United States Senate Select Committee On Improper Activities in Labor and Management - Background and Creation

Background and Creation

In December 1952, Robert F. Kennedy was appointed assistant counsel for the Committee on Government Operations by the then-chairman of the committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Kennedy resigned in July 1953, but rejoined the committee staff as chief minority counsel in February 1954. When the Democrats regained the majority in January 1955, Kennedy became the committee's chief counsel. Soon thereafter, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations, under the leadership of Democratic Senator John L. McClellan (chair of the committee and subcommittee), began holding hearings into labor racketeering.

Much of the Permanent Subcommittee's work focused on a scandal which emerged in 1956 in the powerful trade union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In the mid-1950s, Midwestern Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa began an effort to unseat Dave Beck, the union's international president. In October 1955, mobster Johnny Dio met with Hoffa in New York City and the two men conspired to create as many as 15 paper locals (fake local unions which existed only on paper) to boost Hoffa's delegate totals. When the paper locals applied for charters from the international union, Hoffa's political foes were outraged. A major battle broke out within the Teamsters over whether to charter the locals, and the media attention led to investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Beck and other Teamster leaders subsequently challenged the authority of the Permanent Subcommittee to investigate the union by arguing that the Senate's Labor and Public Welfare Committee had jurisdiction over labor racketeering, not Government Operations. McClellan objected to the transfer of his investigation to the Labor Committee because he felt the Labor chairman, Senator John F. Kennedy, was too close to union leaders and would not thoroughly investigate organized labor.

To solve its jurisdictional and political problems, the Senate established on January 30, 1957, an entirely new committee, the Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, and gave it broad subpoena and investigative powers. The new select committee was given a year to complete its work, and charged with studying the extent of criminal or other improper practices in the field of labor-management relations or in groups of employees or employers. Half the membership was drawn from the Committee on Government Operations and half from the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. McClellan, Ervin, McCarthy, and Mundt were drawn from Government Operations, and Kennedy, McNamara, Ives, and Goldwater from Labor. An equal number of Democrats and Republicans sat on the Select Committee. Senator McClellan was named chair of the Select Committee, and Republican Senator Irving Ives of New York vice chair. Democrats and liberals, primarily, criticized the committee for not having a neutral attitude toward labor. Only three of the committee's eight members looked on organized labor favorably, and only one of them (Senator Patrick McNamara) was strongly pro-labor. The committee's other five members were strongly pro-management, and that included the Select Committee's Southern conservative chair, John L. McClellan. McClellan hired Robert F. Kennedy as the subcommittee's chief counsel and investigator. Kennedy, too, did not have a neutral opinion of labor unions. Appalled by stories he had heard about union intimidation on the West Coast, Kennedy undertook the chief counsel's job determined to root out union malfeasance and with little knowledge or understanding of or even concern over management misbehavior. The biases of the Select Committee members and its chief counsel, some observers concluded, led the committee to view corruption in labor-management relations as a problem with unions, not management, and management as nothing more than a victim.

Senator McClellan gave Robert Kennedy extensive control over the scheduling of testimony, areas of investigation, and questioning of witnesses. This suited McClellan, a conservative Democrat and opponent of labor unions: Robert Kennedy would take the brunt of organized labor's outrage, while McClellan would be free to pursue an anti-labor legislative agenda once the hearings began to draw to a close. Republican members of the Select Committee voiced strong disagreement with McClellan's decision to let Kennedy set the direction for the committee and ask most of the questions, but McClellan largely ignored their protests. Robert Kennedy proved to be an inexpert interrogator, fumbling questions and engaging in shouting matches with witnesses rather than laying out legal cases against them. McClellan and Kennedy's goal had been to refer nearly all their investigations to the Justice Department for prosection, but the department refused to do so because it concluded that nearly all the legal cases were significantly flawed. A frustrated Robert Kennedy publicly complained about the Justice Department's decisions in September 1958.

Chief Counsel Kennedy resolved to investigate a wide range of labor unions and corporations, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Auto Workers (UAW), Anheuser-Busch, Sears, and Occidental Life Insurance. The Select Committee also established formal liaisons with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service, Federal Narcotics Bureau, Department of Labor, and other federal agencies as well as state and local offices and officials involved in law enforcement.