Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  The years after that witnessed a proliferation of what one negotiator called Walter’s “Alice-in-Wonderland things.” Executives were increasingly nettled by his persistent attempts to give them advice. He was forever trying to be useful, submitting some suggestion for the good of the industry—changes in marketing patterns, five- and ten-point plans, labor-management get-togethers, a “fish-bowl” for prices—that ruffled their feelings. His helpful hints were hard enough to take, but what really set the conservative tocsin clanging was the way he transmuted so many of his dreams into the harsh prose of labor agreements. The simple world of January 5, 1914, when Henry Ford announced he would pay five dollars a day for eight hours’ work, had vanished. Contracts were increasingly complicated by escalator clauses, supplementary unemployment benefits, pension provisions and productivity factors; it took actuaries and statisticians to figure them out. The U.A.W.’s Solidarity House stood on the old Edsel Ford estate overlooking the Detroit River, and union and Chrysler engineers were studying work speeds together.

  All this came in with the Reuther era. Labor gadflies of the other days were dogged enough, but they were limited by what Walter scouted as their “penny-ante” philosophy. They were haunted by the memory of America’s first labor organization, the nineteenth century Knights of Labor, which collapsed when it became entangled in political and social doctrines, and they clung to the tight little more-and-better unionism of Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor. Their tranquillity was shaken when John L. Lewis strode out of the A.F.L. in 1935 to found the Congress of Industrial Organizations, but Lewis, for all his Thespian effects, was a traditional fat-pay bargainer. He never rocked the managerial boat much, and when Walter was elected president of the Congress at the age of forty-five and merged it with the Federation, John L. was fit to be tied. “Mr. Reuther,” he thundered, “is an earnest Marxist, chronically inebriated, I think, by the exuberance of his own verbosity.”

  He didn’t call Walter a Communist. There was a bitter fringe which was convinced the Reuthers were secret Soviet agents, but the record read the other way. At the height of the Cold War the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy reviewed the FBI report on Walter and granted him clearance to see “the highest degree of secret information,” and his only infidelity to the Democratic party arose from his fear that the Henry Wallace threat might be real. He wanted the Democrats to nominate Justice William O. Douglas in 1948. Like all other savants, he felt sure that Truman hadn’t a chance. He expected the Democrats to fall apart after the election, so he and his union planned a liberal anti-Communist party, to be launched the day Dewey was inaugurated. When the fantastic happened in November, Walter slipped quietly back in line. He remained there ever afterward, an active leader of the Democratic liberal wing.

  As a multitude of G.O.P. candidates noted from time to time, he was also active in the Americans for Democratic Action, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the United World Federalists. Some conservatives distributed a pamphlet identifying him as The Man Who Plans to Rule America; others just said he wanted to run the Democratic party. Their failure to thwart him only sustained their distrust of what they called Reutherism. “When a Democrat gets defeated he says his wife didn’t want him to run,” Abe Martin drawled, “and when a Republican gets snowed under, he says the people are following strange gods.”

  Abe, a cartoon character in the Republican Indianapolis News, also said that “if capital and labor ever do get together, it’s good night for the rest of us.” To Walter there wasn’t any rest of us, and even the capital-labor split was wrong. He spoke mellifluously of “voluntary cooperation” between unions and corporations, advocating a sort of cozy industrial togetherness in which bosses and labor skates would work harmoniously as “architects of the future.” His critics—and even many who admire him—thought this a bit naïve. His own career brought him blood, bruises, hooliganism and hard words, but very little voluntary cooperation. He liked to think that the character of management was changing, and he regarded Henry Ford II, who ordered coffee and sweet rolls served to pickets during 1958s six-hour strike, as a very decent man. Yet he must have known how many people regarded the Reuther name as a bogy.

  Late in the 1950s, he met Martin Luther King in Miami. Outside, police whistles were warbling, and when Walter strolled to the window he saw that the street below was thick with blue uniforms. He burst into laughter. “What a couple of characters we are!” he called to King. “We’re really starting something!”

  The cordon was a tribute to the fear of what Walter started and to his eminence in public life, which made him a strong finisher. His national role had long ago transcended the leadership of an automobile union. Because he was deeply involved in sensitive issues, and because he moved swiftly on the advancing edge of the present, he also had a substantial international following. British Labourites extrapolating from their own political system—he would have been a Cabinet member there—found him the most exciting man in America. In Nehru’s India he was a popular hero. Official Washington, seeking an unofficial emissary to New Delhi in the Eisenhower years, picked Walter. He proved poisonous to Indian Reds. Local papers doted on his prim democratic quirks—at receptions he wouldn’t wear a dinner jacket, which he vaguely associated with limousines—and his speeches were powerful Western medicine, laced with wit.

  Even in the paneled boardrooms of Detroit, where his eloquence was rarely appreciated, he was conceded to be fast on his feet. Once a supervisor was showing him through a Ford automated plant which could turn out an engine block, untouched by human hands, in less than fifteen minutes. Walter, remembering the hundreds of hours that went into each block during his early days in Detroit, was silently impressed until his guide said slyly, “Aren’t you worried about how you’re going to collect union dues from these machines?” “Not at all,” Walter said instantly. “What worries me is how you’re going to sell them Ford cars.”

  To him automation was one of the reasons nickel-in-the-pay-envelope bargaining was obsolescent. Its threat of a sterile society depressed him. “Every man needs a feeling of achievement,” he would say, running his fingers along a cabinet in his homemade home. “I get it here, making things. But what accomplishment can a push-button pusher feel? You can’t be in the image of God unless you have some creative capacity, because that’s the basic concept. Suppose we do have the highest standard of living in the world; if the outer man strips the inner man, we’ve still been robbed of our sense of achievement.”

  Workmen’s pride had become more important than take-home pay to him, because by the time of his death the pay battle had been pretty much won. By then young union members were making what their fathers had called Cadillac money. Economically the proletarian had invaded the middle class. Culturally he remained a pinball-playing hillbilly, however, so his leader brooded over the four-day week and the constructive use of leisure—and was prepared to strike for intangibles to get it.

  A consequence of this was that other labor leaders tend to look upon Walter as a traitor to his class. He was born in a dingy West Virginia purlieu and came up through the Detroit shops, “but he acts like a priest,” Jimmy Hoffa said. “Why? He just wants to win the war, like me.” Hoffa, of course, affected the air of a sea wolf; Walter’s benign colleagues on the A.F.L.-C.I.O. board didn’t snarl enough for the Teamster boss. They did pledge allegiance to orthodox symbols of power, though. George Meany is a golfer and duck hunter, like Ike; Dave McDonald cultivated the profile of a steel tycoon. Walter, however, stuck with his intellectual predilections. He actually enjoyed books about atomic energy, and though he bought a TV set to watch the 1952 political conventions, it was seldom on. One night he forced himself to sit through a typical evening’s programs. Long before bedtime he was appalled. When Ed Murrow attacked TV mediocrity Walter sent him a note. It read, “Hurray!”

  The labor fraternity mocked him as “the egghead.” He snapped back that at least he was n
ot an emptyhead, but some of his own automobile workers wished he weren’t quite so smart. In the swarming tenements of Detroit’s Third Avenue district a man feels that lean meat and neat whiskey will generate all the creative excitement he needs. The working stiffs there rarely dream of pie in the sky, and they couldn’t understand why a man with Walter’s upbringing should scorn bread-and-butter raises and insist that their bowling leagues be interracial. They grumbled, but Walter didn’t hark. He’d strike for intangibles inside the union too. He was determined to build “a labor movement that will remake the world,” and much of the activity in Solidarity House reflected this. There was a monthly newspaper and a daily radio commentator to educate the workers, a school for new union officials, and a forward-planning staff of experts in such fields as slum clearance and recreation for the elderly. Walter always attracted men of ideas, not all of whom were shop veterans. After a memorable strike-strategy meeting, one of them took a girl aside. “Tell me,” he whispered. “Confidentially—what is a tool-and-die?”

  This may have confirmed those who suspected sinister figures in the union were designing a master trap for all of us. Walter, however, didn’t give that impression. He was a thoughtful man, and he thought ahead, but his vision of the future seemed rather hazy. Either he hadn’t seen the farthest reaches of his ideas or he wasn’t talking about them, which in him would have been incredible.

  He appeared convinced that socialism had become a weary doctrine, and he insisted that he was in favor of the free marketplace. Yet every triumph at the bargaining table brought him closer to the great keep of industrial power, and apart from expressing a wish for chummy relations with management all he would say was that he was a pragmatist. Walter was for what worked. After he had it, he stalked the next thing that would work, and then the next, feeling his way, pushing on toward an unseen horizon and saying little about the implications of the victories behind him. “Don’t ask me what he wanted,” says a man who knew him twenty years. “I honestly don’t think he knew. But I’ll tell you this. He would have gotten it.”

  In the grim spring of 1948, when Walter’s condition was still grave, his mother went to the hospital and begged him to quit. Later she would recall sitting by her son’s bed and saying, “Go into some other work. Give this up. You could write books, or go back to your trade. You would make just as much money.” Walter, she remembered, looked startled. “I’d make more money,” he said weakly. “Then do it,” she pleaded, and there was a pause, and he said, “No. I’m all tied up in this thing, all involved. I must do it.” He faltered—Anna caught something about “brotherhood of man,” a phrase all the Reuther brothers heard throughout their childhood from their father—and his voice trailed off. Then May, sitting opposite, quietly asked her, “Don’t you see he must do it? You must understand,” and Anna left.

  Understanding Walter stumped men less close to him than his mother. Why he did what he did, and what he really wanted, may remain conundrums to everyone. Still, there was this thing, and he was all tied up in it. It brought grief and terror to the members of his family, the only people he really cherished. Had he lived, it would have meant that he would have had to spend the rest of his life in a home with a padlocked gate, escorted everywhere by bodyguards, but that’s the way it had to be. There was this thing. It may have been an Alice-in-Wonderland dream, a pie in the sky, or the brotherhood of man—that didn’t matter. Whatever it was, he was all involved. He believed in it, and he felt that he had to do it, whatever the cost, which, in the end, turned out to be the supreme sacrifice.

  Cairo After Farouk

  In the small hours of July 23, 1952, Jefferson Caffery, the United States ambassador to Egypt, was awakened by two eventful telephone calls. The first was from a young Egyptian army officer who apologized for the hour of his call but said he had news that could not be delayed—the army was taking over the country. Caffery thanked him and hung up. There wasn’t much else he could do. The second call, somewhat later, was from His Majesty King Farouk I, or, as he was popularly known in Cairo, the King of the Whores. His soldiers had imprisoned him in his own palace, the king said, and he wanted American intervention to crush them. Caffery unsuccessfully tried to cut him off by every method short of hanging up, for knowing Cairo, he suspected that the line was tapped. It was. What’s more, that appeal for foreign help ended Farouk’s reign. When members of the Free Officers junta running the coup learned of it, they decided to force his abdication. In his place appeared an Egyptian major general named Mohammed Naguib, who was so little known in the Anglo-American community that only one member of it, a U.S. captain, had been introduced to him. Naguib’s right-hand man was handsome, thirty-four-year-old Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. No Americans at all had met Nasser.

  Cairo was a city of appalling cynicism then—the local equivalent of the college of hard knocks was called “Farouk U.”—but by the following winter, when I arrived in the capital, General Naguib had become enormously celebrated and widely respected. He was probably the most pushed-around dictator in history. Week after week, he continued to work an eighteen-hour day, and authority had not corrupted that curious naïveté which was his most appealing and most puzzling trait. People with the lamest excuses could barge in on him—chiefly, one gathered, because he was terrified that they might think he regarded himself as a big shot. He was such an earnest little shot, except in a pinch, when he could be firm in a wry, whimsical way, that Americans in the capital were comparing him to Lincoln, a slippery parallel which nevertheless provides an inkling of his popularity then.

  It was an extraordinary popularity. He had conspicuous enemies, of course, but while they were powerful, they were also few, being largely confined to the rich, fezzed former pashas who, until his rise, had divided their time between the Riviera and yachting on the Nile. They were not among the fellaheen, the illiterate, diseased descendants of the Pharaonic peasantry, who saw in his land-reform program the culmination of the hope of generations, nor were they in the dirty stucco streets of Cairo and Alexandria, where the general was a symbol of decency that shone particularly bright after a decade of the grossest corruption. They could not be found in the Western legations, either, for occidental diplomats trusted Naguib with a desperate faith born of years of dealing with a depraved king and crooked premiers.

  An instance of Naguib’s accessibility that winter occurred during the Fourth World Cooperation Tour of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Fifteen of the women on the tour, headed by Mrs. Oscar A. Algren, of Whiting, Indiana, arrived in town and informed the American embassy that they would like to meet the general. The embassy put in a routine request for an interview, but without much hope, for Naguib was deep in negotiations with the British over the fate of nine million Sudanese, and therefore presumably fully occupied. But he invited the ladies over for coffee anyway. They arranged themselves on divans in the former palace of Princess Shewkar while their host, a chunky terrier of a man in his early fifties, settled back in his woolly uniform and discussed state affairs with all the eager innocence of an armchair political strategist, which is just what he had been a year earlier. After the chat one of his guests confessed that she had a hobby; she collected memorable coffee cups. Could she have hers? Certainly, said Egypt’s premier, minister of war and marine, and chief of the country’s only political party; take it along. Immediately the other fourteen clubwomen announced that they were going to take theirs, too, and keep them forever.

  Naguib affected people that way, journalists among them. In a New Yorker letter from Cairo I noted that while Naguib had not engineered the coup of the previous summer—“actually he was only an instrument in the hands of a committee of junior officers”—it was reasonable to assume that he would remain in power a long time. One reason, I said, was his remarkable personality. Then I added for the ages: “Another, of course, is that in all Egypt there just isn’t anybody else.” After the general’s right-hand man emerged from the shadows and shoved him aside, I remember
ed that someone had introduced me to Nasser in Naguib’s outer office. Certain that this man would remain obscure, I had been brusque, almost curt, thereby forfeiting a matchless opportunity to interview him. Once I saw just how clouded my crystal ball had been, I felt very sheepish. I said as much to Arthur Krock. He advised me to forget it. “It happens all the time,” said Krock. “I remember that just after the Armistice I was traveling through provincial Italy by train. A friend suggested that I get off at one station and meet the obscure editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, who was standing on the platform. I wouldn’t do it. I knew Benito Mussolini wasn’t going anywhere in Rome.”

  ***

  Years later I read in Britannica 3: “For more than a year Nasser kept his real role so well hidden that astute foreign correspondents were unaware of his existence.” In reality none of us was astute, and that proved it. When he emerged as deputy premier and interior minister on June 18, 1953—actually a little less than a year after Farouk—we were dumbfounded. He had been lurking around, and we had seen him, but we hadn’t read him right. It was a grave error, and a significant one. For years outsiders had misread, misunderstood, and misinterpreted the Egyptian power structure. They still do. Nearly a quarter century has lapsed; Farouk and Nasser are dead; Anwar el Sadat rules in Cairo, and it is a rare journalist who comprehends the long, tangled chain of events behind the Sadat government. The dethroning of the King of the Whores was a pivotal event in the history of the Middle East. Some grasp of how and why it happened is essential to an understanding of that corner of the world, whose destiny, as they used to say in Fitzpatrick travelogues, has become inextricably linked with that of Americans.