Slippery Jim

Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa was back at the old stand--the witness stand in the Senate caucus room in Washington, confronted by a few of his sorely tried inquisitors: Arkansas' weary, sardonic Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Senate labor rackets investigating committee ; New York's finger-waggling Senator Irving Ives; and Hoffa's most implacable enemy, Committee Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, 32, who would give his celebrated forelock to see Hoffa jammed in the jug.

Ducking, snapping and sneering, Hoffa came no closer to the jug. But his performance, laced with an exquisite contempt for Bob Kennedy and the rest of the committee (Q.: Why did he deposit $300,000 in Teamster funds in a Florida bank? A.: "Because I wanted to"), left no doubt that James Riddle Hoffa still regards his morals and methods as being beyond the question of anybody, least of all 1,600,000 dues-paying Teamsters. Teamster morals and methods uncovered last week:

P: Hoffa's good friend Judge Joseph A. Gillis of Detroit's recorders court, received $100 a week for 13 weeks as "adviser" for a Teamster TV program, got an extra $6,200 for his re-election campaign. Later, the judge presided over Teamster extortion trials.

P: Ohio's Boss Teamster William Presser, accused of using his union job to exercise a racketeer's control of the coin-vending machine business, ducked most questions by taking the Fifth Amendment. Reminded, after investigation, that the Ohio Conference of Teamsters and Cleveland's Joint Teamster Council 41 both voted to award him $20,000 apiece if he was "severed" from the union, Presser replied: "I'll tell you the truth if you let me get out from under the oath."

P: Presser's union paid $1,000 for "public relations and professional services" to Ohio's former (1955-57) Republican Senator George Bender, who is now one of three "antiracketeering" commissioners appointed by Hoffa himself. Bender's answer: he sent the money back.

P: Committee Investigator Pierre Salinger polled all 893 Teamster locals on the methods by which Hoffa was elected president of the union last year, received informative replies from 437. Conclusion: of the 1,661 votes cast for Hoffa, 57.6% were illegal.

Thus ended the latest round of hearings on the Teamsters, which added up to the greatest blot on the record of U.S. organized labor. As for Slippery Jim, he announced that he will call a special Teamster election for February (at a cost of $1,500,000) to get out from under the three monitors appointed by a Federal District Court last January to see to it that Jimmy cleans up his union. At week's end two of the three monitors asked the court to cancel plans for the election because Hoffa has not even begun to comply with the monitors' demands for reform. The monitors got some solid support from Senate Committee Chairman McClellan himself.

"No family in this country," warned John McClellan, "can escape the repercussions. All of our lives are too intricately interwoven with this union to sit passively by and allow the Teamsters under Mr. Hoffa's leadership to create such a superpower in this country--a power greater than the people and greater than the Government. This situation even now is critical for the nation."

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