Ted Morgan's A Covert Life
Martin, Benjamin
A COVERT LIFE: JAY LOVESTONE, COMMU NIST, ANTI-COMMUNIST, AND SPYMASTER by Ted Morgan Random House, 1999 402 pp $29.95 Benjamin Martin AMERICAN LABOR has played a central role in...
...imperialism...
...It may be good for book sales to portray Jay Lovestone as "one of the masterminds of the cold war" and as a "spymaster," as Morgan does in A Covert Life...
...But this was only a pretext...
...In 1927, at the age of twenty-nine, Lovestone became general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA...
...By that time, however, forcibly retired, Lovestone had left the scene and Meany had been succeeded by Lane Kirkland...
...Reuther had become Lovestone's bete noir in the thirties during a battle for control of the United Auto Workers...
...Lovestone was an ideologue," Morgan rightly observes, "and the trouble with ideologues is they tend to discount any change that disturbs their system of beliefs...
...Troubled by Meany's refusal to provide assistance to the small but influential Christiandemocratic unions in the region, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sought to change Meany's mind, but in vain...
...Though providing a flawed interpretation, Morgan has unearthed a good deal of new information that will serve as a valuable source for future historians...
...It was not so much that Reuther was the darling of Eleanor 120 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 BOOKS Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and other "liberal pinkos...
...Reuther viewed a tactical alliance with the communists as a lesser evil than continued control by the erratic, unstable Martin...
...He retained that post for the next two years, aided by his growing friendship with Nicolai Bukharin, the eminent Bolshevik theoretician and head of the Communist International...
...He is the author of The Agony of Modernization, Industry and Labor in Spain...
...all too often, however, in the name of anticommunism, assistance went to the Somozas, the Batistas, the Balaguers, the Stroessners...
...While he, George Meany, stood steadfast against any compromise to the communists, Reuther advocated a flabby anticommunism and a policy of detente...
...This was particularly the case regarding the Soviets and China...
...By the fifties, as nuclear parity developed, Western Europeans and even Washington policy makers were intent upon a reduction of tensions...
...BENJAMIN MARTIN is a former trade unionist and State Department senior labor research specialist...
...What really exasperated Meany was that though he himself had become the American labor movement's single most powerful figure (the AFL and CIO merged in 1955 with Meany as its head), Reuther was not only America's favorite labor leader, he was idolized throughout Europe and the developing world...
...By 1941, when Garment Workers leader David Dubinsky introduced Lovestone to the American Federation of Labor's secretary-treasurer George Meany, Dubinsky was able to say, "The son of a bitch is okay, he's been converted...
...The advent of the cold war and the BOOKS ous Democratic administrations that this was the price to be paid for labor's political support...
...Republican administrations followed suit in return for labor's cooperation in attaining cold war objectives...
...The long awaited changing of the guard in the AFL-CIO that came with John Sweeney's ousting of Lane Kirkland, Meany's successor and ideological heir, was hastened by a growing restiveness among executive council members over a leadership that spent more time and money on foreign affairs than on organizing the unorganized...
...By the late thirties, with the Moscow trial and execution of Bukharin, he underwent a change of heart and increasingly moved toward anticommunism...
...Morgan attributes Meany's unhappiness with the Europeans and the ICFTU officialdom primarily to his growing exasperation with financial mishandling and bureaucratic bungling...
...Meany was a conservative Irish Catholic from the building trades, who had a quality rare among labor leaders: a strong and active interest in labor's international activities...
...Possibly the AFL-CIO's greatest anticommunist triumph resulted from the funding of Solidarnosc in Poland when much of the European trade union community, fearful of endangering East-West detente, was reluctant to support Lech Walesa and his embattled supporters...
...Charismatic, an excellent popular orator, a man of ideas, Walter Reuther possessed many of the qualities Meany lacked...
...First it was Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev...
...In 1928, Stalin executed a sharp turn to the left by adopting the "Third Period" policy, which radically quickened the pace of industrialization and collectivization in the Soviet Union and predicted I18 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 imminent capitalist collapse and global revolutionary upheaval...
...But Meany would have pursued his rigid anticommunist policies even if he had never met Lovestone...
...W W HAT MORGAN documents vividly is the exclusively ultraconservative in clinations of Lovestone's circle of friends and confidants...
...Yet because of the difficulties in attaining a balanced grasp of a subject so enshrouded in controversy and secrecy, little of worth has been published about it thus far...
...This is arguably the weakest and least reliable part of the book...
...In the 1920s and 1930s, Dubinsky had engaged in a bruising battle with the communists for control of the garment unions, and had emerged from this bitter confrontation a passionate anticommunist...
...Though Lovestone and his supporters possessed overwhelming support in the CPUSA, he was removed at Stalin's behest in 1929 and his supporters expelled...
...Uninformed critics have accused MeanyLovestone of acting as servile executors of government foreign policies...
...The fact was that Meany was his own man, and both the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency often had to acquiesce in policies that were not to their liking...
...Meany was a Rock of Gibraltar to the Johnson and Nixon administrations on Vietnam...
...Since early in this century, disillusioned exradicals have often served as foreign-policy advisers to the labor movement...
...Ted Morgan's study of the career of Jay Lovestone, the former leader of the Communist Party who became the foreign operations confidant of the AFL-CIO's George Meany is, therefore, most welcome...
...In Latin America, for example, a tendency to overem phasize anticommunist credentials in selecting recipients of largesse often caused the AFLCIO to become an embarrassment...
...I I N MANY PARTS of the world the AFL-CIO was more interested in fighting communists than in aiding trade unions...
...In a chapter entitled "Lovestone's Second Front," Morgan provides an account of Meany/ Lovestone's tortuous relationship with the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the AFL-CIO's withdrawal...
...What is indisputable is that the Meany/Lovestone foreign policy outlook served to strongly alienate the labor movement's traditional ally, the liberal, progressive community...
...In his successful campaign to capture the leadership of the UAW, Reuther broke with the communists, destroying much of their considerable strength in the union, and in the course of his life he evolved from a procommunist socialist to an anticommunist social democrat...
...Bukharin, who remained an exponent of moderation in domestic policies and of a more realistic view of Western capitalism, was branded a "right deviationist...
...Bill and Hillary Clinton last year bestowed a similar award, posthumously, on Walter Reuther...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 121...
...A further sign of the changing times: Ronald Reagan awarded the Medal of Freedom to veteran Lovestoneite Irving Brown...
...AIFLD's principal client in Chile, the head of the dockworkers union, ended up as the Pinochet dictatorship's labor attache in Washington...
...A COVERT LIFE: JAY LOVESTONE, COMMU NIST, ANTI-COMMUNIST, AND SPYMASTER by Ted Morgan Random House, 1999 402 pp $29.95 Benjamin Martin AMERICAN LABOR has played a central role in U.S...
...By the sixties and seventies a growing number of noncommunist unions, including the UAW, began to engage in exchange visits with labor delegations from the Eastern bloc...
...Seeking to insulate his party from the ruinous consequences of third-period extremism, Lovestone vainly sought the acceptance of his "American Exceptionalist" doctrine, which viewed American capitalism as strong and ascendant...
...But he had nonetheless earned the undying resentment of a defeated Jay Lovestone...
...Such notions were anathema to Meany, who advocated unremitting confrontation...
...Lovestone had supported Stalin's purge of Trotsky, but his close relationship with Bukharin assured Stalin's enmity...
...Bankrolled by Dubinsky, Lovestonites were the principal supporters of Homer Martin, then head of the UAW Dubinsky feared a communist takeover of the CIO's second largest affiliate...
...For the next three decades Lovestone served as Meany's secretary of state...
...The arrangement was to endure until the end of Lane Kirkland's reign as AFL-CIO president...
...Meany objected to their denunciations of "U.S...
...What caused his alienation was the European trade union community's changing attitude toward the communist East...
...Morgan tends to understate the virulence of the Meany-Reuther rivalry and its impact on foreign labor affairs...
...The world changed but Lovestone [like Meany] remained frozen in his positions...He had a vested interest in the Cold War—it was his livelihood and purpose—and he kept fanning its embers long after the fire had gone out...
...Organizing a tiny dissident communist group, Lovestone at first supported Soviet policies and sought readmission...
...then he moved to eliminate Bukharin...
...Referring to Irving Brown, Lovestone's man in Europe and long-time political crony, senior diplomat Philip Habib recalled, "We didn't use the sonafabitch, the sonafabitch used us...
...Willy Brandt and the German Social Democrats promoted the doctrine of detente...
...But as Stalin consolidated his power, he conducted a purge of his potential rivals...
...Wellmeaning trade unionists at times provided valuable assistance to struggling Latin American labor organizations, and several representatives of the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development in El Salvador became the victims of rightist death squads...
...In 1944 the American Federation of Labor created the Free Trade Union Committee, and on Dubinsky's recommendation Meany named Lovestone as its executive secretary...
...Reuther became a leading opponent of the war...
...AIFLD activities became the subject of angry exchanges between Meany and Senators Fulbright and Morse...
...Indeed, Lovestone did contribute to the labor movement's overseas anticommunist effort, especially in the years just after the Second World War...
...It had become too dangerous to maintain the old levels of adversarial confrontation...
...The Meany-Lovestone relationship was based not only on a shared anticommunist fundamentalism but on a common detestation of Walter Reuther and his ideas...
...foreign policy over the past six decades...
...But the role of Jay Lovestone over three decades beginning in the 1940s was exceptional...
...More than any other factor, it was widening differences over changing views on relations with the East that led to Meany's decision to leave the world labor body, despite urgings to the contrary by Lovestone...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
