Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jack Goldsmith In Hoffas Shadow 20240

CSPAN2 Jack Goldsmith In Hoffas Shadow July 13, 2024

Prose. My name is alan and i am a bookseller here where we host close to a thousand authors a year. For a full list of everythingg that is confirmed for the rest of the year please go to the website, politicsprose. Com where you can pick up one of the monthly event calendars throughout the store with a current listing going through the enden of october. Before we get started today i would like to ask you to please silence your cell phones so as not to disrupt the event and when it is time for the qanda, please step up to the microphone so that we can hear your questions as we are recording and cspan is recording for booktv. We will have a signing right here at the table so if you havent already purchased the book, we have plenty of them upfront ate the registers. And then if you could fold up your chairs and leaned them against something solid, that would be a great help. Without further ado, tonight i am excitedso to welcome Jack Goldsmith to politics and prose. Celebrating the newest work a stepfather, disappearance in detroit and my search for the truth. There have been many theories about the state of jimmy hoffa, longtime president of the International Brotherhood of teamsters since he disappeared and 75. Many involve charles obrien, his aide and stepfather ended in a compelling account, he recounts how his childhood became more complicated as he pursued a legal career. Then in that perspectiv the pere gained for serving as the assistant attorney general under george w. Bush, goldsmith was moved to uncover the truth about obrien, hoffa, the mob, the labor power and the rise of the surveillance state. It tells the story of how goldsmith reunited with his stepfather hthestepfather he din set out to unravel one of the 20th centurys most persistent mysteries. Goldsmith is a professor at harvard law school, senior fellow at the hoover institute, the head of the office of Legal Counsel and george w. Bush administration, but during this tenure he challenged the warrantless wiretapping program and withdrew the memos justifying the use of torture in the war against terrorism. Hes also the author of terror presidency. So please, join me in welcoming to politics and prose Jack Goldsmith. [applause] stanek thank you very much to politics and prose for hosting this event. Thanks to you all for coming out tonight even though there are serious competition in the democratic debatdemocratic deban Baseball Team that int know. Im grateful that you came. So, my tale begins in june of 1975 when i was 12yearsold. I was living in west memphis arkansas and my mother in june of 75 married her third husband. His name was charles obrien. My birth father wasnt a terribly good father, my otstepfather wasnt a good fath, so i really havent had a good father figure in my life by the time i was 12yearsold. Chuckie obrien shows on the scene and they got married in june of 75 an 75 and id known r six months before that. I immediately clicked onto him and hon to himand he was an ama. He showed me the love and affection i never had. We did everything together, and i thought that he wasge the greatest. Six months after my mom married him, jimmy hoffa disappeared mysteriously from a parking lot and the suburbs of detroit michigan outside of the restaurant. There are lots of theories but no one knows what happened. He waswh in the parking lot coms in as late as 2 45 and the next thing we know he had his last phone call and that was it. There are a lot of theories about how he was picked up. But we dont know to this day what happened. Jimmy hoffa as many people in the room may know in the 50s and 60s, he was one of the most wellknown public figures in the country. He ledy. The union the most powerful in the country at the time when the unions mattered. He had in outsized personality, he was an extraordinary labor leader and he was also corrupt in many ways. He had many ties to organized crime or he upside feels all the time, used the pension fund to line his own pockets. But he wasas a huge arch figure and he basically went to jail and 67 for a variety of things. I out of jail and 71 when Richard Nixon pardoned him i should Say Community sentenced t he was trying to regain the presidency when he disappeared. Probably almost certainly at the behest because he was trying to win back the union the presidency of the union, the mob had taken over more than when he was president and they didnt want him back. They feared he would steal their secrets that he was threatening to do so and there is pretty good evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, but no evidence of what happened on that day. One week after the disappearan disappearance, Chuckie Obrien became the lead suspect. He was also the right hand man from the early 50s basically until he disappeared until the year before he disappeared. He made hoffa when he was 9yearsold and he was by his side basically all the time from the early 50s until he went to prison after prison just before he disappeared. Many people thought that he was hoffa jack landmaillegitimate sy were close. They were always together. Six days after the disappearance, my stepfather became the lead suspect. For those of you that remember, it was a circus. The disappearance of the circus. It was frontpage news every day. It was on the evening news every night for weeks and it was just an incredible maelstrom and i was in the middle of it because i was a 12yearold kid that was leading suspect. So during the next five years during the High School Years as i look back on it, he was caught up and to be brief there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to him being involved including he was in the vicinity of the time of the disappearance. He had a break with hoffa he was drivingg a car with the monster that was calling to organized a hit. The hair matching was found in the car. So there was circumstantial evidence. The fbi had every reason to focus in on him. So, the next five years of my life was basically two or three things going on. One, chuckie and i became like this. I came to revere him as an extra night father. I came to read your Teamsters Union in his union identity. I came to revere those that he was close with. You may have heard of anthony and tony, the new jersey mobster. I spent a lot of time at their house. And i believe my stepfather when he told me that it really didnh exist. I just kind of botched thehe whe thing. This isnt the same tim is at ti was hanging out with these folks and we were very close. The government was all over him basically painted in the press as the guy who did it and its conventional wisdom that he was the person who drove him to his death. If you type in Chuckie Obrien and jimmy hoffa into google, you will find the person who did it, who w picked him up. So, i go to college in 1980 coming in over the next six or seven years i start to rethink. And i used to revel in his the value started to change in college and finally i started to think about my career, my personal career accepted at Yale Law School and maybe it wont be such a great thing to be an attorney especially if i have any ambitions to be in the government and the suspect of the disappearance. But to make a long story short. I cut chucky out of my life it was a slow process and that i needed to go on with my life. I convince myself at the time that i was a virtuous person that i he had other wrong to me orth might wrong me and them basically cut them out of my life. And that hurt him quite a lot they didnt appreciate and tell what i would come back to at the end of the talk. Turns out this was a very good idea from a professional standpoint. And the first thing he asked me to do was to ask on the case to be classified security clearance. I filled out the forms i put down mypo aliases and put down the ages 13 through 21 i didnt say in the half the disappearance but i did fill out the forms properly. I thought it was a standard security clearance interview. I later find out they thought they had access to someone that was close to someone in the lead suspect so i spent a day with the fbi. They didnt expect this at all. About everything i knew about the mob. To make a long story short i convince them i do not have mob values. And that is a metaphor for the next 20 years of my career. I got fancier and fancier government jobs. And it was a good move in terms of professional development. Im skimming over a lot of things because i want to get to the writing of this book and what it is about. Im telling you know how the book opens. 1518 years later in working with the Justice Department the assistant attorney general but it would not be if i had not done what i had done 20 years earlier working in the Justice Department late one night on a program in the Bush Administration there are all sorts of problems in the program. And i am reading along hoffa versus United States and obrien versus United States. And i was shocked to say could that possibly be my stepfather . I look at the curse on thet case and already to say how corrupt the government rule was to engage in illegal surveillance and they did it to me. I never knew about this case. It was mostly true and was illegally surveilled in the early fifties and it turned out this case did make theut conviction out of basically and then to finally emerge in the public in the midof sixties. And was the beneficiary because he loved to illegally surveilled him and his lawyer and the office of the mob person he was close to. This is shocking to me for many reasons with a warrantless surveillance and it justma comes back what he said about the Justice Department and to cut corners. And it was still true in the large when i was there. This began a process for me that took a year and soulsearching about my relationship with chucky and it involved things in me realizing i had judged him very harshly. And underappreciatedhi his virtues that he had never done anything wrong tooth me youd always been a great father to me. He was ill, i appreciated his situation to be charged with bad that he could not fight because when i left the government i was accused of doing things which i did not think were fair. I couldnt fight those charges either so i sympathized with him on thatmp front. My mom said how badly i her chucky when i broke with him but i did not appreciate it until i had children and then i began to reflect and the pain that happened to me that they did to me what i did to chucky. So this leads me to ask for his forgiveness late 2004. In a very casual way we were watching seinfeld in the Television Room while he was sitting in his chair and i turned to him andon said i was wrong to do what i did you 20 years ago i hope you will forgive me. Go me and he was surprised. This is the first trip i had seen in any amount of time just like the good old days. He was shocked his face was ashen and he started to tear up and he said you dont have to apologize i understand why you did what you did. And that was it. So he for gave me, he let me back in his life. We became very close spent a lot of time talking over the next seven years. And over the course of theseth conversations, i started to doubt if he was the person that ticked off jimmy hoffa. I have evidence i about the case but the way he talked about it and revered hoffa. So i said to him one day, seven or eight years ago, why dont i write a book about this . Im sure whatever i find or discover about what happened in the hoffa case has to give you a better shake the new have been given because every book had him driving hoffa to his death of that was the toconventional wisdo wisdom. He hesitated. That he would jump having me writing a book about him and his life with hoffa and try to vindicate him from thend charge. Let me just say hoffa was like a father figure to him so he was basically being charged with patricide. In this charge floated in the seventies and this conventionalge wisdom ruined his life for a bunch of reasons it did dishonor him, ruined his life in the Teamsters Union and destroyedde him. He tried to fight back and could never fight back he had no financial or legal tools to confront these charges. I told him i would do my best. He finally said okay. I said one condition. I will do my best and figure out what happened on one condition. You have to tell me the truth. And he looked at me with his eyes. This was a major challenge because chucky, i learned from my did not have to read the hoffa memorandum that was the report about the case and referred to chucky all his friends say he is a notorious pathological liar. He always says that about everything. So thats one set of challenges. The main witness am trying to clear is unreliable. Another challenge there is so much misinformation built up over the hoffa disappearance based on the early seventies theories. So many claims and counterclaims sifting through it to get to the truth was extremely difficult. Talking to every fbi agent who was still alive, looked at thousands of pages of government documents many have never even been discussed. And chucky and i developed a perapport probably spent thousands of hours more than a thousand certainly talking about the case. It was an amazing dance i was the interrogator sometimes he would answer me straight, he would try to deflect and other times he told me a lot. But not everything. So in the book i do believe i accomplish my original goal of clearing him of the charge he was the person who drove hoffa to hiss death. I hope you agree with that conclusion a lot of reasons i will not go through them but there is lots of evidence the government did not talk about early in the case to suggest he did not or could not have donene it. The biggest piece of evidence for me was the fbi in the 19 nineties believed that chucky was not the first that drove hoffa to his death but this is not known in public. They had all sorts of good reasons for that. I talk about that in the book and why they came to the conclusion he was not involved. In part because the case as known today its much different than what the government understands today is all talked about in the book. In part it is about the journey of atonement to clear chucky and along the way fortunately or unfortunately it turned into something much more than that and a narrative about the rise of labor in the h century which hoffa represented in the decline of the mob andise of the decline which was connected to hoffas rise and fall. And the steps the government took to diminish labor and the mob and its a fascinating story. That hadnt been adequately told. And those that originally accused chucky we became friends. Hours and hours talking about the case nobody has ever worked the case stop obsessing about it. None of the fbi agents they still talk about it and are still involved to solve a mystery. So i learned about extraordinary Law Enforcement abuses. The government did not treat chucky well. He was not an angel. Definitely not an angel. So the government did not jump at all constantly exaggerating in the press and to constantly portray him as the person who did it and pressure him constantly saying that the mob a mechanism for leaking allegations putting them out there for 45 years accused in the public eye no reason for that you be back in the bottle and theresme no incentive for the government to do that once it is out there i approach them and they approached chucky and they offered to send an exonerating letter. Went to the interview and spent four hours in a hilarious interview. And told the truthe about anything then it was in four months and six months in the letter neverer came. And the letter never came and the us attorney and fbi and they did not give himt a letter and hes had bad luck most of his life and also with a history it intersected to go through this extraordinary illegal transcripts and with the fbi illegal bugging with his backup but this goes on for decades in the early sixties but that round of government access and surveillance tied up in lots of ways. And what i was doing in the government 50 years later. Just a couple more things and there are a lot of historical ironies. And there are a lot of interesting historical ironies. Bobby Kennedy Crossing several lines and thought he would get rid of hoffa and to save the teamsters members from the horrible person at the top of the union i can assure you they were doing great under hoffa much more than the millionaire and then in the super aggressive attacks on hoffa. With the labor corruption that is one historical irony exactly the opposite has them. He kept them at bay and was a charge and the very weak successor let the mob take over. And with much greater infiltration that had happened before and also something kennedy did not expect. The third irony is the mob had taken over the teamsters and hoffa tried to get it back and re was the mobs decision to knock off hoffa that finally led the government and to put massive resources in the hoffa case and my god we have uncovered mob conviction on dash as if the Mcclellan Committee never existed. And to get together the resources and the tools to ragressively go after labor racketeering and to diminish it significantly. And with the fbi agents in the case and if hoffa were still in the street there will be a lot more mobsters in the street. Finally and briefly the book is about this is the hardest topic is about fathers and sons and treachery between fathers and sons and sons and fathers. Hoffa lost his daughter when he was seven years old chucky lost his father when he was seven years old his dad took off because he had trouble with the mob in kansas city. My father left me when i was seven years old we were all little boys in search of stability hoffa never really had a real father figure he did on his own chuckys father figures through those themselves were very close he revered both men but jack was the person involved in that disappearance and he was caught in the advice and to make matters worse he was seen as treacherous to be see as the person who killed his father essentially are had his killed and then finally in addition to Everything Else but the different stages of my life because thats how i looked when i was 20 from my perspective and how it looked differently with the thcredible fire from the Justice Department after ten or 12 years talking to them. And thats a reflection on that. So thats what the book is about is about a lot of things and im happy

© 2025 Vimarsana