Description:
A Covert Life tersely chronicles the life of one of the more obscure warriors of the cold war. Jay Lovestone, born Jacob Liebstein, cut his teeth as a youth in the leftist street culture of New York's Lower East Side. Although present at the formation of the U.S. Communist Party in 1919, he was forced out of the Comintern in 1929 by Stalin's political maneuverings. By the end of the Depression, Lovestone broke cleanly with the Soviets and, after World War II, founded the Free Trade Union Commission, an AFL-backed movement that organized noncommunist labor unions outside of the United States. He also developed an intelligence-gathering unit within the organization that traded information with the CIA until the mid-1960s. Lovestone lived a fairly reclusive life, shunning the spotlight that some of his more colorful colleagues and coconspirators, such as James Jesus Angleton and George Meany, craved. As a result, Ted Morgan's biography emphasizes Lovestone's political fights both within the Communist Party and against it. Although Morgan believes that his subject's anticommunist beliefs were genuine, one finishes A Covert Life with the conclusion that Lovestone's motivations lay in his obsessive love of political intrigue rather than the ideological passions that moved both the far left and extreme right for much of the 20th century. While the book doesn't dwell in what Vivian Gornick called "the romance of American communism," it does present a precise portrait of how this ideology was stifled and how the American labor movement aided the intelligence community in combating Soviet influence over international labor. --John M. Anderson
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