OPINION:
VENDETTA: BOBBY KENNEDY VERSUS JIMMY HOFFA
By James Neff
Little, Brown, $28, 377 pages
As so often happens with the victims of political assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s image was transformed overnight from that of a complex, driven and highly partisan politician into an idealized martyr figure. The former bore very little resemblance to the latter.
Some of us old enough to remember the living man recall him as a willing committee staffer for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, an old friend of his father’s; as chief political hatchet man for his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign, when one of JFK’s main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hubert Humphrey, would attribute his loss of the crucial West Virginia primary to the fact that he didn’t have a younger brother with a checkbook circulating in the state buying votes; as a poster boy for nepotism, serving as attorney general to his own brother; or as a cynical carpet bagger who — like Hillary Clinton a generation later — would declare himself an instant New Yorker and garner a Senate seat after turning on his brother’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.
Bobby Kennedy had different enemies at different times — some to his right, some to his left — but he was consistent in one respect. Whoever his enemy of the moment was, Bobby would demonize him. What a pity he never read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the brilliant, semi-crazed 19th century philosopher who warned, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not become one yourself.”
Reading investigative journalist James Neff’s exhaustive account of what Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary and a Kennedy family confidant, called the “blood feud” between Bobby and Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, one feels like the witness to a monumental grudge fight between two ruthless, not particularly sympathetic characters rather than to a heroic struggle between good and evil. It’s a war all right, with plenty of action and a colorful cast. There just aren’t any war heroes.
In fact, it was a political Seven Years War, from 1957 to 1964, during which Bobby, first as a Senate committee counsel and then as his brother’s attorney general, pursued Hoffa with the zealous determination of Inspector Javert hounding Jean Valjean or Captain Ahab stalking Moby Dick. Hoffa, a hard-boiled survivor of a poverty-stricken childhood, was by no means an innocent victim; you didn’t rise to the top of the Teamsters in the 1950s by earning merit badges in the Boy Scouts. But he was in many respects an effective leader of the largest U.S. union, and not personally on the take in the way Frank Beck, his corrupt predecessor had been. What set Hoffa aside from far more egregious characters in the labor movement was the fact that he really bugged Bobby Kennedy.
It got so bad that, when Lee Harvey Oswald, a Castro backer and former defector to the Soviet Union, assassinated his brother in 1963, Bobby initially suspected that Hoffa was behind the killing. William Hundley, a respected senior Justice Department official in charge of organized crime investigations, explained it this way: “Robert Kennedy had a great capacity for love, but he also had an equally great capacity for hate.” Much of Kennedy’s hatred for Hoffa, Hundley believed, stemmed from Hoffa’s outwitting RFK time and again: “With him, it was a game he had to win … Whether it was touch football or a prosecution, he had the Kennedy win-at-any-cost attitude.”
Millions of tax dollars and thousands of federal man hours later, Bobby won. Hoffa was found guilty of jury tampering and sentenced to prison. He was still serving time at Lewisburg Penitentiary when Bobby was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, an obsessive young Arab nationalist, in 1968. “I can’t honestly say I felt bad about it,” Hoffa would later say. “Our vendetta had been too long and too strong.”
Jimmy Hoffa was released from prison in 1971 after receiving a conditional pardon from President Nixon, restricting him from holding union office until 1980. Ironically, the Teamsters had become more corrupt and more deeply entangled with mob figures in the immediate post-Hoffa years; had he lived long enough, Jimmy Hoffa might actually have been returned to power as a “reform” candidate.
But on July 30, 1975, Hoffa disappeared, almost certainly murdered by Mafia elements. As Mr. Neff writes, “Still unsolved after forty years, the mystery of the murder is likely proof of its underworld provenance.” Rival theories abound. Perhaps the strangest was set forth in a 2009 book by a self-professed Mafia hit man named Richard Kuklinski who claims that he killed Hoffa with a hunting knife, burned his body in a 55-gallon drum, sealed it, and buried it in a junk yard. Later, fearing discovery, he dug it up and put it in the trunk of a scrapped car which was compacted and sold as scrap metal to Japan “to make new vehicles.”
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• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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