Dr. No

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the Cold War, the battle between East and West raged most fiercely on the labor front. Today, the “labor question” has receded from public view. The labor movement is a pale shadow of its once mighty self. So it may be hard to recall that it once loomed so large in the competing imperial designs of the Soviet Union and the United States. After all, Bolshevism presumed to speak for the international working class in its historic struggle to overthrow the regime of wage slavery. If the West was to defend itself against the “evil empire,” it needed to frustrate the Soviet demarche which deployed its satellite Communist parties around the world to control trade union federations and the political parties with which they were often allied.

Enter Jay Lovestone. Lovestone lived his life in the shadows and liked it that way. After a youthful escapade as a precocious leader of the fledgling American Communist Party in the 1920s, he converted and spent the rest of his very long life on the other shore as a cloak-and-dagger agent for the CIA and the American Federation of Labor. His behind-the-scenes reign as the labor movement’s unofficial secretary of state lasted a whole generation. Lovestone was the original cold warrior, his gimlet eye mercilessly tracking and confounding real and imagined efforts by the Soviet “evil empire” to subvert to its own nefarious purposes labor movements on at least four continents. James Jesus Angleton, the head of counter-intelligence for the CIA until his own hallucinatory ravings about internal double-agents led to his dismissal, was Lovestone’s admired good friend. Together they inhabited a solipsistic universe, consoling and maddening at the same time, a world cleanly bifurcated between its dark side and its light side yet overrun with paranoid fantasies about diabolical conspiracies and intimate betrayals.

A biography of Lovestone might have treated his life as a clinical case study in the psychopathology of the Cold War. Or it might have explored the domestic as well as the international consequences of the covert dealings between the AFL and the national security state which arose in this country after World War II and which Lovestone embodied. “A Covert Life,” Ted Morgan’s life of Lovestone, however, does neither. Instead, Morgan’s is a kind of book-length gossip column about the closeted life of a monomaniacal anti-Communist. If you happen to care about this, then Morgan’s book works. It works because he’s made wide, if rather randomly organized, use of newly opened files at the Hoover Institution, the FBI and the archives in the Kremlin that once belonged to the Comintern, the Soviet-run high command of the international Communist movement. Whatever juice the book has is squeezed from these sources. And whatever else one might say about it, Morgan’s biography offers incontrovertible proof that the AFL wittingly offered its services to the CIA, a relationship AFL President George Meany and the rest of the labor officialdom spent decades denying.

The breezy superficiality of “A Covert Life” is apparent almost immediately in its offhand remarks about how Jewish immigrants arriving around the turn of the century (Lovestone came here as a child in 1907) were natural-born socialists because they’d lived as an oppressed minority under the czars. What about the vast majority who didn’t become socialists, what about those who opted instead for Zionism, what about the innumerable hundreds of thousands who remained loyal to the faith of their ancestors?

Morgan’s carelessness, however, is symptomatic of a deeper intellectual abdication peculiar to this field of study. Just as the science of Kremlinology was really a form of soothsaying, so too what has often passed for the history of communism has really been a form of theology, a literature of didactic allegory. In this Weltanshauung, communism, as a kind of quintessential evil, rises above (or sinks below) the level of everyday empirical reality. As a metaphysical subject, it’s exempted from the norms of historical narration and interpretation. It becomes instead the dramatic center of a modern-day version of the medieval morality play. This in turn allows for a level of crusading invective and analytic incoherence that would be found impermissible were the subject not Soviet Russia. So, for example, when he is describing the formative years of the American Communist Party, Morgan follows the custom of characterizing party utterances as willful “deceit,” designed to “mask their true purpose.” Yet within these same few pages he also describes Lovestone’s “veritable Niagara” of pamphlets and speeches declaiming from the rooftops the naked, undisguised revolutionary intentions of the party. But why worry about the inconsistency when there are bigger fish to fry?

“Masters of deceit” was, as we all remember, a favorite sobriquet of the Cold War years. It distilled the labyrinthine story of a global social movement into a glutinous piece of world historic mendacity. A powerful metaphor, it combined the pristine pleasures of an intellectual economy with the moral frisson of a pre-modern demonology. More secular and up to date, however, is the medicalizing of communism, its metaphorical association as a dread disease, wildly contagious, stealthy in the insidiously silent and invisible way that germs are. Thus Morgan tells his readers that the party tried to invade the American political bloodstream in the mid-1920s “like a virus looking for a welcoming host.” However, just a few years later, when Lovestone was being brutally excommunicated from the Comintern, Morgan characterizes his Communist Party comrades--these very same microbes of political sickness--as “the genuine voice of the American working class” because they dared defend Lovestone in the teeth of Stalin’s dictatorial bullying. Human viruses one moment, heroes the next. Puzzling to be sure, but to figure it out you don’t need a historian; you need a doctor of the body politic.

Lovestone was the perfect such doctor. He was ideal because in temperament he was a Stalinist, hair of the dog that bit you. A ruthless, nasty, vituperative polemicist, deeply suspicious to the point of paranoia, openly contemptuous not only of his enemies but even of his putative friends, a consummate conspiratorial factionalist, Lovestone knew his enemy all too well. Morgan’s biography is a veritable catalog of Lovestone’s vilest Stalinist traits. When the tide of factional politics seems to be running against him, Lovestone refers to his opponents inside the American Communist Party as “the rank and filth” or “the rank and vile.” Later, during the long night of his exile from the Comintern, lasting into the late 1930s, Lovestone cravenly seeks readmission to the Comintern by apologizing for Stalin’s every violent twist and turn, including the infamous purge trials. And once he switches allegiance and joins the anti-communist crusade, Lovestone deploys every piece of skulduggery, the whole repertoire of character assassination, polemical bullying and personal denunciation he’d learned at the feet of the devil himself.

Above all, Lovestone’s conversion experience, his turn to professional anti-communism, reveals just why he was so well-suited to carry out the Cold War purposes of his managers in the CIA and his co-conspirators in the leadership of the AFL. In 1937-’38, Lovestone went to work for Homer Martin, titular head of the fledgling auto workers union organized by the insurgent Congress of Industrial Organizations. Martin, however, was not only totally inept, he also led a conservative faction of the UAW that was eventually ousted and subsequently Martin affiliated himself with Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic Union for Social Justice. Adamantly opposed to the presence of the Communist Party within the union (which was considerable), that faction was also against the whole militant “progressive” caucus, which included many socialists and non-communists (like the Reuther brothers) as well as Catholic anti-communists who nonetheless recognized that the UAW, and the CIO more generally, were the best hope for revitalizing a moribund labor movement and for moving the country in the direction of social democratic reform.

Lovestone soldiered on through it all, his salary and expenses taken care of by David Dubinsky, the head of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Dubinsky and Lovestone shared an obsession: that any organization, trade union or otherwise, having anything to do with a communist party, home-grown or foreign, was anathema and needed to be destroyed. If this meant linking your fortunes to a laughably incompetent Christian fascist, so be it. From this moment on, Lovestone’s anti-communism was in just exactly this way totally indiscriminate. So he hated the Reuthers passionately even though Walter Reuther rose to the presidency of the UAW in large measure thanks to his own bitter struggle against the American Communist Party.

For Lovestone and for his handlers in the AFL (a troika of Dubinsky, Matthew Woll of the Photoengravers Union and the AFL’s Meany together supervised the Lovestone operation, along with the CIA, while keeping it hidden from the rest of the AFL) in the years immediately following World War II, the CIO was as much the enemy as was the Communist Party, even though by 1949, the CIO was ferociously purging its red-tainted unions and decreeing support for U.S. foreign policy a loyalty test for all its constituent unions. It was precisely that kind of all-embracing absolutism, otherwise so Stalinist in its inquisitorial intolerance, that made Lovestone the complete cold warrior. No neutrality, no “third way,” no nonalignment was permissible. Morgan seems to share this outlook; although this assumption, like others in this book, slumbers below the level of conscious articulation. Consequently, the story of the CIO, that social movement without which it is impossible to imagine the long-frustrated unionization of American basic industry, goes AWOL in this biography except insofar as it surfaces as the foil of the international communist conspiracy.

Beginning during the war with the creation of Lovestone’s “‘Free Trade Union Committee” and heating up after the war turned cold, the CIA-AFL collaboration (for which the CIA picked up a growing share of the bill) directed its fire at splitting apart war-born alliances between various anti-fascist elements of the labor movement, first of all in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy, but soon throughout the rest of the world. It was the Homer Martin gambit applied globally. The overriding objective was to isolate the communists and weaken their position in these labor movements and hence their ability to color the complexion of postwar governments.

Money and agents were sent abroad, and soon enough Lovestone found himself presiding over a far-flung network of covert activities: red-baiting and purging CIO-affiliated Labor Department functionaries in occupied Germany; operating listening posts in Japan; doing sabotage in China; spying and overseeing propaganda operations in the Soviet zone of occupation; laundering money, with the secret connivance of U.S. embassies, to finance the anti-communist trade union opposition in France and Italy; making dark arrangements with Mafia-connected stevedores to beat up communist workers in Southern France striking against the Marshall Plan; running operatives all over the Third World, in Egypt, Indonesia, Tunisia, Ghana, India, Algeria, who worked to get anti-colonial movements to line up behind U.S. anti-Soviet foreign policy.

So it went. Morgan has mined the newly accessible archives well enough to paint a sketchy but intriguing record of this undercover war. Of course we know the outcome. The West won. But, as a matter of fact and tellingly, Lovestone often lost. The anti-communist splinter movements he fostered often infuriated him by failing to toe the line the State Department had laid out for them. Every time someone new was elected to lead the free world’s International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, they quickly disappointed Lovestone, whose craving for dogmatic orthodoxy was as insatiable as Stalin’s. Today’s friendly anti-colonialist turned out to be tomorrow’s Soviet dupe, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, or worse, like Castro. While he and the CIA were purportedly on the same team, they were invariably at each other’s throats. The agency wanted to keep all its options open and so assiduously cultivated the loathsome, Reuther-infested CIO as well as the AFL. If this drove Lovestone to distraction, the agency thought Lovestone was unpardonably soft in the head for his cozying up to anti-colonialists, like the Algerians who were making war on America’s ally, France. Nuttiest of all was the surveillance the FBI maintained on Lovestone through most of the ‘50s. The bureau suspected he might still be a communist in deep cover.

Like so much else about this sorry Cold War consensus, it all came apart in Vietnam. Lovestone and Meany, doggedly dogmatic to the end, sniffed out an obscure, pliable and utterly corrupt trade unionist in South Vietnam willing, for the right price (which kept escalating along with the war), to lend some credibility to the democratic pretenses of the tottering Saigon government. Meanwhile, as domestic opposition to the war became epidemic, Lovestone arranged a last hurrah: the bloody hard-hat rampage through the streets of New York in support of Richard Nixon. It was a signature event, marking the labor movement’s long slide into social isolation, political irrelevance and economic debility. Lost in his obsessions, Lovestone had long since ceased to care. Judging from this biography, neither does Ted Morgan.