John L. McClellan

John L. McClellan was the Arkansas senator who presided over the Senate hearings on racketeering in the labor movement that became known as the McClellan Committee hearings. In the book, he is presented as a congressional figure who gave the inquiry its public authority and described the extraordinary power of the Teamsters under Jimmy Hoffa in terms that made the union’s influence a national concern.

Chairing the McClellan Committee

After investigative reporter Victor Riesel was blinded in an acid attack, his televised appearances advocating labor reform helped provoke a Senate response. The resulting live, televised hearings on racketeering in the labor movement took McClellan’s name because he presided over the committee. Their public setting placed labor corruption before a nationwide audience, while the committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator, Bobby Kennedy, pursued the inquiry aggressively. The book identifies the hearings as a turning point in the growing public exposure of Hoffa’s alliances with organized crime.

Describing Hoffa’s Teamsters

McClellan gave the Teamsters’ power a formulation that extended beyond ordinary union influence. He called “the Teamsters under Mr. Hoffa’s leadership” a “superpower in this country—a power greater than the people and greater than the government.” The comparison stresses the scale of the union’s reach under Hoffa: a nationwide trucking strike, the book explains, could interrupt the movement of food, fuel, medicine, clothing, and building materials, potentially bringing the country to a standstill. McClellan’s description frames that leverage as a challenge to public authority, not simply as bargaining strength.

The Valachi Hearings

McClellan also presided over the Senate hearings at which Joseph Valachi testified in September 1963. Before Valachi spoke, McClellan called Bobby Kennedy as the first witness. Kennedy told the committee and its television audience that intelligence from Valachi had disclosed a Cosa Nostra commission and identified leaders responsible to it in major cities. McClellan’s committee thus served as a public venue for presenting information about organized crime’s national structure, linking the investigation of labor racketeering to a wider account of criminal organization.

Narrative Role

McClellan appears through the formal authority of the Senate committee and the force of his description of Hoffa’s union. The book gives little personal background; his significance lies instead in the hearings he led and the institutional platform they provided. His words sharpen the central contrast between the Teamsters’ material power over the movement of goods and the government’s effort to investigate the union’s entanglement with racketeering.