“They didn’t make a parachute big enough”

“They didn’t make a parachute big enough” is a taunt built from a failed prediction: after Jimmy Hoffa’s acquittal, Bobby Kennedy’s imagined leap from the Capitol became a running measure of how badly the prosecution had misjudged its chances.

The Capitol Leap

In 1957, when a reporter asked what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, Kennedy said he had “never considered that possibility” in such an “air-tight case,” then joked, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.” Hoffa was acquitted. Edward Bennett Williams answered Kennedy’s prediction with a wrapped box containing a toy parachute, turning the threatened leap into a literal prop and a pointed reminder of the verdict.

The Joke Becomes a Refrain

The parachute joke returned after a second, separate defeat for the prosecution. In the New York wiretapping trial, the first jury deadlocked at eleven to one; during the retrial, a juror reported an attempted bribe, was replaced by an alternate, and the jury acquitted Jimmy Hoffa. The narrator recalls that, after this wiretap trial, people were saying “they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.” The image had outlived the Washington verdict: a failed prediction had become a public refrain attached to Kennedy’s repeated inability to convict Hoffa.

The perjury case then collapsed for a different reason. Its indictment depended on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. Although New York law had authorized the wiretap, the Supreme Court ruled such state-sanctioned interceptions unconstitutional and barred both the recordings and evidence derived from them under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. With no admissible evidence left, the indictment was dismissed. The recurring joke thus gathered force from successive reversals: first an acquittal mocked Kennedy’s certainty, then constitutional limits on the prosecution’s evidence made the imagined fall seem harder still to avoid.

From Anecdote to Union-Lore

The recollection gives the taunt a setting without assigning it a single inventor: the narrator says he went to work for the union around that time, shortly after Jimmy Hoffa became president, and remembers that “everybody was saying” it after the wiretap trial. The wording therefore survives not as a recorded reply from Robert F. Kennedy but as reported workplace talk, carried by repetition from one prosecution defeat to the next. Its blunt final word makes the image less a literal prediction than a public jeer; the evidence records the joke circulating, not Kennedy making the threatened leap.

The Joke as a Portable Verdict

The expression compresses a series of legal reversals into one memorable image. A private-sounding wager about a leap becomes, through repetition, a collective judgment on Robert F. Kennedy’s confidence; its impossible parachute turns the joke away from the mechanics of falling and toward the scale of the humiliation. The book presents the line as circulating talk, not as a literal forecast or a documented reply from Kennedy. Its lasting function is therefore less to predict an outcome than to preserve, in portable comic form, the gap between certainty and what the courts delivered.