Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,529

This is the grave of Scoop Jackson.

Born in 1912 in Everett, Washington, Henry Jackson grew up in a Norwegian immigrant family that had changed its name from Gresseth to fit in more with Americans. Not sure how necessary that was in the Everett of the early 20th century, but whatever, hardly uncommon. He got his nickname “Scoop” from a comic book character that he supposedly looked like. He was a very smart kid and managed to go to college at Stanford. Then he came back home and got a law degree from the University of Washington, which he completed in 1935. He was admitted to the bar shortly after and started practicing in Everett. Quite politically ambitious, he became the prosecuting attorney for Snohomish County in 1938 and soon got a reputation for going hard after bootleggers. Never quite understood the need for bootleggers in the post-Prohibition era.

Jackson ran for Congress in 1940 and won, only 28 years old. He was one of the congressmen to immediately join the military upon the nation entering World War II. There was a lot of this and for many of them, it was to score political points at home to advance their career, including from the scheming Lyndon B. Johnson, another young ambitious congressman at this time. But this got in the way of governance and FDR ordered them all back home and told them to knock it off, basically. He also was a huge proponent of locking the Japanese-Americans on the west coast into concentration camps during World War II, which hardly made him unique, and also wanted to keep them out after the war. Depressing stuff there.

Very quickly, Jackson became one of the congressional leaders on foreign policy and defense issues, to the point that he later became famous for this point. Now, Jackson was in fact a liberal on many issues, including Black rights. He was a major proponent in the Senate of Johnson’s big civil rights bills. His later devotion to blowing up the world with Boeing-made products has allowed us to forget this about the man. I get why–how many details of leading senators of the 70s are even remembered today? But still, it is an important part of his story too. We will get to this. But Jackson certainly made his name on foreign policy and national defense. He was one of the first American politicians to visit a German concentration camp, with a trip to Buchenwald shortly after its liberation. He also attended the  International Maritime Conference in 1945 and was soon the head of this organization, He became an early Cold Warrior. He generally despised Joseph McCarthy and his tactics and wasn’t particularly concerned with charades to “root out communists,” but he definitely despised real communists and believed the Eisenhower administration wasn’t taking communism and national defense seriously enough.

In 1952, Jackson took on Harry Cain for the Senate and defeated the Republican incumbent. A Senate institution was born. He became a huge hawk, calling for more ICBMs. The Seattle left always hated him and tried to primary him in 1958 with a peace activist, but he easily swatted that aside. His national defense credentials also prevented serious challenges from Republicans, who could hardly disagree with him on his core issue. John F. Kennedy, who framed himself in a similar way except for openly being buddies with McCarthy and his redbaiting, initially wanted Jackson as his VP candidate in 1960 and was only dissuaded when the party machinery told him that he really needed a southerner to balance the ticket and went with Lyndon Johnson. One reasons for that is that Jackson was really quite good on civil rights issues, which meant two yankees for the South.

Again, Jackson was in many ways quite a progressive politician. I have researched him a good bit for my book in progress on the Northwest since 1960 and he was pretty great on environmental issues, much more so than Mark Hatfield, who gets more laudatory responses from liberals because the latter opposed the war in Vietnam and Jackson most certainly supported it. I get that, but there was more than one issue going on in the 60s and Jackson was far better than that corporate hack Hatfield when it came to things such as forest protection. Well, except for Vietnamese forests, to be fair. Jackson was the main author of the National Environmental Policy Act, which is merely the most important environmental law in this nation’s history. We really should remember this part of his legacy and remember that Hatfield was horrible on these issues.

But at the same time, there’s no question that Jackson’s main legacy was his love of bombing. The Senator from Boeing was called that for a reason. He got into a lot of trouble at home for trying to turn Fort Lawton into an ICBM base in the middle of Seattle; this site became key to the tribal rights movement of the 70s. He wanted to dump endless foreign aid into Israel, fought to stop normalizing relations with countries that did not allow their citizens to emigrate (read, the Soviet Union and China), and promoted America’s nuclear program endlessly. He also was a major supporter of allowing the oppressed Jews of the Soviet Union to emigrate and did more work than probably any other senator on this issue.

Jackson also became the godfather of the neoconservative movement. In some ways, this really isn’t fair. He never turned his back from liberalism on the domestic front the way that these assholes did. But in terms of being disgusted with the left’s foreign policy, such as it was, after Vietnam, Jackson was right with them. Among his aides in these years were Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Bloody Bill Kristol. I might argue that Jackson was actually a good senator on many issues, but anyone with these aides deserves the negative reputation he gets. That’s quite a group of scoundrels and knaves right there. Yuck. He should have known better and he did not. He is responsible for these people, at least in part.

Jackson desperately wanted to be president. He ran in both 1972 and 1976. 1972 was not a good year for someone like him. The left had taken over the party and not only did Jackson support the war, but he also opposed school busing. So he was persona non grata and dead in the water. By 1976, the party leaders had more or less taken back over. He had a better chance that year, but he made some crucial errors. He was close to labor, but they mostly stayed away, hoping that Hubert Humphrey would run again. He didn’t compete in some key primaries. Of course, his views on foreign policy and Vietnam had made many enemies within the party. Jackson actually did win the Massachusetts and New York primaries, but ran out of money and dropped out after finishing 4th in Pennsylvania. His national ambitions faded, or at least he understood he would never be president.

In 1983, the Soviets shot Korean Air flight 007 out of the sky. It was a great tragedy and an unfortunate incident. Jackson of course ranted and raved about this. He gave a press conference shortly after, damning the Soviets. As he was giving it, he began to not feel well. Footage showed him rubbing his own chest in discomfort. Shortly after, he collapsed and died of an aortic aneurysm. He was 71 years old.

Of course Reagan gave Jackson a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. Why not give one to a Democrat who supported Reagan’s violent and vile foreign policy aims? Another man who loved Jackson was AFL-CIO head Lane Kirkland, as they shared the same foreign policy. Kirkland stated upon Jackson’s death, ”He shared our commitment to social and economic justice and to a strong national defense adequate to protect those values against totalitarians of the left or the right.” Sigh.

Scoop Jackson is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Everett, Washington.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1952, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Bricker is in Columbus, Ohio and John James Williams is in Millsboro, Delaware. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.