Henry M. Jackson - Legislative Career

Legislative Career

Jackson successfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1940 and took his seat in the House of Representatives with the 77th Congress on January 3, 1941. From that date forward, Jackson did not lose a congressional election.

Jackson joined the Army when the United States entered World War II, but left when Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Congressmen to return home or resign their seats. As a representative, he visited the Buchenwald concentration camp a few days after its liberation in 1945. He attended the International Maritime Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1945 with the American delegation, and was elected president of the same conference in 1946, when it was held in Seattle, Washington. From 1945 to 1947 Jackson was also the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs. In the 1952 election, Jackson relinquished his seat in the House for a run for one of Washington's Senate seats. Jackson won that election, soundly defeating Republican Senator Harry P. Cain, and remained a Senator for over thirty years. Jackson died in office in 1983 after winning re-election for the fifth time in 1982.

Though Jackson opposed the excesses of Joe McCarthy (who had traveled to Washington State to campaign against him in 1952), he also criticized Dwight Eisenhower for not spending enough on national defense, and called for more inter-continental ballistic missiles in the national arsenal. Jackson's support for nuclear weapons resulted in a primary challenge from the left in 1958, when he handily defeated Seattle peace activist Alice Franklin Bryant before winning re-election with 67 percent of the vote—a total he topped the next four times he ran for re-election.

Jackson boasted one of the strongest records on civil rights during the civil rights movement. He supported the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In April 1968, responding to the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Jackson gave a speech in which he talked about the legacy and injustice of inequality.

In 1963, Jackson was made chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which became the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1977, a position he held until 1981. In the 1970s, Jackson joined with fellow senators Ernest Hollings and Edward Kennedy in a press conference to oppose President Gerald Ford's request that Congress end Richard Nixon's price controls on domestic oil, which had helped to cause the gasoline lines during the 1973 Oil Crisis.

Jackson authored the National Environmental Policy Act and was a leader of the fight for statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. In 1974, Jackson sponsored the Jackson-Vanik amendment in the Senate (with Charles Vanik sponsoring it in the House) which denied normal trade relations to certain countries with non-market economies that restricted the freedom of emigration. The amendment was intended to help refugees, particularly minorities, specifically Jews, to emigrate from the Soviet Bloc. Jackson and his assistant, Richard Perle, also lobbied personally for some people who were affected by this law—among them Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky. Jackson also led the opposition within the Democratic Party against the SALT II treaty, and was one of the leading proponents of increased foreign aid to Israel.

For decades, Democrats who supported a strong international presence for the United States have been called "Scoop Jackson Democrats", the term even being used to describe contemporary Democrats such as Joe Lieberman and R. James Woolsey, Jr.

Jackson served almost his entire Senate tenure concurrently with his good friend and Democratic colleague Warren G. Magnuson. "Scoop" and "Maggie"—as they affectionately called each other—were two of the most effective delegations in the history of the United States Senate in terms of "bringing home the bacon" for their home state. Washington State received nearly one sixth of public works appropriations, even though it ranked 23rd in population.