Labour’s Secretary Lost

Or
What’s the Wirtz that Could Happen?
William Willard Wirtz, the last surviving member of the Kennedy administration, has died at the age of 98. A member of the War Labor Board during World War II, then a member of the National Wage Stabilization Board, Wirtz was well versed in bureaucracy when he was named Secretary of Labor in 1962. He remained in the post through the end of the Johnson administration before returning to private practice in 1969. He was credited with caving in to labor to end several union strikes in the 1960s, for coddling slackers as part of Johnson’s Great Society by offering training and education to further opportunities for the undereducated and underemployed, and for beginning the Washington tradition of lip service to the equal pay provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and is the namesake of the library at the Labor Department. Like much of the nation, Wirtz disagreed with Johnson’s position on the Vietnam War. Unlike much of the nation, he did so in the Oval Office, as the first member of the Cabinet member to publicly support a platform plank calling for an end to bombing in Vietnam, and then having such a heated argument that Johnson questioned whether Wirtz was trying to get fired. Johnson did demand, and received, Wirtz’s resignation in October 1968, then asked him to withdraw the resignation for fear of how it might cost Hubert Humphrey one of the 13 states he would carry in the 1968 election.