Kennedy And The Unions

...Quite callously the White House put out a story anonymously to the effect that Keenan was to be appointed as an assistant to Defense Secretary McNamara and then allowed it to become known that McNamara had rejected the idea because presumably by some sort of computer divining he had determined Keenan was not up to the intellectual standards he required...

...bringing peace, and prosperity and all the rest to men of good will everywhere...

...The Area Redevelopment Program, for exam pie, which never would have been enacted except for continuous daylabor by union people who exhausted themselves in the effort, started its activities by making a cash contribution to the establishment of a plant running away from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers...

...No top union official wants a government job...

...What the union leaders want is a voice which must be located purely for the operating effect in people with top jobs...

...Actually, the Kennedy Administration very often proposes measures legislatively in advance of anything the unions, which are steeped in 19th-century rhetoric, have conceived...

...For people who quite properly expect a big bite of patronage, Goldberg tastes like sawdust...

...What can be attributed in pay-off accounting to the Reuther side of the AFL-CIO are an appointment of his administrative assistant, Jack Conway, to a sub-Cabinet post in the housing agency, the naming of another Reuther staff person in the Industrial Union Department to a sub-Cabinet job in the Labor Department, and the designation of George Weaver as the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of the international labor program...

...But when in his continuing secret war with Walter Reuther, while mechanically blocking anything headed in Reuther's direction, he did abort the U. N. appointment, he pinched a central nerve in the UAW president that blacked out the deepest and most cherished Reuther hope, that one day he would lay a Reuther plan before the world at the U.N...

...The hackneyed but basically meaningless programs adopted at union conventions year after year, with some legislative tinkering and tailoring, are being enacted into law...

...The rhetorical insinuation was that big business diplomats and cookie-pushing sissies in striped trousers were unable to deal with the leaders of countries where workers and peasants, very often colored people, had come to power...

...The result is what could be described as the Goldberg quandary...

...Unquestionably, Reuther has personal ambitions, but whatever they are, they are con-substantial with the political and social hopes of wage earners and minorities...

...Nothing like this has happened either in the foreign or domestic sallies of the government...

...Among the hyper-actives in the industrial unions, the Kennedy Administration at the moment is a not unpleasant trap...

...When they make telephone calls their wires go straight through to the top Administration people...

...Once this is understood, the point should be made that patronage is not really what the unions want...

...If anyone except a trade-union president—say a bank president, an old-line political boss, an insurance-company president, or a corporation lawyer—had ordered as much cash and manpower into an election campaign as Walter Reuther mobilized for Jack Kennedy, he would have gotten a ticket entitling him to this many places in the Cabinet, to that many ambassadorial posts, and perhaps not to a veto over any decision that bore on his interest but at least a nicely polished and highly useful gold-plated oar in the palaver leading to the final judgment...

...Decisions to improve help to the unemployed under present rules, to raise relief standards within existing categories, to increase pensions modestly, to provide limited aid for education, to endorse unions at the NLRB, are reached enthusiastically instead of reluctantly...

...Poets, painters, composers, college professors, liberals and labor leaders now attend parties more or less regularly at the White House...

...To Meany, to most of the old men in the AFL, people without intellectual pretensions, Catholic, and essentially Christian trade unionists, an administration which does acknowledge the Christian obligation of the ruler and the employer, which is moving toward the establishment of a secure place for workers in an ordered, hierarchical society, the cynicism about democratic processes, the skepticism about wage-earner participation in government, are reassuring in spite of their irritation because the attitudes correspond to their own mood and inclination...

...Since the UAW leader's associates say Kennedy himself offered the post as the smallest acknowledgment of a large indebtedness, Reuther's ability to continue to be friendly with Kennedy, to compromise with Meany, and chaffer with Stevenson as one of the two trade-union advisors to the U. N. delegation —Meany is the other one—is a clue to his hardened telic discipline...

...Whatever the inner judgment, officially everyone must smile politely and approvingly...

...While Meany's career does suggest that he is sly and vindictive enough to search out the most sensitive spot of an adversary to knee or to thrust, there is nothing to indicate that he is sensitive or intelligent enough to locate the less obvious vulnerable places...

...With trifling exceptions this is the extent of the recognition by the Kennedy Administration of the expensive, strenuous and critical exertions on his behalf by the unions...

...Because union people are not passed into the Administration, what is undertaken where union officials believe they should have a voice very often is set going against union interests or is condescendingly done for them for their own good...

...It was noted then that Meany did not rush forward to put the AFL machinery at the disposal of the Tractors for Freedom effort...

...And even if the president of the IUDAFL-CIO should choose to walk out, where would he go...

...You might ask what more anyone, even a labor leader can expect...

...Meany originally received such an appointment under Eisenhower for one year and in the ordinary course of public appointments everyone took it for granted that the designation which is the U. S. equivalent of a knighthood would next go to Walter Reuther...

...On the new frontier, there was going to be a different kind of approach based on designating union people and Negroes and minorities to go out to work with their likes in Asia and Africa where actual horny-handed sympathies would produce a new international rule by the common man which would naturally result in peace and justice and prosperity and freedom and a guaranteed annual wage and the FEPC...

...Professional liberals, career Negroes, ADA operators and political academicians who have been associated with the unions, who court them, and who, with more or less success, have exploited them, have collected a substantial number of appointments that have been put down as union debts paid even though the swearing-in ceremony, without exception, was a bitter lump for the union people...

...When Kennedy asked Reuther, for example, to try to run the Tractors for Freedom operation through to a final wrap-up of the Cuban mess, in a sense, he made a public show of the reliance and the trust he put in the UAW leader...

...Wage earners were going to be represented in the high places where decisions are made...

...THE PHENOMENON someone has called the third Eisenhower Administration, the persistence of the old plot with an entire new cast of players was, of course, noted in 1953 and 1954 after Eisenhower succeeded Truman...

...If the Democrats won, in effect union members and minorities were told by him, unions, the government and business were going to join in a common effort to bring about full employment...

...Yet there are differences between the Kennedy Administration and the Eisenhower Administration, obvious enough so that children in the eighth grade current events classes can list them unfailingly in a quiz...

...Even Reuther and his associates, who are there but not with it, are up until now baffled rather than frustrated, still hopeful...

...Arthur Goldberg's champion performance in getting himself named Secretary of Labor as the union candidate despite the wry displeasure both Meany and Reuther have suffered from his efforts practically ever since he came out of Chicago, is a fair example of the kind of low-temperature humiliation labor leaders have endured until now under the Kennedy rule—a succession of snubs from essential snobs the occasions somehow prevent them from resenting, injuries packaged as favors, quiet insults labeled as gifts, and rebuffs offered ceremoniously as honors...

...Kennedy's economic advisors have hardly changed the prescription the Eisenhower economic advisors wrote out...

...Reports from union meetings, for example, those held in connection with UAW and IUE negotiations, as well as accounts of Negro meetings in the country, and even the Administration Cabinet-level missions to the major American cities, all note a particular union-member tone, one of resignation before a destiny brought on by needless screw-up and betrayal which is part hopelessness before relentless erosions of automation, part despair over the prospects for peace, and part bewilderment that the election they won which was touted as so significant for them has meant so little...

...Thus the repulse to Reuther reflects a more fundamental decision...

...In the great cycle, Reuther's role is not petty, for he is in the United States the protagonist of an alternative solution to the world crisis, one based on the involvement of rank-and-file people in the historical process...

...IN HUMAN DIMENSIONS, on the scale of feet and inches, with a cast in which each person is known to every other person by his first name, George Meany, Walter Reuther, Arthur Goldberg, Arthur Schlesinger, Adlai Stevenson, George Harrison, Joe Keenan, and Jack Kennedy, this is a single drama out of a cycle whose totality is the presentation of a crisis in human history engaging three billion people across a stage that is measured in light years and is subject to megaton disturbances...

...ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED not only to George Meany, in the view of many people something to be welcomed and to be expected because of the widely advertised sympathy that is supposed to bind Kennedy to Reuther (and does, curiously), but unhappily and unexpectedly Reuther is victimized by it too, in a particularly bewildering display, since the brush-off occurs in the midst of a great and convincing show of affection...

...As for the rest of the program, so loudly hailed as a foundation stone of a new world by union orators who very foolishly believed their own speeches, it has settled down into lubricant for tight Southern political situations...

...Making allowances for the more elevated rhetoric, AID, re-alphabetized from ICA, is unchanged in all but one respect from Kennedy to Eisenhower...

...Among trade-union members at the present time, and especially among those wage earners in the CIO stream, there is a greater sense of world crisis, except for a handful of radicals and pacifists, than anywhere else in the nation...

...If they cannot claim recognition and a role in the government with a voice in the decision-making at least it is pleasant for them to testify personally that they have received tickets entitling them to places at an elegantly served table...

...When they disclaim an interest in patronage, they mean it...

...In appointments, the AFL has been treated even worse, and in one instance, an AFL personality of some importance, Joseph Keenan of the IBEW, was gratuitously humiliated...

...The difference is a consequence of a surgical excision which has eliminated overt labor participation that prevailed under Eisenhower, in favor of a covert CIA labor program under Kennedy, to be jointly administered by Goldberg, a special labor agent in the OSS during the war, and Jay Lovestone who won his conspiratorial spurs as an apprentice Lovestonite at CCNY...

...In fact, up until Tractors for Freedom came to its unhappy and unspectacular end, the headlines featuring Reuther elicited a perceptible wince on 16th Street at the park, particularly because the AFL interpreted the Tractors for Freedom assignment as a presage of a liberal labor administration with Walter P. Reuther ranging the country like Lanny Budd or Arthur Goldberg armed with the commission of a powerful minister with many portfolios...

...And when dignified pot latches are scheduled there are engraved R. S. V. P. invitations and places for union leaders...

...THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION, ruling the country, more like Catholic royalty, is kinder to the lower classes, including union members, other wage earners and minorities, but still it recognizes there are lower classes, less gifted people, less well educated people, people with fewer qualifications, and for this reason, people not really eligible for anything except the kind patronage of the properly powerful...

...The speech writers at the White House, and Stevenson himself, who invented the phrase, speak glibly of the revolution of rising expectations in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin America but when they see it in the person of Walter Reuther they are suddenly blind...

...No pipelines are necessary, however, to determine that each of these postings was made from happenstances that had nothing whatever to do with the discharge of political obligations, although it is generally credited in Washington that jobs the Reuther faction have actually sought and still wish for have never been granted and are not likely to be—but in all friendliness...

...Meany, however, displaying a grim and determined pettiness, quite skillfully in fact, euchred Reuther out of the spot, three times, twice with the connivance of Nixon and Eisenhower, but the third time out with the sly assistance of Adlai Stevenson...

...First, labor skates still look forward to a day when union people represent wage earners in the administration just the way bankers represent bankers, oil men are on hand to speak up for the well diggers, farmers for the tillers of the soil, and cattlemen for the ranchers...

...But when you tote up what Walter Reuther got for the massive dispositions he commanded in patronage, in recognition, in favors, in acknowledgement of his contribution, and in special honors, the sum is less than nothing, because merely as Duke of Detroit, he would be entitled in the run of things to more than he has received so far and is likely to see in the next seven years...

...Even when jobs are available they go chiefly to skates who are an embarrassment on their union jobs...

...The beat is left of center instead of right of center...

...Almost the first reward Reuther anticipated, according to a unanimous but perhaps apocryphal presumption, was a long-delayed appointment as U. S. delegate to the United Nations...

...Especially for labor leaders it is difficult even to think of walking out on a pleasant host who happens to be President of the United States who calls you by your first name...

...These jobs they never had before and don't have now...

...On tax policy, on the question of interest and money, on full employment, on federal budgetary policy, the Kennedy appointees impatiently brush off union protests, including Reuther's, as simply uninformed or as economically illiterate...