One of the great but seldom-heard stories of the Cold War is the subject of Ted Morgan’s superb new biography, A Covert Life, and its hero, Jay Lovestone, is crisply summarized by the book’s sub-title: Communist, anti-Communist, and spymaster.
A founding member of the Communist party in the United States, a force to be reckoned with in George Meany’s American Federation of Labor, and an agent in James Angleton’s CIA counter-intelligence division, Lovestone led one of the most fascinating American lives of this century. But until now, the tale of his life — and the larger story of the struggle against the Soviets’ seventy-year campaign to control the free world’s labor unions — has been found mostly in the clotted prose of doctoral dissertations or academic journals, where it is usually buried in condemnations of the AFL for the great sin of rejecting world socialism and the even worse sin of working with the CIA.
Born in 1898, Jay Lovestone was a Jewish boy from New York’s East Side, a graduate of City College, and a radical who rose by age twenty-nine to be secretary of the Communist Party USA. On a trip to Russia in 1929 for a “Communist International” meeting, however, he had the audacity to show a bit of independence, arguing against Stalin that the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy was doomed to fail in the United States, a country with no Socialist tradition.
For this heresy of an “American exceptionalism” that seemed to exempt the United States from Marxist-Leninist determinism, he was promptly deposed as secretary and expelled from the party. He was lucky to get out of Moscow alive.
I knew Jay Lovestone in the 1950s, while I was a labor journalist and he was at the peak of his anti-Communist ardor. But even then, it was Lenin’s theory of revolution that propelled him — not toward international communism anymore, but against it as a theorist and strategist for the AFL. In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder — in a chapter entitled “Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?” — Lenin had argued that Communists must “agree to any sacrifice and even — if need be — to resort to all sorts of stratagems, artifices, illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, so as to get into the trade unions, and to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work within them at all costs.”
At all costs, indeed. No one will ever know how vast was the sum the Kremlin expended with some success in its attempt to control trade unions throughout the world. The reason for this Communist offensive was to build up an international labor front to support Soviet foreign policy. The ninth provision of the terms of admission to the Comintern demanded that national Communist parties “conduct systematic and unflagging Communist work in the trade unions . . . and by their sustained and unflagging work win the unions over to the Communist cause.”
In 1936, desperate for help in its breakaway from the AFL, John L. Lewis’s CIO asked the Communist party to supply organizers for its new industrial unions. The Communists immediately did — with full Soviet approval, as we now know from Russian archives — and eventually at least a quarter of the CIO Executive Board were either CPUSA members or under party discipline.
Similar scenarios played out across the world. In Britain, the Soviet Union played a significant role in the Trades Union Congress. After World War II, the dominant labor organizations in France and Italy were openly Communist. Had it not been for the resistance of the AFL, Moscow might have controlled the reborn West German trade unions as they already did those in East Germany. In Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America, Stalin’s emissaries did everything they could to organize unions afresh or subvert those that existed.
The Soviets’ biggest failure was the AFL — from the American union’s refusal to call general strikes to foil the Marshall Plan in the 1940s to its support of the Polish labor union Solidarity in the 1980s. When the Moscow-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions voted against the Marshall Plan, the CIO and the British TUC seceded from the organization. With the AFL (which had always refused to join the WFTU) in the lead, the CIO and other labor organizations in Asia and the Americas formed a new labor international, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. In France — where Soviet influence was so great in 1947 that French longshoremen’s unions wouldn’t allow the unloading of arms shipments for a French government just liberated from the Nazis — a new anti-Communist national union was created, the Force Ouvriere, with American labor money and eventually with CIA subventions. Similar means were adopted in Italy.
In all these anti-Soviet maneuvers, it was Jay Lovestone who, as Morgan writes, “sounded the trumpet and led the charge.” As secretary of a one-man operation called the “AFL Free Trade Union Committee” (financed by union barons like George Meany, David Dubinsky, and Matthew Woll), he prepared the position papers, the resolutions, the pamphlets, the polemical open letters, the exposes of Communist wiles. He was lucky in gaining the assistance of Irving Brown, the AFL’s representative in Europe for two decades after World War II (and before that a leftist like Lovestone; it was Ignazio Silone who in a hyperbolic moment in 1950 predicted that the next war would be between the Communists and ex-Communists). Without Brown, who spoke perfect French and German, Lovestone’s strategies would have had no chance.
The most serious question Ted Morgan takes up in A Covert Life is the collaboration of the AFL and later the AFL-CIO with the CIA from 1948 to 1968. (The collaboration actually lasted well into the 1970s and the AFL-CIO presidency of Lane Kirkland.) The academic labor histories that disparage Meany and Lovestone invariably assume that the CIA was somehow directing the AFL, but exactly who was manipulating whom remains an open question. “Sometimes it seemed that American foreign policy was an instrument of the AFL,” Morgan somewhat exaggeratedly writes, and he quotes Ambassador Philip Habib about Irving Brown: “We didn’t use the sonofabitch, the sonofabitch used us.”
One of the most fascinating chapters in Morgan’s biography is the hitherto untold story of Louise Page Morris, the Boston debutante, fashion model, and CIA Mata Hari who teamed up with Lovestone to spy on the Communists. Lovers for almost thirty years, they always maintained separate apartments — which was fine with “Pagey,” who also conducted affairs with U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan. Lovestone lived long enough to see the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Empire he had fought, dying on March 7, 1990, at the age of ninety-one.
A biographer of Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Somerset Maugham as well as a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the now-vanished New York Herald Tribune, Ted Morgan has performed a remarkable job in A Covert Life. He conducted interviews with Lovestone’s friends, enemies, and relatives; prowled through the FBI files, Lovestone’s papers (now at the Hoover Institution), Soviet archives, and AFL-CIO records; and then put it all together in highly readable prose. As any publisher will tell you, books about labor are boring and, worse yet, don’t sell. Whether Morgan’s long-overdue biography of Jay Lovestone will sell, I can’t predict, but it deserves to. Boring it certainly isn’t.
Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in California.
