The Last Good Democrat

...Elliott Abrams, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was special counsel to Senator Henry M.Jackson in 1975 and 1976...

...As Kaufman points out, Jackson's races back in Washington state had never been seriously contested, and he did not enjoy the kind of tough fight he faced in the presidential race...

...his 1976 campaign speeches are replete with "let's rebuild the railroad beds" rhetoric...

...He laid the foundation for the foreign policy of the 1980s and the ultimate American victory in the Cold War, which he did not live to see...

...In the fall of 1938, at the age of twenty-six, he won his first election, to the public prosecutor's office...

...He also had "a tin ear for the new cultural ethos of the younger generation of activists within the Democratic party...

...But by the 1970s, American politics and the Democratic party had changed...

...His cure for unemployment was to spend more money and create jobs on the federal dole...

...Moreover, in 1972 he had no real fund-raising apparatus, and relied on his Senate staff to launch a national campaign, at which they were incompetent...

...Jackson was a kind of missionary, who emerged from the American provinces and was never fully acculturated by the national elites among whom he spent his adult life...

...one could even say he had limited political talent, as that commodity is measured these days...

...This was the first entry in an extraordinarily prescient record on foreign policy: • He was a key figure in the creation of a Navy powered by nuclear reactors and a submarine fleet armed with nuclear missiles...

...Jackson captured Massachusetts and New York but never gained momentum, and Carter's victory in Pennsylvania sewed up the 1976 nomination...

...And Jackson, for all his liberal voting record on economic issues and civil rights, was by then hated by his party's left wing because of his foreign-policy views...

...As Kaufman notes, "Few men in politics worked harder or longer at it than Henry Jackson...

...For floor debates Jackson prepared a battle book—that's what his staff called it—in which every possible question was anticipated, mastered, and answered...

...He is no more impressed by the later re-writings of the history of those four years by Zbigniew Brzezinski and others than he is for the Nixon and Ford years...

...He did not believe in the "Nixon Doctrine" (of reliance on regional proxies) and felt there were "no sufficiently robust alternatives to American power to protect vital U.S...

...He reports on every time (though there are not too many) Jackson pulled in his horns in the mid-1970s in an effort to blunt left-wing opposition to his candidacy for president...

...Thousands of members of Congress have come and gone over the years, their individual achievements hidden in committee reports, private compromises, amendments pushed through or blocked, and innumerable, unnoticed meetings...

...Scoop Jackson was a modest man in many ways, and had no great rhetorical talents...

...Jackson has long needed a sympathetic biographer to chronicle his amazing life story, and the new biography by Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, is cause for celebration...

...His insistence on a "moral realism," combining American power with principled support of human rights and democratic allies, helped prevent disaster during America's post-Vietnam crisis of détente, malaise, and the Brezhnev Doctrine...

...nothing was left to chance...

...In addition, the energy crisis of the mid-1970s brought out the most serious flaws in Jackson's political philosophy...

...In all of this, history has proved Jackson right and his contribution invaluable...

...The account Kaufman gives of the Carter presidency is immensely well-informed...

...He did not drink...

...The election in 1976 might have been different...

...He was a mediocre public speaker who came through badly on television, lacking the charisma with which to mobilize an audience...

...He had a far more pessimistic view about Soviet prospects, and "viewed the Cold War as a struggle with a terminal point, which would end with the breakup of the Soviet Union," so that "the objective of American foreign policy ought to be to hasten that end with every means available within the bounds of prudence...

...His achievements with respect to the environment, which won him an unprecedented series of awards from conservation groups like the Sierra Club, were ignored...

...He left as little as possible to improvisation, and then he went out onto the floor and crushed his opponents...

...As Kaufman writes, "Jackson's foreign policy ideas triumphed just as the peak of his power passed...

...Profound changes in the Democratic party and in American politics, unrecognized by him, made his nomination nearly impossible—partic-ularly when combined with his real weaknesses...

...He argued in 1962, long before Daniel Patrick Moynihan became America's U.N...

...The Last Good Democrat The life and times of ScoopJackson By ELLIOTT ABRAMS Even the greatest senators— Clay, Calhoun, Webster, La Follette, Taft—rarely grip the country's imagination the way presidents and generals do...

...Through what became known as the "Jackson Amendment," which tied trade with the Soviets to their willingness to let Soviet Jews emigrate, he insisted that morality and foreign policy be linked long before Jimmy Carter's much-touted human-rights policy...

...His subsequent campaign totals are astonishing: He was reelected to the Senate with 67 percent of the vote in 1958, 72 percent in 1964, 82 percent in 1970, 72 percent in 1976, and 69 percent in 1982, his final campaign...

...Few legislators in American history have ever succeeded so brilliantly in redirecting American foreign policy...

...Here again, Kaufman is a reliable guide, portraying with accuracy what in one chapter title he calls "The Great Liberal Crack-up...

...Jackson opposed forced school busing but sent his children to public school—while George McGovern was loudly supporting busing in public and sending his own children to private schools...

...As early as 1963 he used the forum of the Senate hearing to challenge administration policy (in this case, the test-ban treaty), and he employed Senate committee jurisdictions and staffs as his weapons in the fight against policies he considered morally weak and militarily dangerous...

...He had a mastery of Senate procedures, a detailed knowledge of arms programs, and an unshakable faith in the country's willingness to bear the burdens world leadership forced upon it...

...His unfamiliarity with the city—and the city's unfamiliarity with him—did not last long...

...Outside groups were enlisted to lobby...

...As early as his trip to the USSR in 1956, he understood that the Soviets would, as he put it, act like a "hotel burglar," trying any doors that were open but passing those that were locked...

...He was a big-government, public-power, never-trust-the-markets Democrat whose reaction to the oil crisis was, typically, to blame the oil companies and to urge price controls and a large federal bureaucracy to administer them...

...An associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont, Kaufman is the author of the 1990 Arms Control During the Pre-Nuclear Era, which helps explain his grasp of the complex arms-control issues he takes up in this biography...

...He explained in a 1957 speech that "the essence of the Soviet dilemma [is that] the Kremlin must grant some freedom in order to maintain technological growth but allowing freedom undermines Communist ideology and discipline"—a view later embraced by George Shultz and Ronald Reagan...

...He acknowledges fully that Jackson had little understanding of the American economy and resorted to panaceas involving an expansion of government far more likely to exacerbate the problems they tried to solve...

...During his heyday—through the Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger years and the Carter presidency—Henry Jackson was a rare voice of confidence in America...

...As Jackson saw it, Carter and his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, dangerously misunderstood the interplay of power and ideals and threatened to weaken America while the Soviets grew stronger...

...These were the years in which it was a source of pride and honor to call oneself a "Jackson Democrat...

...Jackson's fight with Carter was another chapter in the great struggle over détente, this time with Soviet behavior in the third world, the SALT II treaty, and the role of human rights as the tests...

...Through exhaustive hearings and key pieces of legislation, it was he, not Kissinger, who did more than anybody else in American politics during the 1970s to make possible the policy of boldness during the 1980s that the secretary of state now defends...

...He and his managers badly underestimated Jimmy Carter, and unlike Carter's team, they "failed to grasp that generating the money and momentum necessary to wage a successful campaign depended on getting off to a fast start in the delegate-poor but media-rich early primaries...

...He did not smoke...

...He did not go to the symphony or listen to music of any kind...

...the only weakness he could never comprehend was the love of ease...

...The Democratic party Jackson knew—com-posed of ethnic groups, big-city political machines, and labor unions—was losing ground to the new Democratic party of the baby boomers in the suburbs...

...Finally, he believed far more attention must be paid to human rights, and Kaufman correctly notes that "Jackson's approach to statecraft rested on a synthesis of power and principles...

...But . . . of all things human, the only emotion he never knew was fear...

...In this sense Scoop Jackson did not love politics...

...Jackson was at the peak of his senatorial influence and was prepared to use it: "Of the nine presidents from Roosevelt through Reagan with whom he served," Kaufman trenchantly notes, "Jackson would have the worst relationship by far with his fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter...

...he loved instead public affairs and the opportunity to affect them...

...Indeed the truth is almost exactly the reverse...

...Scoop Jackson died on September 1, 1983, of an aneurysm, at age seventy-one...

...Perhaps decades earlier these traits would have helped Jackson in national politics...

...Moreover, he did not share the ebullience of Hubert Humphrey and Bill Clinton, who gained energy from the audiences they faced...

...By 1940, he was running for the congressional seat in Washington's Second District, which he won six times before his successful Senate run in 1952...

...He worked twelve- and four-teen-hour days, utterly devoted to the Senate, and voters in his home state figured it out...

...He visited his ancestral Norway after its liberation from the Nazis, and ever after he insisted that there is sometimes no substitute for military power...

...Nor did he socialize with many of his Senate colleagues...

...Kaufman's treatment of Jackson is strikingly thorough and honest...

...With those ideas and people ascendant, and with a Republican Senate in which Jackson lost his chairmanships, his own role became less central...

...Kaufman quotes Bill Bradley, who served with Jackson (one wonders at times if there is anyone Kaufman did not interview), to explain that Scoop played the legislative game the way good generals fight wars: everything was planned...

...And he combined all that with an absolute insistence that no aspect of American foreign policy could be unmoored from our basic dedication to human rights...

...His 1972 campaign was doomed from the start, for his party was bound that year to nominate a liberal...

...When legislators do change the course of events, the drama is usually lost to our collective memory...

...Jackson won another landslide election in his home state that year and returned to the Senate for what proved to be four more years of struggle over foreign and defense policy...

...Kaufman has examined in detail every aspect of the long debate between Jackson and Kissinger (still now carried on in Kissinger's volumes of memoirs), and the conclusion in Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics is clear: Henry Jackson exhibited the persistence, strength of character, knowledge, and legislative talent to challenge the conventional wisdom that détente was desirable, possible, and the best the United States could do...

...Yet his extraordinary record in public life is in danger of being forgotten—particularly his long struggles during the Cold War, which are often misclassified (when they are remembered at all) merely as examples of "hard-line foreign policy...

...Much of the Cold War material Kaufman presents is familiar to those who lived through it, but he provides the details that show Jackson at his best—and thereby gives us a historical record of inestimable value...

...Certain decided senators were asked to contact the other senators who were still uncertain about the issue at hand...

...But Kaufman has discovered so much about Jackson that for every weakness he discloses he finds a new and greater virtue...

...What impelled him was the belief that the Soviet regime must collapse before a genuine détente could occur...

...Seeing Buchenwald eleven days after its liberation, he learned something about barbarism and why it must be resisted by force of arms...

...ambassador, that "the hope for peace with justice does not lie with the United Nations...

...It fell to him to tell this to his own people and to the world and he did so full well knowing that there is a cost for such truthtelling...

...Who's he with...

...In addition, Jackson failed to see that the so-called "McGovern reforms" had changed the dynamics of the Democratic primaries, and his own campaign was poorly designed and made many mistakes...

...He gives Jackson no quarter for his excessive pro-Chinese sympathies, which were incompatible with his principles on human rights...

...Jackson started out as a serious candidate: He was on a Time magazine cover early in the campaign with the headline "Scoop Out Front," a Ralph Nader group called him "most effective senator," a 1975 Gallup poll showed him running neck and neck with President Ford, and the nomination of the liberal hero George McGov-ern in 1972 had led the Democratic party to ruin...

...Scoop" Jackson, the son of Norwegian immigrants, was an entirely self-made man, that true American phenomenon: no money, no connections...

...He thought better of us, and hoped to be appreciated for the career he constructed through fifteen thousand days of public service...

...The political capital Jackson amassed in his home state depended on his effectiveness in bringing home federal dollars and on keeping promises he made to the voters...

...He did not wish to feel our pain, nor could he tell a good story or an easy lie, nor did wading into a crowd delight him...

...In 1967 he was the key opponent of Nixon's anti-ballistic missile treaty, which limited the ability of the United States to deploy missile defenses...

...He led the debate over anti-ballistic missiles again in 1969 and 1970, and he spearheaded the opposition to the SALT I treaty in 1972...

...Kaufman recounts the story of the day Robert Redford came lobbying for an environmental cause...

...Once again, Jackson became the pole attracting staff (such as the redoubtable Dorothy Fosdick, his chief foreign policy adviser for twenty-eight years), supporters, and allies—some even within the Carter administration—in an enormous effort to blunt a foreign policy he believed would undermine America in the Cold War and set back the cause of liberty...

...He did not really have any hobbies...

...Thus "the duty of the American government to safeguard and encourage human rights in the Soviet Union arose, he thought, from both moral and practical considerations...

...He had the most successful political career in the history of Washington state, never losing there...

...His entry into Jackson's outer office caused the predictable stir among the receptionists and staff members, but Jackson's reaction was pure Scoop: "Robert Redford...

...In Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, Kaufman is especially good at bringing to life the twenty-year debate over détente, which lasted from the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 to the end of the Cold War...

...In preparing his present work, Kaufman had the full cooperation of the Jackson family and the support of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, and if he tells Jackson's story without soaring literary passages, that, too, is true to Scoop's memory...

...As Kaufman suggests, this was perhaps the product of his late marriage and the young age of his children: While his rivals dealt with the new youth culture every night at home, Jackson's children were not yet teenagers during the 1976 campaign, and he drew a complete blank when it came to the post-Vietnam cultural revolution in America...

...From then on, Jackson demanded, as Kaufman describes it, "a synthesis of power and principle" that included "vigilant containment" and an insistence on infusing "American foreign policy with greater moral clarity and confidence about U.S...

...nothing but talent and determination that raised him from his home in Everett, Washington, to national power...

...He lived for his work, which is to say for his country, and his career reminds us—at a time when we need remind-ing—that public life can be lived with an integrity that inspires as Jackson inspired those who knew him, followed him, worked for him, even those who fought him...

...The best hope for the United Nations lies with the maintenance of peace...

...By the end of 1980, he had reached the twilight time of his life and his career...

...Yet Henry Jackson, this titan of the Senate, was widely spurned in his own party, and his two attempts to win its presidential nomination were disastrous...

...Once again, Jackson used the tools he had mastered in the Senate to change the course of American foreign policy...

...He believed Nixon and Kissinger misunderstood the American people and were too pessimistic about rallying public support for a strong military and a vigorous American foreign policy, but he also believed this required a distinctly moral—indeed ideological—foreign policy...

...There was an outpouring of grief, and gratitude, and among the many wonderful things said, Pat Moynihan's tribute stands out: "He lived in the worst of times, the age of the totalitarian state...

...Kaufman, for instance, presents in clear focus Jackson's five objections to the view of Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger: • Jackson agreed with Solzhenitsyn that "the Soviet Union's internal structure was the key to its international behavior" and that as long as it was totalitarian no real détente was possible...

...And even this New Deal approach to economics was out of step with party activists...

...Jackson had entered Congress steeped in the isolationism popular in his district, but World War II changed his views...

...Surprisingly, Carter—who had run as a Navy veteran tough on communism—pursued a policy Jackson called "moralism, malaise, and retrenchment...

...interests...

...A statue of Scoop Jackson now stands in a corner of the Russell Senate Office Building, but Robert G. Kaufman's Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics is a far more useful monument...

...And Jackson's influence over the decades was matched only by his foresight, beginning with his argument in favor of building the H-bomb rather than relying on Stalin's forbearance...

...The years of America's attempt at détente were Jackson's finest hours...

...The fact of the fund's existence only became public when new Senate ethics laws, designed to prevent private vice, forced Jackson to disclose his private charity...

...Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America...

...virtues and our adversaries' vices...

...It depended as well, as they got to know him better, on a widespread admiration for his integrity and dedication...

...Votes were lined up in advance with meticulous personal lobbying...

...Kaufman's account of the struggle over détente is thorough, lively, fair—and willing to drop the pretense of academic neutrality to make sharp judgments when the evidence supports them...

...In 1969 he opposed the anti-ballistic missile treaty, arguing twelve years before Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency that (as Walter Mondale later recalled it) the United States should "bankrupt the Soviet Union by developing weapons systems that forced the Soviets to match us...

...By 1949 he was playing a role in national security policy...

...His duty, as he saw it, was to learn and to teach the lessons of world politics in his lifetime—and the most important lesson, he thought, was the necessity for the great democracies to practice the kind of foreign policy that Kaufman correctly describes as "moral realism...

...So what went wrong for Jackson in 1976...

...Kaufman also helped Richard Nixon prepare his book Beyond Peace, and that work gave him a deep understanding of Nixon's foreign-policy views...

...When he arrived at Union Station in 1941, the youngest member of the House at age twenty-eight, he had never been to Washington, D.C., before and had to ask a cab driver to find the Capitol for him...

...Jackson earned tens of thousands of dollars giving speeches and quietly donated every single cent to a scholarship fund for poor students that he had established in honor of his sister, a schoolteacher...

...He did not follow professional sports...

...Jackson provided, not alone but as a principal and irreplaceable figure, the foundation upon which Ronald Reagan was able to build—using some of Jackson's ideas and some of Jackson's people...