The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [159]
Jack, of all the newly elected members of Congress, was the first to berate publicly a putative Communist, months before Senator Joseph McCarthy or even Congressman Richard Nixon had begun their own attacks. On the day after Truman’s historic speech, Jack interrogated Russell Nixon, the legislative representative of the United Electrical Workers, before the House Labor Committee. The former Harvard instructor had taught Jack back in his college days, but Jack showed him no deference.
“Could you tell me whether Julius Emspak is a Communist?” Jack asked, referring to the union’s secretary-treasurer. This was the kind of question that Senator McCarthy would soon make notorious, asking witnesses to cough up the names of others.
“You do not need to rely on me to tell you that,” Russell Nixon replied. “He testified before the Senate Labor Committee … and said he was not.”
“For your information, he was a Communist and proof can be provided,” Jack said. This was the kind of exchange that led a Catholic magazine, The Sign, to call Jack “an effective anti-Communist liberal … more hated by Commies than if he were a reactionary.”
Later that month Harold Christoffel appeared before the House Labor Committee. Christoffel was the honorary president of United Auto Workers local 248 at Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company outside Milwaukee. The union was in the midst of a brutal, nearly yearlong strike in which almost half the workers had given up their membership and returned to work. That in itself was a rebuke to the leaders, and left alone, the rank and file might soon have condemned them. Nonetheless, they were paraded before the House Labor Committee.
Christoffel may have considered fidelity to a foreign ideology more important than loyalty to his own government; in 1941, at the time of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, the union leader had led a seventy-six-day strike at a war production plant. That was an unseemly business, but to those with deep concern for civil liberties there was something equally unseemly about Jack berating Christoffel and asking him whether he was a Communist or had been a Communist. And there was something unsettling about Jack’s recommending perjury charges; in fact, the labor union leader was eventually sentenced to sixteen months to four years in prison.
The young congressman was so furiously anti-Communist that when China fell to Mao’s army, he blamed the Democratic administration, giving a speech that any Republican would have gladly given. “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State,” he said on the floor of the House.
Jack might attack the State Department and take a few swipes at alleged Communists, but he was not the kind of politician who reveled in controversy. When James Michael Curley was convicted and sentenced to prison for mail fraud, the Massachusetts Democratic pols lined up to sign a petition to get Curley pardoned. Jack owed Curley for having retired from Congress, leaving his seat open. Moreover, Curley was wildly popular among Massachusetts Democrats. To ignore Curley now might make Jack an outcast in his own party. Yet if he joined with the others, he became just another political hack, a self-righteous hypocrite no better than the man he had succeeded.
He turned to Mark Dalton for advice, though, like most men, Jack often sought not advice but confirmation of what he already intended to do. “Jack was fearless,” Dalton recalled admiringly. “He would listen to you, and if he decided you were right, he would go with you. Everybody wanted him to sign the Curley pardon. He came to me and asked me what I should do. I said, ‘Listen, you haven’t got your seat warm down there. And these bastards are putting you over the barrel. Tell them to go to hell.’”
On the floor