The Dallas assassination of President Kennedy is both a national catastrophe and a turning point in the book’s tangled account of Bobby Kennedy, organized crime, and Jimmy Hoffa. The book connects the assassination to an abrupt halt in the federal campaign against organized crime, to Hoffa’s anger at the public mourning, and to a later allegation by Hoffa that Frank Sheeran had unknowingly carried replacement rifles connected to the killing. That allegation is presented as remembered speech, not independently established fact; the event’s importance lies partly in the way suspicion and unfinished business gather around it in the narrative.

The assassination and its immediate setting

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That day, Bobby Kennedy was in Washington, D.C., presiding over a two-day meeting at the U.S. Department of Justice with federal attorneys from across the country. They had gathered to work out the next phase of the attorney general’s campaign against organized crime. Bobby Kennedy learned the news during a lunch break on the meeting’s second day. William Hundley, chief of the Organized Crime Section, later described the assassination as the moment the program stopped. The book thus sets the president’s death against a specific institutional consequence: the interruption of a campaign that Bobby Kennedy had made a personal, fiercely competitive struggle.

The assassination also enters through Sheeran’s recollection of an ordinary workday transformed by the radio. He had union business in Wilmington, Delaware, where the Local 107 hall was near the train station, and had stopped at trucking terminals on his way down. When he walked into the hall, news of the shooting was being broadcast. Sheeran remembered being troubled, as people everywhere were, despite disliking Kennedy; he said he had nothing personal against him and regarded his family warmly. Before Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, Sheeran’s thoughts had already turned to an earlier matter at Monte’s Restaurant. He recalled that there was no one he could ask about a possible connection. The account leaves that suspicion unresolved rather than supplying an explanation.

Political shock and Teamsters conflict

The book places Bobby Kennedy’s response within his continuing knowledge of organized crime. On December 9, seventeen days after the assassination, he discussed with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. whether Oswald had acted alone or as part of a larger plot, potentially involving Castro or gangsters. Two years after the Warren Commission issued its report, Bobby Kennedy told Richard Goodwin that he had never thought the Cubans were involved and that, if anyone else was, it was organized crime—though he believed there was nothing he could do about it then. These reported remarks show suspicion persisting, but they do not establish a conspiracy or identify perpetrators.

The assassination also sharpened an existing clash inside the Teamsters. As flags in Washington were lowered to half-staff and government workers were sent home, International Vice President Harold Gibbons lowered the Teamsters headquarters flag and closed the building. Hoffa flew into a rage when he learned of it and never forgave Gibbons. Sheeran later argued that Gibbons had simply followed the widespread response and recommended that Hoffa put him in charge of day-to-day operations while Hoffa was away at school. Hoffa dismissed the suggestion. In this episode, public mourning becomes a test of loyalty for Hoffa: even a conventional gesture toward the slain president fed his grievance against a senior union official.

Hoffa’s later allegation

In a later conversation recounted by Sheeran, Hoffa tied the assassination to a delivery Sheeran had made to Baltimore. Hoffa alleged that the package contained high-powered rifles intended for the Dallas killing, and that the original weapons had been lost when a drunken driver crashed a Thunderbird. According to this account, a pilot associated with Carlos Marcello helped deliver replacement rifles, which Sheeran carried without knowing their alleged purpose. Hoffa characterized himself and Sheeran as having been used as unwitting intermediaries. These details are Hoffa’s claims as reported by Sheeran; the passage does not independently verify the weapons, the delivery, or the asserted connection to the assassination.

Hoffa’s account went further. He alleged that both fake and real police officers were involved, and that Jack Ruby had been expected to deal with Oswald before doing so himself. He placed the supposed participants among figures connected to the Bay of Pigs invasion and also invoked a plot to kill Fidel Castro involving Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. The accumulation of names and alleged operations gives the speech the force of a revelation within the story, but its force is not the same as corroboration. The distinction matters: the book presents an accusation made by Hoffa in a charged private conversation, preserved through Sheeran’s later recollection.

Retrospective testimony and its limits

The assassination’s place in the account depends on layers of retrospective narration. Sheeran’s recollection of hearing the news in Wilmington sits beside his later report of what Hoffa claimed and the book’s historical framing of Bobby Kennedy’s response. These are different kinds of evidence: a remembered scene, reported allegations, and attributed statements by public figures. The book’s form brings them into contact without making them equally certain.

Charles Brandt describes the work as a history built from one-on-one interviews with Sheeran, most tape-recorded. Their first interview, in 1991, ended after Sheeran reconsidered the questioning and stopped the process. After renewed contact in 1999, interviews continued for four years. Brandt says he approached them with experience as a homicide and death-penalty prosecutor and a student of interrogation; he also explains that steps were taken to protect Sheeran’s rights so that his words would not constitute a legally admissible confession. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then the full manuscript. In a final hospital-bed recording, he affirmed the book’s account, including its account of what happened to Hoffa. That later endorsement establishes his willingness to stand behind the book, not independent proof of the specific assassination allegations attributed to Hoffa. The Dallas killing therefore remains a point where the book’s documented chronology meets its most consequential, unresolved suspicions.