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At war's end, Goldberg returned to Chicago and turned full time to being a labor lawyer. Those years are fondly remembered by his two children, Barbara, now 25, and married to a Boston intern, and Robert, now a 20-year-old junior at Amherst. During the summers, Goldberg installed his children and his wife Dorothy, a former social worker and an abstractionist painter, in a two-room cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan; he showed up on Friday nights laden with cartons of Chinese food. Goldberg appointed himself sole arbitrator of family disputes, once ruled that Barbara could not wear lipstick until she was 14. Such decisions were not always popular—and on at least one occasion, the kids picketed the house with signs that read DADDY UNFAIR.
In 1948 Goldberg moved to Washington as general counsel for both the Steelworkers and the C.I.O. When he went to Washington, labor's political and moral standing was jeopardized by the existence of eleven Communist-controlled unions within the C.I.O. Goldberg directed the meticulous, scrupulously legal C.I.O. trials that ended with the banishment of all eleven. In 1949 he devised the pension and insurance plans for the Steelworkers that were finally accepted by industry in a labor breakthrough that was followed up by the U.A.W. and other mass-production unions. "This really transformed American life." Goldberg says unabashedly. "In all this, I take great personal satisfaction."
"Sorry Mess." When the C.I.O. and the A.F.L. wanted to merge but remained suspicious of each other's motives, Goldberg drew up a "no-raiding" clause that was agreeable to both sides, then worked out the complex details of the merger itself in 1955. Two years later, he was a prime mover in the expulsion of the Teamsters from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And in 1959 he was labor's legal strategist during a no-holds-barred Steelworkers' strike that lasted 116 days. When the Government invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to stop the strike for a cooling-off period, Goldberg fought the case to the Supreme Court—where he lost, even though the Justices concurred in public praise of his legal performance. The strike left Goldberg with a suspected gastric ulcer (an exploratory operation found nothing) and the firm conviction that labor and management had to find some better means of resolving their differences than by striking. Says Goldberg: "The whole thing was a sorry mess. I criticized the Government then, and I criticize it now, for letting the strike go on much too long. The recession we have just been through was in large part set off by the length of the steel strike."
Brief Sputter. Goldberg had met Jack Kennedy while testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee. The two men became friends with a common interest. Says Goldberg: "We would sit around discussing the philosophy of various aspects of labor for hours." When President-elect Kennedy tapped him for Labor Secretary, Goldberg told him to discuss the choice with other people. Kennedy did, got an affirmative consensus, although George Meany sputtered briefly before agreeing. (Because Goldberg has never carried a union membership card, Meany has never really considered him an honest-to-overalls labor man.)