Audie Murphy
“[Jimmy Hoffa’s] mention of legal problems in New Orleans translated into his insistence that Carlos Marcello arrange another meeting with Partin, despite my warning that dealing with Partin was fruitless and dangerous.”
“He wanted me to get cracking on the interview with Partin. In June, Carlos sent word that a meeting with Partin was imminent and I should come to New Orleans. As [my wife] watched me pack in the bedroom of our Coral Gables home, she began crying, imploring me not to see Partin. She feared that it was a trap and that I would be murdered or arrested.”
– Frank Ragano, J.D., attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafacante Jr., in “Lawyer for the Mob,” 1994
Audie Murphy had 268 confirmed kills and he may have been one of the few people unafraid of my grandfather.
After World War II, Audie became famous first as America’s most decorated war hero. His fame remained because he became a Hollywood action and western film star, and when he died in 1971 he was buried in Washington DC’s Arlington Cemetary only a short stroll from President Kennedy’s grave and the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. Audie is the second most visited memorial in Arlington Cemetary, second only to Kennedy.
In the 1950’s, Korean war soldiers looked up to Audie, and so did anyone who learned his story or met in him person. He became the star of almost 40 Hollywood films viewed by millions of people born after the war, including classics like The Red Badge of Courage, The Quiet American, and his own To Hell and Back. Presidents and politicians courted a public handshake with him.
He remained humble and said:
“I’m just a friendly, sort of scrawny, freckled face kid from Texas, so how can anyone honestly expect me to maintain an air of superiority and romantic mystery?”
Audie grew up in the hill country of Texas after his father left him and his mother when he was a toddler. His mother raised him, and he remembered her sacrifices in To Hell and Back when he wrote:
“My mother, a sad-eyed, silent woman, toiled eternally. As a baby, I sat strapped like a papoose in a yard swing while she fought the weeds in a nearby field.”
Audie adored his mother and returned her love by learning to shoot rabbits for dinner with deadly accuracy; they were so poor that even a single .22 rifle bullet cost more than they could spare for a day. Like a lot of people, he learned to take each and every shot as if it were your last hope of surviving. She passed when he was 16 years old, and then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Audie mourned his mother and sought a way to focus his sadness. He turned 17 and tried to join the military, but he was declined because of his age. He and his sister lied and bumped his age up a year, but he was declined again because he was underweight by most standards.
But he was small and as he said himself “kind of scrawny.” At his enlistment he was 5’4″ and 123 pounds, the same I weighed as an equally scrawny by only 5’1″ 14 year old high school wrestler. Audie was declined by the marines and then by the army’s new special forces, what he called the paratroop’s.
Paratroopers are soldiers wearing practically their weight in parachutes and gear who jump from airplanes at low altitudes while being shot at and land behind enemy lines carrying all the ammunition and water they can. Most were the burliest of infantrymen before they dawned the first parachutes and prepared to jump behind enemy lines. By 1942 Germany had already launched their version of paratroopers, and on 15 August 1942 The United States responded by creating the 82nd Airborne (formerly the 82nd Infantry and still nicknamed the All Americans), the 101st Airborne (known as the Screaming Eagles), and the 555 Airborne (an all African-American unit called The Triple Nickel at a time when the All Americans didn’t include African Americans).1 Audie had heard of the paratroops’ and wanted to challenge himself to the toughest job in the military, but organizers of the new units thought he wasn’t big enough to heft all of the machine guns, ammo, water, food, and supplies paratroopers carried on their backs and stuffed in their oversized cargo pants.
But Audie persisted and was allowed to join the U.S. army infantry. He quickly fit in and then thrived.
“I have to admit I love the damned Army,” he said.
“It was father, mother, brother to me for years. It made me somebody, gave me self-respect.”
If love is sacrifice, Audie loved the army and his fellow soldiers.
“Loyalty to your comrades,” Audie wrote, “when you come right down to it, has more to do with bravery in battle than even patriotism does. You may want to be brave, but your spirit can desert you when things really get rough. Only you find you can’t let your comrades down and in the pinch they can’t let you down either.”
In one of his earliest battles, the 18 year old handsome but scrawny and freckly faced kid stood atop a destroyed U.S. Tank armed with only a stubby machine gun and faced off a platoon of Germans so that his platoon could retreat. He killed more than 20 men that day and his team lived because of him. Audie earned his first field promotion and a purple heart for injuries sustained in combat that day, and he went on to be awarded every medal America had to give including having the Congressional Medal of Honor given while still overseas so that he could keep fighting without pause.
Every soldier who served with him or met him looked up to Audie Murphy. He served more days in combat than Frank The Irishman Sheeran and won all medals the United States had to give and many of them two, three, and more times. He returned home a celebrated icon; parades were held in his honor.
He wrote a memoir – To Hell and Back- and it was made into a film and he starred in it and America fell in love with his handsome, youthful face and Texas twang. Scenes of Audie in To Hell and Back were cut and reused in dozens of other WWII films that created a stereotypical American soldier who was humble and hard working and had been to hell and returned to talk about it.
“I made it through life because of my mother,” he said after the war, meaning he lived to honor her memory and that he had learned his discipline and shooting skills in the Texas hill country as a kid with no other option.
But war changed Audie Murphy; he left as a kid and returned home three years later and decades older. Any fond memories of hunting rabbits died with him in combat.
“I can’t ever remember being young in my life,” he wrote in 1956.
By then he was internationally known because of his films, but only a few years before that he was already known to everyone in America as a war hero. Practically every newspaper and magazine showed his young, handsome, confident face above a chest full of medals that probably weighed more than his small frame. He began drinking alcohol to sleep at night, and took amphetamines to stay awake during the day, and used his wartime fame to springboard his Hollywood acting career.
Tropes are made into characters for books and films. Author David Morrell, whose 1972 book First Blood created the special forces character John James Rambo, said he conceived Rambo in 1968 by asking what would happen if a decorated, deeply traumatized veteran like Audie Murphy returned home, faced local police harassment, and unleashed that combat training domestically. It took the tall and muscular Sylvester Stallone to convey 5’6″ Jimmy Hoffa’s intensity in F.I.S.T., and it would take him again to convey the bravery of 5’3″ Audie Murphy in Rambo.
If you’re a Marvel Comics fan and saw the early Avengers and Captain America films in the 2010’s, you saw Captain America first portrayed as a marketing ploy of a little guy named Steve Rogers who grew big and became Captain American and was shown on stage and TV fishing Nazis with only his shield; but when Captain America decided to go into actual combat, he led by example and hundreds of soldiers followed him home safely. That was the legend of Audie Murphy persisting in American folklore. Audie Murphy was the first Captain America.
Like Cap’s comic book character, Audie’s humility stood out in every interview as he aged and transitioned from war films to westerns.
“I came to Hollywood because I had no place else to go,” he admitted.
His status as a soldier became less useful for paying his bills than his ability to be cast in films. He remained in the army reserves, but he focused on his career as an actor to pay bills in the 1950’s.
By the 1960’s, America was in the midst of the Vietnam conflict and California became the epicenter of war protests that spread to Kent State Ohio and eventually even to conservative strongholds in the south. Even heroes like Audie Murphy were shunned as part of the out of control war machine; no hero would fight, a real hero would refuse the draft and become a conscientious observer. Vietnam was no WWII in their eyes, and the Vietcong were not Nazis.
To my parents’s generation, the new all-American hero was a pacifist. Before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Muhammed Ali, the olympian and professional boxer banned from fighting in America because he would rather go to jail than Vietnam, famously explained why to a white reporter when he said: “Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Ali told anyone who doubted his bravery that he’d fight them right then, right there, and that it was more brave to go to jail with your principals intact than to war without independent thought. A real patriot would solve problems at home before going overseas to fight, not to save lives to stop war’s proliferation, but to escalate warfare for an ideology not universally shared at a time when African Americans were being sprayed with water cannons by caucasian police and put in jail for sitting in white-only bus seats or sipping water from white-only water fountains.
“It’s out of mode nowdays to be patriotic,” Audie said. “If you show patriotism you are considered a subversive.”
Audie said that without malice, but as a fact spoken from an aging war hero who saw first hand that personal character and commitment and sacrifice are stronger than patriotism; patriotism is a word used most often by people sitting safely at home, and for many veterans with PTSD being subversive was more honorable than sending more soldiers off to learn what you know. Audie was not hypocritical; he never hid his PTSD or drinking, and he didn’t chastise those who did, he just wanted people to know the price of becoming a war hero and that civilians or soldiers shielded from hands-on combat who said going to war was patriotic didn’t know the sacrifice they were asking of others.
Audie was still envisioned as an action and western film star. Only ten years earlier, he was voted as the most popular western star, beating out people like future president Ronald Reagan and other actors, and Audie wanted to get back on that horse.
“Sure the exhibitors love me; I’m a two bag man!” he said. “By the time I’m through shooting up all the villains, the audience has gone through two bags of popcorn each.”
But his genre of film was aging out.
“I guess that all those westerns on television killed the market,” he said. “I seem to be the only one left. I’ll keep making them till they get wise to me.”
Behind the scenes, Audie hoped for another Hollywood role, but his priority was his love of animals. He lived in San Diego, coincidentally only a few miles from where I would live as an adult, and kept a couple of quarter horses at the Del Mar racetrack, a New Deal project overlooking the ocean and the only private venture built to drag us out of the Great Depression. He probably saw his future self in his horse’s eyes when he patted its side and said:
“The faces [of actors and actresses] are the same, and so is the dialogue. Only horses are changed. Some of them get old and have to be retired.”
Audie’s acting roles dried up as he aged. But he refused lucrative cigarette and alcohol endorsements because he didn’t want to influence kids for unhealthy habits, and that he wanted to honor his mother.
She died when I was sixteen,” he began as he explained how love for his mother drove his actions. “She had the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen. It reached almost to the floor. She rarely talked; and always seemed to be searching for something. What it was I don’t know. We didn’t discuss our feelings. But when she passed away, she took something of me with her. It seems I’ve been searching for it ever since.”
He was searching for something and knew that selling alcohol and cigarettes wasn’t it. The best way to honor his mother was by being a role model to other kids, especially those without a father. And he wanted to not just treat PTSD, but to bring awareness to how it can linger in even America’s most decorated war hero. A real hero would stop future kids from having wars to fight. In the end, America’s most decorated war hero spoke of peace and tried to honor his mother with honorable actions.l
In 1971 Audie was in a small private plane with four passengers when it crashed into a Virginia mountainside and killed everyone inside. America mourned and buried him in Washington DC’s Arlington Cemetery only a short stroll from President Kennedy’s. Texas named their Veterans Memorial Medical Center after him, and to this day all army medics including Special Forces medics in the Kennedy Special Warfare Center go through or have gone through training at the Audie Murphy memorial medical center in San Antonio, Texas. He remains a legend among all branches of service.
Every branch has their heroes, but even the elite forces known as marine Force Recon, navy SEALS, and army Delta Force knew of Audie and what he did for his teammates and how he lived his life as a civilian. In the 1990’s I parachuted with the 82nd Airborne 36 times, Navy SEALS five times, and Delta Force once; in all of those jumps, every one of the soldiers looked up to Audie regardless if the only badge missing on his uniform were Airborne wings. And in 1993 when I was being reviewed for the 82nd’s soldier of the year, two of the six generals on that board had a photo of Audie Murphy in their office. Anyone can jump from a plane and hump hundred pound rucksacks, but it takes a true hero to stand between your team and people trying to harm them, and then remain humble about it. Everyone looked up to Audie Murphy.
When I first saw a photo of Audie Murphy and read a his memoir To Hell and Back, I had just turned 18 and completed Advanced Infantry Training and was on a weekend break before I’d begin Airborne school. If I graduated, I was scheduled to join the 82nd Airborne on the front line in the first Gulf war. On my weekend pass I visited the Infantry Museum in Fort Benning, Georgia, and I stood under Audie’s display on his life and legacy. It had a collection of his photos, film stills, and a re-released copy of To Hell and Back with accolades from famous names I recognized speaking about how Audie influenced them growing up.
Across from it was a wall-sized exhibit the John F. Kennedy exhibit that showed a wall-sized photo of Kennedy in his PT boat behind a MK-19 Grenade launcher; his display had a long list of what Kennedy did that led to the United States Special Warfare Center. Audie’s exhibit was almost as big as Kennedy’s, but what stuck in my mind was that I had grown up hearing both of their names, but only just then put them together and saw the bigger picture of my grandfather’s part in history. Big Daddy had only been buried a few months before, and the rumors about his involvement with Audie Murphy had resurfaced.
Big Daddy was suspected of killing Audie Murphy by having someone sabotage his plane. Evidence shows it was a faulty old airplane and pilot error, but I grew up believing my grandfather had killed America’s most decorated war hero. It was a conspiracy theory that only made fringe newspapers that were not much more highly regarded than today’s rambling blog posts, but the belief was so deep in our family that my great-uncle Doug Partin, on his deathbed in 2020, still swore it was true and that’s why in his 2014 self-published autobiography he wrote about his big brother killing Audie and all four people on the plane just to get Jimmy Hoffa off his back.
It turns out his plane went down due to faulty maintenance and pilot error, but that’s not what I thought in 1990. I had grown up hearing Big Daddy called an all-American hero, but when I stared up at Audie’s face and read his story I finally saw what a true All American hero looked like. Anything in my military career afterwards stems from that realization and my desire to live a life that would make someone like Audie proud (though I decided it was best to not tell generals and fellow paratroopers that my grandfather killed Audie Murphy).
I wondered how someone like Audie Murphy became entangled with Hoffa and The Teamsters. I followed his life every time a new book was published about Hoffa and my grandfather. No one questioned his honor, valor, or intentions. But somehow Audie Murphy began working with Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia.
The Irishman said:
“Still suffering nightmares from the war, Murphy had fallen on hard times. He had filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and had been acquitted on an assault-with-intent-to-murder charge in the 1970’s. Still, to a southerner like Partin, the decorated soldier from Tennesee was a shining star. Hoffa brazenly wrote that for the deal to turn out profitable for Audie Murphy and Partin, an unspecified favor was needed from Jimmy. Hoffa wrote that shortly after the deposition, “Senator George Murphy [California Republican and former movie actor] personally took [the deposition] to Attorney General John Mitchell, and Audie Murphy gave it to President Nixon.”
(I assume the editor let a typo slip, and that an unspecified favor was needed “for” Jimmy, not “from” Jimmy; in other words, Hoffa dangled a Hollywood film deal and business venture at the impoverished war hero in exchange for a favor.)
Walter Sheridan’s final two chapters of The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa focus on Audie Murphy, my grandfather, and President Nixon. He’s following Audie around the time my father met Wendy, which tells me a lot of confusing things were happening quickly and not even Walter could keep up. He elaborates on D’Alton Smith, a friend of New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello who Walter described as “a sort of in-law” to the family (because Smith married one of Marcello’s nieces). Walter’s meticulous note taking details Smith approaching Big Daddy about changing his testimony against Hoffa as far back as 1967, and Walter follows the effort until Audie’s death in 1971.
“Some where along the line,” Walter wrote, “Smith met Audie Murphy, the most decorated hero of World War II and a former movie star.”
Consistent with his writing style, he began by addressing any controversies around Audie.
“Murphy’s career in motion pictures and later in television had gradually faded and, following some abortive investments, he declared bankruptcy in 1968. In 1970 he had been acquitted of a charge of assault with intent to murder arising out of a dispute with his wife’s dog trainer. Now, still in poor financial conditin, Murphy was attempting to finish a movie he was producing.”
Saying someone was charged with assault with intent to murder doesn’t tell the whole story. Walter was always accurate, but he usually missed a few points that I believe are useful in characterizing someone. With Audie Murphy, the “dispute” with his wife’s dog trainer Walter mentioned was when Audie learned that the trainer hit one of their dogs instead of training it with patience and consistency; Audie confronted the trainer and the trainer called the police and charges for assault with intent to murder were, technically, filed against him. But no one would ever believe that if Audie Murphy intended to murder someone they’d be alive to file a complaint, and the charges were settled out of court.
And it turns out that Audie had been on amphetamines – speed – to wake up every day and audition for films after drinking himself to the brink of slumber the night before but never falling asleep. Amphetamines make latent aggression spike. And Audie’s PTSD, like that of many soldiers, grew worse as he aged and saw other young men going to war and wanted to protect them like he had protected his teams time and time again. Audie probably did snap on the trainer; but even my mother, Wendy, who volunteered with rescue dogs and knew about the dog trainer hitting Audie’s dogs, said the trainer probably deserved whatever Audie did to him.
Audie realized what was happening with his mind on booze and amphetamines, and he imagined what his mother would say if she were alive to see him loosing his temper. He locked himself in a hotel room and sweat out his addictions and, to the best of my knowledge, shook off his alcoholism and amphetamine addiction and focused on either getting a Hollywood film deal or a business opportunity from Hoffa. That was when he began flying in to Baton Rouge to meet with Big Daddy as a favor to Jimmy Hoffa.
Walter and his team of FBI agents followed the saga of Audie Murphy, Hoffa, Nixon, and Big Daddy daily, and Walter’s book has a long list of names of politicians and mafia associates who were parts of those meetings. Hoffa’s pension fund had funded Hollywood films and mafia business ventures; that link is probably what led Carlos Marcello to lend D’Alton Smith a private plane to fly Audie Murphy and Big Daddy back and forth between Baton Rouge and San Diego. Doug joined them a few times.
From San Diego, Audie, Big Daddy, and Doug drove north past the Del Mar racetrack where Audie kept quarter horses he fought to save after his bankruptcy, past the Rancho La Costa Country Club that was built by Detroit mafia head and Las Vegas and Havana casino boss Morris B. Dalitz2 using a $27 Million loan from the Teamster pension fund (and where Richard Nixon would play golf with Teamsters in 1975), and past the Camp Pendleton marine base to Nixon’s San Clemente estate built on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I’d spend decades of my adult life making that drive and surfing the breaks below Nixon’s estate.
It’s a famous surf spot, nicknamed Slippery Dick’s after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, with Nixon’s mansion looming overhead.3 When Doug talked about making that drive up the Highway 101 his face lit up just like it did when he talked about stealing all the guns and riding motorcycles back up Highway 61 to Woodville; he had the time of his life. And it was obvious Nixon loved meeting my grandfather.
Slippery Dick had many reasons for listening to Big Daddy; he wanted to find something against his rivals, the Kennedys. And Walter pointed out that Nixon was afraid of Hoover’s power – he was known to manipulate people, politicians, and judges by blackmailing them with storehouses full of recordings and videos of practically everyone in Washington DC – and Nixon wanted the aging veteran out of the FBI; he thought if Big Daddy knew they used illegal wiretapping to get Hoffa, that would get Hoffa out of jail and the conspiracy would fall on Hoover’s head.
Someone gave Audie a preemptive pardon for perjury for Edward Partin from Nixon on the condition Nixon was elected, and Hoffa’s attorneys gave Murphy a 31 page affidavit for Big Daddy to sign that said he was pressured by Bobby and Hoover to either perjure or go to prison, and he specified how they used several illegal bugging devices to monitor Hoffa’s defense planning. He never signed it, but witnesses took that document to Hoffa’s attorneys in preparation for Hoffa’s parole hearing. It was a gesture from Nixon saying he’d accept campaign donations and Hoffa’s endorsement in exchange for Hoffa’s freedom.
Walter reported that to combat the affidavit prepared by Murphy and Nixon, congressional committees against freeing Hoffa and presumably against Nixon as president wanted to send Hoffa’s parole board “a lengthy memorandum containing information concerning the numerous connections of Hoffa to organized crime,” but that “a decision was made up the line not to send it to the board.”
On 28 May 1971, two weeks after Audie flew Big Daddy from San Diego and dropping him off in Baton Rouge, Marcello’s plane crashed in West Virginia and Audie and all four passengers died. Their crash made international news, and America mourned the loss of America’s most decorated war hero; that’s what prompted David Morrell to write First Blood based on the concept of a soldier like Audie Murphy in 1972, which was a imagined telling of a soldier with PTSD returning, not from World War II as a hero and becoming a Hollywood star admired by America, but from Vietnam as a shunned citizen who became a vagabond brutalized by a sheriff department that didn’t want him in their town; I guess, in a way, Audie Murphy got his wish to educate more Americans on the silent suffering of war heroes. But what Jimmy Hoffa mourned was not the loss of an aging hero, but of an unsigned document that could have gotten him out of prison.
Hoffa clung to a copy of that affidavit and and in his second autobiography, published a month or so before he vanished in 1975, and he ranted about it being 31 pages long and exonerating him from his 1964 conviction; and he still insisted that Bobby Kennedy had violated his rights, and that Audie Murphy had the proof.
Hoffa’s insistence he had gotten my grandfather to change his testimony and then Murphy’s death fed rumors that Big Daddy had Audie Murphy killed rather than kowtow to Hoffa or Nixon. But, as I mentioned, evidence points to faulty maintenance and pilot error; though, like many rumors about my grandfather, some came straight from his mouth. A year after Audie died, Walter published The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa and said: “Murphy had recently expressed concern to Partin about both the condition of the plane and the ability of the pilot.” Walter said that whatever the reason, “The plane overflew Martinsville during a violent thunderstorm and crashed into the side of a mountain,” and any chance of Hoffa being freed by a piece of paper went up in flames.
The mafia spread word that Big Daddy had Audie Murphy and the passengers on his plane killed rather than free Jimmy Hoffa. Everyone was wary of cross my grandfather; if he could secretly kill a national hero with 268 confirmed kills, then he could kill anyone. Even Hoffa and the mafia’s attorneys and hitmen would write how they were worried that even meeting Big Daddy could lead to their death. That belief was so strong that it stuck in Doug Partin’s mind until the day he died. In his 2014 book, Doug dedicates two chapters to describing two plane crashes at that time, Audie’s and another person who challenged Big Daddy’s authority, and Doug always swore that his big brother was capable and willing to kill even a true All American hero to get what he wanted.
Hoffa’s copy of that 31 page affidavit vanished with him, but people continued to ask Big Daddy what it said in the years that followed.
“I gave ’em nothing,” my grandfather said when he was asked about that affidavit for Dan Moldea’s 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars.
“Sure,” Big Daddy said. “I said some words, and they wrote them down. But they were accusing me of doing everything, including being involved in the Kennedy assassination. So I just told them what they wanted to hear and refused to sign anything.”
So no one knows what was on that affidavit that Hoffa swore by.
In 1971, just after Audie died and Hoffa’s hopes went down in that plane with him, Hoffa grew agitated in his prison cell. He began talking too much and trying to throw weight around though he weighed much less than when he had gone into prison five years before.
Word got out among the mafia that Hoffa was using insight into President Kennedy’s assassination to get out of prison; Hoffa could point a finger in exchange for his freedom. But the mafia still clung to the temptation of $121 Million of debt forgiven and then more access to the Teamster pension fund if they helped Hoffa. I assume that the mafia also believed it would be easier to silence Hoffa outside of prison; inside of a maximum security penitentiary, there would be too much publicity and too many witnesses willing to talk. Whatever the case, after Audie Murphy died Hoffa was rapidly loosing control of the Teamsters and facing the another eight years in prison.
But even from prison Hoffa still had pop culture appeal and his name carried weight. And he still had access to his own personal wealth and influence over the Teamster pension fund through his puppet president, Fitzgerald. Hoffa used coded messages to his attorneys to fund Nixon’s campaign and gave his endorsement even without Big Daddy’s affidavit. The Irishman wrote about heaving a heavy bag full of cash for what he suspects was Nixon’s campaign fund, and I heard that Hoffa funneled millions of dollars to the big Dick’s campaign fund.
Nixon was elected president and commuted Hoffa’s sentence in time for Christmas in 1971, only days before Wendy met Edward Grady Partin Junior.
Hoffa’s endorsement surprised people who did not know he funded Nixon’s campaign, which was practically everyone in America outside of Hoffa’s attorneys and a few close contacts he still trusted after Big Daddy’s betrayal. It was the first time in history a major labor union endorsed a republican. When asked, Hoffa said in his typical personalized approach: “I would say President Nixon is the best qualified man at the present time for the Presidency of the United States in my own personal opinion.”
And it made sense to voters at the time. Nixon had campaigned that he’d begin withdrawing the 550,000 American soldiers in Vietnam, and part of his deal with Hoffa included Hoffa was wooing veterans by saying Hoffa would represent Nixon in negotiating the return of American Prisoners of War and – ironically, as it would turn out for Hoffa – to help America find the remains of around 50,000 soldiers missing in action. Like Hoffa, most them will probably be lost forever, but that doesn’t keep people from trying or politicians from promising the improbable to win a few more votes from people who had hope.
Hoffa, known for his successful negotiation tactics, rallied and seemed to agree with Nixon’s promises. He also began his own campaign for prison reform, saying that not even he had realized how cruel and hopeless prison could be. Hoffa spoke openly about prison reform, but in time only seemed mildly interested in Nixon’s rhetoric about Hoffa going to Vietnam on his behalf. And most of his colleagues said that he used his travel to show he was still important to presidents and to promote his return to the Teamsters.
Nixon wasn’t altruistic; he famously said “I’m not a crook” soon before facing an inevitable impeachment for the Watergate scandal; his crime was obstructing justice and – ironically, given his support of Hoffa – illegal wiretapping. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1975, and his role in history is immortalized in the surf break under his San Clemente mansion named after him: Slippery Dick.
After Nixon released him from prison, Hoffa was in the public eye for prison reform and getting prisoners out of Vietnam, but he was remarkably silent about the Teamsters. That’s because Nixon slipped a clause into Jimmy Hoffa’s contract that surprised even Hoffa’s legal team; he barred Hoffa from Teamster activity for another eight years, and stipulated that Hoffa would return to prison if he violated the terms. Even as a free man, Hoffa’s situation hadn’t changed since 1966’s Hoffa versus The United States.
The Irishman wrote:
“It said that Jimmy could get out with his good time and all in November 1975, but Nixon was letting him out now. It didn’t say one word about Jimmy not being able to run for office until 1980. I can assure you that I would have picked that up right away. Jimmy was already planning to run in 1976. I might not have a lott of education, but I had been reading union contracts and legal documents for a living for many years. I had read hundreds of documents that were far more complicated than that pardon. All it said was that Jimmy was getting out, finally. We were happy people in that lunchroom, and after a lot of double-crossing by Partin and Fitzsimmons and Nixon and Mitchel, Jimmy was finally getting what he paid for. He was getting out for Christmas.”
Wendy lost her virginity to my dad that New Years Eve, and two weeks later she and my dad eloped to Woodville and she became a part of the Partin family. I was born nine months later, when Nixon was the newly elected president and Jimmy Hoffa was out of prison but still fighting to regain his role in the Teamsters.
What happened and led Wendy to flee the anti-war epicenter of California is the next and final chapter of this story.
Go to the Table of Contents
- The All American’s didn’t allow African Americans; we were a young country fighting in a world war. Those Airborne units would evolve into America’s special operations teams, including the Special Forces made famous by Rambo and other movies who were trained in the real-world John F. Kennedy Special Warfares Center, named in his honor after he championed fewer pawns in war and more dedicated, highly atrained soldiers who teach other countries instead of dying for them. In the early 1950’s, Congress forced the U.S. military to allow African Americans and any other hetorsexual race to fight and die side by side, more than a decade before Justice Earl Warren would oversee Brown vs. The Board of Education and All of America was forced be begin integrating kids in school, which led to Governor George Wallace ordering the Alabama National Guard to stand armed guard in front of schools to keep out African Americans.
Times have changed. ↩︎ - Years later, Walter Sheridan admitted the FBI had used illegal wiretapping on phone calls between Dalitz and Hoffa, put in place by Hoover’s men without Walter knowing; he said: “I had not known about these overhearings until long after I left the department.” ↩︎
- A favorite joke in San Diego back then was a report of a young surfer saving a drowning Richard Nixon’s life during rough surf at Slippery Dick’s. After being drug back to shore, Nixon asked what he could do to thank him. The young boy replied that he’d like to be buried in Arlington Cemetary with dad’s heroes, President Kennedy and Audie Murphy. Nixon said yes, but that it was an unusual request from such a young man, and he asked to know why he was thinking about his burial plot now. The kid replied: “Because when my dad hears that I saved you, he’s going to kill me!” ↩︎