Senator Henry Jackson: 1912-1983
Most of Congress had something to say about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, but in the state of Washington, Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson's reactions had a double resonance: his constituents at the Boeing Co. built the 747 airliner, and during his 42 years on Capitol Hill, he had been more profoundly and articulately wary of the Soviet Union than any other national Democrat. Last week Jackson was recovering at home from a chest cold picked up during a trip to China, but on Thursday morning, he shrugged it off and drove into Seattle to talk to reporters about the aerial atrocity. It was "an act of barbarism," he said, and could have been planned in advance.
But for all his characteristic harshness, he was, as usual, thoughtful and careful. The U.S. should not strike back militarily, he said, adding, "The strongest arm of response is the moral one, one of outrage." Then should the matter be brought before the United Nations? Replied Jackson: "I would rather call a prayer meeting." Afterward Jackson, 71, went back to his wife Helen in Everett (pop. 54,400), the lumbermill town north of Seattle where he was born and raised. And where, a few hours after he got home, he suffered a heart attack and died.
"Jackson," said Sam Nunn, his Democratic colleague from Georgia, "truly was a giant in the Senate." He had decisively won six elections to the Senate, the latest last November, and had been the de facto leader of his party's conservative wing. Jackson felt that his onetime comrades had turned too easy on Communism, or in some cases too hard on social programs, while he remained the archetypal cold war liberal, determined that the U.S. spend generously on guns and butter. "I don't worry about ideologies," he said. "I've been called a Communist, a socialist, a conservative." In 1972 and 1976, he was a credible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.
His death surprised those who knew him. Jackson was fit and industrious, and never smoked. He had no history of heart trouble, and lived prudently. The habit of prudence was bred by his parents, Norwegian immigrants. Nicknamed Scoop after a comic-strip character who appeared in the Everett Herald (which he delivered for years), Jackson practiced frankness young: in the third grade, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he admitted he wanted Warren G.Harding's job.
He started at the University of Washington as the Depression began and returned to Everett with a law degree, taking a job with the new Federal Emergency Relief Administration. But his notions of public service were more ambitious. At 26, he was elected Snohomish County prosecutor; then in 1940, a year after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Jackson was sent there for real, elected to the House. He caught the nation's eye by speaking out early on against the witch-hunting excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1952 Jackson won election to the Senate over a Red-baiting Republican, and sat on the committee that grilled Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.