Here is where Scoop Jackson became a principled anti-communist. Here is where the young Congressman Jackson got a bitter and lasting taste of what modem political violence and totalitarian tyranny did to human beings. In the immediate wake of Scoop’s untimely death, many of his friends commented on what was probably the seminal experience of Jackson’s life: his visit, in 1945, to the recently liberated death camp at Buchenwald. But it is in Homer’s essay that the gravamen of the Jackson enterprise comes into clearest focus. The issues addressed run the gamut, from arms control policy (Richard Perle) to human rights (Charles Homer), China (Michel Oksenberg), and Central America (Ryan Malarkey).

Jackson, a strong-minded man if there ever was one, attracted strong-minded people to his employ. The book is a labor of love, but the overall tone is one of refreshing seriousness, not hagiography.

Jackson and National Security is a collection of essays by former Jackson staffers, edited by long-time Jackson aide Dorothy Fosdick. The hegemony of those tribunes of the sundry liberations of the 1960s, now on display in the presidential campaign, might have been broken, and the “center” could have been in a rather different place than it now seems to be. Jackson been its senior statesman in 1988. Surely the national Democratic Party would have been different had Henry M. Who, since Jackson’s death, has held both administration and congressional toes to the fire of the Kissinger Commission Report? If Jackson had been on the scene, pressing both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue toward bipartisanship, would we have suffered the nine-month debacle of the Iran/Contra affair? The odds seem long. In the current debate over Central America, who remembers, much less tries to implement, the “Jackson Plan” and the Kissinger Commission Report? Yet here was an effort to combine social, economic, and political reform in the region with a clear sense of the geopolitical and security issues at stake. The Reagan administration might also have been different. In that respect, Jackson has never been replaced. As long as Jackson was there, things couldn’t get completely out of hand. Combining, in his unique way, Roman gravitas and Norwegian stolidness, Scoop Jackson kept things honest by setting the boundaries of reasonable discussion on national security issues. Jackson was the ballast of the Senate when the debate turned to America’s role in world affairs. Now, post-Scoop, the ship not only seemed to lack a rudder: the ship lacked ballast. One of Jackson’s aides remarked to your editor, some months after Scoop Jackson died, that he had never before realized the crucial function Jackson served until he had watched the Senate without him. Senate would have been a different place. Some things would almost certainly have been different. What if, to get to the point here, Senator Henry M.

What if the Confederacy had won the War between the States? If Alexander Kerensky had made reformist social democracy work after the fall of the Czar in 1917? If Woodrow Wilson had agreed to see Ho Chi Minh during the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference? If the Allies had invaded France in 1943, and World War II had ended with American and British troops in Berlin, western Poland, Prague, and Budapest? ? is an endlessly fascinating historical game.

Scoop jackson