Good evening thank you for coming to politics and prose program a bookseller here where we host close to 1000 authors per year for a full listcsse that is confirmed pleae go to our website. With the current listing going to the end of october. Please silence your cell phone if its time for q a please step up to the microphone so we can hear your question as we are recording and so is cspan for tv. If you havent already purchased the book they are at the register. If you could the them against something solid so tonight i am very excited to welcome to politics and prose celebrating his newest work a step father and a search for the truth for go there are many theories of the fate of jimmy hoffa longtime president of International Brotherhood of teamsters sinceceer he disappead in 75 many involved Charles Obrien a hoffa aid in golds mom goldsmith stepfather he talks with his affection for obrien became more complicated as he pursues a legal career. With that perspective he gains under george w. Bush he was moved and the rise of the surveillance state. This tells how goldsmith reunited with his stepfather to unravel the most persistent role. And senior fellow at the Hoover Institute the office of Legal Counsel which during the wiretapping program with those two memos with the war against terrorism so please join me to welcome to politics and prose jack goldsmith. Thank you to politics and prose for those of you that have come out for the democratic debate. So my tale begins june 1975 i was 12 years old living in west memphis arkansas and my mother june 75 marriedot her third husband. Myth stepfather was not a good father my first one so i didnt have a good father figure but i had known him six months before that and immediately i glommed onto him and he shows the love and affection and i thought he was the greatest. Six months after my mom married him mysteriously from the parking lot and in the suburbs of detroit michigan and to this day there is no direct evidence of what happened to hoffa. Lots of theories but nobody knows what happened he was seen in the parking lot and the next thing we know he had his last phone call at 330 and thats it. There is theories of how he was picked up but we dont know what happened. And in the fifties and sixties one of the most wellknown public figures leading the Teamsters Union the most powerful union in the country with an outsize personality and extraordinary for the teamsters and also corrupt in many ways and use the pension fund to line his own pockets and basically went to jail in 1967 and when he committed his sentence and then to regain when he disappeared certainly at the behest when hoffa was trying to win back the Teamsters Union the mob had taken over control much where he was president and he feared that they would threaten to do so and there is a pretty good circumstantial evidence he was mob evidence. One week after the disappearance Chucky Obrien was a lead suspect it was awful the right hand man until the year before he disappeared met hoffa at nine years old and by his side basically all the time from the early fifties until he went to prison until just before he disappeared many people thought he was his illegitimate son because they were so close and were always together. It was quite an extraordinary thing my stepfather became a suspect. If you remember it was a circus. It was front page news every day and on the news every night for weeks and incredible i was a 12 yearold kid this stepdad was leading suspect. During the next five years years during high school chucky caught up there was a lot of circumstantial evidence he was in the vicinity at the time he worked with hoffa six months earlier he was driving a car of the man who organized the hit hair was found in the car so there was circumstantial evidence so the next five years of my life basically chucky and i became like this i would revere him he was an extraordinary father i would revere the Teamsters Union i would revere the mobsters he was close with i spent a lot of time at uncle tonys house and i believed my stepfather when he toldst me the mob did not exist. I bought the whole thing. This is at the same time i was hanging out with these folks he was my father but everybody was all o over him basically he was painted as the guy who did it basically if you type in Chucky Obrien into google you will find thats the person who picked up hoffa. So i go to college in 1980 over the next six or seven years i read about chucky and the half disappearance and it turns out that the mafia did actually exist and my uncles were violent in my stepfather had a criminal past all the things i was dimly aware of her did not focus on in high school and also i came to worry that my life could be in danger from hanging out with chucky. Leaves to revel in his making fun of education my value started to change in college and then i started toed think about my professional career with law school maybe its not such a great thing to be an attorney if i had ambitions to be in the government to have these close mob ties to be the stepfather the leading expert in the hoffa disappearance. So i cut him out of my life. It was a slow process over five or six years so i knew i had to go on with my life and i convince myself he was a bad person i am virtuous i needed to stay in a virtuous path he had wrong to me or he might have built this up in my mindt and cut him out of my life and it hurt him in ways i didnt appreciate. It turned out this was a very good idea from a professional standpoint the year after i got out of lawaw school i was clerking on the First Circuit the first thing i was asked to ie was to get a classified security clearance. I filled out the forms that required my aliases i pointed out i was jack obrien i did not say jack obrien the son of the leading suspect of the hoffa disappearance but i did fill those out properly. One week later i thought i had a standard security clearance interview i later found out this was alarm bells inside the fbi and they thought they had access to somebody who was close to the hoffa disappearance. So basically i spent a day with the fbi i thought i was finished with the securityt clearance. But everything i knew about the mob and chucky. Long story short i convince them i did not have mob values i separated myself and got the clearance and the metaphor for the next 20 years of my career i kept getting the clearance with fancier government jobs even though i tossed him under ase bus from a career perspective it was a good move with professional development. Skipping over because i want to get to the writing of the book so fast forward i working at the Justice Department to a job i never would have had or gotten it if i didnt do what i had done to chucky 20 years earlier so nowar im working on the wireless tapping program with the Bush Administration there are all sorts of problems at the program im starting to figure it out about the Justice Department late one night reading Fourth Amendment cases and im looking at berger versus new york reading along with two citations hoffa versus United States obrien versus United States. I was shocked. Could that be my stop stepfather turns out it was when i was in high school chucky said how corrupt the government was they did surveillance all the time i didnt believe him i never knew about this case but it turns out its mostly true and he was illegally surveilled in the early and they did vacate the conviction basically to clean up decades of surveillance finally emerging from the public he was the beneficiary because the government was illegally surveilling him and his lawyer in the office with the mob so this is shocking because i was in a very stressful situation of the warrantless war on terrorism and another dramatic period of my life comes back and came rushing back to me with the Justice Department and there i was kneedeep in the Surveillance Program with serious legal problems and it is still true in large when i was there in the 2000s. This began a process for me in which i went through a lot of soulsearching with my relationship with chucky it involved me realizing i had exaggerated my own virtue that he had never done anything to wrong to me. He was ill and i appreciated his situation to be charged with something bad because i was accused of doing things in the government i didnt think were fair when i left the government and i couldnt fight those charges either so i sympathized with him on that front. Finally i had two young childre children. My mom always told me how bad i hurt chucky when i broke with him but i didnt appreciate it until i had my own children and when i began to reflect the vulnerability and love for my children the pain if they did to me what i did to chucky it all came together to lead me to ask for his forgiveness in late 2004 was very casual we were watching seinfeld he wasnt well and i said i was wrong to do what i did to you 20 years ago i hope you forgive me. He looked at me and was surprised. This is the first trip of any amount of time we had a good couple of days like the good old days. But he was shocked and he looked at me his face was ashen and he started to tear up and said you dont have to apologize i understand why you did what you did. That was t it. He let me back in his life we spent a lot of time talking over the next seven years and over the course of these conversations i started to doubt if he picked up jimmy hoffa for a bunch of reasons i didnt know anything about the case but the way he talked about him and revered him. So i said to him one day about eight years ago why dont i write a book about this im sure whatever i find or discover what happened it has to give you a better shake than you have been get to one gotten because you drove him to his death. He hesitated and thought he would jump at this with the book that tried to vindicate him. So basically he was being charged with patricide so there was this charge but it ruined his life a bunch of reasons and dishonored him and destroyed him. And he tried to fight back and he couldnt he didnt have rhetorical or financial. And finally said okay and just we condition i write this book and ill write the best book that i can. But you have to tell me the truth. Because i did have to read the hoffa memorandum that the early fbi report as they say he is a notorious pathological liar. He always stated the truth about everything. So my main witness that there is so much miss information mostly with the early seventies theories so many claims and counterclaims to get to the truth is extremely difficult. Some every fbi agent that were the case is alive i looked at thousands of pages of government documents that have never been discussed. And chucky and i developed a rapport spent more than a thousand hours speaking about the case. It was an amazing dance i would be the interrogator sometimes answer me straight sometimes not sometimes deflect but over time he told me quite a lot but not everything. In the book i do believe i accomplished my original goal to care from the charge that he was the person that drove hoffa to his death but i hope you agree with that conclusion. There are a lot of reasons that circumstantial case is full of holes things that the government didnt know about originally in the case but then the evidence from me but the fbi starting in the 19 nineties believed hes not the person that drove hoffa to his death but this is not known in public. They had all sorts of good reasons for that and i talk about that in the book in part because they have an alternate theory it is much different than what the government understands today. So the book is in part about my journey of atonement to clear chucky but along the way fortunately it turned into something much more thann that that was a narrative of the rise of labor in the 20th century which hoffa represented and the decline of labor and the rise of the mob and the decline of the mob related to hoffas rise and fall. And the steps the government took to diminish the labor and then i do my best to tell it but i also learned a lot about Law Enforcement i became very close with the original fbi agents they were in their early thirties the man who originally accused chucky of doing this we became friends we spent 12 sessions together hours and hours talking about the case going over the evidence nevernd stopped obsessing about it. I dont think anybody is stopped obsessing about it no fbi agent agents, they still think about it and are still involved but i also learned of Law Enforcement abuses the government did not treat him well. Hes definitely not an angel and theres good reasons to suspect him but it turns out the public narrative didnt match up with what the government was doing inside they were constantly exaggerating in the press the leaks they the evidence they had against him constantly portraying him as the person who did it in the hopes he would feel pressured by the mob. After the government figured out hes not the person who would do it they never corrected the government loan the record theres a method to leak allegations in 45 years hes been accused but then theres no mechanism to put the genie back in thehe bottle. Theres no reason for them not to. The most extraordinarily thing the government approached chucky and they offered to give him the exoneration letter that he was no longer the lead suspect he just had to come in for an w interview and tell thee truth and he would get the letter. He was a very old man we went to detroit in the us attorneys office. It was hilarious and had everybody in stitches and told the truth and they agreed they promised a letter in two or three weeks later they said its coming in than a month and then two months and then six months and the letter never came because the political people at the top the us attorney and head of the fbi they were convinced for a bunch of reasons he didnt do it but they reneged. And then every turn of his life hes had bad luck. Its also a history because intersex with hoffas life in the american surveillance state. I spend a lot of time going through these extraordinary illegal transcripts of the 19 fifties its a story of the fbi engaging illegally with the Justice Department writing them memo in secret to say its okay and they were extremely unconvincing but this practice went on for decades there was reform but most extraordinarily that story of that round of government surveillance tied up with my experience in the government with a connection between what hoffa went through and what i was doing in the government 50 yearsrs later. Finally the book has many themes. There is a lot of historical ironies with the relationship over the 20th century and then historical ironies and place Bobby Kennedy went after hoffa very aggressivelywe. He thought he would save the American Labor movement and save the teamsters of this horrible person but i can assure you that teamsters were doing great under hoffa trusted them much more than the millionaire who never worked in his life but the irony was his super aggressive attacks on hoffa kennedy painted him with a hugely broad brush that stayed all of labor and thats when corruption really got going you could see it dropping at the time kennedy was going after hoffa. Another historical irony is Bobby Kennedy was convinced if you decapitate hoffa that would get rid of the mob from the Teamsters Union but exactly the opposite t happened. Hoffa did dealings with the mob that kept them at bay because he was in charge except for the pension fund when he went away his weak successor let the mob take over so decapitating hoffa led to much greater mafia infiltration than before. Thats what kennedy did not expect. The third irony the mob took over the teamsters hoffa was trying to get it back and really was the mobs decision to knock off hoffa that finally led the government to get its act together for the resources to discover when they put massive resources on the hoffa case and ease of maiming memos amazing memos we have uncovered racketeering between the mob and the teamsters as if that Committee Never existed it was much worse. This is the Time Starting with the hoffa disappearance that led the government to aggressively go after racketeering and fairly ficcessfully. So is a quote in the case if hoffa were still in the street there is still be mobsters in the street. Lastly the book is about this is the hardest to summarize but fathers and sons and loyalty and forgiveness jimmy hoffa lost his father at seven years old his father died chucky lost is at seven his dad took off because he had trouble with the mob in kansas city. My father left me at seven we were all little boys in search of stability hoffa had never had a real father figure. Chuckys were hoffa and anthony jack ohlone senior mob leader in detroit who they themselves are very close and chucky was close and revered both men but chucky was caught in hoffas disappearance later hes the person who was accused of having his father killed and then finally with my relationship with chucky in addition to Everything Else with the different stages of my lifee and how he looked when he was 20 and how i looked and how i look differently with the incredible fire to the Justice Department and even more different as he got old and near death and the book is a reflection on that and complications of our relationship but this brought us much closer than wed ever been before. s and now im happy to take your questions. [applause] i really enjoyed your book. You talk had the idea of not talking about it do you think he would have gotten the letter . No. Just to be clear he answered every single question they were asking about his involvement in the disappearance they wanted to clear him because they hoped if they cleared him that he would cooperate to tell them what he knew. He told them and answered fully he satisfied every condition. They didnt ask him these questions are what he knew hecause theres no way he will answer that until he got the letter. A big part of the book he was half sicilian and half irish but he was raised with sicilian values his mother came from a kansas city crime family and he was taught about the code of silence the most important principle of his life and it bumped up against the truthful book he knew i needed to write in our struggle and his commitment to america its right up to the very end that i talked about in the book. Talk about fathers and sons you couldve told the story without it but i have one quex xquestion you lived in arkansas how did your mom meet chucky quexs so the guy that said he was a reporter that he killed hoffa hes dead now but do you think thats truthful . First i will comment and what you said really this is about of a lot of things but also about forgiveness and the power of forgivenessls and i didnt realize how important i just thought what was important about my relationship that ive heard from all men saying thank you for writing the book because it made me realize the issues i had in my family with the importance of forgiveness thats the most surprising reaction to the book people appreciated that. Living in detroit she has three boys i was the oldest but my grandfather lived in west memphis we were there that summer she metse chucky through his mother who is an amazing woman and mob circles so they got married and then moved to florida. The movie is coming out by Martin Scorsese based on another book that is a confection on confession of frank sharon who was a hitman and gave a confession that turned into the basis of this book and that is rubbish theres more to say but absolutely zero evidence to support it and lots of reasons to think its false the fbi gave me a lot of good reasons theres no way he did it but its lovely written but now the basis for a Motion Picture the book is based on the seventies theory of the case i havent seen the movie but in the book he has him killing hoffa so i suspect the movie has chucky driving him to his death and i suspect the scorsese movie would be more influential than my account which is unfortunate. Thank you so much i cant help but wonder this grenade in the middle of your family affected the other members like your brothers and your mother. Thank you. My brothers and i were very young my brothers were eight and five. We all dealt with it in different ways but my mom is the most devastated she had Health Problems before this event and they got significantly worse as a tlresult of the investigation and publicity and charges and reporters and stress and actually call before the grand jury that she didnt have to show because of that. But for me he was a wild time but what i remember is happines happiness. We were extremely close and i had a pretty good experience in high school i dont remember it as a terrible time but as an improvement in stable part but it was terrible for my mom. Its a small point but how could chucky get the information that turned out to be truthful at one point with inside information. Thats not accurate im sorry if i misled you. Starting in the late fifties when the fbi director became convinced he had to take organized crime seriously the first line of attack and started in the fifties through 1965 and was not known at the time that was secret and indeed the reason chucky r knew about it because when the government revealed this illegal activity the Supreme Court ordered them to say what word you do quexs they confessed and said what they thought was legal theyd stop doing these things they presented a plan to the court that they pledged they would reveal every case that was close to illegal but his case was one of those he got lucky because of the leaks in the sixties. So that was the basis for his conviction to be b vacated. We n era of surveillance paranoia and we have every reason to be paranoid because everybody watches all the time. There was dramatic paranoia in the sixties story after story of newfangled recording devices watching us it sounds like what we talk about today and hoffa had a lot of reasons to think he was surveilled he believed he was illegally wiretapped but the short answer is chucky learned about it that but not the extent i know the extent all of the transcripts these legal recordings are available to the public now believe it or not with the 80s investigation into jfk and they collected all sorts of evidence around the government and the mob and they ended up being Public Record but chucky learned about it in the sixties. I can remember watching kennedy as a tiny person is there a more general confident comment if the teamsters are a force of good . I can talk more about the fifties and forties then i can about today. Its a story of tragedy i think. To exaggerate how powerful it was because hoffa basically extended the bargaining unit and that meant by closing down transportation routes that were crucial strategic points he could put economic leverage on anyone and this was before the government clampdown on the labor laws he had extraordinary power and was extremely successful to bring hundreds of thousands of workers out of poverty into the middle class and he was considered good for the teamsters. Ultimately however i dont think it was a serious promise but there was a promise because of his commitments he was corrupt. And in a counterfactual world if you didnt have this corruption he can have led labor in a different direction because basically his performance was basically in difference to the criminality around him and his indifference had an effect far beyond the whole Labor Movement so not to make sweeping generalities on the whole hoffa was brilliant and Effective Labor leader but he seen as negative on balance. Dave back was his predecessor back was the predecessor and had similar tactics he used similar bargaining technics techniques that hoffa perfected. Hoffa was always making side deals nourishes cash everywhere there is a lot of things i found in my research hoffa didnt have a fancy life he was spending it to enhance his power by politicians off or judges or anyone that would help him he had the teamsters power and that was true but not completely that was more conventionally corrupt to line his pockets to his benefit. Ive read a portion of your book but you said he didnt get the letter to exonerate him that the fbi does know who did it . Over the course spending a lot of time with government officials in detroit i have triangulated their theory which is based on surveillance evidence and conversations overheard is that they think they know who did it that jack picked hoffa up i will not mention the name but andy add another name of the person who actually killed him because he was bragging about it that corroborated other information this is the basis of the last dig so this person who is a very wellknown quickly rose in the ranks im not sure where i have drawn the line but i dont know the fbi evidence they had many theories over the years and they seem very confident about this theory my publisher wanted me to mention the name but i didnt because i found it very frustrating chucky wasnt a suspect based on what the fbi thought this gentleman is dead he died i shouldnt do what i didnt appreciate what others did to chucky but having conversations with people in detroit and the government that they will release this information at some point in the near future. Thank you. I love the book. I think everybody should read i it. Thank you your stepfather does indicate that tony was likely involved is it appropriate to ask how you think it connects to the new jersey mob . Chucky tried hard not to tell me things he was not supposed to but he did and one of the things he told me his dad a teachers official from the teamsters as widely suspected and the organization of the plot and did not give any details but it was corroborated and its not surprising uncle tony was involved but it seems what i learned from chucky and others it was approved by the commission as a decision that affected the whole nation. Everybody. That is the decision made their. And this is my speculation. Especially anthony jack alone he. That that hasnt been fully explored it very much looks in the calls that they made so that is the basic contours of the conspiracy. Does that answer your question . Whatever happened to the pool table . [laughter] uncle tony is chucky said the most uncontrollably violent man i met in my life. But the guy i knew was always in bathing suit in his palmdale home hanging out at the pool with barbecues to play on his gorges pool table. I was 13 or 14 then i love that pool table i asked him where he got it where i could get one. One day uncle tony called chucky and said get that god damn pool table and give it to your children. So we had in our garage in plantation which i adored throughout my high school years. And i dont know what happened if i understood the significance at 17 i would do anything to have it now. But i dont know. I think of tony every time i play pool. Going to the conversation chucky and then to retract a lot of that. Maybe we will never know so the question is to talk through that. And then to resolve that like a lawyer. I learned a lot from chucky over hundreds of hours of conversation he was always torn the image of his mother every time he got close to something he said that he wanted to tell me things this seems bizarre but i came to admire his principles because thats all he had left. But then one day he had a heart attack i came down to boca baton and chucky was at the hospital he was in much worse shape than my mom. She would be okay and my mom said take them to lunch to calm him down. This is a point in my conversations basically i decided i would not press him anymore he told me that he would tell me. We sit down and reflexively i hit the recorder on my iphone i had no expectation of having any conversation i did it without thinking. We were talking alone we were talking about my childhood and the good old dale the good old days. Then somehow a trip to detroit the Previous Year for this interview with the government came up. I said just think that tony was involved i know you dont think that but its pretty clear they were involved in chucky said tony had a lot to do with it. And i was stunned. Stunned that he never ever had talked about it and he said in a way that was very credible but never talked about the disappearance and always gave me the stories that i never believed he looked at his first one at his soup and proceeded to tell me a bunch of things. I learned a lot in the conversation thats when i realized the moment hoffa had disappeared he was not involved but he knew about the backdrop and the teamsters relationships and the players and immediately knew what happened and why. s and all the pressure comes down on him they were worried he would break and flip so he had to be very careful about what he said and get permission every time you talk to the government. He understood the pressure he was under he told me i didnt tell them and hes glad he didnt and he doesnt know what will happen and one of the many reasons that he immediately regretted i think he did because he was distraught about my mom. I dont know why and exhausted and just downloaded. At that point i had a huge dilemma. I just learned a lot of things that go to the truth of the hoffa disappearance that is not known and credible but i cannot write this book if i dont include this information. On the other hand a couple weeks later chucky had a meltdown and said you cannot put that in the book. Not because he feared for his life but that was his honor he told me something he wasnt supposed to and made it very clear to me. I struggled with what to do i said to my publisher i can either not write the book but i cant write it without the book or wait until he passes away. That was my plan. And yet i wanted to exonerate him to show the world but i didnt want to stay in his honor in the process. So i decide not to publish the book until he passed away. He was very anxious for me to publish the book he was putting pressure on me to publish it. So i decided time is running short so i showed him the manuscript which included the things he told me not every detail but what was material and let him decide and make the tradeoff. I gave him the manuscript i need it back by friday. So i was sure he was a you can publish this book i saw him looking at the manuscript he was wincing he asked me to take some of the stupidest Little Things out of respect for hoffa or whatever but the meat he might regret was that the end of the book friday comes around. Your call for go he handed me the manuscript with a terribly sad face and said i wrote one i read every word. You wrote a great book. Congratulations on. I dont thank you read the book and i dont think he read to the end and i dont know why. What the hell does that mean . [laughter] was that too painful or didnt want the responsibility or he decided to suck up his honor to publish the book or if he decided my name is more important. But he gave me the thumbs up. I reflect in the end i cannot reproduce here but if that was the right call. The right call. And he was in tears which he doesnt often do and he basically said ive read the book three times. I really read it this time. You wrote an amazing book. I dont know how you did it. I am terribly sorry i was such a pain. That judgment for him by any made it all okay. Thank you very much. [applause] we will have a signing at the table i dont like to always shut people out at the very beginning that walking in right now is the great, great granddaughter eleanor and her husband. [applause] its special to have them but welcome everyone to the museum. I know many of you have been here before but is this everybodys first time . We are delighted to have you on this Beautiful Day in downtown connecticut. It is in fact the last museum for the community that we serve many are familiar in 2010 we were hit by a tornado because that is the kind of stuff that happens and then the year after that was hurricane irene and super storm sandy so thank you to the delegation who support the bonding appropriation because we are just about to embark on a major historic rehab of that building from 1893. To add to that also the congressman has been working very hard with us to get the building on the National Register of. We have been wog