On the Leash

Chunky, hard-boiled Teamster Czar Jimmy Hoffa has shown remarkable talents in recent months both for getting into trouble and for wriggling out. Jimmy's latest wriggle: in Washington last week, U.S. District Judge F. Dickinson Letts lifted his own injunction barring Hoffa from taking office as Teamster president. At the Teamsters' marble-and-glass palace in Washington, Jimmy's secretary promptly started greeting telephone callers with a cheery "President Hoffa's office." But Hoffa was a president on a leash, and the other end was held by Judge Letts.

The judge issued his injunction last October on complaint of 13 New York Teamsters who charged that Hoffa finagled the president's chair for himself by packing the Teamster convention with puppet delegates, hand-picked in violation of the union's constitution. Under the arrangement that Hoffa's lawyers worked out with the 13 rebels, these charges remain hanging. In a settlement without precedent in labor cases, Judge Letts, 82, kept jurisdiction over the case, ordered a three-man "board of monitors" set up to look over Jimmy's shoulder and report to the court on what they see. One monitor will be named by Hoffa & Co.. one by the 13 dissidents; the two sides will pick a third man to serve as chairman (if they cannot agree. Judge Letts will do the picking). The watchdogs may prove a nuisance to Jimmy at times, but they may also be useful to him in his efforts to convince the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that he is running an honest union, and that the federation did wrong to boot the Teamsters out last December.

Judge Letts labeled the settlement "a magnificent disposition." It left a federal court acting as a supervisor over a labor union, an awkward arrangement that responsible labor leaders can hardly view with composure. And it confirmed as president of the U.S.'s biggest labor union (1,400,000 claimed members) a man whom the A.F.L.-C.I.O. deemed unfit for leadership in the united labor movement.

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