Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson (May 31, 1912 – September 1, 1983) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a U.S. representative (1941–1953) and U.S. senator (1953–1983) from the state of Washington. A Cold War liberal and anti-Communist member of the Democratic Party, Jackson supported higher military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union, while also supporting social welfare programs, civil rights, and labor unions.

Born in Everett, Washington, to Norwegian immigrants, Jackson practiced law in Everett, after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law. He won election to Congress in 1940, and joined the Senate in 1953 after defeating incumbent Republican Party senator Harry P. Cain. Jackson supported the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and authored the National Environmental Policy Act, which helped establish the principle of publicly analyzing environmental impacts. He co-sponsored the Jackson–Vanik amendment, which denied normal trade relations to non-capitalist countries with restrictive emigration policies. Jackson served as chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources from 1963 to 1981. He was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic Party nomination, in both the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections. While still serving in the Senate, Jackson died in 1983.

His political beliefs were characterized by support of civil rights, human rights, and safeguarding the environment, but with an equally strong commitment to oppose totalitarianism in general and – with the start of the Cold War — communist rule in particular. Jackson's political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, both of whom previously served as aides to Jackson.

Early life and career Jackson was born in the home of his parents, Marine (née Andersen) and Peter Jackson, in Everett, Washington, on May 31, 1912. His mother and father were both immigrants from Norway. Peter Jackson was born Peter Gresseth in the Kristiansund area, and changed his name when he immigrated. He met Marine, who was born in Alvenes, at the Lutheran church in Everett, where they were married in 1897. Henry was the fifth, and youngest, of the Jackson children; he was nicknamed "Scoop" by his sister in his childhood, after a comic strip character that he was said to have resembled. Jackson was a member of the National Honor Society. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Washington School of Law, where he joined the Delta Chi fraternity.

In 1935, the year of his law school graduation, he was admitted to the bar, and began to practice law in Everett. He found immediate success, and was elected to become the prosecuting attorney for Snohomish County from 1938 to 1940, where he made a name for himself prosecuting bootleggers and gamblers.

United States Representative Jackson successfully ran for the U.S. Congress as a Democrat in 1940 and took his seat in the House of Representatives with the 77th Congress on January 3, 1941. From then on, Jackson did not lose any congressional elections. Jackson joined the Army when the United States entered World War II but left when Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all representatives to return home or resign their seats. He visited the Buchenwald concentration camp a few days after its liberation in 1945. He also visited his parents' native country Norway, where he observed the repatriation to Russia of Red Army soldiers captured by the Nazis, in which he recalled"I remember how reluctant most Russians were to return to the Soviet Union. They knew they would have even less freedom there."

He attended the International Maritime Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1945 with the American delegation, and he was elected president of the same conference in 1946, when it was held in Seattle. From 1945 to 1947, Jackson was also the chairman of the House Indian Affairs Committee.

United States Senator In the 1952 U.S. House election, Jackson relinquished his seat in the House for a run for one of Washington's Senate seats. Jackson soundly defeated Republican senator Harry P. Cain and remained a senator for over thirty years. He was Washington's first U.S. senator to be born in the state. Jackson died in office in 1983 after winning re-election for the fifth time in 1982.

Although Jackson opposed the excesses of Joe McCarthy, who had traveled to Washington state to campaign against him, he criticized Dwight Eisenhower for not spending enough on national defense. Jackson called for more inter-continental ballistic missiles in the national arsenal, and his 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, which he topped the next four times he ran for re-election.

During the 1960 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Jackson was the first choice of fellow senator John F. Kennedy for a running mate; Kennedy became convinced that a Southerner would better balance the ticket. Lyndon B. Johnson was later selected. Jackson boasted one of the strongest records on civil rights during the civil rights movement.Peter J. Ognibene, Scoop: The Life and Politics of Henry Jackson, 1975. He supported the 1957 and the 1964 Civil Rights Acts. On July 22, 1965, Johnson signed the Water Resources Planning Act into law, citing Jackson as one of the Congress members to "have made a very invaluable and very farsighted contribution to America's future." In April 1968, responding to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson gave a speech 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 Gerald Ford's request for Congress to end Richard Nixon's price controls on domestic oil, which had provoked oil companies into withholding gasoline during the 1973 oil crisis. Kaufman writes that, after 1968, Jackson "emerged as an intellectual and political leader in the perennial struggle of U.S. foreign policy to reconcile ideals with self-interest."

Jackson authored the National Environmental Policy Act, which has been called one of the most influential environmental laws in history. It helped to stimulate similar laws and the principle of publicly analyzed environmental impact in other states and in much of the world. Jackson was also 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 such as Natan Sharansky.

Throughout his time as senator, Jackson was a strong supporter of Israel. In 1970, he urged President Nixon to sell F-4 Phantom II fighter jets to that country, on the terms that amounted to a grant. During the Yom Kippur War, Jackson, alongside fellow Congressional leaders demanded an urgent resupply of weapons, to ensure that Israeli forces would have the material, diplomatic and political support necessary for a victory. When the Nixon administration balked at direct and visible material support, Jackson worked with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs Seymor Weiss, and senior American military commanders, notably Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, to secure the decision to airlift vital weapons and ammunition to a "gravely imperiled IDF". In December 1968 Jackson declined Nixon's offer to serve as Secretary of Defense.

In 1975, after President Gerald Ford announced he would not invite Soviet dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for fear of angering the Soviet Union, Jackson and a group of other senators asked Solzhenitsyn to speak at an office in the Capitol. Jackson was also one of the first senators to call for the normalization of relations with China, and was instrumental in arranging many business, educational, and community contacts between Washington and China.

In March 1975, Jackson released a statement in which he expressed the view that it was paramount the Franklin Peroff case be found out to be either "an aberration or was symptomatic of much greater problem" within the Drug Enforcement Administration. In June 1975, Jackson stated that if accounts about the conduct of former director of the Drug Enforcement Agency John R. Bartels Jr. were correct then his actions amounted to obstruction of justice and that evidence disclosed "in the last two days would indicate that there was a conscious, premeditated plan involving misconduct at the highest levels of the D.E.A."

In July 1977, the Senate approved a funding for the experimental nuclear reactor compromise proposal by Jackson and Idaho senator Frank Church. While the initial version by Jimmy Carter sought a decrease in funding from 150 million to 33 million, the Jackson and Church measure halved the funding to 75 million. In October 1979, the Senate voted in favor of Carter's energy mobilization board plan, Jackson labeling the plan the "centerpiece" of Carter's program that was essential to guaranteeing the effectiveness of the rest of the legislation and was noted for successfully persuading colleagues to reject amendments to the plan. Later that month, after the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted in favor of the Alaska public lands legislation, Carter issued a statement thanking Jackson and other members for supporting the legislation.

Jackson led the opposition within the Democratic Party against the SALT II treaty. For decades, Democrats who support a strong international presence for the United States have been called "Scoop Jackson Democrats," and the term was still used to describe Democrats such as Joe Lieberman and R. James Woolsey Jr by the 2000s.Meyerson, Adam. "Scoop Jackson Democrat ", Hoover Institution, Policy Review, 1990."Media Influence on National Security Decisionmaking ", Brookings Institution, December 12, 2001.

Jackson served for all but the last three years of his Senate tenure with Democratic colleague and friend Warren G. Magnuson. As a result, he spent 28 years as the state's junior senator, even though he had more seniority than all but a few of his colleagues. "Scoop" and "Maggie", as they affectionately called each other, gave Washington clout in national politics well beyond its population. They were one of the most effective delegations in the history of the Senate in terms of "bringing home the bacon" for their home state. Washington received nearly a sixth of public works appropriations but ranked only 23rd in population.

Criticism