Labor's Love Lost

HOFFA NEVER could make the distinction, Murray Kempton wrote, between mine and thine--for all his right-wing bullshit (rapists should be lined up against the wall and shot, "the sons of bitches") he's a working class rebel. George Meany and Leonard Woodcock seem to like argument and accomodation with presidents and corporate bosses. Jimmy preferred to pound people who got in his way--and men who drive trucks and work in mills like Jimmy's method better.

His language doesn't ring of responsible leadership and compromise, the stuff of collective bargaining:

"I'm convinced this war [between labor and management] is going to take place and I want to be part of it. In the old days they bombed our homes, shot us, used tear gas on us, and beat the hell out of us."

Hoffa's "authorized book" emphasizes that ongoing war: Jimmy was smashing in scabs' heads and seeing company police shoot his friends when he led Teamsters organizing drives in the Midwest during the thirties. Meany was fat even then, holding down a sinecure as business agent for an AFL plumbers union in New York. Neither labor boss seems to have forgotten how he started.

If Hoffa had been born in another time and place he might have been a Communist--even though they're "screwballs," as he says in his book. America warped him, making him grow up like a hero out of a Merle Haggard song; his father died when Hoffa was seven, forcing him to leave school at fourteen to help support the family. Mama used the strap on Jimmy plenty and he loved her for it.

But Hoffa understood that he couldn't make it in the world by working on an oil rig like his father. With no education and no wealthy background he had to steal money from somebody--and first he stole it from the bosses, then fleeced his membership while getting them huge wage hikes (he denies this in his book). He had little conception of working people rising together; he had fierce loyalty to his men, but Hoffa never believed in such a mysterious thing as class solidarity.

Hoffa was always worried about the bottom line. His society taught him to believe in himself and his ambition. Like Nixon, that other great self-made man, Hoffa writes of "toughing out" his prison sentence. Nixon ended up on political skid-row, though, a pathetic outcast who sleeps fourteen hours a day. To beat Jimmy, perhaps the mob had to kill him. The difference between the two men isn't purely personal either; Nixon quit because his base of support collapsed, while Hoffa kept on because the truckers never loved him so much as when he left the joint.

PRISON PROVED TO UNION MEN that Hoffa really was an independent rebel. He never pretended'to respectability, talking in his book about "homos" and "shits" and "assholes"--the way Nixon talked in private but without the viciousness. The government's pursuit of Hoffa only confirmed his heroism. If his obsession with Robert Kennedy, the "spoiled brat" was not so real, Hoffa would have needed it for style alone. His explanation of the feud with Kennedy is typical: he says Kennedy began to hate him after losing an arm-wrestling match to Hoffa. Hoffa's "war" is not capital vs. labor, but man against man to see who will crumple.

Hoffa's style resonates--Overdrive magazine reports that 83 per cent of the truckers responding to a poll favored Hoffa's return to the Teamsters' general presidency. His rough fidelity is returned in kind: while in prison, truckers making deliveries to the Lewisburg pen drove past his cell window and shouted manly encouragement. Hoffa's other obsession--the crusade against Frank Fitzsimmons, his handpicked successor as Teamsters' head--is not only the product of a power-mad boss, but the outraged sense of a regular guy whose wife has been raped by his best friend.

The book, written in the months preceding his July 30 disappearance, leaves little doubt about what happened to Hoffa. His indictment against Fitzsimmons includes funneling union benefit funds to the Mafia, and "Fitz's" conspiracy with John Dean and Charles Colson to attach restrictions on union activities to his parole. In the epilogue, Oscar Fraley, Hoffa's transcriber (I don't believe ghostwriter), quotes Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, the ex-Teamster official and Mafia member: "Jimmy was...is...a friend."

THE REAL STORY about Hoffa only comes through between-the-lines, his book is as extreme a self-justification as a public figure could consciously write. Unconsciously, he reveals his sense of majesty: when Hoffa tells of playing with the grandchildren at his Lake Orion, Michigan, summer home, it reminds you of Don Corleone. For Hoffa, wealth and loyalty to family and union are living denials that he has never broken the respectable union boss's code of conduct. But while Leonard Woodcock may have a summer home just like Jimmy's, he is no rebel and will hardly meet the same end.