by Larry Tye
Both combatants made their case to the press at the time and in memoirs afterward, although the battle for media attention was not an even one. Jimmy avoided most reporters, assuming they would never give him a square deal. When John Bartlow Martin offered to show him a seven-part series he was writing for the influential Saturday Evening Post, Jimmy said he “didn’t want to see it, he didn’t care what I wrote.” By contrast, Bobby habitually leaked documents to reporters, then counted on them letting him inspect a draft of the article. “Bobby and I spent the better part of the day going over [the series], not an easy negotiation—he was as tenacious with me as with the witnesses,” Martin recalled. “What bothered him most, I think, was my view that there were similarities between him and Hoffa. He never had thought of it and he simply refused to believe it.”
The public could sense their antagonism the very first time Hoffa showed up in person before Kennedy’s committee, on August 20, 1957. Newspaper reporters lined one side of the cavernous hearing room, seven television crews filled the other, and, up front, photographers snapped pictures of the lawmakers and their star witness. Bobby, seated next to Chairman McClellan facing the crowd, jumped right in:
Kennedy: Since you have been with the Teamsters union, you have been arrested a number of times, have you?
Hoffa: That is correct.
Kennedy: How many times, approximately, do you think?
Hoffa: Well, I don’t know, Bob. I haven’t counted them up. I think maybe about 17 times I have been picked up, took into custody of the police, and out of the 17 times, 3 of those times—in many instances these were dismissed—but in 3 of those times I received convictions.
Kennedy: Now, the first one was in 1940, was it?
Hoffa: I believe that was an assault and battery, is that correct?
Kennedy: That is not the one I was thinking of.
Hoffa: I am talking about the ones where I was simply taken off of a picket line because of a disagreement with some so-called policeman of authority without any legal authority. I haven’t kept track of those.
Kennedy: But there are about 17 in all and you think you have been convicted on 3?
Hoffa: I think you have the record, and you can count them.
He and Bobby were “like flint and steel,” Jimmy conceded. “Every time we came to grips the sparks flew.” But while Beck during his testimony had claimed his Fifth Amendment rights at the rate of nearly once a minute, Jimmy never did. That didn’t mean he answered the committee’s questions. During one back-and-forth with Bobby on alleged Teamsters ties to racketeers, Hoffa began by saying, “I cannot recall that, whether or not it was discussed or not, since you don’t want my belief, and I can’t answer.” Pressed again, he replied, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” His language might have been muddled, but it also was carefully calculated, as he conceded: “I sat down and put on paper everything I could think of they might ask questions about. Then I got with the lawyers and went over every item. We’d rehearse what we thought Kennedy would do and we got it right damned near every time. He’s not the brightest fellow in the world, you know.” Sometimes words alone would not do: “I used to love to bug the little bastard. Whenever Bobby would get tangled up in one of his involved questions, I would wink at him. That invariably got him. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ he’d shout, ‘would you please instruct the witness to stop making faces at me?’ ”
A record number of witnesses—343 of 1,525—followed Beck’s lead in falling back on the Fifth Amendment. Bobby understood the principle but said, “I can think of very few witnesses who availed themselves of it who in my estimation were free of wrongdoing. I know of several who took the Fifth Amendment out of fear, but aside from them, for whom I felt immensely sorry, I know of none whom I should like to work for or have work for me—or have anything at all to do with.” There was one more reason certain attestants might have been tempted to take the Fifth—Hoffa signaled they should by holding up five fingers as they approached the stand.
Bobby couldn’t prevent a witness from using this constitutional protection, but he did exact a price. He called to the stand one witness after another who he knew, from pre-interviews, would decline to answer his questions. The point wasn’t to see if they’d changed their minds. It was to publicly ridicule them. A typical exchange was one with Joey Glimco, the president of a Teamster local in Chicago who was notorious for shaking down everyone from taxi drivers to poultry dealers. When Glimco cited his Fifth Amendment right fifty-five times in one short exchange, Bobby and Chairman McClellan left no doubt how they felt:
Kennedy: You can have a lot of tough people call up witnesses, poor businessmen, poor members of the union, who can’t afford to protect themselves, and have them intimidate these people, but you can’t come before this committee and answer any questions, can you, Mr. Glimco?
Glimco: I respectfully decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
Kennedy: You haven’t got the guts to do that, have you, Mr. Glimco?
Glimco: I respectfully decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
McClellan: Morally you are kind of yellow inside, are you not? That is the truth about it?
Glimco: I respectfully decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
Kennedy’s objective in summoning all those witnesses extended well beyond better union-management relations, Hoffa argued. Bobby wanted “the greatest prize in the modern world: the White House.” Hoffa’s claim made a lot of sense. The politically savvy Bobby had more in mind than just his brother’s company when he suggested that Jack join the newly formed select committee, which Jack agreed to do even as two of his rivals for the Democratic nomination—Senators Henry Jackson and Stuart Symington—refused to sit on the panel. To win the nomination in 1960, JFK would need to secure the support of antiunion Southern Democrats while at the same time appealing to the party’s pro-labor Northern wing. As the committee’s obvious target, the Teamsters saved him from choosing: They had supported President Eisenhower in 1956, so weren’t likely to be with the Democrats in 1960, and the powerful and pro-Democratic AFL-CIO was battling Hoffa’s union and welcomed another ally almost as much as union-bashing southerners did. As Hoffa predicted, the evils of the Teamsters became almost as constant a refrain as the dangers of the missile gap in Jack Kennedy’s campaign for the White House. Hoffa railed against the Kennedy brothers in speeches and articles, and passed on a quieter message via Pierre Salinger: “You tell Bobby Kennedy for me that he’s not going to make his brother President over Hoffa’s dead body.”
Neither Kennedy could have predicted that, thanks to exhaustive television and newspaper coverage of the hearings, for three years Bobby would get more national attention than Jack. Finally, he had emerged from his father’s and brother’s shadows. This once shy middle child was now inundated with speaking requests (of two hundred and fifteen in 1957, he accepted only eight) and had three fan clubs (the one in Brooklyn said, “We think you are the living end and a real doll”).*7 Even less foreseeable was how much Bobby reveled in the spotlight. While JFK played a supporting role as just one of eight committee members, RFK starred in a drama that Hoffa referred to as McClellan’s Playhouse 90.*8 Sometimes people confused the hard-nosed prosecutor with the more patrician senator, which was easy since the brothers sat side by side at the sessions. Each spoke in a distinctive flat Boston accent, glasses high on his head and hands in perpetual motion. They conferred constantly, with Bobby telling Jack precisely when to show up to ensure maximum TV exposure.*9 Joe also turned up occasionally to suggest that Bobby back off a bit, for the sake of Jack’s relationship with organized labor and for fear of dredging up old gossip about Joe’s bootlegging.
Asking Bobby to back off on Jimmy was like asking the Hatfields to go easy on the McCoys. Too much honor was at stake, and each man took too much joy in the o
ther’s misery. But it exacted a toll on them, and on many others. At least eight witnesses suffered heart attacks, and one dropped dead on the desk of Kennedy’s receptionist. Jimmy gained five pounds in 1958, when the committee kept him so busy he couldn’t get the exercise he was accustomed to, and his son James remembers that “he would tell us about the problems he was having, what was going on, and we would meet around the dinner table.” Bobby felt the pressure even more acutely, although it was harder to pinpoint the source.
Kennedy “received anonymous threats from a telephone caller that someone would throw acid in the eyes of his six children,” The New York Times reported in 1959. As inconceivable as that seemed, Bobby knew better than anyone else about the blinding three years before of the labor reporter Victor Riesel. Kathleen, Bobby’s oldest, remembers that “I had to wait after school in the principal’s office until my mother arrived to take me home.” Ethel says that “during the worst of the hearings, the most tendentious, the big semis would get off the main roads and come by Hickory Hill with the horns just blaring.” When Bobby tried to back into a parking spot near the Capitol, a burly man slipped in first and seemed to dare him to complain. If it had occurred just once, or even twice, it might have been by chance, but three times meant it was preplanned, said the Kennedy family friend Paul “Red” Fay, Jr.
Yet Bobby didn’t worry about himself or even his family. Kennedys, he would maintain over the years with considerable pride and diminishing evidence, could take care of themselves. He had no illusions about Hoffa and his lieutenants: “They have the look of [Al] Capone’s men….They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jeweled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet-smelling perfume.” What made him anxious, Bobby added, was the power these Teamsters exercised in the lives of every American. They drove us to the hospital at birth, delivered us to our graves, and in between manned the trucks that brought us the necessities of life. They are “the most powerful institution in this country—aside from the United States Government itself.” Vesting that kind of control in Jimmy Hoffa’s unscrupulous hands, Kennedy told anyone who would listen, made him the most dangerous man in America.
For all their tough-guy talk, Kennedy and Hoffa from time to time indulged themselves in ways only the entitled could, although both remained sensitive to their everyman image and kept quiet about it. In Jimmy’s case, that meant taking his private elevator to his walnut-paneled office in the Marble Palace, then having his French chef prepare a lunch of his favorites—cold crab and lobster. If time allowed he might indulge in a steam bath and rubdown in the fifty-thousand-dollar gym he had installed in the basement. Bobby likewise made an opening in his frenzied schedule to drive once a week to Baltimore for a speed-reading course, with Jack sometimes coming along. Instead of the milk and sandwich he typically gulped down at his desk, his butler occasionally brought from Hickory Hill a wicker basket with grilled lamb chops and ice cream. Battling a foe as intrepid as the Teamsters boss would have left most people sorely depleted, but it gave a competitor and sportsman like Bobby a purpose and contentment he had never known. It was, he said, “like playing Notre Dame every day.”
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HOFFA AND HIS Teamsters were not the Rackets Committee’s only targets. Other cases, as Bobby said, “cried out for an investigation.” One centered on a union organizer from Los Angeles who wanted to organize jukebox operators in San Diego but was warned away. He went anyway, was knocked out by assailants, and woke the next morning covered in blood and suffering excruciating stomach pain. He headed to a hospital for emergency surgery. “Doctors removed from his backside a large cucumber,” Bobby recounted. “Later he was told that if he ever returned to San Diego it would be a watermelon. He never went back.”
The committee investigated charges of corruption in a dozen unions, including the Bakers, Operating Engineers, Carpenters, Sheet Metal Workers, Mail Deliverers, and Hotel and Restaurant Workers. Bobby found one official who was spending thousands of dollars of union funds on gifts for his girlfriend. Another used bullies to stifle dissent. He investigated the United Auto Workers, too, mainly to quiet committee Republicans who charged he didn’t have the guts to go after a union that Democrats relied on for votes and money. The probe focused on allegations of violence and vandalism during the union’s bitter strike in the mid-’50s against the Kohler plumbing company of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The upshot, Bobby said, was that “after five long weeks—one of the longest hearings we conducted on any one subject—after eighty witnesses, and more than a million words of testimony, we proved that when a strike is long and violent, it will engender great antagonism. And, of course, everybody knew that before we started.” The Republicans, egged on by the Teamsters, pounced anyway, accusing him of being in the tank for the UAW. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Bobby’s most outspoken critic, later explained that it wasn’t personal: “You’re in politics, Bob, whether you like it or not.”
While the committee’s title had promised hearings on management as well as labor, that happened only as a sidelight to union probes. The committee did unexpectedly dig into organized crime. It concentrated its attention on mobsters infiltrating labor groups, but in November 1957 news broke of a meeting of fifty-eight Mafia dons from across the country at an estate in upstate New York. The famous Apalachin conclave woke the nation to the existence of a Cosa Nostra syndicate and encouraged future committee probes of gangsters.*10 It also alerted Bobby to the fact that the haloed FBI “didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States.” One of those Bobby called to testify was the notorious New York wiseguy Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, who afterward expressed surprise at how fairly he’d been treated (he especially liked Bobby attesting to how dangerous Joe and his brother Larry were). To show his gratitude, Crazy Joe told the committee counsel, “I’ll line up my people for your brother in 1960.” A bemused Bobby responded that “the second biggest favor he could do for me was to keep his preference quiet—and the biggest favor would be to announce for my brother’s opponent. He laughed and went merrily on his way.”
All that activity was intended to prove that the panel wasn’t singling out any one union. But it was. It had targeted the Teamsters from the start, and it became more aggressive when the insatiable Jimmy Hoffa replaced the colorless Dave Beck. The battle with Hoffa would define Bobby in much the same way that Richard Nixon’s career was kicked into gear when, as a young congressman, he chaired high-profile hearings on the accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss that helped catapult him into the Senate, then the vice presidency, and ultimately the Oval Office.
The final verdict on the Kennedy-Hoffa matchup is more ambiguous. Hoffa was an old-school scrapper who had absorbed beatings all his life, on picket lines and at the bargaining table. Now, after more than two years of pounding by Rackets Committee investigators, he was bloodied but still standing. By his count, that constituted victory. He had survived two criminal trials—in Washington for bribery, in New York for wiretapping—both ending in acquittal. Kennedy’s committee held 207 days of hearings on the Teamsters, which added up to a longer, harder look than any legislative body had ever taken at any union. It produced evidence that Hoffa had enriched himself and sullied his union’s reputation, but it never offered conclusive proof that he had taken even a dime of Teamsters money, and it never uncovered the stash of ill-gotten cash Bobby was convinced was out there.
Ironically, all that probing helped Jimmy Hoffa capture nearly 75 percent of the votes in 1957 when he ran for president of the Teamsters. Bobby and his investigators had brought down the incumbent, Dave Beck, who in the wake of his humiliation by the committee declined to seek reelection and eventually went to jail. Kennedy had undervalued the appeal of Hoffa’s simple creed—“the fight for more and better.” He also miscalculated the allure of Jimmy himself, who, for all his misdeeds, had generally delivered for his members and convinced them that attacks on him were
affronts to them. “The [election] outcome,” the leftist National Guardian newspaper wrote, “was an almost natural reaction of tough men in a tough industry who objected to being told how to run their affairs by an anti-labor Senate committee and a labor leadership which seemingly endorsed governmental intervention in union affairs.” Whatever his intent, in the end Bobby Kennedy made Jimmy Hoffa into such a hero to America’s 1.5 million Teamsters that if it had been within their power, they would have crowned him president for life. Asked how he felt about boosting the career of the man he had tried to bring down, Bobby admitted to a reporter that he had let down the public and “I have a debt to society.”
The investigations left Bobby with another legacy that he hadn’t predicted and thought missed the mark—that he was not just determined but grim, and not merely relentless but ruthless. That perception arose out of his disdain for the Fifth Amendment and the broader arena of civil liberties. Whereas democracy extolled the means, the chief counsel extolled the ends, which in this case meant throwing Hoffa out of his union presidency and into jail. It didn’t help that Bobby didn’t feel obliged to explain himself and wasn’t good at it when he tried. A honey-tongued Teamsters lawyer had no such hesitations, and he kept a running list of ways he believed Bobby used innuendo and proximity to incriminate his clients: “We had guilt by association, guilt by marriage, guilt by eating in the same chophouse, guilt by the general counsel’s amazement, guilt by somebody else taking the Fifth Amendment, guilt by somebody else refusing to testify. But we think the ‘doozer’ was the one that happened when the committee was taking testimony concerning a criminal case in which eight defendants were tried for eleven weeks; the jury was out only eight minutes and came in with a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ The police detective who helped prepare the case said the prosecution felt it was not a fair trial. The Committee nodded in sympathy and agreement. This is guilt by acquittal.”
