Donald Slaiman is a department head at the AFL-CIO. It was Slaiman who tapped Tom Kahn to head the Department of International Affairs, despite the fact that Kahn had no previous work experience with labor unions.(4) Slaiman is on the boards of LID and APRI.(6,19)
Bruce McColm is the executive director of Freedom House.(7) He is the only North American to serve on the Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.(11) He served on Freedom House's presidential election observer teams in Haiti and Surinam.(11)
Penn Kemble was the organizer of the "Gang of Four"--four young Democrats who became contra supporters in the mid-1980s. Kemble and his crew played a key behind-the-scenes role in obtaining congressional support for aid to the Nicaraguan contras.(35) Kemble was the co-founder and president of the board of the Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America (PRODEMCA).(42) PRODEMCA received funding from a conduit for money and arms in Ollie North's Iran-Contra network.(35) It also received major funding from NED for support of La Prensa and other anti-Sandinista political and media groups inside Nicaragua.(2,13,14) Kemble was co-founder of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), an organization with the goal of "restoring democratic values" to churches.(43) IRD targeted progressive religious organizations active in third world countries and charged them with aiding communism.(44) IRD has received funding from the U.S. Information Agency.(43) Kemble was a founder of the CDM and currently serves on its executive committee.(23,28) He is also on the boards of LID and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the Democratic Party's conduit for NED funding.(6,45) Kemble's sister, Eugenia Kemble, is the executive director of FTUI.(4)
Rachelle Horowitz is the wife of Thomas Donohue, secretary/treasurer of the AFL-CIO.(4) She is also on the boards of APRI, LID and the Bayard Rustin Fund.(19,6,21) Horowitz was on the board of the AFT, and was a founder of the CPD.(46,23)
Jay Mazur, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, is a vice president of the AFL-CIO and on the boards of AIFLD, FTUI, AALC, and AAFLI.(29,4,47,30) He served or serves on the board of the National Committee for Labor Israel--Histadrut.(4) Mazur also serves on the boards of LID and APRI.(6,19)
John Roche was a founding member of the CPD and serves on its current executive committee.(23,48) He is on the advisory committee of the CDM, and the boards of LID and APRI.(28,6,19) Roche also serves on the board of the IRC.(17)
Jeane Kirkpatrick was a prominent member of CDM and a member of the CPD.(23) She is on the board of the Committee for the Free World, a stridently anticommunist group of neoconservative intellectuals who promoted their views in the media.(49,50) She was also connected with PRODEMCA. Kirkpatrick is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and is or was on the "faculty" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).(40,51) CSIS was closely tied to the Reagan administration and has been called "a parking lot for former government big shots."(51) Kirkpatrick made the keynote address and was honored at a reception at the secretive, rightwing foreign policy group, the Council for National Policy.(52)
Max Kampleman was vice chairman of the CDM and was on the CPD.(40) Midge Decter, executive director of the Committee for the Free World, joined him on those boards and also served on the board of the influential, conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.(40) Decter was the managing editor of Commentary, an intellectual neoconservative publication edited by her husband, Norman Podhoretz.(40) Elliott Abrams, former Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs and a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, is Decter's son-in-law.(40)
Misc: Albert Shanker of the AFT said of the Social Democrats, "They've had a certain type of tough political education...They know they will never attain power electorally. So they learn other things--how to caucus, organize factions, draw up policy papers, handle ideas. It's a good training ground for politics."(2)
SD/USA served as the spring board for major neoconservative figures Penn Kemble, Rachelle Horowitz, and Carl Gershman, among others.(2)
Comments: SD/USA is an important and powerful group because of the jobs and connections of its membership. It numbers among its members a strange combination of intellectual neoconservatives and top union officials. The Reagan administration brought these groups together by allowing them both a considerable amount of influence and power. So, while the SD/USA name may not be familiar to many, its membership gave intellectual credence to the politics and policies of the Reagan administration and provided "cover" for Democrats who supported an agressive anticommunist foreign policy.
It is questionable whether this extends into the current administration. However, its role in private or quasi-governmental organizations is still intact. Its members dominate the AFL-CIO's Department of International Affairs, and play key roles in NED, and in its major grantees, and dominate the upper echelons of the AFT and APRI. Its members hold sway at Commentary and in the Committee for a Free World.
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