Former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland Dies

Lane Kirkland, an intellectual union bureaucrat who championed liberal politics at home and anti-communism abroad during 16 years as president of the AFL-CIO, died Saturday of lung cancer. He was 77.

Kirkland had battled cancer since before his election in 1979 to the top post in the U.S. trade union movement. Over the years, one kidney, part of the other and a lung were removed by surgeons.

Despite recurring illness, he held the AFL-CIO post until 1995, wooing back to the ranks of the federation some of the largest American unions that had dropped out--or been thrown out--over the years in internal labor disputes. The unions that returned included the United Auto Workers; the Teamsters Union; the West Coast-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union; the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union; the United Mine Workers of America; and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

Kirkland appeared an improbable candidate as union boss. Unlike his mentor and predecessor, the gruff former Bronx plumber George Meany, the bespectacled Kirkland studied international relations at Georgetown University and planned a career in the foreign service. But in 1948 he took a job as a researcher for the AFL and continued as a union staffer for the next 47 years.

The only time he was a member--instead of an official or an employee--of a union was during his service as a merchant marine officer in World War II, when he held a card from the Masters, Mates and Pilots Union.

A collector of modern paintings and sculpture, avid gardener, jazz buff and prolific reader, Kirkland peppered his conversation with quotations from Latin scholars, Lenin and salty sea metaphors. He avoided the cigars that were Meany’s trademark, but he chain-smoked cigarettes in a Franklin D. Roosevelt-style holder.

Kirkland’s second wife, Irena, a Czech immigrant, told the Associated Press that he died at his home in Washington nine months after the start of his final battle with lung cancer.

“He didn’t suffer at the end,” she said. “His body just gave out.”

The great-great-grandson of a member of the Confederate Senate, Kirkland regularly referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. But he became a champion of racial equality, coordinating a campaign by the AFL-CIO to combat racial discrimination within the union movement. He also pushed for anti-discrimination laws at the national level. As executive assistant to Meany, Kirkland lobbied strenuously for the inclusion of a fair employment practices provision in the 1964 civil rights act.

He was a strong supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and other efforts to help the disadvantaged. He raised more than $2 million for the urban renewal programs sponsored by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute.

In September 1981, he organized a march that lured 250,000 unionists and liberal allies to Washington to dramatize labor’s opposition to Reagan administration cuts in a host of social programs.

Kirkland also led the AFL-CIO in supporting workers in countries where the trade union movement was suppressed, including South Africa, China, Cuba and Chile.

In the 1980s, he oversaw a massive effort by American labor to support the Polish Solidarity movement.

But Kirkland’s career ended in bitterness. In May of 1995, he announced that he would run for a ninth two-year term. But he immediately drew strong opposition from union leaders who believed he had already stayed too long.

In August of that year, three months before the AFL-CIO convention to pick a president, Kirkland realized that he was a sure loser. With more than 20 unions, representing 53% of the AFL-CIO membership, opposing him, Kirkland reluctantly announced his retirement.

In the end, Kirkland lost out because he never shed the image of behind-the-scenes operator that he developed as Meany’s lieutenant. In 1995, his detractors complained that, in his televised appearances, he was unable to advance the union cause.

Kirkland’s detractors complained that he had become out of touch with a fast-changing society that had left just 15.5% of American workers represented by unions.

Despite his success in bringing several of the nation’s biggest unions back into the AFL-CIO fold, the federation’s total membership remained stagnant during his tenure as the percentage of organized workers declined steadily.

One of Kirkland’s most controversial decisions allowed the scandal-scarred Teamsters back into the federation. It was Meany who had thrown the union out for its rampant corruption.

Some labor leaders grumbled that Kirkland was turning his back on his mentor by reversing Meany’s decision. But Kirkland rejected the criticism: “All sinners belong in the church,” he said.

Kirkland was a lifelong Democrat who kept the union federation as a key element in the Democratic coalition.

In 1952 and 1956, Kirkland wrote speeches for Adlai E. Stevenson’s Democratic presidential campaign, although he remained on the AFL-CIO payroll.

Nevertheless, Kirkland broke with President Clinton over the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 1993, he charged that Clinton had “abdicated” his role as leader of the Democratic Party because of his support for the trade pact with Canada and Mexico.

Joseph Lane Kirkland was born March 12, 1922, in Camden, S.C., the son of one of the Old South’s established families.

As a teenager in 1939, Kirkland tried to enlist in the Canadian armed forces to fight the war that was then raging in Europe, although the United States was officially neutral at the time. He spent a year as a student at Newberry College in South Carolina.

In 1940, he signed on as a deck cadet on the U.S. merchant marine ship Liberator. The following year, he was sent to the newly opened Merchant Marine Academy. After graduation in 1942, he served as chief mate aboard ships carrying war materiel.

After the war, he took night classes at Georgetown while working as a draftsman of naval charts. But when he took a job in 1948 as a researcher for the AFL, it sent his life in a new direction.

He left the federation in 1958 to conduct research for the International Union of Operating Engineers, but he rejoined it two years later as Meany’s executive assistant.

Kirkland was elevated in 1969 to AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, the federation’s No. 2 job. As Meany’s chosen successor, he was elected president without opposition in 1979.

In 1994, Clinton awarded Kirkland the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Kirkland is also survived by five daughters from his first marriage.

Other survivors include five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.