Word: hoffa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hoffa's "authorized book" emphasizes that ongoing war: Jimmy was smashing in scabs' heads and seeing company police shoot his friends when he led Teamsters organizing drives in the Midwest during the thirties. Meany was fat even then, holding down a sinecure as business agent for an AFL plumbers union in New York. Neither labor boss seems to have forgotten how he started...
...Hoffa had been born in another time and place he might have been a Communist--even though they're "screwballs," as he says in his book. America warped him, making him grow up like a hero out of a Merle Haggard song; his father died when Hoffa was seven, forcing him to leave school at fourteen to help support the family. Mama used the strap on Jimmy plenty and he loved...
...Hoffa understood that he couldn't make it in the world by working on an oil rig like his father. With no education and no wealthy background he had to steal money from somebody--and first he stole it from the bosses, then fleeced his membership while getting them huge wage hikes (he denies this in his book). He had little conception of working people rising together; he had fierce loyalty to his men, but Hoffa never believed in such a mysterious thing as class solidarity...
...Hoffa was always worried about the bottom line. His society taught him to believe in himself and his ambition. Like Nixon, that other great self-made man, Hoffa writes of "toughing out" his prison sentence. Nixon ended up on political skid-row, though, a pathetic outcast who sleeps fourteen hours a day. To beat Jimmy, perhaps the mob had to kill him. The difference between the two men isn't purely personal either; Nixon quit because his base of support collapsed, while Hoffa kept on because the truckers never loved him so much as when he left the joint...
PRISON PROVED TO UNION MEN that Hoffa really was an independent rebel. He never pretended'to respectability, talking in his book about "homos" and "shits" and "assholes"--the way Nixon talked in private but without the viciousness. The government's pursuit of Hoffa only confirmed his heroism. If his obsession with Robert Kennedy, the "spoiled brat" was not so real, Hoffa would have needed it for style alone. His explanation of the feud with Kennedy is typical: he says Kennedy began to hate him after losing an arm-wrestling match to Hoffa. Hoffa's "war" is not capital vs. labor...