The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [240]
Hoffa, however, had never needed the faux combat of the Harvard-Yale game to test his manhood. The son of a coal miner who had died when he was seven, the diminutive Hoffa made his way as a teenager to the docks of Kroger, where he found work unloading fruits and vegetables. He was hardly more than a kid, but he tried to organize the workers. Hoffa learned that a man spoke loudest with his fists, and louder still if he carried a club. He became a protégé of Farrell Dobbs, a Trotskyite labor leader who taught that behind the sleek gentlemen of the boardroom lay all the coercive violence of capitalism. Hoffa became a reformer who organized the unorganized, a fearless man in a time of fear, and he rose steadily up the union ranks. “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the streets of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were part of it,” Hoffa said.
Hoffa soon lost whatever faith he had in the Left. What remained was a rude philosophy of power that saw life as little but an endless series of brutal exchanges. Us against them. Your gang against my gang. Hoffa came to value power for himself more than power for the men and women of his union. He bragged about coercing the companies into higher wages and better benefits, but in reality he was cutting sweetheart deals with owners, throttling those who stood up to protest, and selling out his brethren with impunity. What made him so dangerous was that most of these union men and women identified with good old Jimmy and his vision of the world and stood with him, electing him their new president. He took that as a mandate to expand his union and its power.
If Hoffa had abided by a gentleman’s code of conduct in the brutal brawls of the 1930s, he would have ended up a bloody pulp in the gutter. In his fight against Bobby, there was seemingly no blow that Hoffa was unwilling to strike. The committee staff had hardly begun its investigation when, in February 1957, Bobby met with John Cye Cheasty, a former Secret Service officer and investigator, who told an extraordinary tale of just how far Hoffa was willing to go to sabotage the investigation. Cheasty said that Hoffa had paid him $1,000 as part of an $18,000 payment for getting a job on the committee and serving as his spy. Bobby went ahead and hired Cheasty, then fed him information to pass on to Hoffa, sometimes on a Washington street corner while undercover FBI agents filmed the meeting. It was a mark of Bobby’s obsession with Hoffa that he wanted to be present when the FBI arrested the union leader. The FBI realized how inappropriate that would be, however, and Bobby was not there when agents arrested Hoffa at the DuPont Plaza Hotel with some of the committee documents that Cheasty had given him in his possession. Hoffa seemed certain to be convicted and sent to prison.
Hoffa hired attorney Edward Bennett Williams, a brilliant, mercurial gladiator who had a lyrical love for the law and a street fighter’s instincts. Williams defended Hoffa with every weapon at his disposal, from the high-soaring eloquence of his defense to the low subterfuge of suggesting that Cheasty was anti-black and having Joe Louis, the black former heavyweight boxing champion, flown in from Detroit to embrace Hoffa in the courtroom in front of the twelve-person jury, eight of whom were black.
Bobby was in the midst of conducting hearings when Angie Novello, his secretary, passed a note to him. Bobby glanced at the message and turned back to the witness as if nothing of moment had happened. No one in the room could have imagined that the message contained the news that Hoffa had been found not guilty. Later, when Bobby walked into the committee’s office, he sensed the despairing mood of his colleagues. “Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get to work. We have a lot of work to do. No sitting around.”
Bobby’s father had