Recalling Scoop Jackson

I’m delighted to note the recent formation in the UK of the Henry Jackson Society, of which I am a supporter. Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson is a name undeservedly overlooked in current foreign policy debates. He is in fact one of the great figures of modern liberalism, whose ideas were ahead of his time and his party.

A congressman and senator from 1941 to his death in 1983, Jackson twice sought the Democratic Presidential nomination, in 1972 and 1976. His ideas on economic policy were standard New Deal liberalism of a particularly interventionist bent; he was a strong proponent of the wage and price controls that the Nixon administration fruitlessly pursued with in the early 1970s. With much greater cause, he was an environmentalist long before the issue became fashionable. But he is best known for his views on foreign policy. These also embodied a consistent liberalism – which, ironically, is the reason they were unacceptable to Democratic activists.

Jackson was greatly influenced by having visited Buchenwald shortly after its liberation. He was ever after the most powerful congressional voice in favour of confronting totalitarianism, and opposing the type of diplomacy that would blur the issue of political liberty. It was more than a moral stance; it was a theory of political change that differed fundamentally from the popular heresy on the Left that campaigned against military preparedness.

In the 1980s, Democrats campaigned vigorously for a bilateral freeze on the deployment of nuclear weapons, and most European Social Democratic parties (not the French Socialists, but – to my great regret, as a European left-wing activist – the British Labour Party and the German SPD) devoted their campaigning energies to the notion that the US and the USSR were pursuing a logic of ‘exterminism’ (in the infelicitous phrase of leading anti-nuclear campaigner and Marxist historian E.P. Thompson). These campaigners held – or rather the more moderate ones did – that nuclear weapons were a source of instability and that the superpower relationship should be calmed by pacific unilateral initiatives. Others went so far as to argue perversely that there was no moral difference between the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and the United States (I heard Thompson argue this case in a debate at the Oxford Union; he was opposed cogently and successfully by the then-US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who recounted the debate in his recent memoir, In the Arena; it was always an attractive feature of Weinberger's public service that he was willing to argue with his critics publicly.) Still others, including some Labour MPs, were unabashedly sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

Jackson led the fight in Congress against ratification of SALT II, on limiting strategic nuclear weapons. His reasoning was that tension was generated not by weapons themselves, but by the political relations between nuclear-armed states. The cause of peace could not be divorced from that of political liberty, which Jackson did as much as any Westerner to promote. (The Jackson-Vanick Amendment denied Most-Favoured Nation status to any nation that did not permit free emigration: it was intended particularly as a support for the cause of Soviet Jewry.)

Though tragically he did not live to see the collapse of Communism, Jackson was proved triumphantly right in never mistaking the Cold War for an artificial dispute born of misunderstanding. When the central political issue of our own generation is the defence of political liberty against theocratic barbarism – with the British Labour Party this time realising the stakes and standing firmly with our American allies – Jackson’s achievements merit recalling.