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Nothing so irritates Harry Bridges, now 62, as the notion that the automation agreement means that he is mellowing. Says he: "We've merely adopted a very selfish, narrow program to take care of the people in our union." Yet others insist that he really enjoys his new status. Explains Bridges' "friendly foe," Maritime Negotiator J. Paul St. Sure: "It got a little trying for him to hear all the time about what a rough s.o.b. he was. He likes his present role." Although Bridges lives in a modest two-bedroom house with his third wife Noriko, 40, a Nisei, on a salary of $14,040 a year, he nonetheless basks in the welcomes he receives at such, big businessmen's haunts as San Francisco's Commonwealth and Bohemian Clubs.
"We Let Him Talk." Bridges' politics remain curious. He says he is a registered Republican, but the only picture on his office wall is one of F.D.R. Yet Bridges is still sympathetic to Communist causes—a tendency that kept him in trouble with the U.S. Government for years. The U.S. repeatedly tried to deport Bridges to his native Australia, once got him convicted of perjury for swearing in his 1945 application for U.S. citizenship that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. But Bridges won that on appeal, and eventually won every other case too.
Anyway, across a bargaining table, Bridges' politics do not seem to matter. "Harry will make a big speech at the table about Cuba," says Matson Vice President Wayne Horvitz. "We let him talk, and then we get back to business." Bridges explains it all in his own jargon: "There are some labels, Communism and socialism, liberalism and conservatism, that mean something. But Republican and Democrat—those labels don't mean anything. As against talking left and moving right, I think it is more honest to talk right and move right."
And let no one call him a labor statesman.