LABOR: Hard-Boiled Egghead

The scandal-smeared Teamsters Union boasts no handsomer showpiece than Harold Gibbons, 48, international vice president and President Jimmy Hoffa’s left-hand man. He has been to college, lectured at Harvard. A slim, fit-looking man. he dresses in dignified executive grey, parades a lofty moral code: “Business ethics aren’t good enough for trade unions.” But in just two days last week, Arkansas’ John McClellan’s Senate labor-rackets investigating committee stripped away the veneer, exposed Egghead Gibbons as blood brother to the purple-jawed hoods and goons who have filed before the committee for two solid weeks.

Billed as a cooperative witness. Gibbons showed up in Washington with two valises and a briefcase stuffed with union records. But the committee was not so interested in his luggage as it was in the dark record of his labor career, thoroughly documented by committee research and previous witnesses. Items: ^ Far from abhorring violence, as Gibbons piously testified, he is pretty good as an engineer of violence—as the evidence clearly showed. During a St. Louis cab strike in 1953, he used a crew of enforcers that included a procurer, a stickup man, a pimp who put his own wife in a bawdyhouse, a Teamster arrested for shooting his mother.

¶ Boss of a big, independent St. Louis distribution union. Gibbons in 1949 sold out to the Teamsters, dipping into his union treasury—without informing the membership—to help buy off officers of the Teamster local who were discarded in the merger.

¶ During his 17 years as a labor leader in St. Louis, Gibbons called 250 strikes in an established pattern of violence. Testified St. Louis Police Captain Thomas L. Moran: “We did not find this violence in other unions—it was confined to the Gibbons locals.”

¶ Gibbons admitted that in 1952-53 he armed his union officers with guns—and charged the holsters off against “office supplies.”

The 23rd child of an Archibald Patch, Pa. coal miner. Gibbons has long kept his gunbarrel eyes fixed on personal power. He armed himself with courses at the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin, organized Chicago schoolteachers, then gravitated to St. Louis to stitch a handful of loose-knit locals into a Gibbons whole. When this was gathered into the Teamster fold, Hoffa and Gibbons formed an alliance under which Hoffa is the muscleman and Gibbons the strategist. “Gibbons,” Jimmy once said in undisguised admiration, “there are some men in Detroit who dislike me—but those fellows back there in St. Louis actually hate you.” Hand in hand with Hoffa, Prince Hal rose to power.

If anything. Egghead Gibbons’ committee appearance proved only that pretensions to learning can be a dangerous thing. Alternately arrogant (“I cannot be responsible for the inadequacies of your staff”) and evasive (“Don’t expect me to say yes or no in this instance”), Gibbons left the stand to rejoin the high-binding band that conducts Teamster affairs. It was very unlikely that smooth-talking Harold Gibbons would ever field another invitation to lecture at Harvard.