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 ta