Robert F. Kennedy first gained national prominence in the late 1950s as the chief counsel of a Senate committee investigating corruption in organized labor. The Teamsters Union, the largest union in the nation, was especially targeted by the investigation. The committee uncovered widespread corruption in the union, and Teamsters leaders called to appear before the Senate, such as David Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, were famously uncooperative during their questioning by Kennedy and committee members. In 1957, the year Hoffa became Teamsters president, the union was expelled from the AFL?CIO, the nation's dominant labor organization. Nevertheless, Hoffa remained a popular Teamsters president, even during further Senate investigations and a federal corruption trial that ended with a hung jury and his acquittal. Kennedy served as U.S. attorney general in the administration of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and in 1964 was elected as a U.S. senator from New York. In 1964, Hoffa was...
In early 1957, the Senate launched an investigation of corruption in organized labor, particularly within the Teamsters Union, which with nearly 2 million members was the largest union in the...
On March 16, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Robert Kennedy, a...
On December 23, 1971, former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, serving a thirteen-year prison term for jury tampering and fraud, had his sentence commuted in time for Christmas by President Richard...
On this day in 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, is shot three times in a hail of gunfire in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
At 12:50 a.m. PST on the morning of June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, a presidential candidate, was fatally shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. He had just...
Before Joseph Valachi came forward in 1962 to inform on the organized crime syndicate of which he was a member, federal authorities had no concrete evidence that the American Mafia even existed....
On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed by a sniper while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Motel Lorraine in Memphis,...
On July 31, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa, one of the most influential American labor leaders of the 20th century, disappears in Detroit, Michigan, never to be heard from again. Though he is popularly...
John F. Kennedy, the youngest candidate ever elected to the presidency, proved a fitting representative of the youthful and energetic spirit of America during the early 1960s. Like Theodore...
