The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [158]
Truman talked of “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” Language was one of the first victims of the cold war, for these were not pristine democracies full of “free peoples” but authoritarian regimes whose primary virtue was that they were not Communist. In this darkening world, an enemy of the Soviet Union was a friend of the United States. Jack was resolved to support the authoritarian rule of the Greek military, just as he was resolved that his government should take dark and secret measures to combat Communist subversion. Jack supported whatever measures were necessary to contain a Soviet Union that he believed pushed relentlessly outward, driven by traditional Russian expansionism and fortified by Communist ideology.
Jack accepted the reality that the Soviet Union would soon have its own nuclear arsenal. And he envisioned, decades from now, a possible nuclear Armageddon. “The greatest danger is a war which would be waged by the conscious decision of the leaders of Russia some twenty-five or thirty-five years from now,” he told his youthful audience, whose age was defined by the atomic bomb. “She will have the atomic bomb, the planes, the ports, and the ships to wage aggressive war outside her borders. Such a conflict would truly mean the end of the world, and all our diplomacy and prayers must be exerted to avoid it.”
The young congressman had touched on the darkest irony of the age: the massive power of nuclear weapons made their possessors unwilling to use them, but the nuclear arsenals would build up over the years to create a confrontation that could end life on the planet. Two or three decades hence, as Jack saw it, an American president might have to make decisions of awesome finality and moment.
In his early months in Congress, Jack attempted to cut his own private path through the endless bramble of politics. He had set out publicly in a direction far from his father’s on international issues, but on the economy he advocated a balanced budget in a hectoring voice that could have been Joe’s.
For a pro-labor Democrat, the major issue of the day was the attempt by the Republican Congress to push through the Taft-Hartley Act, which would radically limit the role of unions in American life. Much of the American public was tired of the endless strife and rancor of the union movement, from the belligerent arrogance of the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis to the obstructiveness of leftist militants such as Harry Bridges of the West Coast International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.
Jack saw that while the excesses needed to be ended, the proposed bill was a piece of conservative deception that sought not only to reform what was wrong but also to cripple what was strong. Jack had Mark Dalton take the train down from Boston to work with him preparing alternative proposals and writing his first important speech in the House. Jack was an intellectual tinkerer. He liked to turn problems upside down and shake them every which way until he had figured out the solution that he believed was always there.
Freshman members were rarely heard on such matters, but Jack got up and made an impassioned and daring speech. He proposed stopping secondary boycotts and excessive union dues, but he also opposed ending the closed union shop and industrywide bargaining.
“There is no need to—there is great need not to—smash the American labor movement to rid ourselves of ‘featherbedding,’ racketeering, and similar evils,” he said on the floor of the House on April 16, 1947. “This bill does not assure the worker freedom, and the men who wrote this bill must have known that it does not…. This bill in its present form plays into the hands of the radicals in our unions, who preach the doctrine of the class struggle.”
In international affairs the whole political lexicon had changed from the era just two years before. Then Joseph Stalin was “Uncle Joe,” and many Americans believed that Russia