POLITICS, LABOR AND GEORGE MEANY

...Chou, long the pragmatic broker and compromiser, ducked any head-on confrontation at that time...

...Several of the ira...

...To both of them, the political world no longer makes sense...

...Yet the formula did not hold after the elections...

...When you're wrong, you're wrong and I II JOSEPH HILL iS the pseudonym o] a writer who specializes in labor a~airs...

...11 April 1975:48 Its mentors are the right wing of the now-deceased Socialist party of Norman Thomas, a small but vociferous group of ideologues who have stonewalled real change and fresh ideas within the federation's high councils...

...philosopher was denounced for his policies of trying to "restore the former ruling class" and "to reinstate fallen dignitaries...

...The AFL-CIO operations abroad--in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin Americamhave largely been funded by laundered money channeled through the Agency for International Devd.Commonweal: 47 opment...

...Few old-guard Democrat pols have survived the Meany-Barkan wrath: Chicago boss Richard Dale)' has even made peace with the party, accepting the proportional representation rule which was the only real issue at Kansas City...

...The inevitable result was Meany's declaration at Bal Harbour that the AFL-CIO would play no role in choosing the Democratic presidential nominee next year...

...The Congress may turn out to be the most destabilizing event in China since the end of the Chlrural Revolution...

...IIIIIIIIIIIIIII NEW PHASE IN CHINA JOHN SHARKEY A moderate faction takes the initiative The Fourth People's Congress recently held in Peking was not so much a climax as the opening of a new phase in the political and ideological struggle that has embroiled China since mid-1973...

...For example, once again key figures, in this instance, Teng Hsiao-ping and Chang Chun-chiao, hold major positions in the party, government and military...

...Then Commonweal: 49...

...portant political skirmishes of the past year and a half have occurred in the area of cultural affairs...

...Now, with some of the expendable "company" agents coming out of the cold with now-it-can-be-told literary offerings, the Meany cover appears to be further blown...

...worker delegate to the International Labor Organization, indicated last month that the AFL-CIO may quit this worldwide body as well, another shot against d6tente and a reminder that in one sector, antiCommunism, George Meany will be unlikely to offer any hope of being "open to change or new ideas...

...The AFL-CIO chief was an "agent collaborator" according to one Philip Agee, a onetime Latin American CIA functionary in his book, CIA Diary...

...Cavett: That's interesting...

...This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the AFL-CIO merger, and it was at the first convention of the new federation in 1955 that support was accorded "to the territorial integrity of the state of Vietnam...

...He steadily dodged the blows and diverted the campaigns off into harmless backwaters, His adroitness was nowhere more clearly shown than in his handling of the campaign to denounce Confucius which the radicals used to try to cut down Chou himself, The 6th Century B.C...

...Indeed, for someone who has continued to be a presence on the American political and economic landscape under seven Presidents, there does appear to be a slight crack in the exterior of the man who was a pillar of the Cold War from its inception to these uneasy threshold days of d6tente...

...Through administrative changes set forth in the new constitution brought out at the People's Congress and by a series of leadership appointments, the threads of power have been brought together in the tightest weave since the period before the Cultural Revolution...

...torial quoted from the new constitution to the effect that it is imperative to "exercise all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie in the realm of the superstructure, including all spheres of culture...

...Meany: No...

...Outstanding among these was Teng Hsiao-ping, who had been denounced by the Red Guards as second only to President Liu Shao-chi as a "capitalist roader...

...Seidman, retiring U.S...

...Barkan, 25 years George Meany's junior, shares his contempt of the way the party has gone...

...Yet the admission itself was an indication that the crusty old Meany, who dabbles in abstracts and Dixieland in the years when his peers busy themselves with the obituaries at Sun City or Fort Lauderdale, may be looking back not so much in anger or sorrow, but in somber reflection...

...Those who have supported and perpetuated Meany's incumbency for two decades see him as a rock against the storms of the new politics at home and d6tente abroad...

...Those around him have the siege mentality of purists, an unlikely defense against the inevitable change which must surely come to America in the second half of the seventies...

...When then Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright called Meany on this in 1969 hearings, the labor chief almost lost his public cool as well as his private cover...

...Meany sees them, do not reside only with domestic politics and a sagging economy...

...The new labor delegate to the ILO who may preside at this final isolation is Irving Brown, for decades the AFL man in Europe and a name which is familiar to those who have worked the corridors of the intelligence cult at home and abroad...

...Special offense is reserved for the man the AFL.CIO chose to take over and remake the postMcGovern party---Chairman Robert S. Strauss, who did little to prevent the embarrassment which the labor delegates suffered at the party charter meetings and pre-mini-convention assemblies...

...It was Chou who brought back to power many of the leading figures purged during the Cultural Revolution...

...Under Chou's direction the drive against Confucius was gradually and subtly altered and eventually defused...

...A1 Barkan," said a Kansas City delegate, "turned out to be the biggest McGovemite of them all He is an ideological purist who wants to take over the party and purge the other side...

...The moderates are making their strongest challenge in that most sensitive of areas in China, restoration of control by the center, especially by the party apparatus in Peking...

...The indomitable old Meany, with every indication that he will continue on that course, is ready to preside on the bulwarks of his union-made bunker...

...The degree may be one of conscious participation...

...For it is still here that the AFL-CIO role is most significant, and on the political stage some observers have come to expect change, but the Meany role-.-articulated through his political stump rider and spellbinder, A1 Barkanmappears to be entrenched Whig-centrist...

...J. The circle around Mecmy has retreated into ideological factionctlism One of George Meany's dose associates recently characterized the venerable 80-year-old labor chief as a man "open to change and new ideas," backing up this assertion by noting that the AFL-CIO leader had taught himself how to paint at age 60 and to play the organ at 75...

...The real target for the radicals in these campaigns was, of course, Chou and his policy of reaching out to the world--a policy which involved compromises unacceptable to the radicals...

...Yet, only a few weeks previous, insomniacs and earlyhour talk show followers found the always entertaining Mr...

...A Bitter Pill The Kansas City mini-convention must have been an especially bitter pill for the labor power brokers, and it ended with the Meany forces just about as influential as they were at the 1972 McGovem-dominated convention when they walked out...

...For the past several years, a major influence in cultural matters has been Ching Chiang, Mao's wife and a leading figure among the radicals...

...Recent reports out of Bal Harbour, the Florida watering-hole of the AFL-CIO executive council, suggested that the crack is only a hairline, however...

...Meany's biographer, Joseph Goulden, agreed that virtually everyone familiar with the intelligence community and the interlocking world of State, Defense and Labor in the capitol accepted the AFL-CIO role with CIA...

...Another sign of the aggressiveness on the part of the moderates is the new ideological campaign launched three weeks after the People's Congress in the People's Daily.The new drive for the reinforcement of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, party control...

...Despite simplistic characterization of the AFL-CIO as being broken into competing "conservative" and "liberal" factions, the federation is likely to survive both the traumas of domestic and foreign change...

...An oemasional remark on a late-night talk show sufficed to become but a footnote to the unquestioned, virtually undebated participation of American labor in its country's disastrous adventure in Southeast Asia...

...The cynicism which greeted the membership of the Rockefeller Commission to "investigate" the CIA was complete with the observation that Meany's man, Lane Kirkland, is or has been a functionary for a scattering of Rockefeller foundations and committees which have plugged into CIA operations over the years...

...Do you still believe you were right on that...

...the CIA has nothing to do with our unions and we have nothing to do with the CIA...

...Labor's pains, as Mr...

...It was this superstructure that Mao Tse-tung had to undo when he tried to regain power in the mid60s by unleashing the Cultural Revolution...

...Is it hard for you to admit that...

...Despite the fact that the Committee on Political Education had contributed greatly to the Democratic sweep in Congress only weeks previously, the script was essentially a rewrite of Miami Beach: labor was insulted by the "new politics" practitioners who had taken over much of the party machinery, ignored by many of the old politics crowd and offended by some of the party's policy positions...

...Meany: No...

...Zeroing in on one of the greatest strongholds of the radicals, the field of culture, the ediJOHN StIAI~EY is an assistant foreign editor on the Washington Post, specializing in Asian affairs...

...It was first changed to a drive to denounce both Confucius and Lin Piao, who had once been Mao's designated successor but who died following an abortive attempt to overthrow the chairman...

...Yet apart from his Vietnam flip, Meany appears to be moving with less than unchecked escalation toward any new domestic political role...

...if I'd known then, what I know now, I don't think we would have backed them...

...If I knew then, what I know now, I would not have backed them.., no...

...Although they pride themselves in being practitioners of the world of realpolitik, professionals who would trade the rhetoric of policy positions for real power, the small circle around Meany has retreated into an ideological factionalism which could rival any of the doctrinaire cults of the far left...

...This, in the words of the editorial, is the "key question" raised by the People's Congress...

...Meany is now experimenting in abstract impressionism, adds the associate, "and plays Dixieland jazz on the organ...

...In keeping with the usual tactics of Chou, the editorial stopped short of urging purge of dissidents...

...In fact through another spokesman, Bert Scidman, AFLCIO social security expert, the signals may have already been flashed for a final severance of the American labor movement with its last international tie...

...H 1972 was a demonstration of what labor could do by defecting from a national campaign, then 1976 was to be a lesson of what it could do by plunging in...

...iiiii iiii iiii i I POLITICS LABORAND GEORGEMEANY fOE HI...

...Unlike the policy statements which George Meany has issued virtually by executive fiat in the name of some 14-million American working people for the past two decades, there was no AFL-CIO statement or amplification of these remarks...

...How deep, though, are the cracks in the Meany veneer...

...By their assessment, withdrawal symptoms are the only treatment necessary to deal with the forces attacking the body politic and the remnants of the "free iiiiii i u u,,,,,,,,,,,,,, fill world...

...For while the Ford administration's economic policies were predictably excoriated, there were the same cold-war resolutions which the labor federation has adopted for virtually the whole of its organizational life...

...Specifically, there were the campaigns against Antonioni's documentary, C/~na, against Western classical music, and the denunciation of the regional opera, "Three Visits to Fao4eng," the sponsorship of which by the moderates had been a tentative attempt on their part to break the radicals' domination of cultural affairs...

...And the latest revelations indicate that the CIA monitored Meany's mail for several years to see that its funds were being properly allocated to chosen overseas fronts...

...And the one-time favored candidate, Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, has now apparently fallen from favor because he journeyed to mainland China and bucked the AFL-CIO on trade legislation, making his prospects in 1976 even dimmer than they were after his poor showing in the presidential primaries two years ago...

...Barkan suffers one of the ironies of the new politieaI game: only months after having helped dispense more than $3 million in COPE cash and having provided an incalculable cadre of trained election workers who helped secure the most liberal Congress in a decade, he is reduced to a telephone booth-type mini-faction within the governing and policy-making apparatus of the Democratic party...

...Cavett: . . . everybody knows, of course, that you had to be involved with the CIA...

...The convening of the Congress indicates that the so-called moderate faction identified with Premier Chou En-lai has decided to take the initiative after months of trying to negotiate compromise with the group generally known as the radicals...

...and we felt that this was the man we had to back and we did back LBJ and we did back Nixon...

...But does anyone really care any more if George Meany is involved in the cult of intelligence...

...This follows only a few years after the AFL-CIO withdrawal from the World Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which Meany had helped to found as an antiCommunist body in the salad days of the Cold War, but which slid back into fraternal relationships with Communist-bloc union federations...

...Meany as a guest on the Dick Cavett show, and it was in this unlikely setting that the onetime Bronx plumber made one of his frankest and most significant admissions of error: Cavett: You backed Nixon and Johnson on Vietnam...

...Two close allies in labor politics--COeE's top men in Pennsylvania and southern California--were passed over as mini-convention delegates (an unemployed black woman replaced the COPE broker in Los Angeles at Kansas City), and this as much as anything appeared to have blown the Barkan political mind...

...I've lived a long time and I've made a lot of mistakes...

...Isn't that what they ae~nsed MeGovern of doing...

...But, we backed them on the information that was given by the President of the United States...

...Meany: That's not so...