Beck's Goodbye

Dave Beck finally tumbled to what other people in and out of labor have known all along: his Fifth Amendment appearances before the McClellan Senate investigating committee had done him in as president of the 1,400,000-member Teamsters Union. After a secret meeting with Teamster vice presidents last week, Beck announced he would retire in September. Dave also announced he would summon an executive board meeting in mid-June, raised the interesting possibility that he might step down even before September.

Much credit for removing the ugliest stain on the labor record was due the Teamsters themselves. The proof by McClellan & Co. that Beck had been using their dues payments like a business tycoon spurred Dave-must-go movements in half a dozen key Teamster locals before Beck finally took the hint. The ugly evidence that he could stoop even to profiting on the sale of real-estate equities to the widow of Union Official Ray Leheny (TIME, May 20) turned his retirement into a sooner-the-better situation (although Beck, protesting innocence in that, says that he has since sent the widow a check). But credit was due also to A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany.

Meany applied pressure on Beck where Senator John McClellan left off. From the Senate hearings, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. compiled a 45-page list of charges, summoned Beck to a hearing before his brother vice presidents on the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Executive Council. Unanimously the 25 council members who heard the charges decided that "there is not the faintest question in our minds that Beck is completely guilty of violating the basic trade-union law that union funds are a sacred trust." Even this was not strong enough for George Meany. He needed an additional 20 minutes to tell the pudgy pride of Puget Sound "what I thought of his actions."

Meany and his council took pains to prove that they were after Beck and not his union, the nation's biggest. One day later they filled Dave's vacant chair with another Teamster, General Secretary-Treasurer John English, 68, a onetime coal-wagon driver who has been a Teamster 52 years, has never liked Latecomer Beck. Promised tall, dour John English: "We are going to wash our own dirty linen." The A.F.L.-C.I.O. believed him. To allow time for the scrubbing to begin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Ethical Practices Committee postponed indefinitely its scheduled investigation of the union that once belonged--lock, stock and cash drawer--to Dave Beck.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.