William Loeb

William Loeb enters the account through a letter that connected a newspaper publisher, a Supreme Court justice, Jimmy Hoffa’s appeal, and the Teamsters pension fund. As owner and publisher of New Hampshire’s influential Manchester Union Leader, and an old college chum of Justice Potter Stewart, Loeb had both public standing and a personal channel to the justice who had written the Court’s opinion against Hoffa.

Identity and position

Loeb’s significance here rests on the overlap between his press influence and his private friendship with Stewart. The book identifies him as the publisher of an influential newspaper and as someone close enough to the justice to write to him directly. That combination made his intervention more than a routine submission to the Court: it carried a personal appeal into the aftermath of a consequential ruling.

The letter to Justice Stewart

Nine days after Stewart’s opinion, Loeb wrote to his old college friend on Hoffa’s behalf. He reported that an unnamed high government official had assured him that Bobby Kennedy had used illegal wiretaps in his determination to prosecute Hoffa. The letter thus introduced an allegation about the government’s conduct after the Supreme Court had rejected Hoffa’s appeal on its merits.

The undisclosed pension-fund loan

The account emphasizes what Loeb left out: he had been promised a huge loan from the Teamsters pension fund, and subsequently received it. The loan placed his communication with Stewart in a materially different light, though the evidence does not establish that it disproved the wiretap allegation or explain Loeb’s precise motive for writing. Had it been proved that Hoffa’s attorneys had put Loeb up to sending the letter, they would have faced ethics proceedings. The matter was not pursued, leaving the letter’s allegation and its undisclosed financial context together in the record.