THE POINT MAN by Ben Rathbun, Minerva Press, London and Washington, 94 pages, paperback $13.95.

It’s an old axiom among the movers and shakers in the world that the better known you are, the less freedom you have in which to operate. It’s often the people behind the scenes, whose names and faces never appear in print or on TV, who wield the most power and influence and who are most often called upon to do the “dirty work” for a democracy.

The late Irving Brown was such a man, and even though he may have preferred not to have any book written about him, a biography now exists. It’s called “The Point Man,” and it’s by Ben Rathbun, a longtime Maine summer resident who knew Brown well and who covered labor and political matters from Washington, Geneva, Paris and Brussels for the influential Bureau of National Affairs for many years.

Subtitled “Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa,” “The Point Man” is also a minihistory of the American labor movement, as well as a full account of how Brown and others prevented Communist parties from attaining monopoly control over the labor movements of Western Europe, especially France and Italy, after World War II.

What did Irving Brown do, and why does Rathbun call him “The Point Man?”

From 1945 until his death in 1989, Brown, who began as the European representative of the American Federation of Labor, was everywhere. At first, he was “to help the ravaged and prostrate European unions recover from World War II.” For more than 30 years he helped undermine the communists in Eastern Europe. For his activities, he received millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan and the Central Intelligence Agency. He worked with “Wild Bill” Donovan in the Office of Strategic Services in the 1954-62 war between France and Algeria. Brown “was the most conspicuous American working for Algerian freedom.” His network sent cash and assistance to Lech Walesa and the Polish Solidarity Union in 1976.

The term “Point Man” refers to someone who goes ahead of everyone else; and Brown was certainly that. As Frank Doyle, executive vice president of General Electric Co., has said: “At a time when the advanced industrialized nations are grappling with the impact of a globalized economy, we see in Brown’s story how deeply he was immersed in globalization long before most of us were aware of the issues of a global economy.”

And, as the late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in his introduction to this book: “The story of Irving Brown is also the story of a monumental conflict pitting the forces of democracy against the forces of communist totalitarianism … Irving Brown was … one of the most ardent critics of colonialism in the west. He was especially committed to the independence of the peoples of both black Africa and Arab North Africa. He was also one of the earliest opponents of apartheid in South Africa and he helped make that position the official policy of the AFL-CIO by the 1950s. It is no exaggeration to describe Irving as a democratic visionary who was convinced that people everywhere had the capacity to live in freedom, if their elites would permit democratic self-government.”

The picture of Brown that emerges from these pages is that of a brilliant, feisty, type-A workaholic who was also a multilingual gourmet with a great sense of humor and a lot of charm. Rathbun describes him as “a personality of special force,” who had a “versatile ear” for languages and a photographic memory. Brown would be up at 4:30 each morning reading the important newspapers, and making as many as 40 to 60 long distance phone calls a day.

A native of New York City, Brown loved baseball, Babe Ruth, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Paris, the city that served as his headquarters for most of his years in Europe. While working his way through NYU, he held such jobs as shipping clerk, waiter, baggage shipper, garage mechanic, bakery worker, and copy and document runner for The New York Times. In college, he was president of the NYU Social Problems Club.

Albert Shanker said of him, “Irving Brown was a man of the old school. He was disdainful of publicity, and cared little as to who was given credit for a particular achievement.”

Early on in his union career, Brown paid his dues at Harlan County, Ky., with the bloody United Mine Workers strike, and in 1937 he was almost beaten to death at the Ford South Chicago plant, which they were trying to unionize.

The story of his life and times is filled with colorful characters, including such major figures as George Meaney and Lane Kirkland. When Brown died, Kirkland said, “We have lost a giant. No other individual did more than Irving to protect and advance worker rights in every nation around the world … the story of Irving Brown is indispensable to the history of the AFL-CIO, to international labor history, and to world history.”

David S. Broder, the columnist of the Washington Post, said of “The Point Man”: “… this book … will shed light on the role of a whole generation of people, some from business, some from labor, some from law firms, who moved beyond their backgrounds and dedicated themselves to a struggle that almost literally saved the world from calamity.”

This first edition of “The Point Man” is a British publication, but while copies are available in this country through an Atlanta distributor, here in Maine copies can be purchased from the following bookstores: BookMarc’s in Bangor, Port In A Storm in Somesville, and Gulf of Maine in Brunswick.