Where is he? And you! Who are you?”2 Lucky to escape Russia, Lovestone returned to New York and organized a tight-knit communist opposition group known as the Lovestoneites. (The ability to inspire intense personal devotion in his followers appears to have been one of Lovestone’s greatest political assets, along with powers of sexual attraction that led to a string of affairs with women in his coterie.) He also began building bridges to the American trade union movement, courting the patronage of anticommunist labor leaders like the dynamic head of the New York garment workers, David Dubinsky, who needed Lovestone’s help flushing Stalinists out of their unions.
By the end of the 1930s, Lovestone had despaired of regaining Stalin’s favor and completed his transformation from CP apparatchik into a particularly fanatical and ruthless anticommunist. “The son of a bitch is okay, he’s been converted,” said Dubinsky in 1941, as he introduced Lovestone to George Meany, the cigar-chomping Irish plumber from the Bronx who minded the finances of the nation’s foremost trade union center, the American Federation of Labor.3 Soon the former communist, whom even
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Stalin recognized as an “adroit and talented factional wirepuller,” was established as Meany’s number-one advisor on international labor affairs, and was given considerable latitude to operate overseas under the AFL’s imprimatur.4 This arrangement was institutionalized in 1944 by the creation of the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), a semiautonomous labor foreign policy unit funded by Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILG), run from a cluttered cubicle in the ILG’s Broadway headquarters by Lovestone and represented on the ground in Europe by an extremely able and energetic young Lovestoneite named Irving Brown. Later, the separate status of the FTUC would give Meany the ability to deny charges that the AFL had directly handled covert CIA subsidies.
During the war years, the OSS ran a labor desk under the charge of union lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who employed the bustling Brown in several clandestine operations against the Nazis (hence Lovestone’s friendship with Donovan).5 In 1945, with the disbanding of the wartime secret service, the U.S. government effectively abolished its political warfare capability in the labor field. The Lovestoneites filled this vacuum with a foreign policy of their own, geared to exporting the principles of AFL-style “free trade unionism”—in particular, workers’ freedom from any form of political control—and thwarting communist attempts to win the allegiance of European labor. Their most characteristic tactic was surreptitiously fostering splits in Popular Front–
style alliances of communists and socialists or social democrats, a maneuver the Lovestoneites had pioneered in factional struggles for control of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) during the late 1930s. In France, for example, Brown egged on former resistance fighter Léon Jouhaux, leader of the new union federation Force Ouvrière (FO), to quit the communist-dominated Confédération Générale du Travail while at the same time promising Italian socialists “suitcases of money” if they broke away from the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro.6 He also resorted to more direct methods, such as channeling AFL support to the Corsican union leader of the Marseilles docks, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, whose members beat up communists trying to disrupt the landing of Marshall Plan supplies. The crowning achievement of “Lovestone diplomacy” came at the end of the decade, when the international labor congress, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which included Soviet as well as west-
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ern organizations, split apart and a new anticommunist alliance, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), was born. Small wonder that Brown, whom