Our political drama begins in the conference room of the AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C. President John Sweeney, in his eighth year of leading the 65-member union organization, is slumped in a chair, staring at the huge portrait of the AFL-CIO’s first president, George Meany. Meany led the AFL-CIO from 1955 until his retirement in 1979. In 1972, the AFL-CIO refused to endorse George McGovern, and while playing a round of golf with Richard Nixon, Meany assured the president that the president would carry the Meany household.
Sweeney is talking to the portrait.

George, did you watch that circus on Saturday night? Could you get through it? Trumka almost had a cow. He says to me, “Sweeney, we are going to get murdered. Just killed.”