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Lane Kirkland by Arch Puddington
- Abstract
One day in 1984, when the outcome of the cold war was still in the balance, the phone rang in my office at the Wall Street Journal/ Europe in Brussels, precipitating an encounter of the kind that changes one’s thinking. My caller, an official of the AFL-CIO, was inviting me to meet Lane Kirkland, the trade-union federation’s president, in the bar of the Hilton hotel.
Kirkland was in town for a meeting of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, an institution established at the close of World War II to vie with the Soviet-backed World Federation of Trade Unions for the leadership of organized labor in Europe. Over drinks, I found Kirkland highly exercised by the Reagan administration’s recent decision to permit the Communist regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski in Poland to rejoin the International Monetary Fund. Instead, as I would report a few days later in the Journal, Kirkland advocated the imposition of crippling sanctions on Warsaw, and legal action to force Poland either to pay its foreign debts or to face default.
About the Author
Seth Lipsky is the editor of the New York Sun
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