A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster

by Ted Morgan

The extraordinary life of Jay Lovestone is one of the great untold stories of the 20th century. A Lithuanian immigrant who came to the USA in 1897, he rose to leadership in the Communist Party of America, only to fall out with Moscow & join the anti-Communist establishment after WW2. He became one of the leading strategists of the Cold War, being described as 'one of the five most important men in the hidden power structure of America.' Lovestone was obsessively secretive. It's only with the opening of his papers at the Hoover Institution, the freeing of access to Comintern files in Moscow & the release of his 5700-page FBI file that biographer & Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Morgan has been able to construct a full account of the remarkable events of his life. The life described is full of drama & intrigue. He recounts Lovestone's career in the faction-riven communist world until he was spirited out of Moscow in 1929 after Stalin publicly attacked him for doctrinal unorthodoxy. As he veered away from Moscow, he came to work for the American Federation of Labor, managing a separate union foreign policy as well as maintaining his own intelligence operations for the CIA, many under the command of the counterintelligence chief James Angleton. He also associated with Louise Page Morris, a spy known as 'the American Mata Hari,' who helped him undermine Communist advances in the developing world & whose own significant espionage career is detailed. Lovestone's influence, always exercised from behind the scenes, survived to the end of the Cold War & the USSR's demise. A Covert Life has all the elements of a classic spy thriller: surveillance operations & stings, love affairs & bungled acts of sabotage, many thoroughly illegal. It is written with the easy hand of a fine biographer (Washington Post Book World called Ted Morgan 'a master storyteller') & provides a history of the Cold War & a glimpse into the machinery of the CIA while also revealing many hitherto hidden details of the superpower confrontation that dominated postwar global politics.

Genres: History, Biography

416 pages, Hardcover

First published March 16, 1999

About the author

Born Saint-Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont*, he used the name Sanche de Gramont as his byline (and also on his books) during the early part of his career. He worked as a journalist for many years, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for local reporting written under pressure of a deadline. He first came to the United States in 1937, and became a naturalized citizen in February 1977, at which time he had his name legally changed to Ted Morgan. He was a National Book Award finalist in 1982 for Maugham: A Biography.


*His father was a military pilot who died in an accident in 1943, at which point he inherited the title "Comte de Gramont". He was properly styled "Saint-Charles Armand Gabriel, Comte de Gramont" until he renounced his title upon becoming a U.S. citizen in 1977.

Reviews

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few men who told Stalin to his face to go to hell and lived to tell the tale! His epic confrontation with Stalin in Moscow in front of the assembled leadership of the communist leaders of the world was remarkable and contrasts strongly with the fawning and obsequious manner in which other US leaders treated Father Stalin...... Lovestone was an early convert to the cult of Marxism Leninism who rose to lead the US Communist Party but fell foul of Stalin. He became one of the most effective Cold War warriors fighting communism using soft power to support democratic Labour movements across newly liberated Europe and post colonial Africa, Asia and South America. His unsurpassed understanding of the machinations of the Comintern and its successor labour, youth, cultural and other fronts enabled him to covertly support democratic alternatives and roll back Soviet influence. Lovestone's covert war bought him into conflict with proponents of detente who believed failed to understand the Soviet agenda. A fascinating book examining the life of a complex and secretive man who very seldom emerged from the shadows. A great read.....

"After so many meetings and so many speeches, after their repeated verbal bludgeoning, Stalin had expected obedience, but the mulish Americans refused to cave in. By now it was well past midnight, and Stalin rose again to deliver the coup de grâce. Starting out calmly, in a low monotone, he worked himself up into a fit of barely controlled rage. “We ought to value the firmness and stubbornness displayed here by ten of the eleven American delegates,” he began. “But true Bolshevik courage does not consist in placing one’s individual will above the collective will of the Comintern.… Comrades Gitlow and Lovestone announced here with aplomb that their convictions do not permit them to submit to the decisions of the Presidium.… But only anarchists can talk like that, not Bolsheviks, not Leninists.”

What if a majority of workers in a factory wanted to go on strike, Stalin asked, and a minority refused to walk out? What would those workers be called? “You know that such workers are usually called scabs,” he said, “and for scabs, there is plenty of room in our cemeteries.” Scab was perhaps the worst name that one Communist could call another, far worse than rotten diplomatist, speculator, or opportunist.

By now Stalin could not contain his anger; his voice rose almost to a shout in a passage that was deleted from the printed text of his speech: “And you, who are you? Who do you think you are? Trotsky defied me. Where is he? Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? Bukharin defied me. Where is he? And you! Who are you? Yes, you will go back to America. But when you get there, nobody will know you except your wives.”

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a book this has some profound weaknesses, but I nonetheless became insufferable for months as anecdotes from it were the only things I could think about. Lovestone is a type of character I absolutely adore: a quiet, shadowy wielder of influence who shuns the spotlight but persists Zelig-like in the halls of power. Some of the setpieces are simply extraordinary.

The description of Lovestone bringing a rowdy coterie of American working folk, from steelworkers to sharecroppers, and having them do a surround bollocking of Stalin in Moscow in 1929 … what a scene! What I wouldn't give to see Iannucci or someone dramatize that.

Communist-to-conservative conversion stories aren't exactly rare. The term neoconservative exists for a reason, and Lovestone trod ground that Max Eastman, Whittaker Chambers, and his childhood friend Bert Wolfe trod as well. He started out working with John Reed and ended up working with Chuck Colson. But as much common ground as he found with the right, and despite his positions in the 1970s being to the right of Nixon (due to his rejection of detente and the China opening), I'm not sure it makes sense to call him a conservative per se. He was always committed to the labor movement: his loyalty was to the AFL, and he refused to work with Franco and other right-wing anticommunist regimes. He preferred the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher to the Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer.

At times Morgan meanders a bit too long on internecine rivalries within labor and the specifics of this or that scheme Lovestone and James Jesus Angleton cooked up. The highlights of this section are the tales of Louise Page Morris, Lovestone's lover and more importantly a talented spy who abandoned her marriage and her Boston Brahmin upbringing so she could jetset around, wooing General Nasser and Chiang Ching-kuo and the like. Morgan clearly leans heavily on interviews with her, and she arguably is an even more deserving biographical subject. But every moment spent on Lovestone's grudge against the Reuther brothers was dull.

There are also some factual weaknesses. Morgan credits Lovestone with coming up with the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" for JFK, and with setting up the Hard Hat Riot of 1971; historians Andreas Daum and David Paul Kuhn, in their booklength treatments of these two incidents, both cite Morgan so they can say that he's dead wrong. These are cases of Morgan straining to exaggerate Lovestone's influence. He needn't bother; the man clearly played a major role in the way in the Cold War progressed, and in the preservation of liberal democracy in France and West Germany in the late 1940s. No need to stuff envelopes, even if that's what Jay would've done.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly readable overview of Lovestone's role in the 1920s Communist Party; his sidekick Irving Brown's role in preventing the Communist parties from taking over the labor movement in postwar Germany, France, and Italy; Lovestone's relationship with George Meany and James Angleton; and the anti-colonial activities of Pagie Morris and Maida Springer in Africa in the 1950s. Morris and Springer clearly deserve their own biographies.

I found three major gaps.

First, "A Covert Life" left me wondering what Lovestone's organization was up to in the 1930s besides a botched intervention in the United Auto Workers. Important as that was for making lifelong enemies of Walter and Victor Reuther, they also conducted union organizing drives in the New York area. Was Lovestone directly involved? Robert Alexander's "The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s" was published long before this book, but it isn't even in the bibliography. This gap seems to express Morgan's excessive reliance on a sources that don't include labor history archives other than what Lovestone was silly enough to put in writing.

Second, Morgan skips over the entire second world war. In 1941, Lovestone started working with George Meany. In 1945, Meany put him in charge of foreign operations in Europe. How come? Lovestone and Brown must have done something in the meantime. Partly as the result of a deal negotiated by Meany, AFL and CIO memberships expanded geometrically during the war. Was Lovestone involved in any of the local organizing or in fending off Communist Party takeover bids at the local level? Was he involved, even peripherally, in reducing Trotskyist influence in the Teamsters?

And third, why couldn't Lovestone find replacements for habitual bunglers like Harry Goldberg and Richard Deverill (2 of his staff of 6) to work in Japan, India, and Indonesia? I get the impression that the higher ups considered their work so unimportant that they directed all their competent operators and organizers elsewhere.

4 stars for what it includes, -1 star for the omissions.

[Eric Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jay Lovestone, who is largely forgotten today, led an extraordinary life – much of it in the shadows. He was one of the founders of the Communist Party in the US, and rose to become its general secretary by the late 1920s. He survived the various faction fights in the Communist International until 1929, when he bet on the wrong horse. In supporting Bukharin against Stalin, Lovestone very nearly signed his own death warrant. He managed to escape from Soviet Russia and returned to the US, no longer having a political home. For a decade or so, he and few hundred supporters tried their best to curry favour with the Stalinists and be readmitted to the ranks of the Party. They failed, despite doing things like declaring the Moscow show trials to be free and fair. By the time Stalin and Hitler had signed their 1939 non-aggression pact, Lovestone knew that his time as a Communist was finished. He was recruited by David Dubinsky, the leader of one of America’s largest unions, to run international labour work, including building support for the US entering the war on the Allied side. Lovestone continued in that role, as the head of the American labour movement’s international work, for some three decades. His main job – indeed his only job – was to fight against the Communists that had previously been his comrades. Lovestone used the tactics of the Stalinists against the Stalinists. He was manipulative, deceitful and utterly ruthless. And once he started the work, he never looked back. He died an embittered and lonely man. Ted Morgan tells the story well, though he has a tendency to bounce around a bit and sometimes it’s hard to pick up the thread of Lovestone’s life.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jay Lovestone was one of the primary founders of the American Communist Party, only breaking with the Soviets during the purges and then becoming, in effect, the foreign affairs agent for the AFL (and, covertly, the CIA). My interest in him arises primarily from having spent my summers growing up in and around Bridgman, Michigan, the little town near Lake Michigan where the Party. It was there, at a private resort, that representatives of the two major pro-Bolshevik factions which had arisen from the Socialist Party of America settled their differences and united. Lovestone was one of them. (The preface to this is portrayed in the movie "Reds".)

This biography of Lovestone is very detailed, representing a lot of work by its author. Sadly, it's pretty dry. My interest was primarily in the communist period of his life. The material about the AFL and CIA was of less interest except for the discussion of Lovestone's friendship and professional association with James Jesus Angleton, for decades of head of Counterintelligence at the agency.

[Gabriel Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whatever your politics, Jay Lovestone's life is an important story seldom told, a prequel to the Cold War. Just as McCarthy is a household name, but Dies is forgotten, so too Dulles and Kennan are household names, but Lovestone is forgotten. He was 29 and still a communist the year Debs died, and Lovestone's life continued in quite another direction. Read all about it. And if you remain curious about this era one of the greatest American collections is the Tamiment special collection of the NYU library.

[Roger Mattson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovestone, finally out of the shadows

The book is well researched. The insights to Ray Murphy, Pagie Morris and James Angleton are priceless. Lovestone was a key to winning the Cold War.

[Cheryl]

335.4309
Morgan
1999