Potter Stewart

Potter Stewart’s role in James R. Hoffa’s Chattanooga appeal placed him at the center of a consequential Supreme Court ruling and its murky aftermath. Stewart wrote the majority opinion rejecting Hoffa’s appeal; a letter he received nine days later from publisher William Loeb tried to cast doubt on the government’s conduct, but Loeb’s undisclosed connection to a Teamsters Pension Fund loan complicated the intervention.

The Chattanooga Appeal

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Hoffa’s appeal because it raised a novel constitutional question: whether his right to counsel had been violated by the presence of government witness Edward Grady Partin at the Andrew Jackson Hotel. The case arrived during the decade the book calls the “criminal law revolution,” when courts were defining rights that had not previously been established. Joseph A. Fanelli, a seasoned appellate lawyer newly added to Hoffa’s legal team, handled the appeal. After oral argument, Walter Sheridan said the prosecution team was “not at all certain when it was over how the Justices would rule.”

The Majority Opinion

The Court ruled against Hoffa on the merits. Stewart wrote the majority opinion, and Justice William Brennan joined it. Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, voting to reverse Hoffa’s conviction and condemning the government’s clandestine use of Partin as “an affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement.” The contrast made Stewart’s opinion the decisive ruling in an appeal that had tested the boundaries of the right to counsel, while Warren’s dissent recorded a sharply different judgment of the government’s methods.

Loeb’s Letter and the Rehearing Bid

Nine days after Stewart’s opinion, he received a letter from William Loeb, an old college chum who owned and published New Hampshire’s influential Manchester Union Leader. Loeb wrote that an unnamed senior government official had assured him Robert F. Kennedy used illegal wiretaps in his effort to prosecute Hoffa. The letter did not disclose that Loeb had been promised a large loan from the Teamsters Pension Fund; he subsequently received it. The book notes that proof Hoffa’s lawyers had prompted Loeb to write could have exposed them to ethics proceedings, but the matter was not pursued.

Hoffa’s lawyers also sought a rehearing of Stewart’s decision. Such motions were routinely filed but rarely granted, and the account presents Loeb’s letter as an inappropriate appeal to influence rather than a change to the Court’s ruling. Stewart’s place in the episode therefore extends beyond authorship of the majority opinion: the decision became the target of a post-ruling effort whose alleged evidence came from a politically connected publisher with a concealed financial interest.