Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War

In Between a River and a Mountain, Edmund Wehrle details American labor’s surprisingly complex relationship to the American war in Vietnam. Breaking from the simplistie story of hardhat patriotism, Wehrle uses newly-released archival material to demonstrate the AFL-CIO’s continuing dedication to social, political and economic reform in Vietnam. The complex, sometimes turbulent, relationship between American union leaders and their counterparts in the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (known as the CVT) led to dangerous political compromises: the AFL-CIO eventually accepted much-needed support for their Vietnamese activities from the CIA, while the CVT’s need to sustain their relationship with the Americans lured them into entanglements with a succession of corrupt Saigon governments. It has long been believed that the AFL-CIO submitted to a junior partnership with the U.S. government in the 1950s and ‘60s. Edmund Wehrle explodes this simplification, describing the AFL-CIO’s fight to maintain its reformist foreign affairs agenda. The union did make alliances of convenience to advance its causes, however, and as these compromises piled up, the union’s reputation eventually suffered. Although the story’s endpoint - the painfully divided and weakened labor movement of the 1970s - may be familiar, Wehrle offers an entirely new understanding of the historical forces behind that decline, unraveling his story with considerable sophistication and narrative skill.