He decided to move to another neighborhood as soon as his condition permitted it, but meantime the killer had another diversion for the mob. Victor and his wife Sophie had begun to notice that their cocker spaniel was barking urgently in the yard nights. It wasn’t much of a bark, however, because it wasn’t much of a spaniel, and they were surprised when a policeman called to tell them an anonymous protest had been lodged; they would have to get rid of the dog. Next day, at the cop’s insistence—there had been another anonymous complaint—they gave away the one sentry they had. That night they were sitting in the front room, Sophie mending, Victor reading the New York Times magazine. Sophie had a wifely complaint. Her light bulb was dead, she couldn’t see to sew. Her husband had scarcely replaced it—“illuminating the target,” Victor observes dryly—when another shotgun roared on the lawn. In the brief moment before he lost consciousness he thought the bulb had exploded; then everything went black. There were two pea-sized slugs in his throat, and one in his mouth; a fourth had destroyed his right eye. At the hospital Walter, still crippled, cried, “It’s not possible, not both of us, not twice.” Victor, who in a quieter way was just as game as his brother, said, “It’s a good thing they didn’t shoot out my tongue. I couldn’t make a living.”
This time the gunman had left his weapon in the shrubbery. Despite that, and despite a clumsy attempt to dynamite the union building a few months later, the police couldn’t find enough evidence to make a charge stick. Five years later a hood confessed he had driven the killer’s car the night of the attack on Walter. He named two other men, but before the trial he gave police the slip and left the country, ending the case. Today the twin mystery remains a quarter-million-dollar question; no one ever claimed the U.A.W. rewards for new information.
The lack of convictions accounts for the elaborate security system the union set up to protect the Reuthers. Walter’s office was approached through an intricate maze of narrow corridors; visitors felt like balls in a pinball machine. He took a bodyguard everywhere—when a priest called to say he was sending a ticket to Cardinal Mooney’s funeral, Walter gently reminded him, “I’ll need two tickets, Father”—and over the years he came to accept his armed chaperon. There were problems, though. One night a family party went to see Hamlet. Two guards sat in the row behind them, and during a lull on stage the Reuthers heard a queer rumbling sound. They turned. It was their escorts, snoring in concert.
Walter revolted against the union’s protective measures just once. He didn’t mind the invasion of his privacy. He was worried about how it looked. Appearances meant a lot to him, which is why he hunted out the cheaper restaurant in a convention town and raised Cain if anybody on the union payroll bought an expensive car. It was an automobile that was at the bottom of his row with his security men. They had Packard build an elegant $12,000 armored car to convoy him around. The thing never worked properly. Ventilation was poor, the bullet-proof windows didn’t open, and on a long ride, with Walter working on correspondence, the back seat literally became a sweatshop. Rides were longer than they were supposed to be, because the car kept breaking down on Detroit streets. It was just too heavy. The motor couldn’t pull all that armor. Friends started calling it “the hearse” as a joke, which on second thought they realized wasn’t so funny. To Walter it was always “the limousine.” He had long ago formed an opinion of men who rode around in limousines, and he didn’t want to be one of them.
“I can’t be seen in this thing,” he protested, and he wasn’t. If he went downtown to the movies, he dismayed his lookouts by insisting he disembark in an alley, violating the most elemental security precautions. Once a governor directed his state police to escort Walter through a stretch of New Jersey. The governor thought of it as a gesture, but Walter wasn’t flattered. Whenever they hit a town, sirens screaming, the people on the sidewalks would peer out to see who the big slick was. He squirmed in the back, feeling guiltier and guiltier. Finally he ordered a stop and told the bodyguard in front to switch with him. The rest of the ride was fine. Ignored by pedestrians, he chatted easily with the driver while the man in back gravely bowed and waved. The guard loved it, and everyone agreed he looked far more distinguished than the little redhead by the chauffeur.
The limousine reached the end of the road in Canada. One wintry morning the driver saw, through the thick slab of a windshield, that he was approaching a town. A meetinghouse was letting out; the street was jammed with automobiles. He hit the brakes. The wheels locked. The car, with its monstrous weight, kept right on going. Luckily they were just idling along. The only damage was a crushed fender—on another car, of course. Walter, however, had had enough. He jumped out, slammed the ponderous door, and snapped, “That does it. I’m not going another inch in that.” He finished the trip by bus.
The spectacle of America’s most colorful labor leader fussing over what people thought was diverting to many. Some thought it was also revealing. Walter, they held, was a true ascetic—a man who shrank from pleasure, even from normal conviviality. Company bargainers saw him as an implacable, humorless robot, a talking machine obsessed with doctrine. Even some of his friends wondered about him. “He never asks me about my family,” one complained. “He speaks of eleven o’clock on Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in America,” a clergyman said, “but he never thinks of the personal hurt in race prejudice.” “Walter,” said a wry admirer, “is a dedicated fanatic.” In public he seemed to be infatuated with principles but indifferent to people. In private, however, he was a very different man. He was no machine to his daughters Linda and Lisa. And though May said that whenever she heard him speak she wondered how she dared to argue with him, at home she more than held her own.
On one of his rare fishing days he caught a great northern pike. He hadn’t fished enough to know what a feat this was, but when he found out he was excited. The prize was shipped home in a box, and when it didn’t arrive he called the express agency daily, inquiring. The agent who turned up with it asked, “What’s in that box, Mr. Reuther? It must be pretty important.” “It is,” Walter replied. “It’s my reputation.” He had it stuffed and mounted it in his living room. It didn’t stay there, though. (“How would you like a great northern pike in your living room?” a woman who knew May asked.) Somehow his wife got him to take it to his office. “The difference between May and her daughters,” said another of May’s friends, “is that Walter knew when the girls were pushing him around.”
There wasn’t much doubt with the girls. They weren’t as subtle as their mother. Once Walter stopped off at Linda’s progressive New England boarding school and invited her to dinner. She told him she’d really like to, she honestly would, but she was busy. In fact, she was so terribly busy she didn’t have time to shop for some things she just had to have, and would he mind? Walter hurried off to buy her some jeans and underwear and then spent the evening alone in a nearby motel, going over papers. He hadn’t minded at all, nor did he protest when little Lisa informed him, on his departure for the West Coast, that she had made up her mind that her classroom was going to win the P.T.A. attendance banner the evening of his return, even though it meant he must drive straight there from the airport.
He could outsmart goons and ginks and company finks, but he was helpless against this kind of exploitation. At home he lived with a menagerie—two parakeets named Misty and Chippy, a horse called Charlie, and assorted dogs and cats and goldfish—because the girls loved pets. The mosquitoes that teemed on his stream seemed to find him irresistible, but the only effective repellent he could find drove birds away, so he took it back and settled for a swatter. His daughters liked birds too.
Until they reached their teens they had a sheep and two lambs. Everyone agreed that this was too much, so Walter quietly asked a couple of the guards if they would like some mutton. Lisa heard him. There was a scene which didn’t end until Walter reached an agreement with a neighboring farmer, who promised to treasure and caress them and feed them and, above all, not
kill them. She even insisted this be in writing, and her father drew up a formal document, which the baffled farmer signed.
For a time Lisa doted on a dog she and her sister called Soapy—he had polka dots and had come from a family named Williams. When a car ran over him there was a solemn ceremony. Walter was soberly digging the grave when his weeping daughter suddenly pointed at him and cried, “Daddy! You didn’t love him!” He insisted that he had, but she stamped an accusing foot. “You didn’t either! You’re not crying!” There was only one thing to do, and as a conscientious father Walter did it. He screwed up his face and sobbed noisily as he shoveled Soapy under.
The girls were responsible for the house on the creek. After the retreat from Appoline Street, the Reuthers lived for several years in a residential area that was turning Negro; values were dropping, and they got a bargain. Summers were a problem, however. In the past they had rented cottages outside Detroit during July and August, but now landlords were afraid the Reuthers might bring gunfire with them. Walter bought the place by the stream as a solution. Being Walter, he began wondering how he could improve it. Since he had abandoned his leather-and-steel brace, continual exercise of his right hand had become a necessity; his doctor told him that unless he kept stretching the fingers he would have a claw hand. He squeezed a ball for a while, and then hammered nails each day until tears came. Slowly the muscles returned. At the creek he had a chance to do something useful with them, and for four years he worked at making the cottage livable. At the end of the fourth summer Linda and Lisa announced that they wanted to stay there always. Walter wasn’t hard to persuade—he decided he had always wanted to live on a stream lined with evergreens—and May enrolled the children in the local school. That September the expansion began.
In the beginning things were primitive. They all slept in the one room with Walter’s power saw. As nights grew chillier the country rats moved in. By the end of the year he had the chinks sealed and the first bedroom finished; they celebrated Christmas Eve by moving the saw there. Then there was a hitch. Walter ran out of construction materials. The lumber yard kept putting him off. One Saturday morning he appeared there at seven o’clock dressed in denim and helped cut lengths himself. When the man delivered them and saw the skeleton of beams, he started. “Gee, Mr. Reuther, I didn’t know you were living in the open!” he said. The family felt affronted. They thought things were beginning to look rather nice. After the edifice was complete, the saw and Walter’s tool box—“my social security”—were stored in the rising guest house. The Reuther home was quite nice now, and quite finished, and sometimes Walter was even there to enjoy it.
At home he liked to squint out hungrily at the brown trout lazing in the stream, or kick off his shoes and dance with May or just listen to light opera, romantic melodies and Strauss waltzes. Walter’s musical tastes were in dead center field. He never went to the Detroit Symphony; he preferred to sing German lieder, draping the honorary-degree hoods of Walter P. Reuther, LL.D., L.H.D., over the shoulders of visiting children and leading them from room to room in a stamping march. His family was his relaxation. When he left them he left contentment behind.
Walter’s home rarely intruded on his career. After building it he had just two emergency calls from there. The first came when the stream rose a foot and a half over the bridges and water was within a fraction of an inch of the electrical circuits under the house. May suggested he’d better cancel his appointments until the flood was over, and he left his office on the run, standing up Clare Boothe Luce. The second call was from Linda. Anticipating an intensive period of collective bargaining, Walter had given a friend permission to angle for trout. The man arrived with a determined glint and a hat full of flies, and before the day was out he triumphantly yanked a six-pound beauty from the stream. Linda saw him. “You stole my Daddy’s fish!” she shrieked and raced for the phone. She thought Walter ought to know what his so-called friend had done.
***
That was during the 1955 negotiations for the Guaranteed Annual Wage, and it is unlikely that any of the corporation representatives poring over the contract would have believed the rufous ogre opposite them capable of a tender reply to a child. At bargaining sessions Walter was very much in his Detroit role. The meetings were staged around long, brilliantly lit tables; outside there were switchboards, recording devices and private lines to relay new proposals from the other side.
The union negotiated with Ford, General Motors and Chrysler simultaneously, in different parts of town, but the tip-off that Walter had picked his prey came when he stowed his briefcase and toothbrush under one table.
After that things would get rough. The final stretch might last forty hours without a break—he once suggested cheerily that General Motors hew out a tunnel from their office building to his—and a man with his constitution had a big edge. It wasn’t that he huffed and puffed so much. He just kept talking. Walter was voluble under any circumstances; after dominating a Mike Wallace interview and cornering Wallace outside the studio for an hour he said, “There was just one thing wrong with the program. The questions were too long.”
Company men complained that his multiloquence made negotiations longer than they need be. Flexing his powerful jaw muscles hour after hour, he suggested this, recommended that, expatiated, rebutted, lost his temper, was contrite, turned accusing, and expostulated in a dry monotone until the others were numb. Sometimes they were too numb to say anything themselves; one vice president wearily dealt reporters printed cards which said “No Comment” in six languages.
For a quarter of a century the best minds of the industry pondered ways to beat him. Their predicament was that they were many and he was one, which in Detroit meant that the arithmetic was in his favor. His authority cut across corporation lines. The union could assess its million members two dollars a month, build a strike fund of twenty-five million dollars, and use it to support workers in the one plant struck. Under the Taft-Hartley law the lockout was an unfair practice. If a company had tried to outwit him by building, say, a hundred-day inventory, he could have waited until the other two brought out new cars and had his men strike then. The struck company would have had to go to market with last year’s models.
Henry Ford II and George Romney of American Motors suggested industry-wide bargaining—one huge table, with Walter facing everybody. Now and then there were signs of a common front. Walter would write all the presidents, suggesting they cut prices or share profits with their workers, and the phrasing in their icy replies would be curiously the same. Identical proposals might even be handed across two tables; Walter would cry indignantly, “How the hell do you get a Chevy on a Ford assembly line?” Sooner or later, though, one corporation would decide it could get the drop on the others by making a deal on the side. Even if that competitive instinct could have been curbed, there was no guarantee that unity would be successful. Moreover, there would have been the dreaded possibility that a provoked public would have demanded Federal intervention, which was what many executives thought Walter really wanted. He may have quit the Socialist party, they argued, but he played pretty close to third base just the same, and he had been trying to take over the plants since 1940.
Walter’s first big bright idea came in 1940. America was supposed to be getting ready for war, and Big Bill Knudsen’s Office of Production Management was issuing grand we-can-do-the-job statements, but vigilant patriots were painfully aware that the job was not being done. One of them was Walter. Another was Senator Harry Byrd, who complained that America was manufacturing a thousand cars for every combat plane.
Unlike the Senator, Walter knew a lot about jigs, lathes and assembly-line combinations. He even knew a little about converting civilian shops to military production, because he had seen tank dies introduced in that Ford-built Russian factory. The upshot was a Reuther plan to abandon the design of new automobile models, freeing skilled mechanics for work on airplane tools. If industry pooled its resources, he insisted, the country co
uld have its cars and still turn out—this was the title of his pamphlet—500 Planes a Day.
Hardly anybody took that figure seriously. Still, it was something when there wasn’t much of anything, and when Walter assembled his men at Cass Technical High School on the dingy West Side and showed them a Rolls-Royce aircraft engine, they thought their first planes might be ready to fly in six months. Franklin Roosevelt was delighted. Management was vexed. Knudsen, a former president of General Motors, blandly told Walter he lacked authority to take him through a plant, and though Walter requested airplane-motor blueprints so he could break down the job, he never got them. One labor-relations man said bluntly, “Who the hell will pay attention to a squirt of a labor leader?” That was the crux of it. The patroons of the industry had reluctantly recognized the U.A.W. at the bargaining table, but this new business was ridiculous. If any breaking down of jobs was going to be done, it would be done by bosses.
That attitude became a trial to management after Pearl Harbor, when the union crowed we-told-you-so, but the position of Knudsen, Charles F. Kettering and their successors continued to be consistent. Somebody had to have the power on the factory floor. Either they were in charge or the notion of private property had to be abandoned and command transferred to the first clever worker who sat on his job and flirted with a friendly administration in Washington. They suspected that Walter was flirting outrageously with Roosevelt then, and they felt certain he was vamping Truman five years later.
In 1945 he not only wanted a look at General Motors books (this came out of the Reutherian euphonium as “democracy in the economic sphere”); on the national level, where he was feeling increasingly comfortable, he proposed that the War Production Board be replaced by a Peace Production Board of industrialists, labor leaders, farmers, and consumers. Naturally he had an idea of what it might do. He wanted idle airplane factories converted to the manufacture of twenty million cheap, prefab housing units. Once more he ran afoul of management by demanding that workers’ councils share in determining consumer needs. This time his senatorial crony from Virginia wasn’t on his side.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 40
