Rogues' Gallery

Four Republican and three Democratic Senators last week signed the most scathing bipartisan indictment of a large segment of U.S. organized labor to come out of a congressional committee since the unions hit their heyday under the New Deal. In an interim report based on 16,000 interviews by investigators, testimony by 486 witnesses at hearings and 17,485 transcript pages, a special Senate committee headed by Arkansas Democrat John McClellan freely used such words as "plunder" and "hoodlums," "gangsters" and "thievery" and "collusion," and "crime against the community." Major finding: "Union funds in excess of $10 million were either stolen, embezzled or misused by union officials over a period of 15 years."

Taking pains to point out that its findings were limited to the few unions it had investigated, the McClellan committee bore down hardest on the biggest, richest and most powerful of them all: the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which, said the committee, can "stop the nation's economic pulse." The committee accused ousted Teamster President Dave Beck of "thievery" arising from "uncontrollable greed"; it said that the Teamsters' new president, James Hoffa, runs "a hoodlum empire." Said the report: "The power of the Teamsters Union president is extraordinary . . . that this power is now lodged in the hands of a man such as Hoffa [is] tragic for the Teamsters Union and dangerous for the country at large."

By signing the report, at least two of the committee members, Massachusetts' Democratic Senator John Kennedy and New York's Republican Senator Irving Ives, took their political lives in their hands in their heavily industrial states. The lone dissident was Michigan's Democratic Senator Pat McNamara, for 18 years an official of a pipe fitters' local, who argued that organized labor could clean its own house, heavy-handedly suggested that it was time for the McClellan committee to go out of business. He was promptly and loudly supported by A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, who called the report "a disgraceful example of the use of sensationalism in an attempt to smear the trade-union movement." Like Pipe Fitter McNamara, Plumber Meany pointed out that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has kicked out the Teamsters and a couple of other corrupt unions. Neither mentioned that organized labor allowed its ugly situation to grow uglier for years--until the McClellan committee came along.

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