National Affairs: Brickbats at the Threshold

Grinning like a bridegroom at his third wedding, Detroit’s James Riddle Hoffa waited in Miami last week at the threshold of his highest ambition—presidency of the giant, 1,400,000-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Yet few prospective bridegrooms—and indeed few union bosses—had ever been the target of so many brickbats, bombshells and booby traps calculated to keep him from the church on time. Items:

¶ In Washington, concluding five more days of Teamster testimony, John McClellan’s Senate investigating committee listed 34 instances of “improper activities” by Hoffa and associates. Among them: Hoffa himself stood to make a windfall from land at Sun Valley, Fla., which had been bought at $18.75 an acre, was being pushed to Teamster members as homesites at prices ranging from $150 to $550 an acre on false pretenses, i.e., they were assured roads and water facilities, but neither had been installed.

¶ In New York, a federal grand jury indicted Hoffa for perjury on the grounds that he lied five times during an earlier grand jury investigation of wiretapping at his Detroit office; Hoffa last May was indicted for the wiretapping.

¶ In New York, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council found that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was “dominated, controlled, or substantially influenced in the conduct of its affairs by corrupt influences,” gave the Teamsters 30 days to root out the influences or be suspended, i.e., if Hoffa is elected president, the Teamsters’ suspension seems certain.

¶ In Washington, to the applause of Teamster locals across the U.S., 13 rank-and-file, New York-area Teamsters won a temporary federal court injunction halting the Teamster election on the grounds that some delegates to the Miami convention had been selected unconstitutionally. One day later a court of appeals decision struck down the temporary injunction because it “had gone beyond the necessities of the situation,” but left the way open for a post-election challenge of election procedures if the rank and filers still suspect unconstitutionality.

In Miami on the eve of the convention, opposition candidates scurried about trying to throw up a stop-Hoffa united front. (One powerful new contender: Chicago Vice President William A. Lee.) But Jimmy Hoffa kept his pose as an unstoppable front runner, predicted confidently that he would win on the first ballot. Despite suits, threats of expulsion and all the revelations of the McClellan committee, it seemed, the Teamsters were still going to have the opportunity of replacing tarnished President David Daniel Beck with smirched and smirking James Riddle Hoffa.