that had nothing to do with political and ideological issues. Specifically, L[ovestone] was expressing the fact that he is a plebeian and a Jew.”37 In his transactions with the CIA, the ex-communist articulated his grievances about the Agency’s behavior in language dripping with class consciousness. “These people are purely socialites whose names appear in the Social Register, who look for excitement and who confuse thrills with results,” he once told Brown. “I have not minded being a janitor in the firm, but Irving I do not want to be a janitor whose functions are increasingly devoted to carrying out strange tenants’ garbage.”38 It cannot have helped that the OPC case officer originally assigned Lovestone, Pinky Thompson (or “Stinky” as the Lovestoneites called him, on account of his fondness for bouts of heavy lunchtime drinking), was “an affluent Philadelphia clubman with a plantation in Georgia where Wisner went shooting each
60
A F L- C I A
year.”39 It was no surprise that the humbly born Italian American Offie fit in better at ILG headquarters. In short, the alliance between the FTUC
and the CIA was an unnatural one of New York and Georgetown, Lower East Side and Upper West Side, City College and Princeton, that only the strange circumstances of the secret Cold War crusade against communism could have brought into being.
In late 1950 the already stormy marriage of the Free Trade Union Committee and Office of Policy Coordination grew even more tempestuous when Lovestone began to suspect that Wisner was flirting with another labor suitor, the AFL’s industrial rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO had by this date shed the communist associations that had characterized its early existence, purging its communist-led affiliates in 1949 and, in the same year, walking out on the World Federation of Trade Unions. As well as signifying the final extinction of the American Popular Front, these actions prepared the way for the CIO’s rising star, Detroit auto workers’ leader Walter Reuther, to assert his immensely attractive personality abroad. Emulating the example of the AFL, the CIO dispatched a European representative, Reuther’s younger brother Victor, to open an office in Paris in 1951. The CIO also succeeded in building up considerable influence within the government agency responsible for administering the Marshall Plan in Europe, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), whose head, Milton Katz, favored the notion of a “dual-track” labor foreign policy involving the two American labor federations on an equal footing.40
Lovestone was dismayed by these developments, in part simply because he was possessive of his foreign turf, but also because there was a deep ideological and personal animosity between him and Brown, on the one hand, and the Reuther brothers on the other. The latter had never forgot-ten or forgiven the part played by the Lovestoneites in the splitting of the UAW during the 1930s. On their side, Lovestone and Brown regarded the Reuthers, former socialists who placed as much emphasis on the promotion of economic growth abroad as on fighting communism, with the same sort of contempt they showed the Fizz kids, referring to them sneer-ingly as the “YPSLs” (members of the Young People’s Socialist League).
As Lovestone explained to his intelligence liaison, Sam Berger, “Victor
L A B O R
61
Reuther might be a very nice guy. If I had an eligible daughter and she was in love with him, I would not interfere with her desire to marry him. But to put Victor Reuther and Irving Brown on a par in carrying on the frontal struggle against totalitarian Communism and its machinations . . . is enough to make, as Stalin said, a horse laugh.”41
Whether these remarks were passed on to the OPC is not known.
What is clear is that the professional spies did not share Lovestone’s factional agenda: their main concern was to improve their access to the noncommunist left, and the CIO, whose social democratic politics played rather better with European labor than the business unionism of the AFL, was able to provide them with contacts that the FTUC could not. Also, next to the Lovestoneites’ brand of obsessive, negative anticommunism, the positive, constructive approach of the Reuthers was bound to seem more appealing, especially to those younger intelligence officers who liked to think of themselves as belonging to the non-communist left or, at the very least, the liberal center. Finally, the CIO, with its roots in the
“corporatist” politics of the New Deal era, simply seemed a more natural government partner than the AFL, which, ever since its founding in the late nineteenth century by British cigar maker Samuel Gompers, had avoided entangling official alliances.