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 to take your questions. O r qu[applause] i really enjoyed your book. But you talked a lotot about do you think if you wouldve told everything he knew he wouldve gotten that t letter . And he answered every single question. With his involvement of the disappearance. They wanted they hope if they clear them to cooperate what he knew. So he answered all their questions completely and fully and satisfied every condition that they had. I dont he told me a lot of things later they didnt ask him what he knew because theres no way he would answer that. A big part of the book that he was half sicilian and half irish but was raised with sicilian values. And his mother schooled him. And jack ohlone schooled him on the code of silence. And the most important principle in his life cap beating up against the desire to help me right to the truthful book that i needed to write and while it is about our struggle to work through his commitment to america and to figure out everything he knew and it was a struggle right to the very end. Thank you for being here putting the stuff about fathers and sons in the book that did not have to beic there. It is a great thing. One quick question you lived in arkansas when your mom met chucky so how did that happen . And second the reporter says that he was the one who killed hoffa. What do you think . He is dead now but do you think thats truthful . I want to comment on the first thing you said. It is about fathers and sons but its also about forgiveness and power of forgiveness. I did not realize what anen important thing this was i just read the book that was important about my relationship and what i learned but the main feedback i have gotten is thank you for writing this book because it made me realize the issues i have in my family with my parents and the importance of forgiveness and those atrelationships that several rerprising because people appreciate that. So chucky was living in detroit my mom was living in florida i was the oldest of the boys but my grandmother lived in west memphis so we happen to be there that summer and met chucky through chuckys mother who was an amazing woman so they got married and then he moved to florida. But for the book theres a movie coming out about hoffa call the irishman based on the book and thats based on a confession of frank sharon who was a teamsters official or at least a serious criminal. So the basis of the book is turned into a major Motion Picture so it is rubbish. There is more to say about it but there is absolutely zero evidence to support it at all and lots of reasons. Every person i talked to in the fbi gave me a lot of good reasons why but now is the basis of a Motion Picture. Most importantly for me, the book is based on the early seventies. But in the book he has chucky beating up hoffa. So i suspect the movie has chucky driving him to his death. And i suspect the scorsese movie will not be the account of what the fbi things. If that affected the others like your brother and youre mother. I was 12 my brothers were seven but it got significantly worse as a result of the investigation, publicity, chargs and reporters in theei stress to be called in front of the grand jury my mom did not have attend but it was a toll on her but as for me it seems strange and implausible. And it seems impossible. With my relationship with chucky we were extremely close. And i had a pretty good experience. We did everything together. I dont remember it as a terrible time in my life. And as a stable time in my life. Thank you for your interestings story. How is it that chucky was able to get but you had inside information. Thats not accurate im sorry if i misled you. In the late fifties the fbi director became convinced that he had to take organizedo crime seriously. In the first line of attack was to use wire surveillance to gather intelligence. This started in the late fifties and went through 1965. It was secret but all came out in the sixties. And the reason chucky knew about it because when the government revealed this illegal activity the Supreme Court and to look at the court because they thought the legal basis and presented a plan to the court and to reveal every case that was even close to legal surveillance. And with the links of this in the sixties. And with the conviction to be vacated. How we live in surveillance paranoia. There is dramatic paranoia there was story after story after story of for the newfangled recording devices around every corner watching us. Much like what we talk about today but hoffa had a lot of reasons to think he was being surveilled the government was aggressively followed. He believed he was illegally wiretapped but could not prove it. And all of these are available in the public now and believe it ors not with a 1980s investigation into the jfk and they collected all sorts of evidence about the government and the mob but chucky learned about in the sixties. I can still remember but do you know of a teamsters are a force for good or ill . May be then maybe. And they were up because he extended the bargaining unit to the National Level so that meant he could close down transportation routes to fail for deliveries and could put economic leverage on everyone. And basically to have extraordinary power with extremely successful at bringing many hundreds of othousands of workers poverty into the middle class and considered h narrowly in terms of being good for the teamsters. And there is a promise i dont think it was serious but hoffa was on the outs for a bunch of reasons and in part because of his commitments. And in that counterfactual world and then he did a great damage to the labor the department. And that is the effect and its hard to make that sweeping generalities with a brilliant and Effective Labor leader. But with the predecessor to hoffa he was not the charismatic leader hoffa was in here different hoffa was always making side deals and amassing o cash. That was confirmed by a lot of things but hoffa wasnt spending ong it himself and was ospending it to enhance power and to buy people off and to buy off politicians and that was more or less true. More conventionallyy corrupt. And while chucky didnt get the letter to exonerateu him sr food diday it . And with government k officials in detroit and that theory of the case of surveillance evidence they think they know who did it with thats a person pickoff up and have reasons to think that i wont mention the name but they know because they caught amonte bragging about it in a way that wasap corroborated with other pieces of evidence. But then quickly rose in prominence through the detroit ranks. I mention one i didnt mention his name of the books. Because i dont know the fbis evidences. And you seem very confident and as suspect. My publisher wanted me to mention the name but i didnt and to find at very frustrating. And that turned out not to be true. And what i appreciate others doing. And with conversations in detroit and the government they will release this information that some point in the near future. I am a victim from everybody else but at the end of the book i love the book. Everybody should read it. Your stepfather indicates that tony was involved so how do you think that connects u up to the new jersey mob . Chucky tried hard not to tell me things he was not supposed to tell me but he did tell me some things he wasnt supposed to tell me. One of the things he told me that tonye was a teachers official for the new jersey teams terms one teamsters as was widely suspected and didnt give any details but told me an extremely incredible ways and its not surprising that uncle tony was involved. But it seems pretty cleary to me and what ive learned from others that the hoffa hit was approved by the commission. This was a decision that affected the whole nation and everybody. And hoffa threatened to take everyonene down. And basically hoffa was the intermediary. He didnt tell me this but it is the informed speculation in detroit especially. There is a lot of metadata information which has notn been shared with the public to Share Communications between the two that looked very much like because of the intensity and the other calls they made looks very much like they were working with jack alone he. Thats the basic contours of the conspiracy at the 40000footics level. And to follow on the last question, what ever happened to tonys pool table . [laughter] and was the most uncontrollably violent man in unmy life. He had other descriptions as well. But thats not the tony that i knew the tony that i knew was a gentleman always in a bathing suit we would always go hang out with barbecues and play on his gorgeous pool table it was a gorgeous wooden pool table. I was 13 or 14 then i was into pool and i loved it and asked him were he got it in one day he said come over here and get this god damn pool table and give it to your children. So chucky did and we had it in our garage implementation. Which i adored throughout my High School Years and i dont know what happened to the pool table. If i understood the significance at 17 i would give anything for it now but i dont know what happened to it. I think about tony every time i play pool. [laughter] and that goes to the conversation that they had and then he reveals a lot more but unlike those conversations to retract so at the end of the book you talk about your internal struggles. And i guess we will never know exactly what you did or did not publish but. So let me explain i learned a lot from chucky over many hours of conversation. He always had his mothers image in the back of his head every time he got close to telling me something and then to say i cant say that but what he wanted to tell me things but i didnt push him because i came to respect that asimportant principle because he lost Everything Else. He still told me a lot then one day my mom had a heart attack i came down to boca raton and chucky was there at the hospital so my mom said take this and him will calm him down so i basically decided it i wouldnt listen to him anymore and i was going to write the book so we sit down and i just reflexively hit the voice recorder on my iphone does all the conversations i just had a record i had no expectation to have a conversation. So we are talking alone in my childhood and the good old days with jack obrien and the jfun things that we did and somehow the trip to detroit the Previous Year this interview with the government came. And chucky said tony pearl had a lot to do with it. And i was stunned. Stunned that he never ever had talked about in a way that was very credible that he had never talked about that he always given me the stories which i believe and then he proceeded for about 40 minutes to tell me a bunch of things. And to learn a lot and that conversation and then to realize a lot of things that i realized and i explained this nt the moment hoffa disappears he was not involved but he knew a lot about the backdrop, the teamsters relationships with the mob and the players involved and immediately knew what happened and why. All this pressure is coming down on him and he had to be very careful. And seem to understand the incredible pressures he was under not what happened that afternoon i dont believeon he knows what happened. He told me they didnt tell him he said he didnt want to know what happened. But he told me a lot of things that i found it credible that day. Because he immediately regretted telling me. He told me this because he was distraught. I dont know why he told me. He was distraught about my mom and distraught and exhausted and just downloaded. And at that point i had a huge dilemma. I just learned a lot that goes to the truth of the hoffa disappearance that is not known and it is credible and i cannot write the book without this information. Its Crystal Clear to me. But on the other hand a couple c weeks later he said you cannot put that stuff in the book. Not because he feared for his life but it would violate his honor he told me something that he wasnt supposed to. I struggled with what to do. And that was my plan because i wanted to exonerate him but the way was to publish the book until he passed away but because of the scorsese movie , he was very anxious for me to publish the book because he didnt want one did want the public to know he did not drive him to his death he was putting pressure on me so i said i will let him decide. Ka i showed him the manuscript which included the things he told me. Not every single detail that what i found to be i material. And i would let him decide and make a tradeoff about what he valued most. I gave him the manuscript on monday and said i need it back by friday. My publisher had to know we were Going Forward on friday. Over that week i thought for cou sure he would say you cant publish this. I saw him looking he would wince a few times. Heat asked me to take some things out completely nonmaterialen completely stupid things. But the meat of what he told me that he might regret was at the end of the book. Finally he comes around on friday i said you want me to publish it or not. Your call. He handed me manuscript with a terribly sad face and said i read every word. You wrote a w great book. Congratulations, son. And i thought what the hell does that mean . [laughter] because i dont thank you read the book. I dont thank you read to the end. And i dont know why. I dont know if it was too painful, he did on the responsibility, if he decided to suck up his honor so i could publish were clear my name. But he gave me the thumbsan up. I reflect in the end of the book i cant do here but did i do the right thing . And it was a very tough decision. I can report now that he is not well. Hes near the end of his life i fear. But he has struggled with the book in various ways. I talk about that i tried to ride in on this book. But the week it was published he basically had not talked to me about it and it was concerning to me and i wrote the book for him when he figured if he hated it then i failed. Basically he called me up a couple days after it was published, gave him a copy a couple weeks earlier and he was in tears. Watch on which he doesnt do. I read the book three times. I really read at this time. You wrote an amazing book. I know how you did it. I dont know how you figured it out. You got it exactly right. Im so sorry i was a pain in the ass. [laughter] and that to me made it writing cathe book. Because i cleared his name it was a difficult call of what to put it in. But that judgment by can made it all worth it. Thank you very much. Pp [applause] [inaudible conversations]