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Without further ado, tonight im very excited to welcome Jack Goldsmith to politics and celebrating his new work in hoffas shadow. There been many theories about the fate jimmy hoffa, longtime president of the International Brotherhood of teamsters sense he disappeared and 75. Many involved Charles Chucky obrien half his age and goldsmith stepfather. The when the perspective he gained for serving as assistant attorney general under george w. Bush goldsmith was moved to uncover the truth about what hoffa, the mob, winning laborers power and the rise of the surveillance state and in hoffas shadow tells the moving story of how goldsmith reunited with the stepfather he disowned and set out to unravel one of the 20th centurys most persistent mysteries in chuckys role in it. Goldsmith is the Henry L Shattuck professor at harvard law school. Senior fellow at the hoover institute. Head of the office of Legal Counsel in the george w. Bush administration which during his tenure challenge the one list wiretapping program and withdrew memos ab is also offered terror to presidency as well as ab please join me in welcoming to politics pros, Jack Goldsmith. [applause] thank you very much to politics pros for hosting this event. Thank you to you all for coming out tonight, even though there is serious competition with the democratic debate and certain Baseball Team that i know there are many fans for. Im grateful you came. My tail begins in june 1975 when i was 12 years old i was living in west memphis arkansas and my mother in june 1975 married what was her third husband. My birth father was not a terribly good father. My stepfather the second marriage was not a great father so i hadnt had a great ab Chucky Obrien shows up on the scene they got married in june 1975 i got married abi immediately glommed onto him. He was amazing father he showed me love and affection i had never had we did everything together and i thought he was the greatest. 12 years old. Six months after my mom married him jimmy hoffa disappeared mysteriously from a parking lot in the suburbs of detroit michigan and Bloomfield Hills outside of the restaurant that was then called the marcus red box. To this day there is no direct evidence of what happened to hoffa, he vanished. Theres a lot of theories but no one knows what happened. He was seen in the parking lot as late as 2 45, his last phone call at 3 30, thats it. Theres a lot of theories about how he was picked up. But we dont know to this day what happened to hoffa, who is jimmy hoffa . Many people in the room may know was in the 50s and 60s one of the most wellknown public figures in the country. He led the Teamsters Union, the most powerful union in the country at a time when unions mattered. He had an outsized personality, and extraordinary labor leader for the teamsters and he was also corrupt in many ways. He had many ties to organized crime. He cut side deals all the time. He used the pension fund to line his own pockets. But he was this huge large figure and he basically went to jail in 1967 for a variety of things. He was out of jail and 71 when Richard Nixon parted him abi should say. He was trying to regain the presidency of the teamsters when he was disappeared. Probably almost certainly at the behest of the mob because basically hoffa was trying to win the Teamsters Union the presidency of the Teamsters Union the mob had taken over control of the Teamsters Union much more than when he was president they didnt want him back. They feared he was going to spill all their secrets because he was threatening to do so. Theres pretty good evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, that it was mob organized. Moderate evidence of that but no evidence of what happened that day. One week after the disappearance Chucky Obrien became the lead suspect. Chucky obrien was also hoffas righthand man from the early 50s basically until he disappeared until the year before he disappeared. He met hoffa when he was nine years old and he was by hoffas aside basically all the time from the early 50s until he went to prison and then after prison until just before he disappeared. Many people thought that chucky was half as legitimate son because they were so close. They were extremely close. They were always together. It was quite an extraordinary thing went six days after the disappearance my stepfather became the lead suspect. For those of you who remember, it was a circus. Half of disappearance was a circus. It was front page news every day it was on the evening news every night for weeks. And it was just an incredible a i was in the middle of it because i was just 12yearold kid who knew stepdad who were he revered as the leading suspect. And during the next fiveyear in my High School Years the formative years of my life as i look back on it, chucky was corrupt, why was he leading suspect, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that pointed toward him being involved. Including he was in the vicinity at the time of the disappearance. He had a break with hoffa six or eight months earlier. He was driving the car, the car of the sun leading detroit mobster thought to organize a hit. Hoffas hair hair matching hoffa was later found in the car and hoffas sent was found in the car. There were circumstantial evidence pointing toward him. The fbi had every reason to focus in on him. The next five years of my life was basically, two or three things going on, one, chucky and i became like this. I came to revere him, he was an extraordinary father, i came to review the Teamsters Union. I came to revered Teamsters Union identity. I came to revered the mobsters that he was close with. You may have heard of Anthony Giacalone and anthony problems anna, tony pro, new jersey mobster, those are both uncle tony to me. I spent a lot of time at their house. I thought they were wonderful gentlemen. I believe my stepfather when he told me that the mob really didnt exist. I bought the whole thing. This is at the same time that i was hanging out with these folks and he was my father and we are very close to hoffa stuff was out of control. The government was all over him. He was basically painted in the press of the guy who did it. To this day its conventional wisdom that chucky was the person who drove hoffa to his death. If you type in Chucky Obrien and jimmy hoffa into google you will find that the person who did it, who picked off up. I go to college in 1980 and over the next six or seven years i start to rethink chucky. When i got to college i read books about and a half a disappearance for the first time. One of which was abthis might seem nacve, it turns out the mafia did actually exist. It turned out my uncles tony were violent guys. It turned out my stepfather was had a criminal past. All things that i kind of either was dimly aware of or didnt focus on when i was in high school. I came to worry that my life would be in danger from hanging out with chucky and being his son. When i used to revel in his Union Identity and i came to revel in making fun of education, my values started changing in college and i came to admire him less. When i started thinking about my career my professional career i was accepted at Yale Law School and i started think, and it wont be such a great thing to be an attorney, especially if i have any ambitious to be in the government which i only barely did commit to have these very close mob ties and be the foster son from the stepson of the leading abto make a long story short, i cut chucky out of my life. It was a slow process about five or six years, gradual process and i concluded basically by the time i finished in law school i needed to go on with my life and have nothing to do with him i convinced myself at the time that he was a bad person that i was a virtuous person and needed to stay in a virtuous path, that he had either wronged me or might wrong me. And basically cut him out of my life. It was brutal. It hurt him quite a lot in ways that i didnt appreciate at the time and i will come back to at the end of his talk. It turned out this was a very good idea from a professional standpoint. The year after i got out of law school and was clerking for jay Harvey Wilkinson the first thing he asked me to do was to work on a case that required me to get classified security clearance, secret clearance. I filled out the forms and as the forms require a put down all my aliases i pointed out that i was my name was jack obrien from the age of 13 to 21, i didnt say jack obrien, the son of the leading suspect in the hoffa disappearance but i filled out the forms properly. About a week later two or three fbi agents come, i thought it was a standard security clearance interview i didnt know what they were at the time. I later found out through diversey act request this set off alarm bells inside the fbi and they thought that they had access to someone who was close to the leading suspect in the hoffa disappearance never did learn something. Basically i spent a day with the fbi who they were basically grilling me for a day, very unexpected to me. I thought i was finished in terms of getting security clearance. About everything i knew about the mob everything i knew about chucky, my attitude toward chucky. I convinced them i didnt have mob values and i convinced them i had separated myself from chucky and got the clearance. Thats kind of a metaphor for the next 20 years in my career i kept getting the clearance as i got fancier and fancier government jobs. I did so basically because i tossed chucky under the bus from up career perspective it was a good move in terms of professional development. Im skipping over a lot of things because i want to get to the writing of the book and what its about. Its about what im telling you now is about how the book opens. Fast forward 15 or 18 years later im working with the Justice Department. Assistant attorney general for the office of Legal Counsel, a job i wouldve never gotten had i not done what i did to chucky 20 years earlier. In working in the Justice Department late one night and working on a program called stellar wind, a wiretapping program in the bushes ministration. To make another long story short, there are all sorts of problems in the program and i was just starting to figure it out. I was in the Justice Department late one night reading Fourth Amendment cases and im reading a case called berger versus new york which some of you might remember, im reading long and theres two citations, however his united states, obrien versus united states. It was kind of shocked. I said can that possibly be my stepfather . Look at the case, turned out it was the case involving Chucky Obrien. When i was in high school chucky had always said how corrupt the government was, they could break every rule in secret, they engage in legal surveillance over time. And they did it to me and i had a famous Supreme Court case he told me. I didnt believe him and i never knew about the case. It turned out that was mostly true. It turned out he was legally surveilled in the early 1960s and it turns out this case did convict eviction as part of basically cleaning up decades of surveillance abuse by the government that finally emerged in the public in the mid 60s and he was the beneficiary of this because the government actually was illegally surveying him and his lawyer and the office of a mob person he was close to. This was shocking to me for many reasons i was and is very stressful position involving the president of the nine states. Another traumatic period bella comes back we just came rushing back to me that the things chucky said about the Justice Department and how they could cut corners. There i was kneedeep in a Surveillance Program that had serious legal problems and chucky basically in the large was right about the 60s and still true in a large when i was there in the early 2000s. So this began a process for me that took about a year. The process in which i went through a lot of soulsearching about my relationship with chucky. It involved a lot of things that involved me realizing i had judged him very harshly and that i had not abi exit exaggerated my own virtue and under appreciated his virtues. That he had never done anything wrong to me. Hed only been a great father to me. When i was in high school. He was ill i appreciated his situation of being charged with something bad that he couldnt really fight because when i left the government i was accused of doing things which i didnt think were fair but i couldnt really fight those charges either so i sympathize with him on that front. And finally, i have two young children. My mom had always told me how badly i hurt chucky when i broke with him but i didnt really appreciate it until i have my own children. When i began to reflect on the vulnerability and the love i have for my children and the pain that would happen to me if what they did to me what i had done chucky. All these reasons came together to lead me to ask for his forgiveness in late 2004. It happened in a very casual way we were sitting watching seinfeld and the Television Room he wasnt well he was sitting in his chair and i turned to him and i said, it was wrong to do what i did to you 20 years ago, i hope youll forgive me. He looked at me and he was surprised. This is the first trip i had really seen him with any amount of time we had a good couple days together like the good old days but he was shocked when i said this. He looked at me and his face was fashioned and his eyes were hollow and he started to tear up and he said, you dont have to apologize, son, i understand why you did what you did. That was it. And that was the end of any discussion of what had happened the previous 20 years. Eva gave me. He let me back in his life, we became very close, we spent a lot of time talking over the next seven years. Head over the course of these conversations i started to doubt whether he was the person who picked up jimmy hoffa, for all but two reasons. I didnt have any evidence and i didnt know anything about the case but the way he talked about it in the way he revered hoffa. I said to him one day about seven or eight years ago. I said, why dont i write a book about this. Im sure whatever i find whatever i discover about what happened in the hoffa case that its got to give you a fair shake that you been given because every book that had been written had him driving hoffa to his death. Thats the conventional wisdom. So he hesitated at first, i thought he would jump at this to have me write a book about his life with hoffa and a book that tried to vindicate him from the charge. Let me just say he was like this with hoffa, hoffa was a father figure to him. He was basically being charged with patricide in this charge that was floated in the 70s and conventional wisdom everywhere it ruined his life for a whole bunch of reasons. It is our him it ruined his life in the Teamsters Union. It just basically destroyed him. He tried to fight back and he could never fight back he didnt have the rhetorical or financial or legal tools to even confront these charges. I told him i would do my best to try and he finally came around and said okay. I said just one condition, i will write this book, i will do my best i will try to clear you and figure out what happened and i will write the best book i can but one condition, you have to tell me the truth. He looked at me with his eyes a this is a major challenge. Because chucky i learned when i read something called the halifaxaball his friends say he is a notorious pathological liar. I knew this. He always shaded the truth about everything. Thats one set of challenges my main witness that im trying to clear is unreliable. Another challenge was there is so much misinformation built up about the hoffa disappearance over the years. Mostly based on the early 1970s theories so many claims and counterclaims that sifting through that to try to get to the truth was extremely difficult. I spent seven years doing it talk to every fbi agent who ever worked the case. Became friends with many of them. I looked at thousands of pages of government documents, many of which had never been discussed in public about the case. Chucky and i developed a rapport. We spent probably thousands of hours, more than a thousand certainly talking about the case. It was this amazing dancewear i was the interrogator and he would sometimes answer me straight, sometimes not answer, usually try to deflect. Over time he told me a lot, not everything but a lot. In the book i do believe that i accomplish my original goal. I accomplish my original goal of clearing him from the charge that he was the person who drove hoffa to his death. I think everyone whos read the book has agreed with that conclusion. Theres lots of reasons i wont go to them, circumstantial case against him was full of holes. Theres lots of evidence that the government didnt talk about or know about early in the case that developed to suggest he didnt