Lew explores the career of United Autoworkers (UAW) union leader Walter Reuther, and the central role he played in the implementation of the Fabian strategy in America. As a young man, he spent time in the communist USSR, wrote glowing letters home about his experience, signing one of them “Yours for a Soviet America.”
Reuther was a central figure in the bloody battles against GM, Chrysler, and the prolonged struggle against Henry Ford. After the war, in the charged anti-communist atmosphere in America, Reuther ditches the communists, turning on a dime as do many Fabian leftists in suddenly becoming a “Cold-war liberal.” He defeats a pro-Soviet candidate by a hundred votes to take control of the UAW. He then took the leadership of the Congress Industrial Organizations (CIO), ejecting several Communist-led unions from this umbrella organization for labor. This allowed Reuther to then orchestrate a merger with the American Federation of Labor, forming the AFL-CIO.
Reuther held membership in the exclusive, establishment one-worlder Atlantic Union Committee. He was also Vice-President of the United World Federalists. The globalist policies of these two groups brought the near-demise of the car industry in Michigan and its UAW members.
Reuther became a key player in electing John Kennedy president in 1960. He was a founder of the socialist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which filled many key positions in the Kennedy Administration. At the same time, Reuther fostered the development of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This major radical youth group of the 1960s launched a huge community-organizing effort backed by Reuther, and then played a central role in antiwar protests during Vietnam. The most radical faction of SDS later formed the Weather Underground, which perpetrated bombings and other mayhem all over America.
Walther Reuther was also indispensable to the civil rights movement and particularly to the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. He marched with MLK over the Edmund Pettis Bridge in the “Bloody Sunday” protest. Reuther was the power behind the March on Washington, providing funding, personnel, and the huge sound system for the 250,000+ assembled.
After JFK’s death Reuther worked closely with Lyndon Johnson and was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the huge new program called Medicare, among others. Reuther helped start Cesar Chavez’s Farmworkers union, as well as the Earth Day movement, which spread environmentalism across the nation.
Reuther made many enemies. He died in a plane crash in 1970 that was likely a successful assassination, the fourth attempt on his life during his career.