The Nation's Pulse/A Hero of the Cold War
Puddington, Arch
A Hero of the Cold War by Arch Puddington T om Kahn began his political life in the 1950s as a member of the youth wing of a small radical group whose ancestry can be traced to Leon Trotsky. He...
...They were among the civil rights movement's most courageous troops...
...Tom hated what the left became because he genuinely liked America—the real America, with its electronic gadgets and open highways, not the unattainable ideal sketched out by critics who insisted that they would love America only when it "lived up to its democratic promise...
...He knew whereof he spoke...
...For days he would agonize over the perfect idea, the perfect formulation, the perfect insult...
...Whether or not they had Tom in mind, it was he whom the advocates of neutralism and "peace" were describing when they spoke of retrograde Cold Warriors, warmongers, and enemies of mutual understanding...
...During his association with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Tom helped prepare a series of controversial essays on the future of the movement, and authored several stinging attacks on the New Left at a time when student radicals were being hailed as living saints...
...Yet he was convinced that Poland would be different...
...Although the ISL was small and relatively obscure, Shachtman, by dint of intellectual charisma, attracted a cadre of brilliant young followers—many of whom went on to distinguished careers in the arts, the universities, and the trade union movement—at a time when most of the American left was in a condition of advanced ossification...
...Early on, he'd learned that revolutionary periods are few and fleeting, that opportunities must not be squandered, that chances have to be taken...
...For no sooner did Kirkland announce the formation of a Polish workers' assistance fund than Secretary of State Muskie rushed in to assure First Secretary Brezhnev that the Carter Administration would have nothing to do with it...
...It never ceased to amaze Tom that American officials, ostensibly appointed to prosecute a foreign policy rooted in anti-Communism, would mount vigorous arguments against exploiting the contradictions of the Soviet system...
...It's right there, in black and white, in a 1980 speech he delivered to Social Democrats, USA, predicting, not without some prudent hedging, that the destruction of Communism was in reach if only the democratic world approached the challenge with firmness...
...Détente was still a sacred cow to many European trade unionists and social democrats, and it fell to the AFL-CIO to minimize the damage done by the Brandts, Palmes, and Kreiskys...
...For Tom, the Polish developments Arch Puddington worked for nine years as executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy, where Tom Kahn served as chairman...
...T om died recently, of AIDS, at age 53...
...an exhausted and discredited Communist leadership without the resources to buy off the proletariat...
...In carrying out the labor movement's Polish project, Tom thus found himself at war with Western elites almost as much as with the Communists...
...Tom fought Communism the way he fought left-wing factional wars—to win...
...In recent years, Tom privately was realistic about the decline of blue-collar America, but he was not happy about it, believing we were in for a less happy time in the post-industrial age...
...Tom was an especially gifted writer, all the more reason to lament that his reputation never spread outside left-liberal circles...
...He loathed defeatists and regarded with contempt the governing and business elites who preferred the stability of Soviet rule to the messiness of freedom...
...Alas, even Tom's beautifully crafted phrases couldn't convince Democrats to make Scoop Jackson their presidential nominee...
...These people were the enemies of the working class, a class Tom held in great respect for its honesty and modesty and saw as the source of American strength...
...Among his qualities was a talent for inspiring an audience with the nobility of a cause...
...According to its proponents, realignment would bring to power an alliance of trade unionists, blacks, and libThe American Spectator July 1992 43 BEN STEIN'S DIARY The Road to Surfdom by Benjamin J. Stein erals—an expanded and strengthened civil rights coalition—and overthrow the Dixiecrats and urban machines that seemed to exert so powerful and baleful an influence on American politics...
...All young leftists, of course, carry their share of hostility, and those like Tom who also devoted themselves to the civil rights movement had a ready-made excuse for their anti-bourgeois resentments...
...Here all the elements were in place: a revolutionary democratic movement rooted in the working class...
...Replaced, in other words, by the pro-Communists, New Leftists, and black nationalists who brought to ruin just about every cause Tom cared about...
...At one time or another, Tom had been friends to them all, and a comrade-in-arms...
...Even the Reagan Administration harbored a strong impulse to bow to the prevailing wisdom that Solidarity was a spent force and that there was no alternative but to accommodate General Jaruzelski...
...His commitment was perhaps best exemplified by his decision to spend his last two years of college at Howard University, a logical, if unorthodox, step for someone who planned to devote his life to working for racial equality...
...and an imperial colossus weighted down by war, a restive empire, and internal stagnation...
...Although hardly a triumphalist, he enjoyed a bit of gloating over Communism's pathetic collapse, not to mention the humiliation of its apologists and fellow travelers at home...
...As chief foreign policy assistant to AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, Tom was privy to the foreign policy establishment's craven discomfort at the coming Polish turbulence...
...With his relentless logic, knife-blade prose, and virtuoso polemical talents, he could easily have matured into one of his generation's important political analysts...
...He ended up a hero of the Cold War, one of the last of the liberal anti-Communists, a man who, in helping to sustain Poland's Solidarity movement during the mean years of martial law, played a direct part in pushing the Evil Empire over the edge...
...That sanctions against the Polish Communist regime were maintained to the very end is in no small way due to labor's—and Tom's—tenacity...
...As one of the architects of Democratic party realignment, Tom ruefully came to admit that he perhaps bore some responsibility for the transformation of the party from Cold War liberalism to McGovernite isolationism...
...In the event, the Daleys and Eastlands were shoved aside and replaced not by labor-oriented cold warriors and black integrationists, but by Bella Abzug, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson...
...42 The American Spectator July 1992 A photograph of Tom from those early days reveals an emaciated young man with a vaguely hostile expression...
...Eventually, essays ceased to appear under his byline, although he continued to churn out glittering speeches for presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson, and for George Meany and other trade union figures...
...The Hungarian Revolution had been a defining moment in his political upbringing, and he later witnessed the shameful betrayal of the Prague Spring...
...He was, in fact, among the very few to have foreseen Communism's demise...
...All the same, Tom and the other youthful Shachtmanites steered clear of the hard-edged anti-Americanism that made the New Left so unsavory...
...Not that he suffered from the rampant post-Communist malaise...
...In their private conversations, Tom reported, government officials expressed alarm over this newest threat to East Bloc stability, and distress over the labor movement's provocative response...
...His years of political activism allowed him immediately to dismiss those earnest demands for "participatory democracy" as nothing more than the power move of an educated elite bent on class supremacy...
...Unfortunately, Tom suffered from an acute case of perfectionism that turned writing into a torment...
...A few months after Solidarity's birth in 1980, Tom commented that, while it was one thing to tell America's young "that the road to peace and freedom is arduous and long, it is quite another to suggest that it stretches on to nowhere...
...were the central event of our time...
...His memorial service drew a diverse group, including Lane Kirkland and Vladimir Bukovsky, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Richard Perle...
...Tom, in the phrase of the day, often put his body on the line, and was roughed up more than once...
...T om Kahn received his political education as a member of the Independent Socialist League, an organization led by the legendary Max Shachtman, who had made the journey from Communism to Trotskyism to a militant and altogether unique brand of left anti-Communism...
...There aren't many people left who can still do that...
...A man of the old school, Shachtman was given to four-hour speeches on subjects like the betrayal of the revolution or the immorality of the peace movement...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
