The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [241]
When Hoffa returned to testify before the committee again, he forcefully defended his stewardship of the union. At times, Bobby’s questions got close to their mark. Then Hoffa flicked the queries away, feinted for a while, and moved forward to rake the chief counsel with a few tough blows of his own. Hoffa took exquisite pleasure in taunting Bobby. “Oh, I used to bug the little bastard,” he recalled fondly. “Whenever Bobby would get tangled up in one of his involved questions, I would wink at him. That invariably got him.”
The invective that Hoffa slung in Bobby’s direction was merciless. At one point he described his adversary to a reporter as “a young, dim-witted, curly-headed smart aleck and a ruthless little monster.” Bobby had never come up against anyone like this. In his attempts to bloody Hoffa and his associates, Bobby at times sounded like McCarthy at his inquisitional worst. “Is there any question in your mind that Mr. Goldblatt [secretary-treasurer of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union] is a Communist, Mr. Hoffa?” he asked rhetorically. “You haven’t got the guts to [answer], have you, Mr. Glimco?” he accused another union official who took the Fifth Amendment.
What Bobby and his associates exposed was a dark hidden kingdom in which corrupt labor unions, willing local politicians, organized crime, and amoral business executives all worked in harmony while Washington leaders and most of the press looked the other way. Hoffa treated a criminal conviction as a worthy reference for work in the Teamsters.
As the parade of witnesses passed through the Senate hearing room, there was a seamless meld between corrupt unions and organized crime. One of the many witnesses was Sam Giancana, the reputed head of the Chicago mob, who had muscled into the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to take over the lucrative jukebox business in Chicago. If physiognomy was fate, Giancana might have run a small restaurant or dry cleaners. Instead, the nondescript,
balding “businessman” with a taste for show business and pretty women had a reputation as a pathological killer. Bobby asked him whether he disposed of his enemies “by having them stuffed in a trunk.” When he took the Fifth Amendment in a laughing way, Bobby taunted him: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
The exchange played well on national television, but it was silly gamesmanship. Bobby was indulging in what Yale law professor Alexander M. Bickel would later call “relentless, vindictive battering” of reluctant witnesses.
Beyond that, Giancana was a vicious man who could call up a hired killer with the nod of his head; Bobby was foolish to take such seeming pleasure in taunting such a man.
When Bobby and Jack stared across the committee table at mobsters such as Giancana, they were looking evil straight in the face. In all the hours of testimony the Kennedy brothers heard endless accounts of just how far such men went to protect their illegal turf. Intimidation. Coercion. Bribery. Assault. Murder.
Bobby took testimony and heard tales that would have made any public figure cautious about ever allowing himself to be vulnerable to blackmail. As a committee member, Jack heard much of the same testimony and surely should have learned the same lessons.
Mollenhoff sent Bobby a memo about Giancana’s Chicago that would have made most politicians draw back from letting friends and associates set them up with women. Mollenhoff told of Dan Carmell, an attorney for the Illinois Federation of Labor and a former Illinois assistant attorney general, who had recently jumped