik, former CDM executive director...
...Others who didn't get posts under Carter but did under Reagan include Richard Perle, Jackson's defense expert who is an assistant defense secretary, and Charles Horner, a former Moynihan aide now at the State Department...
...In any case, the rules changes and the increase in the number of primaries (from 17 in 1968 to 35 in 1980) ruined Jackson's presidential bids in 1972 and 1976...
...Some of the vigor of the Jackson wing came from its staunch support for Israel and for emigration of Soviet Jews...
...Others are bluntly critical of him...
...Unidentified Soviet sources suggest his protracted absence is attributable to nothing more than a cold...
...And he also lacks the necessary affinity to organized labor, once a bulwark of the Jackson wing...
...Yet, Harriman's assurance to the contrary, rumors about Andropov's health have been circulating since the summer...
...This obviously works against a hard-line presidential candidate, an unabashed anti-Communist, say, and it contributed to Jackson's pathetic showings in the 1972 and 1976 races...
...Moynihan says no one should be surprised by these positions, since the core of his foreign policy position had always been a "Wilsonian" concern for international law...
...it's a feather...
...In 1984, it keeps potential hard-liners such as Senators John Glenn of Ohio and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and former Governor Reubin Askew of Florida from articulating a hawkish position...
...There used to be two magnetic poles in the party, Jackson Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...His fame and power comes from being Pat Moynihan...
...The reflexively soft-line approach of the Democratic presidential candidates is a symptom of the crumbling of the Jackson wing...
...But they had their moments even under Carter, pushing him toward a boost, not a cut, in military spending...
...During World War II he moved up in rank to assume the post of first secretary of the Karelo-Finnish Young Communist Stein & Day, $16.95...
...The warming of the relationship between CDM and Mondale, surely an ideological odd couple, is a small thing by itself...
...COMRADE 'DROPOFF ly) from kidney failure, a weak heart, and Parkinson's disease...
...In keeping with the genre, they have sought to locate Andropov's place in Soviet history, have traversed his life's course through the Soviet institutional labyrinth, and above all have exhibited a solemn tendency to overvalue the role of their subject in shaping the present...
...Now, as President Reagan's UN ambassador, she wonders about "the persistence of this peculiar Democratic resistance to the preferences of ordinary Americans [for] a strong defense and a reasonably but prudently assertive foreign policy...
...It turned out that on foreign policy he was, but not on domestic matters...
...Mondale is "less clearly left-wing" in foreign policy than Jimmy Carter and is "acceptable" to most CDM members, noted Austin Ranney, a leader of the organization...
...Later, he conceded he should have used different language to explain his opposition, but he remained opposed...
...The AFL-CIO no longer plays a major foreign policy role...
...And several days later he was a no-show at the opening session of the USSR's rubber stamp parliament--the Supreme Soviet...
...But Jackson's death was accompanied, Krauthar0mer notes accurately, by Moynihan's "abdication...
...As Beichman and Bernstam report, "Andropov lived side-by-side with the Gulag system and saw it in operation each day...
...Abrams himself represents another reason for the faltering of the Jackson wing...
...But the decline of the Jackson wing involves more than the absence of a presidential contender...
...Leaders of the party-regular variety adored him, but they were vastly outnumbered by liberal activists, who prevailed...
...Apart from its intellectual elite, the Jackson wing has lost its base among labor leaders...
...The Soviet leader's formative experience was integrally linked with the Gulag, which saw Andropov and his Party cronies "living in a prison camp with forced laborers...
...He voted against the MX missile, calling it a first-strike weapon...
...Andropov has been out of public view for nearly a half-year...
...Jackson lost ignominiously, and a political tradition evaporated with his defeats...
...One, of course, is the reform of party rules governing presidential delegate selection, which took power out of the hands of centrist Democratic leaders in the South, West, and cities and gave it to liberal activists...
...Kirkland started a trend, Jackson's death accelerated it, Moynihan's actions did nothing to impede it, and CDM, all but irrelevant, merely followed suit...
...Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time recently, dubbed it "liberal internationalism"--strong defense and interventionist, anti-Communist foreign policy coupled with full-throttle, Great Society liberalism in domestic policy...
...He has clearly abdicated that role...
...None liked the Kissinger Commission report...
...They aren't doves, but they emphasize all the peace overtures and defense cuts they would make as President...
...They make it clear that Andropov officially remains undisputed Soviet leader...
...That demonstrated to all of us that the Democratic party was a McGovernite party," he said...
...Maybe I speak defensively as a former head of the CIA...
...The causes lie elsewhere...
...The logical heir to Jackson, of course, was Senator Pat Moynihan of New York...
...The unions-steel, building trades, crafts--which promoted Meany's hard-line positions have sagged in clout in the labor movement, and the liberal unions representing government workers and communications employees have gained influence...
...One of them was recently reading his book about his experience as ambassador to the United Nations and was amazed--and saddened--by the contrast between his views then and now...
...But it touches on something bigger--on a trend of enormous significance in the Democratic party...
...To see how this affects the Democratic party, you only need look at the fight for the presidential nomination...
...Though .he was a founder of CDM, Kirkland largely abandoned his involvement in the group after the 1980 election...
...All eight candidates found something critical to say about President Reagan's decision to invade Grenada...
...So did Carter four years later, his ambiguity leaving many liberals with the impression he was one of them...
...He opposed the invasion of Grenada, arguing that democracy couldn't be imposed at gunpoint...
...A Carter aide boasted of blocking her nomination...
...One of those barred from a Carter job was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been recommended as ambassador to Israel...
...He is sharply critical of American policy in Central America...
...In December his ashen, trembling visage was absent from a key meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee...
...Even Vice President Bush joined in the fun, telling the Christian Science Monitor: "My view of Andropov is that some people make this KGB thing sound horrendous...
...He found flaws in the Kissinger report, complaining that it contained no evidence that the Soviet-Cuban influence in Central America was a serious threat to the United States...
...Moynihan was "the natural heir," Abrams said...
...Instead, he threw in with the national Democratic party in spite of its dovishness, got labor officials installed on all its panels, and began clearing the way for the AFL-CIO's pre-primary endorsement of Mondale...
...Abrams has become a Republican, giving up on the Democratic party in 1976 after anyone associated with CDM was blackballed in the Carter Administrati~m...
...Whatever the flaws in 1983's yearend "obituaries" of Andropov, we can be thankful that they did not read like eulogies, which is surely what they would have been had Andropov died at about the same time as Leonid Brezhnev...
...In November, he became the first leader in Soviet history to miss the annual military parade celebrating the Bolshevik revolution...
...We might recall some of the nonsense spouted on Andropov's accession...
...Moynihan's abdication has troubled many of his former allies...
...Kirkland, for instance, can't unabashedly back Reagan's policy in El Salvador because the Administration has failed to get the government there to bring to justice the murderers of two AFL-CIO officials...
...The last American to see Andropov was nonagenarian Averell Harriman who asserted that at their June encounter Yuri "seemed well and vigorous...
...Today there is only one, and as a candidate himself this year, McGovern boasts correctly of having drawn his colleagues to the left on such igsues as the Middle East and Central America...
...Even before Jackson's death, Kirkland signaled the decline of the hard-line wing of the Democratic party...
...Since Jackson's death last summer, however, no heir has stepped forward and the CDM faithful are left with trying to reconcile themselves to an old foe, Mondale...
...Besides, Ben Wattenberg, the writer and CDM leader, says there are doubts over whether "Glenn understands the geo-political equation...
...They were often unsuccessful, failing miserably in attempts to steer Carter away from his meek, guilt-ridden foreign policy...
...This, in turn, gives their ideology national visibility, which serves to bring its adherents together as a movement...
...The United States violated international law by invading Grenada, he said, but doesn't by backing the antiSandinista contras...
...Jackson was its last influential advocate...
...The obituary-like tone of such discourse is of course not without basis...
...For two decades, Henry Jackson and his followers (mostly CDM members) exerted a hard-line influence on Democratic policy-making...
...It wasn't...
...And Kirkland's stress is mostly on domestic policy anyway, namely combating Reaganomics...
...If Moynihan retains hawkish tendencies, he is successfully suppressing them...
...he's distrusted by party regulars, just as Carter, another military man, was...
...That's the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington, not the Reverend Jesse...
...McGovern benefited immediately from this reform in capturing the presidential nomination in 1972...
...AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland is an anti-Communist, but not in the fashion of George Meany...
...In time, Edward Jay Epstein, among others, demonstrated the implausibility of by Adrian Karatnycky these claims in his justly famous New Republic essay which put to rest much of the wishful thinking and outright disinformafion...
...And the Jackson wing died...
...Penn Kemble, the chairman of CDM's executive committee, said he and others were "encouraged" by Mondale's "general tone of realism...
...Once a neoconservative, then something of a neoliberal, Moynihan has emerged as a conventional, unadorned liberal, one who eagerly endorsed Mondale for President...
...While two-thirds of the nation's Democrats identify themselves as moderates or conservatives, liberals dominate the presidential selection process...
...It must have something to do with his presidentia[~ campaign failures...
...If Moynihan won't be Moynihan, why not John Glenn as heir...
...He, after all, has a military background, was dubious about SALT II (voting against it in committee), and supports a military buildup...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
