The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [243]
Bobby’s name would always be linked with his obsessed campaign to convict Jimmy Hoffa, but his team of investigators went far beyond the Teamsters Union. He even investigated the New York Times, whose editorial support his brother would soon be seeking in his presidential race. He took startling testimony that the greatest paper in America had made payments to reach favorable agreements with the Teamsters. In all, the committee and its 100-member staff, interviewing 1,525, witnesses and taking testimony that filled 59 volumes of official hearings, presented strong evidence of corruption in at least 15 unions and more than 50 companies.
Bobby’s critics on the left accused him of destroying unions, but he celebrated union reformers who stood up to corruption and whose victories would ensure a stronger movement. His critics on the right said that he avoided investigating Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers, but in fact the committee looked at the UAW and found little seriously wrong. Sadly, this congressional investigation, the most monumental in half a century, achieved a result hardly commensurate with the enormous effort and resources put into it. Congress did enact a labor reform bill, and a year after the committee disbanded, twenty figures in labor and business had gone to jail. But as Bobby himself admitted, there was “appalling public apathy”; by the measure of congressional mail, practically no one in America cared deeply about labor corruption. Beyond that—and this was not something that Bobby conceded—he had helped make Hoffa a folk hero to the Teamster rank and file, a working-class Houdini who had wiggled out of all the handcuffs and jails in which his enemies had sought to confine him. The union president sat behind his nine-foot-long mahogany desk in a Washington office far more spacious and impressive than the Oval Office. He ate gourmet meals prepared by chef Jean Grihangne, and when he had eaten too richly, he worked out in the tiled gymnasium that he had built for his use. He had hopes of expanding the Teamsters into other areas of American life.
As for Bobby, he too had become a hero to millions of Americans. “At thirty-three years old, this quiet little fellow is the most exciting guest we’ve had in years,” Jack Paar told his late-night audience on national television during Bobby’s appearance in June 1959. “I think that Robert Kennedy is the bravest, finest young man I know.”
Bobby was a man who never forgot, and when he left the committee after three years in 1959, he was as consumed with the Teamster leader as when he had first met him. He believed that Hoffa stood at the center of a contagion of evil that had to be stopped or the whole nature of America would change. He had other work to do now in helping to elect Jack president of the United States, but it was clear that one day these two implacable enemies would meet again on another field of conflict.
JJack did not have the same visceral feeling about corruption and evil that Bobby had. His most passionate political concern remained foreign affairs. In July 1957, Jack gave a speech in the Senate on the tragic situation in Algeria, where the French were brutally repressing a guerrilla movement seeking independence. The speech was a revelation to many. One of those listening that day was Howard E. Shuman, administrative assistant to Senator Paul Douglas. Shuman, like many of his peers, considered Jack “an extraordinary minor figure” in the Senate. Yet as the aide listened, he thought,