The late U.S. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.) finally is being recognized on the campus of the University of Washington. According to the New York Times, a bust of the senator is now on display at the university’s School of International Studies, after years of fears that it would be vandalized during the final throes of the Reagan-era struggles against Soviet expansionism.
Jackson was a complicated figure, as the Times profile notes. He was a New Deal economic liberal, who served as a mentor to former House Speaker Tom Foley. He was also a hardline Cold Warrior who supported the kind of defense build-up that helped lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. He was a mentor in this respect to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and other neo-conservative thinkers. In his presidential candidacies in 1972 and 1976, he combined a pro-labor economic policy with a conservative foreign policy and a traditionalist social policy, all against the leftist stream of George McGovern.
I’m not entirely comfortable with Jackson’s ideological legacy, either at the AFL-CIO headquarters on economic policy or at the Weekly Standard offices on foreign policy. But I consider him an under-valued American hero. When the Nixon-era Republicans and the McGovernite Democrats both seemed willing to, in widely varying degrees, trust the Soviets as a permanent presence on the world scene, Jackson understood that what was at stake was about more than American dominance on the world stage. It was about real people, bodies and bones and souls, held in bondage to a totalitarian dictatorship. He made sure that, every time Soviet issues were raised, that we understood that this conflict was ultimately moral in nature. And he did so at some personal risk. After all, Jackson was not an Okie from Muskogee but a senator from among the bluest of blue states, Washington.
I don’t think Scoop Jackson’s policies are immediately applicable to every question of 21st century public policy. There are differences between combating Soviet expansionism and Islamic jihadism, to be sure. And Jackson’s arguments are not as simple as the call for exporting democracy around the world. But Jackson’s courage in the face of what seemed to be a permanent Iron Curtain is a model of moral leadership.
This morning I kissed my two sons, both of whom were born in a Russian orphanage. And I recognize that they would never have American citizenship and American parents if it were not for hard decisions made by men such as Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Scoop Jackson. Not all of those decisions were right, but an entire generation of Americans, Europeans, and Soviet dissidents knew that there is indeed such a thing as an evil empire.
I’m glad Scoop Jackson’s bust is now prominently displayed. And I hope no Soviet sympathizer decides to vandalize it. But even if the bust is emblazoned with hammers and sickles, the real monument to Scoop Jackson is a Berlin Wall that no longer stands and a Soviet flag that no longer flies over the Kremlin.
