7

Who Speaks for American Labour?

The CIO approach to international affairs had differed from the AFL’s from the early 1950s, and much of the continuing tension between the two organizations prior to the merger in 1955 was over international issues. It remained the situation even after the formation of the AFL-CIO: Walter Reuther’s autoworkers disagreed with the way the federation prioritized the battle against communism over all other aims. The friction eased temporarily during the American-led campaign to replace Jaap Oldenbroek as ICFTU general secretary in 1959–60 over his handling of policy in Africa. However, as AFL-CIO relations with the ICFTU went into free fall from 1962 over the constraints Omer Becu attempted to place on Irving Brown’s freedom to travel internationally, and with George Meany applying a tourniquet to solidarity fund spending—and especially vetoing further support for programs planned by the International Metalworkers’ Federation and other trade secretariats—the UAW intensified its own international operations. These transcended the negative anti-communism of AFL-CIO international work that stood in the way of cooperation with less zealous sister organizations abroad. In contrast, they aimed to promote militant activity among free labour organizations in pursuit of economic improvements in the lives of trade unionists. Through its program, the UAW demonstrated an alternative approach to trade union international activity that found much favour overseas, and especially in Europe. As such, it was to lead to heightened friction between the autoworkers and the federation, and it would ultimately be an important factor in the former’s subsequent disaffiliation from the AFL-CIO—with major consequences for the American role in international trade union affairs.

Seeking Influence in Foreign Affairs

The internal politics of the AFL-CIO were willy-nilly a factor behind the deteriorating fortunes of Omer Becu and the ICFTU in the 1960s. Clashes at leadership level between George Meany and Walter Reuther were recurrent, at times reflecting genuinely divergent policy positions, though just as often a product of personal rivalry stemming from Reuther’s overweening ambition to replace Meany as AFL-CIO president and the latter’s determination that he mustn’t. National centres elsewhere could hardly ignore this contest within the ICFTU’s largest affiliate and, by being drawn to identify with one or the other side, unavoidably helped project it onto the international stage.

Domestically, the struggle within the AFL-CIO’s leadership was often represented as one between Reuther the “liberal” and Meany the “conservative business unionist,” though Meany himself rejected the distinction and claimed that on basic trade union issues there was little to separate them. What Reuther characterized as Meany’s conservative foot dragging was viewed more positively by other labour leaders—including former colleagues of Reuther in the CIO—as a reflection of the AFL-CIO president’s tactical skill in “bringing people along” and maintaining cohesion. In typical sardonic fashion, Mike Ross characterized the essential difference between Meany and Reuther as no more than that between a pessimist and an optimist.1

A better case can be made for the claim that their foreign policy differences were real and genuinely corrosive of personal relations. Meany was typecast as a belligerent, uncompromising cold warrior, whereas Reuther’s anti-communism came with a measure of subtlety and willingness to explore ways of easing cold-war tensions. Though real, such differences had more to do with means than ends; both were committed anti-communists. The existence of such disagreement over how to pursue that common end brings into sharp relief the way those in Meany’s camp regarded any “compromise” with communism as abhorrent and how Reuther recoiled from a rigid approach that regarded any tactical flexibility as the first stage in selling out to the forces of darkness.

They manoeuvred for tactical advantage in international affairs as much as in domestic policy issues. Reuther’s visit to India in 1956 and his meetings with Soviet Deputy Premier Mikoyan and Party Secretary Khrushchev in 1959 had been in no small part exercises in image projection as an international statesman. In related vein, from the very start of the Kennedy administration, Reuther competed with Meany for the ear of the new president. It coincided with a period of intense speculation about the likelihood of a Reuther challenge to Meany’s leadership at the AFL-CIO’s 1961 convention and compounded their rivalry.

Ahead of Kennedy’s inauguration the two men vied for influence over presidential appointments, not least in the field of foreign affairs.2 Days after the presidential election in November 1960 a private strategy meeting was attended by Walter Reuther, his executive assistant and Kennedy insider Jack Conway, UAW general counsel Joe Rauh, and AFL-CIO general counsel Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg was Kennedy’s main link to the labour movement and a leading candidate for high office in the administration. They agreed that Kennedy should be urged to offer George Meany the ambassadorship to Ireland or the Vatican—an honour they thought he, as a Catholic, would have difficulty refusing—so allowing Reuther to take over as AFL-CIO president. The meeting deputed Goldberg to relay this proposal to Kennedy. He duly went to see the president and at the meeting effectively staked his claim for the cabinet post of secretary of labour, but as Rauh ruefully recorded, it was doubtful that Kennedy ever heard the other components of the proposed deal.3

Kennedy’s first appointments in the international field—Adlai Stevenson as UN ambassador, Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state, and G. Mennen Williams as assistant secretary of state—all chosen before the appointment of Dean Rusk as secretary of state—set alarm bells ringing for Jay Lovestone. The trio were to a man liberal Democrats with whom Reuther had close relations. That made their appointments all the more worrying for Lovestone, who feared that under the inexperienced figure of Dean Rusk, Bowles would be the real policy maker in the department. Indeed, Lovestone even speculated that the appointment of Bowles had been Stevenson’s precondition for his own reluctant agreement to serve at the UN. As Lovestone saw it, the “double plays” would be from Stevenson to Bowles to Rusk.4

Chester Bowles was one of Kennedy’s first appointments, but he was also one of the first members of the administration to lose his job, over his public criticism of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. At the first opportunity, Meany joined a campaign to have him replaced. Bowles had upset senior diplomatic staff with his support for new blood in foreign postings. In particular he had made an enemy of Loy Henderson, until recently the deputy undersecretary of state for administration and thus a key figure in advancing or retarding diplomatic careers, with whom Jay Lovestone had long benefited from ease of access and the ability to pitch for his favourites. In July 1961, Meany and Lovestone met with the secretary of labour, Arthur Goldberg, and lodged their complaint about Bowles. Lovestone described him as “an intrepid, petty factionalist working closely with Victor Reuther and in my opinion to the detriment of the best interests of the State and Labour Departments as well as the ICA [now being restyled as AID].” Seeing the danger to their ally, the Reuthers rallied to Bowles’s defence and Victor Reuther lobbied attorney general Robert Kennedy and Arthur Goldberg to make the case for him. But his critics, including Meany, would claim his scalp, and shortly afterward Bowles was packed off as ambassador-at-large.5

In their meeting with Arthur Goldberg, Meany and Lovestone also took the opportunity to protest about other supposed “Reutherites” in government service. They included the labour attaché, David Burgess, who had accompanied Walter Reuther on his 1956 tour of India, but also, and more importantly, George Weaver, Goldberg’s own hand-picked assistant secretary of labour for international affairs, who came from Jim Carey’s International Union of Electrical Workers and had recently been suggested by Reuther as a candidate for ICFTU assistant general secretary. Weaver was another person to be denounced as “a scheming factionalist,” his most recent offence being to cast aspersions on Herb Weiner, a Lovestone favourite within the labour attaché corps, by describing him as a “controversial” figure. Meany joined in the criticism of Weaver’s attempt to undermine the labour attaché, and Lovestone’s report to Irving Brown glowed at Meany’s “fine job at the session with Arthur.”6

The highest-profile victim of the fallout from the Bay of Pigs episode was CIA director Allen Dulles. In this case it was the Reuthers who anticipated gaining a competitive advantage from his removal. Victor Reuther suggested to the British labour counsellor that a consequence of the housecleaning that would follow Dulles’s replacement would probably be a move to curtail Irving Brown’s activities in Africa. It was wishful thinking, and in reporting his conversation with Reuther, the labour counsellor observed that he, personally, had “seen no signs that Irving Brown will not continue his peregrinations in Africa, doling out largesse as and when he thinks fit.”7

More directly than in the attacks on Reuther’s allies in the Departments of State and Labour, Meany also tried to sideline the UAW president himself and so undermine his influence with the administration. A month after Meany’s intervention against Bowles and Weaver, labour secretary Goldberg asked him to nominate trade union candidates for his department’s labour advisory committee on international affairs. Meany failed to include Reuther’s name among those proposed, and Goldberg sent the list back to Meany as unacceptable, noting that the UAW president was the single most active union leader in the field.8 In a still more decisive intervention, Meany opposed Reuther’s nomination to the US delegation to the United Nations. This was a position that Meany himself had enjoyed since 1957, and Reuther hankered for similar recognition as a sign of parity with the AFL-CIO president. However, knowing that Meany would not give his approval, UN Ambassador Stevenson held up renewal of Meany’s membership in the delegation, while broaching instead the idea that both Meany and Reuther should be appointed to positions as joint special advisors to the US delegation. Lovestone immediately saw it as a ploy to keep in play the idea that the AFL-CIO had a dual leadership and advised Meany to reject it:

Among some of Mr. Stevenson’s cronies there is talk about . . . being able to . . . “harness Mr. Meany and Mr. Reuther to cooperate with each other in serving the nation under his guidance.” Of course this is poppycock. . . . If [the Administration] was ready to risk being called a pro-Reuther Administration, people should know it.

Lovestone also went on to describe Arthur Goldberg’s involvement in this initiative as “insolent” and likely to damage their relations with the secretary. Meany shared his sentiments and was happy to reject Stevenson’s ploy.9

By 1962, a series of such reverses at Meany’s hands within the AFL-CIO contributed to Reuther’s decision to focus on what he could achieve independently through the UAW and the federation’s Industrial Union Department, which he largely controlled. And with AFL-CIO relations with the ICFTU following the 1962 Berlin congress in free fall over the issue of Irving Brown’s defiance of Omer Becu, it was now Reuther’s intention to redouble the UAW’s effort in the international sphere—independently of the AFL-CIO.

The UAW’s Free World Labour Defence Fund in Operation

At its 1962 convention, the UAW voted to establish a $3 million Free World Labour Defence Fund based on the interest earned by the union’s $45 million strike fund, planning to use it in a significantly enhanced program of international activities. It meant that the union would now be contributing 50 percent of the total funds spent by the American labour movement abroad. It reflected the importance the Reuther leadership attached to international solidarity, and especially the concept of “international fair labour standards” that it was promoting as a means of cross-border mobilization of labour in circumstances where multinational companies were beginning to make their presence felt around the globe with strategies of divide and rule.10

With no major domestic collective bargaining with Detroit’s “big three” auto makers scheduled for the next three years, the decks were cleared for Walter Reuther to concentrate attention on international matters.11 In gearing up for this new phase of international work, Victor Reuther, who had previously combined the roles of international affairs director with oversight of the union’s legislative-lobbying function in Washington, now concentrated exclusively on the former, supported by an enlarged staff.

The main beneficiary of the UAW’s largesse would naturally be the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), especially after George Meany blocked further support from the ICFTU’s International Solidarity Fund for IMF projects. The latter received $400,000 of the first $500,000 disbursed by the UAW over the initial eighteen months of the fund’s existence. By its example, the UAW hoped to encourage other leading affiliates of the IMF—particularly the German metalworkers led by the leftist Otto Brenner and the Swedish metalworkers among whom Arne Geijer was still a towering influence—to contribute generously toward a war chest for which a target of $1 million was set.12

Much of this money was used by the IMF on programs for metalworkers in Latin America, Italy, and Japan. But there was also considerable independent expenditure abroad by the UAW under its own name, reflecting a keen awareness of its reputation as a “clean” union that did not operate as an agent of government and was not compromised by association with discredited elements in other countries. At the same time, Victor Reuther cautioned his colleagues against giving an impression that through their well-endowed treasury they expected to “run” the world labour movement from Detroit; the participation of other unions was necessary, and in the absence of a matching input from metalworking unions elsewhere, the UAW would scale back its financial support rather than assume disproportionate responsibility for international solidarity and appear to be buying allies.13

Among the first batch of grants made was a $10,000 donation to the 100,000 striking metal and mining workers in Spain whose underground unions were waging an illegal strike against the Franco regime in 1962.14 The clandestine Spanish unions now coming to prominence were to be regular beneficiaries of assistance: a donation of $6,000 covered the annual cost of maintaining a headquarters in Spain for the emerging triple alliance of social democratic, anarchist, and Christian trade unions, while $1,000 was channelled to the Young Catholic Workers movement in Bilbao and Barcelona for leadership training.15

In 1963, the autoworkers donated $25,000 to striking French miners who were acting in defiance of a government back-to-work order. This was a union action of particular significance, since it was the first successful work stoppage of major proportions in the five years since Charles de Gaulle’s return to power. The strike was seen as a blow struck for democracy amid current fears that France was drifting dangerously toward a form of strong-man rule. The UAW contributed $20,000 per annum of the $100,000 now paid regularly by the AFL-CIO to the Histadrut-led Afro-Asian Institute. Combining with Germany’s Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the union donated $10,000 to kick-start the work of a new ICFTU regional office in Beirut. The latter would henceforth serve as an information and documentation centre and distribution point for trade union literature in Arabic. UAW funding had been advanced after Jay Lovestone opposed the Beirut initiative as a waste of time. The Greek national trade union centre GSEE benefited from a $6,000 UAW grant toward its press and education service, and the union also underwrote a $25,000 loan to enable the Greek centre to hold its congress and officer elections in 1964 in circumstances where there was a possibility that the state would invoke its right under Greek law to nominate its choice of officers.16

Alongside such transactions numerous smaller amounts were awarded. $6,000 was donated to the labour movement in Northern Rhodesia, divided equally between the national trade union centre and Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party, toward the cost of a jeep for the former and the purchase of a printing press for the latter. As well, $2,500 was voted for Defence and Aid, the Canon Collins fund for legal defence of South African nationalist opponents of apartheid, together with a $3,000 grant to the Pan-African Congress Refugee Centre in Bechuanaland. For the benefit of IMF-affiliated unions, $5,000 was allocated to finance an “International Labour Bookshelf” comprising between twenty-five and fifty essential titles. Funds were made available for translations of Walter Reuther’s “Collected Works”—speeches and official statements—into French, Spanish, and Japanese. More ambitious was the proposal—subsequently dropped—to publish foreign language translations in Malay, Chinese, Bengali, Urdu, and Tamil.17

There was much more to the UAW program than writing out cheques for worthy causes; it also sought to involve the union’s own membership. Reuther’s idea was to harness the enthusiasm of local activists for whom “international affairs” was traditionally an esoteric subject to be handled by professionals. The union arranged for two hundred local union officers to travel to Berlin to experience at first hand the ICFTU congress in July 1962. Inventory was taken of foreign language skills and experience overseas of the UAW’s local leadership, with plans then developed to train fifty such people to undertake short missions abroad on behalf of the union. Reflecting prevailing optimism about the work of the United Nations and the way it might help realize the UAW’s “dynamic peace policy,” the union instituted an annual four-day conference at the UN in New York, bringing together some three hundred local union activists in a bid to raise awareness of international questions and consider what American wage earners could do to help people in the developing world find democratic solutions to their problems. To stimulate rank-and-file interest in international affairs, the UAW arranged for bulk purchase and circulation of ICFTU literature. With a similar objective in view, it also entered into a joint publishing arrangement with the Foreign Policy Association to produce at a cost of $15,000 pamphlet literature specifically for circulation at local union level.18

Walter Reuther had been a leading proponent of the Peace Corps, yet the UAW was disappointed that, as introduced by the Kennedy administration, the corps was largely closed to participation by blue-collar workers. The UAW leadership lobbied for the scheme to be extended to manual workers with an industrial background, and, by 1966–67, Peace Corps volunteers from blue-collar occupations sponsored by the UAW were operating in Guinea and Gambia. By this time, the UAW’s community outreach unit had been incorporated as the Social, Technical and Educational Program (STEP), enabling it to access foundation grants and to contract with the government for AID projects. In conjunction with World Medical Relief, STEP collected and reconditioned medical equipment such as X-ray machines for use in mobile clinics supplied by the union to developing countries.19

At its height, the UAW’s international program successfully tapped into a wellspring of idealism and creative energy. It had a fair claim to be the most ambitious effort in the field by any single American trade union, aiming to promote a new sense of direction and contrasting with the AFL-CIO’s focus on bolstering whatever group of labour leaders appeared the strongest opponents of communism in a given location. Its significance was recognized by veteran American socialist Norman Thomas, who approached Walter Reuther ahead of the 1964 Democratic Party convention urging him to apply pressure for a more radical line in foreign policy, writing: “I understand the Lovestone-Meany policy would not be too different from Goldwater’s. Our chance of getting anything like the policy we ought to have depends on the sort of labour you represent.”20

Reuther and the Italian Centre-Left

The UAW’s key strategic focus was to help the non-communist labour movement become a more effective representative of workers vis-à-vis employers, especially in situations where communist unions claimed a monopoly of militancy, even if the militancy operated only in the sphere of rhetoric. This UAW focus had a particular relevance for the IMF program of confronting multinational companies. Walter Reuther was the driving force behind the creation of IMF “world coordinating councils,” which comprised national unions that represented a given multinational’s workforce in different locations. These councils were to serve as the forum for union-employer engagement, with the hope that one day they might become agents for international collective bargaining.21

And in countries where communists did have a significant presence, the strategy required particular assistance to non-communist elements to prevent them from being dominated by political opponents setting the trade union agenda. It was this factor that drew the UAW leadership to focus heavily on Italy and Japan, where non-communist unions punched below their weight.22

During the Kennedy presidency, Walter Reuther was able to make common cause with like-minded members of the administration in a sustained campaign to realign Italian trade union and political forces on the centre-left—what Kennedy special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed “Operation Nenni.”23 This phase of activity initially saw the UAW contribute to a $100,000 IMF campaign in 1962 in support of the Italian metalworkers attached to UIL (UILM) and CISL (FIM) in a key round of collective bargaining. It led to landmark reforms in the industrial relations system facilitating an articulated form of devolved plant-level bargaining that dovetailed with the IMF strategy for dealing with multinational firms.

The extended range of bargaining opened up the prospects in Italy for union action focusing on concrete economic goals rather than simply being an element in communist-directed national mobilization that often amounted to little more than political street theatre.24 The collective bargaining gains owed much to the fresh political climate that derived from a “turn to the left” in February 1962 with the formation of a Christian Democrat–led coalition supported for the first time in parliament by the Nenni socialists, who were now in the process of distancing themselves further from the communists. At the WFTU’s latest congress in Moscow, the CGIL’s socialists had taken a stand against their communist leadership’s tendency to agree with WFTU policy proposals purely on the grounds that these had the endorsement of the Soviet bloc.25 This was the political context that the UAW and the IMF sought to exploit with attempts to extend the partial “turn to the left” into a full centre-left government.

The political forces working for and against such a further development were finely balanced. Nenni’s socialists were divided over how far they dared go in moderating their traditional opposition to NATO and so exposing themselves to charges of “splitting” and of putting class solidarity at risk. In personal talks with Nenni in Italy in May 1961, Reuther encouraged the PSI leader to be bolder in distancing himself from the communists, while at the same time he urged the White House to change the US’s long-standing policy in Italy and lend support to the centre-left.26 Nenni was invited to the United States, ostensibly for a lecture tour but in reality for talks with the administration. Reuther was happy to be identified with this initiative, whereas George Meany wanted nothing to do with Nenni.27

Visiting Italy again in June 1962, the Reuther brothers had talks on the next phase of the IMF program for Italy at Nenni’s home. Present at the meeting were the PSI leader, his party official responsible for trade union affairs, Giacomo Brodolini, and Piero Boni, the socialist joint-secretary of the CGIL’s federation of metalworkers, Federazione impiegati operai metallurgici (FIOM). The specific focus of the meeting was the IMF’s plan to provide shop steward training in courses that bridged union boundaries and increased the scope for centre-left politics.28 Back in the United States in August, the Reuthers reported to Arthur Schlesinger on the need for a change of labour attaché in Rome and the appointment of someone more sympathetic to the strategy of the UAW-IMF. Schlesinger arranged to accompany them and labour secretary Arthur Goldberg to the home of attorney general Robert Kennedy for a breakfast meeting, arising from which Walter and Victor Reuther were invited to a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) to make the case for the State Department and the CIA to end their resistance to a centre-left government in Italy.29 Their chances of winning converts in the National Security Council were always slim given that George Meany strongly opposed their politicking in Italy. Significantly, labour secretary Goldberg stayed away from the NSC session, choosing not to be identified with the Reuthers in a situation where Meany was not present. In the event, their hopes were killed off by a leak to Lovestone’s newspaper columnist friend, Victor Riesel, whose syndicated column reported misleadingly that the Reuthers had asked the NSC for a large sum of money to aid a merger between the communist and non-communist unions in Italy. Reuther’s personal relations with Meany took a sharp turn for the worse over this episode, Meany accusing him of being deceitful and making “many mistakes” in Italy.30

As the general election in Italy approached in 1963, Walter Reuther returned for more talks with the party leaders of a would-be centre-left government and arranged with Nenni for the UAW and Jake Potofsky’s clothing workers jointly to donate $32,000 to the PSI’s election fund.31 Reuther believed that a successful outcome for the centre-left would have a significance extending beyond Italy by providing a model for other countries in Europe and Latin America. He wrote to Willy Brandt expressing the view that it would influence the German political climate following the retirement of “Der Alte” (Konrad Adenauer). He was concerned that US foreign policy was still ambiguous on the question of the centre-left, but through Schlesinger’s influence, President Kennedy was nudged into appointing Averell Harriman as undersecretary of state, with a brief to take a firm grip on policy toward Italy. Harriman’s appointment came too late to affect the outcome of the general election. A subsequent stalemate over the formation of a full centre-left government lasted many weeks and was only broken when President Kennedy himself visited Rome in the summer of 1963 and made clear through a personal meeting with Nenni that he favoured a government that would properly address the economic and social need of Italians.32

Nenni still needed to overcome opposition within his own party ranks and requested $90,000 from the UAW to organize support ahead of the PSI congress in October 1963. No record of any financial transaction exists, but Victor Reuther wrote to the PSI’s international secretary, Vittorelli, that he had asked IMF general secretary Adolphe Graedel to travel to Rome to meet him, Graedel being the key intermediary in unofficial financial transactions that passed through the IMF’s Geneva office.33 At the congress, Nenni duly won support for entering the government. By the end of 1963, he was deputy prime minister in a government led by Aldo Moro, with five other government posts held by PSI deputies. Meanwhile, in support of this development and to strengthen its factional base in the CGIL, the PSI planned for an ambitious training program for over six hundred socialist trade union activists in a series of two-week-long courses. The $126,000 cost was to be covered jointly by the UAW, IG Metall, and the Austrian and Swedish metalworkers as prominent members of the IMF.34

The extent to which George Meany disapproved of these attempts at reconfiguring the Italian labour movement was evident from his reaction to a proposed groundbreaking joint visit to the United States in the spring of 1964 by Bruno Storti and Italo Viglianesi, the presidents of CISL and UIL, respectively. Both centres were affiliated with the ICFTU, but the AFL-CIO snubbed UIL by inviting only Storti to its executive council meeting. The two Italians planned to travel on State Department grants, but, fearful of offending Meany, the department now held back finance for Viglianesi. Angered at the sign that so little had changed in the AFL-CIO’s approach to Italy since the 1950s, Victor Reuther wrote of his “shock” that the federation “still plays only one side of the street.” Such behaviour had gone on too long, and he challenged his brother to react: “[we] owe it to our own integrity . . . to inquire on what basis these kind of decisions are made.”35

Hopes of fomenting a breakaway from the CGIL by its socialist membership came to the fore again in 1965 following a move by the leader of the socialist faction, Giovanni Mosca, to boycott the WFTU’s Warsaw congress as part of a demand for factional autonomy within the CGIL and the right to associate internationally with whomever it chose.36 IMF general secretary Graedel asked Victor Reuther whether it would be possible to raise $500,000 for such an initiative. The UAW international affairs director took the matter up with John Riley, an aide to US vice president Hubert Humphrey, who, Victor related to his brother, was “deeply involved” in the Italian situation and “in close contact with the Agency people who would have an interest.” Riley suggested that Walter Reuther speak directly with President Johnson before any effort was made to contact CIA representatives, explaining: “If the President gives the green light then we can set up the other meetings to discuss specifics and details.” Whether Reuther followed up this proposal is unclear, but further advice from the IMF headquarters was that a breakaway from the CGIL was not imminent and that there was no urgent need for financial assistance.37 Thereafter, talk among Reuther supporters of engineering a socialist split from the CGIL gave way to ideas for encouraging the reformist movement within the CGIL and hopes for gradually detaching the national centre itself from the WFTU—a project that became a central preoccupation of the international labour movement in the 1970s.

The widening divide between communists and socialists in the CGIL even aroused the interest of the AFL-CIO in exploring the overture from Mosca. Claiming to speak on Mosca’s behalf, a British intelligence agent, Edward Scicluna, who was employed by FIAT, approached Jay Lovestone. Lovestone and Meany met Scicluna in New York and through him asked Mosca to supply a report on the WFTU congress. Lovestone also sounded out the possibility of Mosca paying a discreet visit to New York. But then Meany suddenly closed down this channel of communication on learning that the Italian was a signatory to the recent joint agreement between the CGIL and the French communist-led CGT to defy long-standing communist policy and seek consultative status with the European Common Market in Brussels. It appeared to vitiate Mosca’s claim to be a rebel within the CGIL. In fact, the joint CGT-CGIL initiative amounted to a major revolt within the WFTU by its Italian and French affiliates, a dramatic signal of the growing estrangement of the CGIL from the Prague-based international body and an early sign of what would come to be known as Eurocommunism. A more flexible AFL-CIO leadership might have welcomed the development.38

Walter Reuther’s determination to project himself as an important figure on the international political stage and his hope to involve American labour in discussions with leaders of the European centre-left more generally were evident from his catalytic role in what became known as the “Harpsund process,” a series of meetings of leading labour figures held in Sweden. Between 1963 and 1965, Reuther was the driving force behind these gatherings at the Harpsund country residence of Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander that brought together Erlander, mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt, Britain’s Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, US vice president Hubert Humphrey, Danish prime minister Jens Krag, Norway’s future socialist prime minister Trygve Bratelli, German social democrat leaders Erich Ollenhauer and Herbert Wehner, and leading trade unionists Arne Geijer, George Woodcock, Ludwig Rosenberg, and Konrad Nordahl of the Norwegian LO, for what amounted to brainstorming sessions. Discussions ranged over economic issues relating to growth, full employment and integration, disarmament, problems of developing countries, and technological change. A study group of economists was formed to develop plans for greater international monetary stability that UAW economist Nat Weinberg fondly hoped might lead to a new economic orthodoxy. Reuther and Humphrey considered it important to report back to President Kennedy on the results of the first conference.

However, the meetings promised more than they delivered. Reuther saw them as a clearing house for new thinking and a vehicle for liaison between politicians and intellectuals of the world’s most important centre-left organizations. He was motivated by a desire to overcome the political isolation of American liberals in circumstances where other participants had in common their affiliation to the Socialist International. This proved to be a stumbling block; ahead of the US presidential election in 1964, Lyndon Johnson vetoed Hubert Humphrey’s participation in the second scheduled Harpsund meeting with people so closely identified with the international. When the working party report on monetary stability was complete, Walter Reuther was also advised to omit his name from the document when it was suggested that it be submitted to the Socialist International for discussion. Beyond such issues, by 1965, with the British and German participants now in government and absorbed by the pressures of day-to-day decision making, the time for relaxed blue-skies thinking had passed and the Harpsund process came to an end. George Meany had been in no way involved, and there is no record of how he regarded these events. One can only speculate over his reaction to a project that absorbed so much of Walter Reuther’s energy over a two-year period.39

The Japanese Wage Research Center

For American labour, even more challenging than the trade union situation in Italy was the problem of how to engage with organized labour in Japan, where the unions stood largely aloof from the international free trade union movement, with values and practices quite at odds with those of European and American labour. Faced with this, the UAW’s approach was strategic in its attempt to address a number of interrelated factors: the fragmented nature of trade union organization overlaid by competing political loyalties; the strong anti-militarist and non-aligned sentiment of Japanese workers, which made them suspicious of Americans; the tame. company-dominated nature of unionism in much of private sector industry; and the specific competitive threat posed to the American automobile industry by Japanese car manufacturers benefiting from cheap labour costs that derived in part from an inscrutable wage system.

As in Italy, the UAW chose to work through the International Metalworkers’ Federation, which first established a permanent office in Japan in 1957, very much at the urging of the Reuthers. Victor Reuther wrote: “I do think that the IMF might perhaps succeed where the ICFTU has failed, provided we do not fall into the same pitfall of insisting that our relationship with Japanese trade unionists be on political rather than economic and trade union issues.” He criticized the AFL-CIO for being less concerned with the economic struggles of Japanese workers than with which of their union leaders were paying friendly visits to Moscow and Peking. The need was to avoid the mistake made by the AFL in France and Italy in refusing to work with any union infected by communism.40 The UAW was thus going against the grain of policy for Japan set by the AFL in the early 1950s that had been at the heart of the fraught relations between the federation and the ICFTU.

Central to the divisions within Japanese labour was the antagonistic relationship between the Marxist-leaning centre, Sōhyō, and its much smaller rival, Zenrō Kaigi (the All-Japan Labour Union Conference). Sōhyō was a creature of the American occupation, established with the intention of excluding communist influence. However, it quickly fell under the leadership of Marxists of a fundamentalist stripe and subsequently refused to affiliate collectively to the ICFTU (though ten individual unions did affiliate) for fear of being identified with the Atlantic Alliance and thereby drawn into the war in Korea.41 Pursuing the politics of non-alignment and practising a brand of militancy that frequently bordered on the insurrectionary, Sōhyō routinely mixed together workaday industrial-economic grievances with a rhetorical anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism. As the world’s largest and most significant non-aligned national trade union centre, it was inevitably viewed by the AFL as a threat to free trade unionism, whereas the ICFTU’s refusal to deem it a “lost cause” and its continuing attempts to dialogue with the Sōhyō leadership had been high on the AFL’s charge sheet of complaints against Oldenbroek, Jay Krane, and members of the ICFTU secretariat in Brussels.42

It was Sōhyō’s ultra-militant tactics and its shunning of the ICFTU that led in 1954 to a breakaway by more moderate unions to form the rival centre, Zenrō. From the outset the latter enjoyed the moral and material backing of the AFL. FTUC representative Dick Deverall, its channel to the AFL, advised Lovestone: “I frankly think that the only thing that can be done is to give all aid possible to Zenrō and work increasingly to expose Sōhyō, to split what unions can be split and to try to make Zenrō the major centre.”43

The ICFTU also sympathized with Zenrō, but with four times the membership, Sōhyō was the bigger prize, and so the international shied away from the idea of collective affiliation of Zenrō for fear that it would permanently jeopardize the chance of drawing the larger body into the free trade union fold. Yet, through the late 1950s, Zenrō was backed wholeheartedly by the US embassy in Tokyo. The creation of the Japan Productivity Center in 1955 as a central part of the US aid program helped embed Zenrō’s industrial moderation through a propaganda offensive that promoted a spirit of industrial partnership in pursuit of high levels of productivity. Sōhyō, in contrast, boycotted the productivity centre, leaving Zenrō as the prime beneficiary of an extensive program of study visits to the United States, which clearly established it as the “American centre.”44

For Sōhyō, with its penchant for insurrectionary tactics, the moment of truth arrived in 1960. A massive anti-militarist campaign involving direct action to oppose renewal of the US-Japan security treaty (formally, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan) ended in failure. Concurrently, amid scenes of extreme picket line violence, a year-long strike of coal miners at Mitsui’s Miike mining complex ended in defeat and organizational collapse.45 As Sōhyō leaders began to rethink aspects of their ultra-militancy, the newly installed Kennedy administration also set out to recast US policy toward Japan, emphasizing in particular economic rather than military cooperation. Neither the quiescence of the American-backed Zenrō unions nor the often crude Marxism of Sōhyō appealed to the UAW. It was against this background of a changing climate in the world of Japanese labour and a new start to Japanese-American relations that the Reuthers set out to influence the direction of the trade union movement.46

The components of their approach were to redirect American attention to Sōhyō, help to deepen its dialogue with the ICFTU, and channel the centre’s tradition of militancy more constructively into collective bargaining. Rather than pick sides in the contest between Sōhyō and Zenrō, the UAW hope was to promote unity between the competing organizations. As part of this, metalworking unions were to be encouraged into membership within the IMF especially, with a view to intensifying the relationship between American and Japanese autoworkers and helping the quiescent unions representing the latter to realize the benefits to be derived from a more focused militancy in collective bargaining. The Reuthers deplored the fact that Japan Productivity Center propaganda had conveyed the false idea that American unions spent most of their time collaborating with management to raise productivity, and set about changing this perception.47

The Kennedy administration’s intention to reset US policy for Japan was signalled by the appointment as ambassador of Edwin O. Reischauer, a non-career diplomat who contended that the Eisenhower administration had failed in Japan because of the absence of dialogue with the political opposition and any attempt at “diplomacy in depth” with organizations like Sōhyō.48 To repair this damage, Reischauer introduced a new, extensive exchange program of trade union visits operated by the State Department under which Sōhyō would now receive equal treatment with Zenrō, while the former program under the aegis of the Japan Productivity Center that had favoured Zenrō would be phased out. Attorney general Robert Kennedy inaugurated the exchange program in a high-profile visit in February 1962. Twenty US union leaders were scheduled to make follow-up trips over the next two years, and the UAW made a pitch for most of these to be allocated to American affiliates of the IMF, since it had the most active program in Japan. Jim Carey, of the International Union of Electrical Workers, led the way as a guest at the May 1962 convention of the union’s Japanese counterpart, Denki Rōren, and delivered a personal message from President Kennedy.49

Walter Reuther also planned a two-week visit in November 1962, for which meticulous preparations were made. Competing company unions in the Japanese car industry were pressed to come together and issue a joint invitation to him. The joint welcoming committee that was eventually formed lent the event the tone of a state visit, with Reuther travelling not simply as UAW president but also wearing his several other hats as vice president of the ICFTU, IMF, and AFL-CIO. Repeating the pattern of his visit to India six years earlier, reports of his movements in Japan dominated newspaper headlines as he worked hard to bring the country’s mutually suspicious union leaders together.50

As part of the “Reischauer-Kennedy line,” Washington and Tokyo had created a joint American-Japanese committee on trade and economic affairs that was intended to recast the relationship between the two countries as essentially economic rather than military, but the Japanese had declined a request to include in its remit the contentious issue of relative labour costs. This was to become a particular focus of Reuther’s visit. He proposed the establishment of a Japanese wage research centre, supported by the international labour movement, whose aim would be to shine a light on the complexities of the Japanese wage structure, with its proliferation of company-based bonuses and consequent absence of any concept of a “going rate” crucial for comparing wages in collective bargaining. The expectation was that it would help give effect to the IMF policy of international fair labour standards in Japan, closing the wages gap with Europe in the first instance. The argument that Japanese real wages needed to rise resonated with Sōhyō propaganda, which maintained that low levels of remuneration were a product of Zenrō’s docility.

A related objective of Reuther’s visit was for his presence to act as a catalyst for metalworking unions to come together in a joint council through which they would affiliate to the IMF. More generally, he believed that the functional unity required for cooperation in launching the proposed wage research centre would help bridge the organizational divisions separating the co-sponsors of his visit, who included Sōhyō and Zenrō as well as two lesser centres. Before he left he succeeded in committing the metal unions to form a joint council and in having the national centres sign a joint statement of support for the concept of the wage centre. The New York Times reported that his visit was potentially one of the most important by an American in a decade.51

A projected annual budget of $75,000 was set for the wage research centre, the UAW idea being that the American, European, and Japanese trade unions should each contribute a third of this total and enable it to be staffed with suitably qualified professionals. The American contribution was to be shared equally by the UAW and the Reuther-controlled Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO.52

None of this activity had involved George Meany, and yet as the British labour counsellor shrewdly observed, the success or failure of the wage research centre was likely to depend more than anything on relations between Reuther and Meany.53 This point was well understood by Zenrō leaders, who had little enthusiasm for the project despite their formal support for it. From the outset they were keen to make common cause with Meany in obstructing progress.

In January 1963, Zenrō vice president Takeo Katayama led a delegation to the United States intent on persuading the AFL-CIO leadership that they had only signed up for the centre as a “diplomatic courtesy.” Katayama expressed concern over Reuther’s concept of the wage centre as a mechanism for promoting trade union unity, since Zenrō had no interest in a rapprochement with Sōhyō until such time as it was ready to jointly agree on a statement of opposition to communism. Since there was no chance of that happening, Zenrō had now submitted a new application to affiliate to the ICFTU. Katayama wanted to know from Meany whether Walter Reuther had been speaking for himself in Japan or for the AFL-CIO. Meany’s answer was in the form of a joint statement reaffirming the AFL-CIO’s strong rapport with Zenrō.54

Zenrō general secretary Haruo Wada followed up with a letter to Meany pointing out that the “committee to welcome Reuther,” which had been now been converted into a preliminary consultative committee on the wage centre, was, in fact, only an unofficial preliminary committee. His hope was to slow down work on the centre, and he urged the AFL-CIO to become directly involved in the exercise. Meany agreed to go along with this, and shortly afterward arranged to contribute a token $500 toward the centre’s budget. It didn’t amount to a sign of approval, but it gave Meany the right to express a view on the venture. Thereafter he played a helpful supporting role, whenever necessary serving up lines that enabled Wada to procrastinate.55 In consequence, two more years were to elapse before the centre came into being, during which time, with strong backing from Meany, Zenrō pressed its case for affiliation to the ICFTU.

Zenrō’s membership was expanding with the affiliation of a number of breakaway or “second unions” unions from Sōhyō. It was also in the process of merging with two smaller centres to form Dōmei Kaigi (the Japanese Confederation of Labour). Thus enlarged, it boasted that it was a more even match for Sōhyō, and its new application to affiliate collectively to the ICFTU was discussed at the executive board in March 1963. Writing in the Free Trade Union News, Wada repeated his argument against outside efforts to promote Japanese trade union reconciliation: “Any attempt at organizational unity between Sōhyō and Dōmei-Kaigi would merely confuse the true free trade unionists . . . without the advancement of the Dōmei-Kaigi there can be no progress or development of free trade unionism in Japan.”56

Foot dragging on the part of the Zenrō leadership and bureaucratic obstructionism in conjunction with the AFL-CIO held back progress in establishing the wage research centre throughout 1963–64. Wada persisted in demanding to know in what capacity Reuther had been operating when in Japan—for whom did he speak? Meanwhile, in attempting to clarify the AFL-CIO’s formal position, Ernie Lee only helped muddy the waters, writing to Wada: “It is important to reiterate and make clear . . . that the AFL will cooperate with the project. However, the AFL-CIO does not sponsor . . . nor will it undertake to participate.”57

Walter Reuther challenged Meany over the purpose of Lee’s letter at the AFL-CIO executive council in Miami in February 1964. Angrily, Meany confirmed that it had been sent on his specific instructions, telling Reuther: “Why should the AFL participate in this project because it was your idea and I feel no obligation to support it.” Meany wanted no part of the wage centre, with its unstated purpose of bringing Zenrō/Dōmei-Kaigi and Sōhyō closer together, and he declined to allow AFL-CIO economist Nat Goldfinger to become involved in the centre’s work as Reuther had planned. There was no question of the AFL-CIO agreeing to accept Sōhyō into membership in the ICFTU. An article by Harry Goldberg in the Free Trade Union News that same month made clear the official position. Sōhyō’s line was considered to be little different from that of the communists: “to those inside Sōhyō . . . it is necessary to make clear that the AFL-CIO rejects every neutralist equalization of the democratic ICFTU with the Communist WFTU.” Meany’s main priority for Japan was to ensure a favourable decision on Zenrō/Domei Kaigi’s application for affiliation to the ICFTU, and thereby its acceptance as the sole legitimate voice of Japanese labour.58

Indeed, George Meany’s attendance at Dōmei’s founding convention in November 1964 trumped all Reuther’s efforts in Japan over the previous three years. The AFL-CIO regarded the Dōmei convention and the centre’s subsequent admission to membership in the ICFTU as events of utmost significance; Meany’s personal attendance was a clear demonstration of his priorities for Japanese labour. However, just prior to his departure for Tokyo, Lovestone obtained a leaked copy of a memo to US labour secretary Willard Wirtz from his assistant secretary for international affairs George Weaver, whom he and Meany had long regarded as persona non grata. The memorandum expressed the view that Meany’s planned trip to the Dōmei convention was a mistake. His presence there would inhibit the labour exchange program, which had as an important aim the creation of a better understanding with Sōhyō. Weaver was thus against the trip and wanted the department to exert pressure against Meany’s attendance in Tokyo. For Lovestone this was further damning evidence against Weaver. He wrote Meany that it shed light on “the operation of the pseudo left on an international scale.” Weaver’s memorandum was an insolent attempt to interfere in the US labour movement. “It is impossible for such a character to continue in so responsible an office . . . after the [presidential] election.”59

In fact, there was never any likelihood that Meany would be deterred from attending the convention. His son-in-law Ernie Lee was sent ahead to prepare the way and to arrange a meeting for Meany with the new prime minister, Sato. At the convention three senior vice presidents—David Dubinsky, James Suffridge, and George Harrison—accompanied Meany to underline the importance of the occasion.

While in Tokyo, Meany had a meeting with Sōhyō president Kaoru Ohta and general secretary Akira Iwai where there were sharp exchanges over Sōhyō’s policy of “positive neutrality.” Iwai angled for an invitation from the AFL-CIO to visit the United States—clearly an attempt to stay abreast of Dōmei, whose standing in the international labour movement was in the process of being significantly boosted. But Meany explained unconvincingly that there was no precedent for personal invitations of labour leaders from other countries; he was not about to bolster their prestige in that way. If the Sōhyō general secretary came to the United States, he would be treated politely, but the message was that he would need to come under his own aegis, not as an honoured guest.60

Iwai subsequently cabled Meany and invited him to that year’s Sōhyō convention. A note by Ernie Lee to Meany’s secretary accompanying the telegram said all that needed saying about the AFL-CIO attitude toward Sōhyō: “Jay believes that no reply should be made to Iwai’s cable. But he feels that if President Meany desires to answer, the reply should be sharply and clearly ‘No,’ stating that we should have nothing to do with Sōhyō in view of its cooperation with the Coms.”61 The November 1964 meeting in Tokyo between Iwai and Meany proved to be the last between leaders of these two organizations for twelve years.

By the time the wage research centre was finally launched in the spring of 1965, the conditions necessary for its effectiveness had already faded. There was certainly a continuing need to demystify Japanese wages and make them more open to comparisons. Indeed, employers were increasingly using sophisticated techniques of paternalistic management that left individual workers ever more dependent on a particular employer and at a collective disadvantage in wage bargaining. But having left behind the taste for extreme conflict of the 1950s, trade unionism was increasingly characterized by the dominance of tame, enterprise-based organizations under pressure to cooperate with employers.62 While Dōmei grew steadily in members and confidence, Sōhyō, whose militant tradition the Reuthers had hoped to harness in economic struggles, was losing members in the booming private sector, and its unions there were less able to provide the dynamic lead that the UAW had hoped for.

The wage research centre as devised by Reuther was a technocratic instrument intended to help push up relative wages; but loaded on top of this were unstated political objectives for the Japanese labour movement that proved beyond its power to deliver. As a going concern the centre lasted little more than two years. Even as it was still finding its feet in 1965, the US labour attaché, Louis Silverberg, reckoned that the Japanese trade unionists associated with it merely anticipated plodding along in stolid fashion without achieving much until the funds were finally exhausted.63 Indeed. that proved to be a fair prediction.

Al Epstein, the machinists’ union economist brought in to be the Americans’ technical advisor, was instructed by Lovestone not to attend the initial meeting of the steering committee on the grounds that the cost in time and money could not be justified. Sixteen months later, Dōmei’s international director sounded out Lovestone over the inclination of his superiors to call for the closure of the centre; there was little doubting what his advice would be. In early 1968, Dōmei announced that it wanted to end its association with the project, and three months later the wage research centre was formally wound up.

It was revealing that, in his autobiography, Victor Reuther who had invested so much time in bringing the wage centre into being, devoted exactly one sentence to the exercise. Amid a general treatment of IMF activity he wrote, without further elaboration: “A basis was laid then for the founding in Japan of a Wage Research Centre.”64

The Dilemma over AIFLD

Walter Reuther’s interest in Latin America developed through the UAW’s membership in the International Metalworkers’ Federation. The growth of automobile assembly in Mexico from the mid-1950s first led the UAW to focus on its “backyard” below the Rio Grande. From 1957 onward, the union began to forge close links with the Mexican labour centre, Confederación de trabajadores de México, in the hope that its South American connections would subsequently extend to unions in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, where the WFTU was active. The IMF first established a presence in Latin America that same year, and in 1959 Dan Benedict, a Reuther loyalist, was “loaned” to the IMF. Coming from the CIO’s international affairs department, and following an unhappy spell on the AFL-CIO staff, where he was the object of Jay Lovestone’s suspicion, he had most recently been education director for ORIT. Working for the IMF he was responsible for making initial contacts, distributing literature, and mounting training courses. It was difficult terrain; the trade secretariat’s only affiliates were in Colombia, Uruguay, and Cuba, while a newly created Brazilian metal federation had recently voted against joining the IMF.65

Following Castro’s seizure of power in January 1959, Benedict spent much of 1959–60 in Cuba, assessing the trade union situation for the IMF and seeking to retain the affiliation of the national metal union. Tainted by links with the Batista dictatorship, the old leadership of the Confederación de trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) had been ousted and replaced mainly by members of Castro’s July 26 Movement. Walter Reuther looked to Benedict for advice on how to respond given the fierce battle that raged throughout 1959 within the trade unions between communists and the July 26 Movement. Reuther assessed Castro as an independent figure and retained hopes of keeping the CTC within the free trade union fold.66

However, in 1960, as Castro looked more and more to the Soviet Union for economic support, he drew closer to the Cuban communists and pressured the CTC’s president, David Salvador, to include members of the communist party in its executive committee. It proved to be a turning point, and within months many of the non-communist leaders in the CTC, including David Salvador, found themselves ousted and, in some cases, in prison. The metalworkers’ union, which had continued to pay dues to the IMF in spite of Castro’s opposition to the free trade union movement, was forced to withdraw from the trade secretariat, leaving it with but two Latin American affiliates. The stage was now set for an intensification of the contest in the region between the free trade union movement and communist-leaning unions backed by Castro.67

With an expanded staff of organizers, the IMF geared up for a more concerted effort in the hemisphere, with Benedict appointed assistant general secretary in March 1961, the month that President Kennedy unveiled his proposed Alliance for Progress in Latin America.68 Through the alliance, the administration sought a new relationship with the US’s neighbours to the south, aimed at countering the prevailing Hispanic perception of the “Yanqui” as an economic imperialist. Kennedy envisioned a program of social and economic reform in which the United States would work with democratic elements in Latin America to effect a transformation of society without that process being taken over by communists. Involving hemispheric cooperation between states, national planning, a new emphasis on public as opposed to private development initiatives, and the US promising $20 billion in aid over ten years, the stated objective was no less than to lift the Latin American masses out of poverty, ignorance, and despair. The alternative was to risk the spread of Castroism. Launching the proposal, the new president spoke loftily of transforming the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas, with political freedom an essential accompaniment to material progress.

The UAW-IMF project in Latin America tapped into this new spirit and, as in Italy and Japan, involved close collaboration between the Reuthers and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s assistant with responsibility for general oversight of the Alliance for Progress.69 By 1963, the IMF’s budget for Latin America, at 550,000 Swiss francs, was double that for Japan, which had previously overtaken Italy as the main area of federation expenditure. A year later, the IMF claimed affiliates in eleven countries, with its membership up from the 8,000 of 1961 to half a million, and with the large metalworking unions of Brazil and Argentina as the main prize. These gains were made against a backdrop of keen differences within the US labour movement over how best to approach the development of the Latin American labour movement.70

The CIA’s failed attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and topple Castro just four weeks after Kennedy unveiled his proposal for the Alliance for Progress immediately took the shine off the administration’s high-minded project for Latin America, handing Castro a propaganda coup and hastening his declaration that Cuba was now “communist.” The Reuthers reacted to the bungled invasion by calling for still more radical social and economic reforms in Latin America, with a distinct role for organized labour. Victor Reuther wrote to the president’s special assistant in charge of formulating the Alliance for Progress: “Time gained by the Declaration of Bogota [Alliance for Progress] ran out on the Cuban beaches. . . . The Castro-si, Yanqui-no sentiment has been strengthened . . . the Alliance for Progress slogan must be energized politically by a shift to a democratic Alliance-for-Progressive-Action.”

To assist Latin American trade unions, he urged the creation of a non-government foundation with federal funds that would work with the international trade secretariats, embrace the Peace Corps, and ensure that the unions functioned more effectively by training a cohort of professional and technical leaders. This thinking was incorporated into a UAW proposal to the ICA (soon to become AID) for government funding of trade secretariat programs. It didn’t necessarily require an increase in the ICA budget for labour, currently running at $2.7 million, but rather a change in priorities. The IMF budget for its Latin American office, Reuther pointed out, was currently a mere $50,000, whereas by contrast the ICA had spent in excess of $1 million the previous year on “labour tourism” alone—often ill-focused travel grants for Latin American trade unionists visiting the United States. What he was seeking would merely supplement in a “financially minor key” existing government labour programs.71

The UAW proposal for what it called a trade union “Council for Social Progress” was one of several approaches that were presented for consideration by the ICA/AID over the next few months as the machinery of the Alliance for Progress, agreed at Punta del Este in August 1961, was assembled. The assistant secretary of labour, George Weaver (who was already the target of Jay Lovestone’s hostility), argued for a similar approach, with a view to positioning the trade secretariats at the heart of the alliance. Noting that eight trade secretariats already had functioning Latin American operations and that in six of them the director of the regional office was an American trade unionist, Weaver’s idea was that the secretariats, with a strong American input and supported by an increased number of well-qualified labour attachés possessing a genuine labour background, would constitute the basis of an altogether more dynamic labour program.72

However, a rival trade union initiative with a different emphasis was already taking shape and would lead in 1962 to the creation of the American Institute for Free Labour Development (AIFLD). Its roots lay in a training scheme for Latin American trade unionists begun in 1958 by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the trade secretariat for postal and telecommunications workers, the PTTI. Sixteen trade unionists had been brought to the United States for three months’ training, followed up by a nine-month internship in their home country paid for by the PTTI. CWA president Joe Beirne, a powerful voice on the AFL-CIO executive council who would later become chairman of its international affairs committee, hoped to extend the program. To this end, the University of Chicago’s Union Research and Education Program (UREP) was contracted to elaborate a scheme, and, in August 1960, UREP launched a proposal for the establishment of an institute that would train up to three hundred labour leaders annually using the CWA-PTTI model: three-month courses in the United States, followed by nine-month internships in Latin America. Initially, UREP envisaged the new body having a budget of $1 million, with the money raised from foundations and government agencies. That same month, Beirne secured AFL-CIO agreement to appropriate $20,000 to pump-prime UREP’s preliminary work.73

In May 1961, as the UAW’s idea for a Council for Social Progress began to be refined, UREP invited a number of possible supporters, including Walter Reuther, to a meeting to form a Policy and Design Committee. Reuther didn’t attend—he was in Rome for the IMF congress and to confer with leaders of the non-communist Italian left—but by August the understanding in UREP was that he had agreed to serve on the board of trustees of their proposed body, now being referred to as the American Institute for Free Labour Development. At this point alarm bells began to ring in the UAW as it became evident that prominent business leaders such as J. Peter Grace, of W. R. Grace and Company, and Charles Brinkerhoff, of Anaconda Mines, both with interests in Latin America, were also on the board.74 This unusual arrangement was a product of George Meany’s understanding that there would be more chance of government support for the scheme if employers were involved. Certainly Peter Grace took a keen interest from the start, submitting his own proposals for the new body at the initial meeting of the Policy and Design Committee in May.75

Ahead of a meeting of the board in October 1961 to elect the organization’s officers, Victor Reuther warned his brother: “it is most unwise for the AFL-CIO (or you) to sit on a board with representatives of two companies as notoriously and historically anti-union as Grace and Anaconda.”76 The UAW leader stayed away from the meeting at which Grace was elected president and Meany vice president. Grace and Meany were now the twin driving forces behind the project. In December 1961, Meany demanded that UREP’s head, John McCollum, stand down as the project’s executive director on grounds that he was thinking “too small.” The budget now envisaged was $4 million over five years, but McCollum’s efforts to secure funding from private trusts had been largely unsuccessful. In contrast, Meany had his eyes on a much more bountiful source of income from the US aid budget.77

Meanwhile, by late 1961, the embryonic AIFLD and the UAW’s proposed Council for Social Progress were in competition for government financial backing. According to Assistant Secretary Weaver’s subsequent account, the UAW proposal won the support of attorney general Robert Kennedy and was then submitted to the president, who referred it to the State Department for final approval. But the AFL-CIO objected and lobbied hard for the AIFLD scheme as an alternative. Weaver related how, at a subsequent cabinet-level discussion, with Robert Kennedy urging support for the UAW version and Dean Rusk backing the AFL-CIO’s, the president was loath to choose between the two labour organizations and so called in labour secretary Arthur Goldberg to decide between them. Goldberg understood all too well the realities of life in the AFL-CIO; it had one undisputed leader in the person of George Meany. He made it clear to the president that there was no alternative for him but to go along with Meany’s preferred scheme or risk creating an impossible relationship with the only organization capable of speaking for the entire labour movement. Bizarrely, this outcome was not communicated to the UAW, whose representatives continued to attend meetings with administration officials on the proposed Council for Social Progress for some months afterward until it became clear that their efforts were going nowhere.78

In February 1962, Serafino Romualdi, the AFL-CIO’s Latin American representative, was appointed AIFLD director pro tem in place of McCollum and would go on to become the institute’s first executive director when it was formally constituted in June 1962.79 It may have been important to Meany—it certainly is of interest to historians of AIFLD—that Romualdi was not part of Jay Lovestone’s circle and tended to avoid Lovestoneites in Latin America, though they shared the same brand of virulent anti-communism.80 Lovestone would express irritation that Romualdi kept him in the dark about Latin American developments, and he was never overly impressed with his colleague’s performance.81 The fact was that, through Romualdi, Meany had kept more direct control over Latin American activities than he managed to in areas supervised by Lovestone and Brown. Thus the appointment of the former Latin America representative as executive director of AIFLD was, arguably, Meany’s way of ensuring that this new venture in international affairs remained firmly in his own hands. Contrary to received wisdom, Jay Lovestone was not “in” on the beginning of AIFLD and, indeed, was never enamoured of the AFL-CIO’s approach to international affairs conducted through the three auxiliary institutes created in the 1960s.

Meany was able to announce in April 1962 that the Labour Advisory Committee of the Alliance for Progress (which he chaired) had recommended that AIFLD become the planning and executive arm for approved labour projects and that AID had agreed to this. AIFLD’s formal launch coincided with its first training course held in Washington in June 1962. It was now effectively the semi-official labour wing of AID. It began life with a government grant of $350,000, primarily for training. It was, Meany observed, the first time that the US government had made funds available directly to the US labour movement for overseas programs.82

As much as he would talk up the financial contribution to AIFLD from the labour movement and the smaller sum from business, the fact was that, with some 85 percent of its income from AID, AIFLD was overwhelmingly dependent on government money. Apart from the institute’s training activities, a Social Projects Department was also created under the direction of William Doherty Jr., who, as PTTI representative for Latin America, had supervised the first CWA training course in 1958. The purpose of this department was to help with the formation of workers’ cooperatives, housing schemes, and credit unions—all activities that were increasingly recognized in the free trade union movement as essential tools for development. They tended to be financed by loans negotiated by AIFLD and underwritten by the pension funds of US unions.83

The raw statistics of AIFLD activity in its first two years were impressive—some three hundred leaders trained in the United States by the end of 1964, national institutes established in ten countries for training at lower levels, and elsewhere training courses offered by the national union centres in eight more countries—enabling the institute to claim participation to one degree or another of 20,000 people during the first thirty months of its existence. In 1963, the Social Projects Division began its first workers’ housing project in Mexico City with a loan of $14 million, constructing three thousand dwellings for eighteen thousand trade unionists and their families. In 1964, plans existed for similar developments in a further seven countries.84

However, Victor Reuther viewed AIFLD with deep suspicion from the outset and fed a steady stream of criticism to Walter Reuther, all the time urging him to sever the UAW’s formal link through his nominal membership on the board of trustees. He questioned the high proposed costings—$1 million to be spent in the United States, with over half a million dollars on administrative salaries and other lavish outlays on furnishings and consultancies. In addition there was nepotism in appointments, with Romualdi’s stepson, Jesse Friedman, and Bill Doherty Jnr., the son of Meany’s old crony, postal workers’ leader William Doherty Sr., on the payroll. Given that it was the only approved vehicle for government-backed labour programs in Latin America, Reuther considered it “very nearly a private, unregulated, and irresponsible monopoly,” recommending that his brother request a report on AIFLD expenditure to the AFL-CIO executive council. The nature of its program would, he predicted, be a source of great tension between the AFL-CIO and the ICFTU and ITSs and would “boomerang in the hemisphere.”85

In practice, hundreds of trade unionists from the region, having been on the US payroll of a project chaired by Peter Grace, would be vulnerable to accusations at home that they were “American agents.” Moreover, Grace was not just any American employer; rather he represented Yankee imperialism at its worst and had antagonized many Peruvians through his identification with the notorious former dictator General Odria. On the eve of the launch of the institute, Victor Reuther drafted a letter for the UAW president to send to Meany expressing deep unease about the way AIFLD was shaping up. The letter was not sent, though it reflected the depth of Victor Reuther’s feelings, especially concerning the presence on the board of Peter Grace and the institute’s approach to the training of trade union leaders.86

There was no fundamental UAW disagreement with the AFL-CIO over the question of government finance for labour programs overseas. Victor Reuther was persuaded that essential tasks to be undertaken abroad were frequently beyond the financial means of labour and therefore needed the support of government. This was now recognized in West Germany, where the government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung conducted extensive labour programs abroad on behalf of the DGB and SPD. Other national trade union centres would come to a similar view in later years, including the Scandinavians, Dutch, and Canadians. Nor did the Reuthers oppose all dealings with employers in organizing such programs. In planning their own unrealized Council for Social Progress, they were hoping for the encouragement of a number of “progressive employers”—Henry Ford II, Thomas J. Watson of IMB, and Henry Kaiser were all mentioned—but in the Reuther scheme there was no question of such people having a policy role and an input into the way training for trade unionists was conceived and delivered. What affiliate of the AFL-CIO, Victor Reuther asked, would invite employers to play an active role in training its future leaders, as AIFLD did for Latin American unions?

Between the UAW and AIFLD there were differences in detail over how and where training should be given, with the UAW opposed to the practice of bringing trainees to the United States to be enlightened by omniscient Americans. This, Victor Reuther claimed, would centralize the American effort in Latin America in the hands of people like Romualdi who were closely associated with ORIT, a body that was already widely discredited within the trade union world. The UAW preferred courses to be mounted on the spot, with trade unionists of various countries learning from one another about how to tackle their common problems. This was also the majority view of education officers of AFL-CIO affiliated unions.87

Apart from differences over where to locate training activities, AIFLD was distinct in the emphasis it gave to promoting “responsible” unionism operating in partnership with employers and government whose interests could be “harmonized in a joint equilibrium” with the help of “capable and responsible leadership.” It reflected the sentiment then being assiduously promoted among industrial relations theorists and practitioners that labour-management conflict was passé and was being replaced by the notion of unions as corporate partners in national society. This was part of AIFLD’s justification for according business leaders a high-profile role. As Joe Beirne, the institute’s secretary-treasurer, explained: “If we are to export the concepts of our society, all of the elements of that society must be represented. The institute, therefore, had to find its support not only in labour, but the federal government, business management, and the professions as well.”88

Indeed, partnership with business was not an incidental feature of AIFLD’s approach but central and vigorously pursued by George Meany. It was evident in the way he and Bill Schnitzler, in a private meeting, eagerly wooed H. S. Woodbridge, president of the True Temper Corporation and a potential new member of the board of trustees. True Temper owned metal manufacturing establishments in Peru, where AIFLD was planning to open a labour institute. Extolling the virtues of American free enterprise, Meany explained to Woodbridge that if Latin America became socialist, the American system would be endangered, noting in passing that the socialism of the British labour movement failed to benefit workers as much as American free enterprise did. He conceded that AIFLD had its domestic opponents, and with the Reuthers in mind explained: “Not all . . . labour leaders take this position. Such, nevertheless, are a minority . . . whose noise is greater than its influence . . . and is almost entirely from the mouth out.” Such people were “not truly important” and were not going to stop the cooperation with business he hoped for. Schnitzler chipped in to reassure Woodbridge that the day would soon come when strikes as a tool of collective bargaining would no longer be needed. Meany concluded the meeting with comforting words about the current military junta in Peru, which, he said, had no militaristic intentions. Woodbridge then agreed to join the trustees.89

From late 1962, Grace led a concerted campaign to win US business support for AIFLD and to have two more businessmen appointed as trustees. He engaged Madison Avenue consultants who proposed that Meany should give a keynote speech to bodies such as the Chambers of Commerce and the Detroit Economic Club. The text of this suggested speech was to be circulated to five hundred corporate CEOs with a covering letter from a “distinguished American”—former President Eisenhower was the person he had in mind. Also proposed was the placing of AIFLD publicity material in business journals and “suburban papers in silk stocking districts.”90 Chase Mellon Jr., who served as financial secretary to the board of trustees, distributed to businessmen a letter signed by Peter Grace that raised the spectre of an “all-out offensive by Castro-Communism to subvert Latin America” and spoke of a counteroffensive involving the training of labour leaders in ways of “bringing about a more harmonious and productive relationship between labour and management.” The letter boasted: “This is the first time that management and labour have voluntarily joined forces to launch and support an operation which recognizes the capitalistic and private enterprise system.”91

In a move arising from Grace’s membership on the board of trustees, Victor Reuther ran a campaign against AIFLD, seeking out information on the labour relations record of Grace-owned firms and drawing his brother’s attention to a copper miners’ strike in Chile at Anaconda mines, whose president, Charles Brinkerhoff, was an AIFLD trustee. He obtained a copy of a pamphlet circulating in Chile written by a consultant, Alexander Lipsett, and presumed to have been commissioned by Anaconda. Calling for lower taxes and restraint in labour militancy, and advocating a form of company unionism, it was financed by AIFLD and contained a foreword written by Serafino Romualdi commending the author as “a staunch friend of labour.” “[It] betrays all the things for which you have stood all your life,” Victor Reuther told his brother. The good name of the UAW and Walter Reuther were being destroyed by the latter’s continued silence over AIFLD, and though Victor understood his brother’s caution and reluctance to jeopardize the AFL-CIO merger, he commented that “the merger is fragile indeed if it cannot withstand a clear decision between serving the interests of workers and being used as a company union tool for major corporations in their efforts to secure pliable unions.” The AFL-CIO executive council was due to meet in six days, and he pressed his brother to act decisively.92 However, Walter Reuther chose to bite his tongue, though he did give specific instruction that no autoworkers’ funds were to be used for investment in housing projects abroad and that UAW staff were not to engage in discussions with AIFLD about any activities without first consulting the international affairs department. “Our relations with the Grace-Meany Institute are very tenuous,” recorded Victor Reuther.93

The situation changed radically on 1 April 1964, when a CIA-backed military coup in Brazil ousted President João Goulart, who was perceived to be sympathetic to the communist line and who supported a Latin American labour movement inclusive of both ICFTU and WFTU. For some months beforehand, AIFLD executive director Romualdi and Berent Friele, a business associate of Nelson Rockefeller and also a member of the AIFLD board of trustees, had been privy to the planning for the action. Confirmation of the important role played by AIFLD in this event came three months later when social projects director William Doherty gave a radio interview in which he boasted of the activities of institute interns in helping undermine a general strike called to defend President Goulart while supporting mass counter-demonstrations. “As a matter of fact, some of them [interns] were so active,” Doherty explained, “that they became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution before it took place on April 1. What happened in Brazil on April 1 did not just happen—it was planned and planned months in advance.” Circulating the transcript of the interview, Victor Reuther wrote indignantly: “I am horrified that all this is being done in the name of enabling a ‘strong, free, virile trade union movement in Latin America.’ With these kinds of friends, who needs enemies? . . . When you read the enclosed memo of developments in Brazil you will understand why, as a trade unionist, I feel a sense of revulsion.”94

Communist-led labour organizations were now waking up to the existence of AIFLD and beginning to score effective propaganda points off it, as Victor Reuther had feared. He therefore intensified his efforts to persuade his brother to end his silence. Jack Lever, a CIO veteran who was working for AIFLD in Venezuela, was asked to write to the UAW leader with his impressions of the organization. Lever damned it with faint praise—it was a “playboy agency” whose leadership was not possessed of sufficient background to handle the task before it. Its housing operation—what he termed “the AFL-CIO’s real estate department”—was big on self-promotion but poor on delivery; its labour banks existed for people too poor to save; its cooperatives were promoted by people with insufficient knowledge of the cooperative movement; and beneath all this was the suggestion that AIFLD opened itself up “cloak and dagger” operations.95

Finally, in early 1965, came damning new evidence of Grace’s industrial relations practices in the United States that could no longer be ignored by Walter Reuther. At Airmold Products, a Grace Plastics Division plant in Tonawanda, New York, a UAW attempt to secure recognition under the National Labour Relations Act had been opposed by management. A leaflet circulated to workers entitled “Foreign Aid Plans—Union Style” asserted that “in a Grace plant no one needs a union partner in his pay envelope.” And in highlighting the fact that the AFL-CIO spent 23 percent of income on its own “private foreign aid programme.” the flyer advised workers to “ask the paid union organizer about this foreign aid plan of his AFL-CIO union from your pocket book.” This was clearly a matter on which Reuther would have no option but to resign from the AIFLD trustees, and Victor Reuther drafted yet another letter for him to send to Meany. It reprised the reservations about the approach to training and the recent evidence from Brazil of “political activities far removed from the legitimate purposes of AIFLD.” Yet it was still three months before Walter Reuther finally sent a letter of resignation, more restrained in tone than Victor’s draft and confining itself to the core issue of Grace’s anti-union behaviour at Airmold.96

There is little doubt that Reuther was extremely reluctant to open a rift with Meany, but developments generally in the labour movement were propelling him in that direction, and on this issue he really had no alternative but to take a stand on trade union principle. Increasingly the signs were that differences between George Meany and Walter Reuther would cause a rupture in the AFL-CIO. It was something that UAW president desperately wanted to avoid. Meany was now turned seventy, and Reuther clung to the hope that time might come to the rescue—but thoughts along those lines proved to be mere wishful thinking.

Meany and Reuther at Odds Internationally: The Beginning of the End

For a number of months following the 1965 ICFTU congress in Amsterdam, it was as though a truce had been signed by George Meany and Walter Reuther. In domestic policy, both men were close to President Lyndon Johnson and were enthusiasts for his “Great Society” program, which offered the labour movement scope for significant gains. In international affairs, Reuther’s low-key resignation from the AIFLD board in September 1965 avoided public dispute. The ICFTU was in an advanced state of disarray, and though the two men viewed the causes and possible solutions differently, the UAW’s continued primary focus on IMF programs abroad helped prevent open conflict in this area.

The burning international issue of the day, which increasingly dwarfed all others, was the war in Vietnam, but on this both Meany and Reuther were firm in their support for administration policy, even if Reuther’s instincts were more dove-like. At the ICFTU congress, Reuther had used his influence to help prevent an acrimonious debate over the war. At home, it also proved possible for the two men to conciliate their different emphases on the war. At the December 1965 AFL-CIO convention, Reuther objected to the tone of a resolution drafted by Jay Lovestone that referred disparagingly to anti-war protesters as “a tiny but noisy minority” while pledging “unstinting support for all measures the Administration might deem necessary” to defeat “Communist aggression in Vietnam.” Reuther failed to win support for a statement against further escalation of the war, but he secured Meany’s agreement to tone down the language and to add words of praise for administration efforts to secure a negotiated peace. Meany’s compromise clearly rankled with Lovestone.97

Yet if the UAW president was careful to keep the peace within the AFL-CIO, his brother Victor showed no such restraint, and his antipathy toward Jay Lovestone was as pronounced as ever. For one thing, he was seen to be exploring possible trade union contacts in the Soviet bloc. In March 1966, he approached ambassador-at-large Averell Harriman for help in establishing “unofficial ties” between American and Soviet trade unionists. He had plans to bring over union officials from the USSR through the agency of the Citizens’ Exchange Corps, with itineraries already arranged for the visitors when they reached Washington and Detroit. Briefed by Jay Lovestone, labour columnist Victor Riesel revealed these details, and when Meany then protested, the State Department refused at the last minute to grant visas to the visitors.98 Three months later Victor Reuther led a party of over thirty members of Americans for Democratic Action on a trip to Poland. The UAW avoided publicizing this initiative, but again Victor Riesel obliged Lovestone by disclosing plans for the visit in his column. Riesel claimed that it was another attempt by Victor Reuther to arrange exchange visits with Soviet bloc trade unionists and speculated that Reuther was aiming to hold meetings with leaders of the Soviet AUCCTU while in Warsaw.99

While hoping to pave the way for UAW contacts with Soviet bloc unions, Victor Reuther was also intent on exposing ongoing links between the CIA and the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department, focusing especially on Latin America. In the winter of 1965–66, a series of newspaper articles in the American press had already reported on intelligence operations in the labour field, some in connection with the April 1965 American-led military action in the Dominican Republic. Inquiries by Meany pointed to Victor Reuther being behind the stories, and he cautioned aides: “he is undercutting us.”100 It is hard to understand why Reuther should want to draw attention to this highly sensitive subject at the precise moment he was sounding out Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s office on the possibility of securing financing for an orchestrated split among CGIL members in Italy, and in the knowledge that such funding would need to come from the CIA. Evidently in his ongoing vendetta with Lovestone, the younger Reuther could not resist the opportunity for point scoring.

At the end of the UAW’s convention at Long Beach in late May 1966, Victor went public in a press interview with the Los Angeles Times in which he claimed that the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department was “involved” with the CIA and spent some $6 million annually in Latin America alone. A substantial part of AFL-CIO international activities, he said, was not reported to the executive council, and some of its affiliates had permitted themselves to be used as cover for clandestine intelligence operations abroad. He cited a recent case where the food workers’ trade secretariat, the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), had been forced to close down its entire Latin American operation after general secretary Juul Poulsen in Geneva discovered that at least eight people in Panama were posing as IUF representatives when the head office had no knowledge of their existence. These rogue “representatives” had been engaged by the AFL-CIO’s inter-American representative, Andrew McLellan, who had previously worked for the IUF and still had a hand in its affairs in Latin America.101

Victor Reuther believed this was part of a wider pattern, suggesting that AFL-CIO international activities were a “vest-pocket” operation of Jay Lovestone, who had brought into the labour movement the habits and undercover techniques he had learned in the communist party. Yet so long as Meany had personal confidence in Lovestone, Reuther could see no hope for change in AFL-CIO foreign policy. He used the interview as an opportunity to draw attention to resolutions adopted at the UAW convention in favour of improved relations with communist China and increased trade with the Soviet bloc and warning against further escalation of the war in Vietnam—representing them as “major challenges” to the AFL-CIO. When asked whether these would provoke Jay Lovestone, he replied breezily: “I would hope so.”102

In giving the interview to the Los Angeles Times, Victor Reuter had evidently “gone rogue,” while intentionally raising the stakes in the UAW battle with the AFL-CIO. Meany telephoned Walter Reuther to complain, and the UAW president conceded that the interview had been a mistake; he said that his brother had been expressing a personal view and claimed not to agree with it. On that basis, Meany allowed the matter to rest. Of late his relations with Walter Reuther had been largely free of rancour: he had only recently returned to work after major hip surgery, and while in hospital he had been visited by Reuther, who spent a convivial few hours in amicable conversation with him. It would prove to be their last friendly meeting.103

The tone of their relationship was almost immediately to change as a consequence of dramatic events at the ILO in Geneva. Protesting the election of a Polish communist, Leon Chajn, as chairman of the international labour conference in June 1966, Rudy Faupl, who headed the US workers’ delegation in Geneva, led an American walkout after putting in a phone call to Meany. A statement issued by the delegation maintained that Chajn’s election “placed in serious jeopardy the continuance of the ILO as a tripartite body.” The walkout risked undermining the Johnson administration’s policy of “bridge-building” to the Soviet bloc, and immediately UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg, secretary of labour Willard Wirtz, and undersecretary of state George Ball spoke to Meany to urge caution. The following day, President Johnson invited Meany to see him and warned that although he personally was relaxed about the demonstration by the American workers’ delegation, there could be no question of the United States quitting the ILO.104

Meany’s public position on the 1966 walkout was that the decision had been Rudy Faupl’s alone and that he, as AFL-CIO president, had merely concurred with Faupl’s judgment. Yet the political reality was that no walkout would have taken place against the wishes of the president of the AFL-CIO, and it was widely understood in diplomatic circles that Meany was looking for a way of withdrawing from the ILO. On the basis of the formal constitutional relationship between himself and Faupl—under which Faupl represented the United States and not the AFL-CIO—Meany portrayed the walkout as a tactical decision by Faupl rather than a policy change by the AFL-CIO. He also denied that there had been any administration pressure not to walk out.105

No other trade union delegation had joined the American walkout, and there was a widespread view that the show of American truculence in Geneva had been counterproductive. It had damaged America’s image and had helped ensure the election of the first ever representative from the USSR, P. T. Pimenov, to the Workers’ Group of the ILO Governing Body. This was an outcome that the Americans had hoped to prevent. In the long run, Pimenov’s election was likely to be a more significant breakthrough than Chajn’s election to the conference chair; as Irving Brown wrote from Geneva: “If one cannot sit in a conference when the President is a Pole . . . how can one sit in a Governing Body when there is a Soviet ‘workers’ delegate’?”106 However, it was the sequel to these events within the AFL-CIO that was to have the most lasting impact on the international labour movement.

At the time of the walkout, UAW executive board members were attending the inaugural conference of the IMF’s World Auto Council along with auto union delegates from a dozen countries—the culmination of a decade of endeavour by the UAW in the international field. The UAW delegates were much embarrassed to learn from the press about the ILO walkout, and Walter Reuther was urged to protest to Meany. He duly wrote, complaining that the action was “unwise, undemocratic, contrary to established AFL-CIO policy, and unauthorized by any AFL-CIO body with authority to change the policy,” and he called on Meany to order the delegation back to the conference. He also sent a copy of his letter to the press, which featured it as evidence of a “major split” threatening the unity of the AFL-CIO.107

Unfortunately for Walter Reuther, Meany first learned the contents of his letter from the New York Times. His anger at this discourtesy was compounded by the fact that he and Reuther had been together at a meeting two days after the walkout and on that occasion the UAW leader made no reference to it. Meany replied, blasting Reuther for turning the ILO episode into a public dispute. His emphasis was not on the substance of Reuther’s criticism but the way he had gone about airing it. In a passage that must surely have cut Reuther to the quick, he cautioned against harming the ICFTU, regretting such bad publicity at a time when its future “hung in the balance” and needed “the fullest possible support from American labour.” Meany also announced the calling the following week of a special AFL-CIO executive council meeting to consider Reuther’s criticisms. And with Victor Reuther’s press conference allegations about AIFLD and the CIA still fresh in his mind, Meany was also intent on raising the younger Reuther’s “slanderous attack” and “constant harassment.” As Lovestone noted, it was a very effective response that made it difficult for Walter Reuther to win backing from any quarter.108 Matters were coming to a head.

Bringing Foreign Policy Differences to a Head

At the special executive council on 16 June 1966, Walter Reuther was very much on the defensive for having placed his criticisms of the AFL-CIO in the public arena. Meany gave him a dressing down and the UAW leader was forced to reassure the meeting that his observations on the walkout were meant to censure neither Meany nor Faupl. But on his wider criticism of AFL-CIO international policy generally he held firm; he expressed “deep concern” at the drift in international affairs and the fact that federation policy was neither positive nor constructive. The meeting voted by three to one to endorse the action taken by Faupl and Meany, but Reuther secured agreement to hold a further special meeting in November to review the whole range of AFL-CIO foreign policy, which he described as “rigid” and “frozen” and contrary to President Johnson’s “bridge-building” approach to the Soviet Union.109 In the meantime, Victor Reuther’s specific allegations about AIFLD and the CIA were slated for separate discussion at the regularly scheduled executive council meeting in August.

Privately, Victor Reuther claimed not to be worried by Meany’s “statistical majority” in the executive council, comforted in the belief that those supporting his brother represented a larger share of total AFL-CIO membership. More importantly, he told the British labour counsellor: “While George may have the votes in the EC, he sure as hell won’t get any votes in Europe.” Victor saw this as the start of a major battle over foreign policy and wrote bullishly to Dan Benedict: “this is but the opening shot in what I am sure will eventually involve a broadside against many aspects of AFL-CIO policies in the international field.”110

Within the AFL-CIO international affairs department there was equally a sense that a decisive confrontation was now in the offing, combined with an air of confidence over the eventual outcome. The AFL-CIO executive council had chosen to make no public statement over these internal differences that would dominate discussion in the coming months. Indeed, Walter Reuther was subsequently condemned for continuing to talk to the press about the issues involved. However, Jay Lovestone’s views found their way into print via the syndicated column of labour correspondent Victor Riesel. Describing the UAW offensive as “open warfare,” he predicted “a long hot summer.” Echoing Lovestone’s thinking, Riesel offered a scenario in which the outcome would be determined by whichever side had the best links to President Johnson: “Meany and the overwhelming bloc of U.S. labour chieftains will not retreat. . . . The Reuthers will then tell the Meany majority to jump in the Potomac . . . and then proceed on their own with the bridge-building. The big question is, however, ‘Who will control the pontoon to the White House?’”111

Victor Reuther was preparing in depth for the executive council meeting in August. Throughout the summer he assigned his international affairs department staff to sleuthing work—what he dubbed “Operation August”—tracking down AIFLD representatives and taking statements from them.112 In late July, UAW general council Joe Rauh wrote privately to Walter Reuther on the outcome of this research:

Since I know you are mulling over the CIA matter, you are entitled to have this thought before you. We can demonstrate, all apart from George Meany’s admissions to you personally [author’s emphasis], that there is a massive CIA involvement in the foreign affairs operations of the AFL-CIO and vice versa. I am not suggesting the answers to the policy and political questions you have before you. But . . . my personal assessment, based on what we have learned to date [is] that Vic’s statement was mild indeed and that you can lead from strength not weakness.113

The UAW’s detective work led to the production of a document claiming that, on the basis of evidence amassed, “it can be definitely affirmed without even a shadow of doubt that the AIFLD has from its inception been utilized as an active, intelligence gathering organization by the Central Intelligence Agency.” Moreover, the presence of intelligence agents in the numbers that existed had inhibited the work of genuine AIFLD representatives performing legitimate tasks for labour. In consequence, it argued, AIFLD’s record of achievement was poor, causing large numbers of staff to leave in frustration in the course of 1965–66. At an operational level, the document identified William Doherty, Romualdi’s successor as director, as the chief culprit and called for his dismissal along with that of Secretary-Treasurer Joe Beirne. All covert activity needed to be brought to a halt, and the AIFLD board of directors reconstituted.114

However, the document never saw the light of day. Walter Reuther was coming under intense pressure from the Johnson administration to drop the allegations about the CIA and AIFLD. To this end Reuther had received telephone calls from Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Robert Kennedy as well as Cord Meyer, successor to Tom Braden at the CIA with responsibility for international operations within the international trade union movement. Rauh’s oblique reference to “Meany’s personal admissions” to Walter Reuther about the CIA also related to the fact that the two men had met to discuss removing the item from the forthcoming executive council agenda. Indeed, as a result of the pressures being applied by the administration there were urgent behind-the-scenes talks within the AFL-CIO involving Meany, Reuther, and their respective assistants, Lane Kirkland and Jack Conway, over how to proceed at the August council meeting. And it was Reuther’s firm belief that in a face-to-face meeting with Meany there had been agreement between them to drop the item in the interests of “national security.”115

Yet when the executive council convened in August, as the first item AIFLD secretary-treasurer Joe Beirne insisted on introducing a detailed report denying that the institute was a tool of the CIA. Caught off guard once again, Reuther was forced onto the back foot, agreeing that it was wrong of his brother to raise the issue in public and accepting that Beirne was justified in feeling strongly about it. The majority then voted to commend the work of AIFLD and to reject the campaign of vilification. This time Joe Curran was the only other council member to vote with Reuther; even the normally supportive Jake Potofsky preferred to abstain.

It was far from the end of the debate about AFL-CIO links with the CIA; press disclosures implicating affiliated unions continued for several more months.116 The exposé that proved to be the biggest bombshell came with Tom Braden’s article for the Saturday Evening Post in May 1967, whose purpose was to put the CIA’s side of the story and to counterbalance the moral outrage expressed over the disclosures of shady financing by various correspondents. As well as recalling the $50,000 he passed to Walter Reuther in 1952 for use on trade union programs in Europe, Braden detailed the much larger sums the agency provided to Lovestone and Brown and the CIA’s difficulty in keeping tabs on how it was spent.117 Meany immediately told a press conference that Braden’s account was “a damned lie.” “Neither the AFL during my term as secretary-treasurer and president nor the AFL-CIO has ever received any CIA money.” (He carefully avoided any mention of the Free Trade Union Committee.) Again he absolved his international affairs director: “Lovestone had absolutely nothing to do with the CIA. . . . I’ve talked to him many times, and I can tell you he does not have anything to do with this.” The British labour counsellor reported that Meany now appeared to be one of the few people to believe that Brown and Lovestone were innocent of any connection with the CIA.118

However, for now the meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council in August 1966 had provided evidence of a further shift in the balance of power away from Reuther. The council went on to adopt a hawkish statement on the war in Vietnam that dropped the call for the negotiated settlement that Reuther had introduced at the 1965 AFL-CIO convention. It also condemned anti-war protesters for “aiding the Communist enemies of our country . . . that is bearing the heaviest burdens in the defence of world peace and freedom.” Reuther left the meeting before the statement was voted on and, in a letter to the press, disowned it as “intemperate, hysterical and jingoistic and unworthy of a policy statement of a free labour movement.”119

In light of this outcome, Jay Lovestone now looked forward with confidence to the special session of the executive council in November requested by Reuther and meant to examine thoroughly the whole range of foreign policy positions adopted by the AFL-CIO. He was preparing for a final “showdown” and, in briefings with labour correspondent Victor Riesel, sought to represent Reuther as a frustrated man with overweening ambition in the international field whose multifaceted agenda was hard to fathom but was somehow tied up with undercover work. As a Victor Riesel column described it:

From the Congo to the Copacabana, from Mount Fuji to Mount Kenya, from Washington to Tunisia, Reuther’s organizers trot the world. They supply films. They hand out movie projectors. They distribute literature in Arabic and Japanese. They run underground operations in Africa. They finance undercover activities in Spain. Still the rusty-haired leader of the . . . [UAW] feels that the activities of his . . . International Affairs Dept . . . are too restricted by national AFL-CIO policies. . . . Just what new policies Reuther wants haven’t yet been made clear. Reuther’s aims are intertwined with the auto union’s covert and overt international activities. His International Affairs Dept . . . is deep inside Spain. The auto union runs underground schools to train leaders for the illegal labour and youth movements. It helps to finance organization drives . . . and it publishes anti-government newspapers . . . in and out of Spain. This action parallels work in Africa . . . with Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda, Tunisia’s president Habib Bourguiba, Kenya’s . . . Tom Mboya, and Dr Hastings Banda . . . of Malawi. . . . There are no objections from the Meany headquarters—so long as Reuther speaks for himself and his own union. . . . The Federation is hawkish on Vietnam—and says so frankly. The Reuthers are not—and say so frankly. And that’s how they’ll all talk to each other when the showdown comes.120

However, the showdown as envisaged by Lovestone was not to take place.

The heavy defeat he suffered at the August meeting of the executive council caused Walter Reuther to begin to wonder about the worth of the UAW’s remaining a part of the AFL-CIO and to envision a future outside the federation. He was upset at Meany’s “double cross” over the AIFLD-CIA agenda item and the fact that Beirne was allowed to speak to an item that had been withdrawn by agreement. How was it was possible, he mused, to do business with people who went back on their word given in a face-to-face meeting?121 In fact, the autoworkers’ president was being forced into a position not of his choosing. As the British labour counsellor reported:

It is incredible how Walter Reuther allows himself to be led by the nose by his brother Victor. There is such intense enmity between Victor Reuther and Jay Lovestone that the former cannot resist any opportunity of sniping at the foreign policies of the AFL-CIO. While Walter obviously agrees with Victor he does not seem to know what to do about it. While Walter knows he cannot win a vote against Meany in the Executive Council, by doing things the wrong way he forfeits the sympathies of many others who otherwise agree with him.122

Over the coming weeks, in the autumn of 1966, the UAW president came to the conclusion that it was pointless to attend the special executive council meeting in November that he personally had requested, excusing himself on the last minute on the lame grounds of having a “prior engagement.” His last reliable supporter on the executive council, Joe Curran, wired urging him to attend, but the appeal went unanswered. Yet, in spite of Reuther’s absence Meany insisted on proceeding with the meeting. The council spent a whole day going through a thick file of foreign policy resolutions adopted since the 1955 merger, eventually endorsing them almost unanimously as positions that were “sound . . . justified by events” and had “stood the test of time.”123 For Meany, the simple fact was that all the AFL-CIO’s international policies had been formally adopted in a constitutional manner. Reuther’s larger point about the secretive manner in which Jay Lovestone ran the international operation and formulated policy went by default.

In UAW circles, “independence” was now in the air. No dramatic steps followed immediately, although for the final quarter of 1966 the UAW paid its subscription to the AFL-CIO two months late—a warning shot across Meany’s bow. Taking charge of strategy and evidently ensuring that his brother did not unduly influence the agenda, Walter Reuther’s approach was to win support among the UAW membership for quitting the AFL-CIO by emphasizing the need for a more dynamic, socially progressive labour movement. And in doing so he emphasized that the focus needed to be on domestic issues. In a speech in November at the Wharton School, he described his differences with George Meany:

All the [press] emphasis has been on foreign policy. . . . We do have differences. . . . I happen to support the Test Ban Agreement. I happen to think we ought to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam. I happen to disagree with walking out of the ILO conference. . . . But that is only a small part of the basic disagreement with this gentleman. Fundamentally, I disagreed because I believe that the American labour movement under his leadership is failing in the broad social responsibilities it has to the community of America.124

As ever, there was strong support abroad for Walter Reuther’s international approach, though it was by no means clear that his favoured policies in the international arena would play better with UAW members than those of the AFL-CIO. Reuther therefore understood the need to place domestic disagreements at the forefront in his battle with Meany. The primary focus would then be on allegations of AFL-CIO complacency, adherence to the status quo, and lack of social vision and dynamic thrust. Yet the consequences for future American participation in the international free trade union movement of their disagreement over international policy would be far reaching.

The UAW’s international program in the 1960s aimed to demonstrate an approach significantly different from that of the AFL-CIO. It was by far the most ambitious single international program undertaken by any American union. It was also distinctive in the way it endeavoured to escape from the pattern of international trade union work as a field for professionals and to draw on the idealism and enthusiasm of the union’s local leadership and rank and file as active agents in worker-to-worker contacts.

The Free World Labour Defence Fund provided assistance to non-communist, democratic unions abroad without the narrow anti-communist emphasis that the AFL-CIO brought to bear on its activities overseas. The focus was on support for labour organizations in their struggle for improved conditions. Learning the lessons that the UAW had absorbed in Europe in the early 1950s, a basic aim was to overcome crippling divisions between organizations that were, in many cases, the product of AFL-CIO practice of supporting only the most vocal opponents of communism.

Grant aid was dispensed in small amounts for one-off projects but also for major programs in which the International Metalworkers’ Federation acted as the coordinating body. With UAW funding being offered as an incentive for metal unions elsewhere to emulate the Americans’ commitment, the IMF would typically aim to draw in matching funds from other major affiliates—especially the German and Swedish metalworkers’ unions.

The promotion of “world coordinating councils,” which organized across national frontiers and within specific multinational corporations with the hope of becoming transnational negotiating bodies for their workers, was a core component of UAW strategy. In Japan, where labour movement divisions owed much to policies pursued by the AFL from the early 1950s, the autoworkers’ objective was to help build unity within the framework of the IMF and to further overcome fragmentation of union groups by encouraging their joint participation in a wage research exercise aimed at unravelling the mysteries of a remuneration system that relied heavily on bonuses paid at the discretion of employers.

More ambitiously, the Reuthers aimed for a wider role on the political stage—working with figures in the Kennedy administration to help promote centre-left politics in Europe and Latin America, where previously the Eisenhower administration had favoured the conservative right and where the AFL-CIO had gone with flow of US policy. Walter Reuther played a catalytic role in bringing together leading European social democrats and American progressives for talks in the Harpsund conferences, which, at their most ambitious, aspired to create an international consensus around a new centre-left politics. Reuther’s most concerted effort in that field was in Italy, where, in cooperation with partner unions in the IMF, an “opening to the left” was encouraged that eventually saw the Nenni socialists end their electoral pact with the communists and join a centre-left coalition government with the aim of breaking with the economic and social policies of conservative Christian Democracy.

The UAW programs in Italy and Japan directly challenged existing AFL-CIO policy and renewed friction between Reuther and Meany. In Latin America the UAW studiously avoided involvement in the work of AIFLD, compromised as it was by the formal role accorded to business interests on its board of trustees.

It was at Victor Reuther’s initiative that the long-simmering differences between UAW and AFL-CIO in the international field were brought into the open in 1966 with allegations of extensive CIA involvement in the work of AIFLD, thereby lending substance to other such disclosures by investigative reporters. The bitter public dispute with the AFL-CIO that began with this episode expanded across a range of policies domestic and international and launched the UAW on a course that would see them disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO within two years.