I watched the movie Hoffa last night and was wondering just how close to reality it is..

[Bandit]

My memory is really hazy of that time period..Is it true Bobby Kennedy launched a crusade against the teamsters and in particular Hoffa? The way the movie made Bobby Kennedy out, seemed almost the exact opposite from how I remember him. I don't recall him being on a Communist witch hunt as the movie indicates and I don't recall the teamsters being so anti Democrat and pro Republican as the movie suggests. Nixon pardoned Hoffa and Hoffa gave Republicans the teamster's full support. (according to the movie) but I don't recall it like that..How far from the truth is the movie, does anyone remember?

[Brickbat]

1. Yes, he did investigate the Teamsters as well as other unions.

It was quite a big deal.

[Bandit]

2. My memory is of him investigating organized crime and the teamsters were just caught up in it.

The movie suggests that it was organized labor that he was investigating and their involvement with communism...

[Brickbat]

3. It was both. RFK was a staunch anti-communist.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

4. Robert Kennedy worked for Joe McCarthy for a time until Roy Cohn

forced him out.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/herman-mccarthy.html

That determination to succeed in a hostile environment was one of the bonds that drew together Joe McCarthy and another prominent Irish Catholic family in the fifties, the Kennedys. Robert Kennedy had joined McCarthy's staff in 1953 at the behest of his father, the senator's keen admirer. Like McCarthy, Joseph Kennedy was a former Roosevelt Democrat and a fervent anti-Communist. He often invited McCarthy to stop by for drinks at the Kennedy house at Palm Beach and to stay at the family compound at Hyannis Port. The senior Kennedy's view of politics, and of life, was much like McCarthy's: "It's not what you are that counts, but what people think you are." McCarthy became a minor figure in the Kennedy circle. To the ex-ambassador's delight, he dated two of the Kennedy daughters, Patricia and Eunice, who discovered "he had a certain raw wit and charm when he had not had too much to drink," as Eunice later put it. Joe also played shortstop in family softball games (he did so badly that the Kennedys eventually had to bench him).

Robert Kennedy served McCarthy loyally as assistant counsel for his Subcommittee on Investigations, until a personal quarrel with the chief counsel, Roy Cohn, forced him to quit. But he and Joe remained close, and Joe McCarthy stood as godfather for Bobby and Ethel's first child. One day after McCarthy's censure by the Senate in 1954, Bobby was sailing on the Potomac with a group of reporters. He started defending McCarthy against their criticisms. "Why do you reporters...feel the way you do?" he wanted to know. "OK, Joe's methods may be a little rough, but after all, his goal was to expose Communists in government — a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?" Even after his own conversion to left-to-center liberalism, he refused to disown or even criticize his old boss. "A very complicated character," he would muse to himself years later. Robert Kennedy had seen in America's Grand Inquisitor a man who, for all his glaring faults, had "wanted so desperately to be liked."