The thugs were never caught, but they weren’t necessarily hirelings of management. Walter made plenty of other enemies. He drove Communists out of the union and numbers operators out of the shops, and his campaigns against every form of racial segregation in UAW social life alienated bigots. His name attracted lightning like a Franklin rod. To Jimmy Hoffa he was a prig; to John L. Lewis “a pseudo-intellectual nitwit”; to Henry Wallace “the greatest single obstacle” to his Progressive Party. At the same time, his leadership in the ADA, the NAACP, and the United World Federalists had won him many liberal admirers. After he became president of the CIO in 1952, British Labour intellectuals regarded him as the most exciting man in America. Reuther votaries included Chester Bowles, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who thought he might even be qualified for the White House.
While other labor leaders tended to become voluptuaries, Walter was recognized as a true ascetic—a man who shrank from pleasures, sometimes from normal conviviality, and always from ostentation. After his narrow brushes with death he recognized the need for bodyguards, but when the union had Packard build an elegant $12,000 armored car to convoy him around, he protested, “I can’t be seen in a limousine.” And he wasn’t. If he went downtown to the movies, he dismayed his lookouts by insisting that he disembark in an alley, violating the most elementary security precautions. Finally, when the wheels locked in Canada and the car smashed another auto, he sprang out and snapped, “That does it. I’m not going another inch in that.” He finished the trip by bus and never entered the limousine again.
Providing the Reuthers with a safe house proved more successful. An isolated, easily defensible one-room summer cottage was found in the country. Walter, being Walter, began wondering how he could improve it. His doctors told him that constant exercise of his injured hand was necessary if he wanted to avoid having a claw hand. For four years he worked at making the cottage livable. He started surrounding it with other rooms, attaching a kitchen here, a bedroom and study there, adding a second story, screening in a porch. He even built the furniture, including an elaborate hi-fi set. At the end his hand was well and his home was complete. Of the original building only the hand-hewn beams in the living room and the rainspouts (which were on the inside) could be seen.
His energy became legendary. So did the creative ferment of his mind. In ideas he found the exhilaration others got from cronies, liquor, or tobacco, none of which appealed to him. He could talk endlessly, on anything; Murray Kempton called him the only man he knew who could reminisce about the future. “Ask Walter the time,” said Spencer McCulloch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “and he tells you how to make a watch.” Sometimes in the torrent wildly confused metaphors would tumble out. Once Walter charged that Hoffa, Dave Beck, and Joe McCarthy were “in bed together, hand in glove,” and another time he described a company negotiator as “a man with a calculating machine for a heart, pumping ice water.”
The negotiator was not amused. In bargaining sessions the redhead’s verbosity was a powerful weapon. The union negotiated with Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler simultaneously, in different parts of town. This was part of Walter’s “one-at-a-time” stratagem. It was based on the belief that competition among auto’s big three was stronger than their distrust of the UAW. Separate one from the group, he argued; none wanted to be strikebound while the other two seized its share of the market. The whipsaw worked—the tip-off that Walter had picked his prey came when he stowed his briefcase and toothbrush under one table—and one reason for its success was his multiloquence. Flexing his powerful jaw muscles hour after hour, he suggested this, suggested that, expatiated, rebutted, lost his temper, was contrite, turned accusing, and expostulated in a dry monotone until the others were numb.
Sometimes they were numb with fury. The Hoffas and Becks of labor held that it was the union’s job to win money and management’s to decide whether the stockholders or the public paid the bill. Walter disagreed. He contended that another nickel in the pay envelope wouldn’t help a worker if the corporation charged more for its cars, stoking the fires of inflation and raising the cost of living, and he asked the big three to pay higher wages without raising their prices. In corporate boardrooms this was seen as an outright attempt to usurp the traditional prerogatives of the boss. To make matters worse he demanded to look at the companies’ books so he could prove his claims were sound. (This came out of the Reuther euphonium as “democracy in the economic sphere.”) He didn’t get it, but he altered the concept of labor-management relations all the same.
For while his rivals in the union were mocking him as an “egghead” pursuing “pie in the sky,” and management spokesmen scorned his “Alice-in-Wonderland things,” the redhead from Wheeling was successfully demonstrating that there was more to the job than what Detroit workmen call Cadillac money. After his guaranteed annual wage, after the escalator clauses—after the blue-collar proletariat had been lifted into the middle class—Walter turned his Solidarity House staff loose on broader matters: slum clearance, recreation for the elderly, UAW radio programs, a union newspaper, interracial bowling leagues. And the working stiffs followed their leader. Often puzzled, sometimes even resentful, they nevertheless moved toward what his father had called the brotherhood of man.
On May 9, 1970, Walter and May Reuther were killed in the crash of a chartered plane near Pellston, Michigan. Walter’s coffin was draped in the UAW banner, a white gear wheel on a blue background. Mrs. Martin Luther King delivered the eulogy. At the end the mourners sang that most moving of union ballads:
From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill
Where working men defend their rights,
It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.
And one redhead.
THIRTEEN
The Fraying Flags of Triumph
Indian summer, 1945.
Up before 6 A.M. for his daily predawn raid on a well-stocked White House refrigerator—installed for his convenience near the presidential bedroom—Harry Truman showers, shaves, and dresses with haberdasher nattiness in a white shirt, bow tie, and double-breasted suit. He is alone; the presidential tradition of retaining a valet educes from him a scornful snort. Riffling through the morning papers, he dashes off several memos to his staff while sitting erect at his desk in the stiff, no-nonsense, Palmer penmanship posture he learned as a schoolboy. At seven o’clock sharp he is out of the mansion, hitting the pavement on his prebreakfast constitutional. Accompanied by Secret Service bodyguards and a few panting reporters, he steps off at his brisk, 120-paces-a-minute clip—cutting across Lafayette Square, up Connecticut Avenue to K Street, east to Fifteenth Street, south to New York Avenue, and then down past the Treasury Building and the future office of John W. Snyder, Truman’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury after Fred Vinson is elevated to the Supreme Court. His advisers are telling the President that Snyder is too conservative to become a cabinet member in a Democratic administration. Truman shakes his head and reminds them that Snyder, like his military aide General Harry Vaughan, is an old friend. The new President believes in relying on old friends, in trusting them.
The First Family’s breakfast is served at eight o’clock: fruit, toast, bacon, milk, coffee, and a little conversational pepper from the head of the household, who tells Bess and Margaret that he wishes Jimmy Byrnes would stop treating him like a freshman senator, that Henry Wallace were less gullible about the Russians, that MacArthur would stop acting like ceremonial viceroy in Tokyo, and that the damned admirals, especially the s.o.b. Radford, would suppress the Navy’s mutiny against the administration’s plan to unify the armed forces.
Among the issues not discussed by the President are militant students, Black Power, Women’s Lib, presidential income tax returns, airplane hijacking, wife swapping, heroin epidemics, heart transplants, SDS trashing, spacecraft modules, racial integration, domestic riots, hard-core pornography, economic game plans, the bombing of office buildings, the CIA, the Middle
East, Red China, Indochina, Krebiozen, law and order, the sound barrier, foul-mouthed college girls, ungovernable cities, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Pill, ecology and charisma—two words then found only in Saturday Review puzzles—and the John Birch Society.
***
The mutilated body of twenty-seven-year-old Captain John Birch, Mercer ’39, lay that morning in a fresh grave on a wooded hillside overlooking the Chinese town of Suchow. A Baptist fundamentalist and a brave OSS officer, Birch had met a fate which struck many who had known him as almost predestined. Before it, Major Gustav Krause, his commanding officer, had written in his diary: “Birch is a good officer, but I’m afraid is too brash and may run into trouble.” On August 25, 1945, the zealous captain had encountered a Chinese Communist patrol and quarreled violently with its leader, whose men then fell upon him. “In the confusing situation,” Krause later said, “my instructions were to act with diplomacy. Birch made the Communist lieutenant lose face before his own men. Militarily, John Birch brought about his own death.”
***
By that autumn Betty Goldstein, summa cum laude Smith ’42—in college she demanded that her first name be spelled Bettye and was so independent that she stamped on a boy’s foot if he tried to open a door for her—had become disillusioned with her Berkeley psychology fellowship. Returning to the East Coast she married a summer stock producer named Carl Friedan. He entered the advertising business, acquired a lovely mansion overlooking the Hudson, staffed it with servants, and came to share with his wife a joint pride in their three handsome children. To neighbors’ eyes it would seem that as suburban wives and mothers go, Betty—no longer Bettye—was thriving. In her spare time Betty Friedan began to write short stories about feminine heroines for women’s magazines.
***
Allen Ginsberg had begun working his way through Columbia as a spot-welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was studying to be a market research consultant. He rarely swore, and he shaved every day.
***
In the new State Department Building on Virginia Avenue, Alger Hiss, director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, was moving into a larger office. He had just completed his tenure as secretary general of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco and was now principal adviser to the United States delegation to the U.N. General Assembly.
***
While winning an E certificate as a war worker, Norma Jean Baker had also been photographed for Yank. The picture had caught the eye of the Blue Book Model Agency, and by V-J Day Norma Jean was taking the agency’s modeling course. Her husband was still overseas; he knew nothing about it. She earned the modeling course’s hundred-dollar fee by keeping her war job, calling in sick, and doing a ten-day stint as a hostess.
***
Joe McCarthy, late of the Marine Corps, was reelected circuit judge in 1945. He immediately began laying plans to stump his state the following year under the slogan “Wisconsin Needs a Tail Gunner in the Senate,” telling voters of the hell he had gone through in the Pacific. In reality McCarthy’s war had been chairborne. As intelligence officer for Scout Bombing Squadron 235, he had sat at a desk interviewing fliers who had returned from missions. His only wartime injury, a broken leg, was incurred when he fell down a ladder during a party on a seaplane tender. Home now, he was telling crowds of harrowing nights in trenches and dugouts writing letters to the families of boys who had been slain in battle under his leadership, vowing that he would keep faith with the fallen martyrs by cleaning up the political mess at home—the mess that had made “my boys” feel “sick at heart.” Sometimes he limped on the leg he broke. Sometimes he forgot and limped on the other leg.
***
In Boston a skinny, twenty-eight-year-old former naval lieutenant returned home after covering the U.N. opening in San Francisco and the British elections in London as an INS reporter. Newspaper work had an uncertain future, he lacked a graduate degree for college teaching, and the thought of becoming a businessman was unappealing. So John F. Kennedy decided to file for congressman in the Eleventh Massachusetts District, his chief qualifications being his father’s money and boyhood memories of his grandfather as mayor of Boston. Meanwhile he established a legal address by renting apartment 36 at 122 Bowdoin Street, just around the corner from the gold-domed capitol. An astonishing number of well-bred young women found their way there.
***
Republicans in California’s Twelfth Congressional District were desperately in need of a presentable candidate to run against incumbent Jerry Voorhis, a liberal protégé of Upton Sinclair’s. In the late spring of 1945 a committee of GOP “citizen fact-finders” had advertised in the newspapers for a qualified candidate. None had replied. Then the president of Whittier College mentioned one of his alumni, Richard M. Nixon. After a talk with Nixon’s parents, two members of the Republican fact-finders reported that the young man was still in uniform, negotiating naval contracts in Baltimore while awaiting release from the service. A third committeeman, a banker named Herman Perry, then put through a historic long-distance call to Maryland. Perry was uneasy; further inquiries had revealed that Nixon, though a lawyer, hadn’t voted until he was twenty-five years old. Even his party affiliation was a mystery. Over the phone he said sure, he’d be glad to run. Perry asked, “Are you a Republican?” There was a pause. Then Nixon replied, “I guess so. I voted for Dewey last time.” That would be good enough, Perry said, and he asked Nixon to fly west as soon as possible. At last the citizen fact-finders had a candidate, though his skills needed some honing. His own instinct, as first revealed, was to appear in dress blues outside factory gates where former enlisted men would be leaving work, look them squarely in the eye, hold out his hand, and say sternly, “I am Lieutenant Commander Richard M. Nixon.”
***
In Washington another former lieutenant commander, Lyndon B. Johnson, was once more representing Texas’s Tenth Congressional District. Congressman Johnson deplored speedy demobilization in the wake of peace. “We must keep strong!” he cried from the well of the House. “We must have military strength to fulfill our moral obligations to the world. Our supreme duty today is to underwrite the future. We must have a strong police force to protect us from criminals, an Army and Navy strong enough to carry out our pledge to help the United Nations police the world.”
***
A fourth naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Benjamin M. Spock, a former instructor in pediatrics at the Cornell Medical College and now a naval physician, was putting the final touches on his first book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
***
In distant Hanoi, French colonial soldiers had returned on the heels of the withdrawing Japanese army. Ho Chi Minh, a native politician with a mixed background but most recently known as a Chiang Kai-shek protégé, had applied week after week for official recognition of his popular Viet Minh (Viet Nam Independence League), but Admiral Thierry D’Argenlieu, General de Gaulle’s representative, had refused to see him. Still independent and still a peaceful advocate, Ho carried his cause to Paris. If thwarted there, he resolved, he would order his followers to blow up the Hanoi reservoir and wage guerrilla warfare from the hills.
***
A few blocks from Ho’s room in Paris, thirty-seven-year-old Major William F. Knowland, presiding over an Army historical section, was notified that he had just become the youngest member of the United States Senate. Governor Earl Warren of California had chosen him to succeed the late Hiram Johnson, confident that he was the most qualified man available. Among Knowland’s merits were his youth, his military service, six years in the state legislature, a fine record as a charity-drive organizer, a wife and three children, and his father, Joseph Russell Knowland, a millionaire and the chief contributor to Warren’s political war chests.
***
In May 1945 a strong-minded widow named Marguerite Oswald had remarried, but by fall it had become clear that the marriage was a mistake. The bride insisted upon taking her five-year-old
son Lee with them wherever they went, and Marguerite’s husband and child found themselves competing for her attention. To Lee, who seemed fond of his new stepfather, the parental quarrels were baffling. He was becoming moody and withdrawn.
***
The press that autumn was unfamiliar with the public personalities of Jane Alpert, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Diana Oughton, Bernadine Dohrn, H. Rap Brown, Kathy Boudin, the Soledad Brothers, Bill Ayres, Huey Newton, Jerry Rubin, Linda Fitzgerald, William L. Calley Jr., Tom Hayden, Cathlyn Wilkerson, and Patricia Campbell Hearst, because none of them had any.
***
Descending from the presidential apartment in a small elevator shortly before nine o’clock each morning, the thirty-third President of the United States strode smartly to his oval office in the West Wing of the White House and plunged into work. His zest was genuine and his manner direct. Roosevelt had enjoyed intrigue and sleight of hand; Truman liked clear-cut decisions, the harder the better. To prevent misunderstandings, all of them were put into writing. He never regretted one, never lost sleep over consequences, never glanced over his shoulder. Procrastination was a sin to him, and he despised it. His customary air was that of an alert shopkeeper, all business, and in fact visitors on his daily appointment schedule, from Anthony Eden to advocates of National Poultry Week, were always referred to by the President as “the customers.” Each was welcomed with a manly two-pump handshake and escorted to the presidential desk, where, in those first months of peace, Truman liked to call attention to the tiny plow which had replaced his model gun on V-J Day. “It’s the little things that count,” he would say sententiously. “I like the feeling of having the new little fellow there.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 59
