<Begin Segment 18>

CS: It was then that Bob Kennedy, whom I had known through his investigation of the Teamsters union (for) the McClellan Committee, quote, "took notice" of me, and my ability to convict the president of the Teamsters union. And Mr. Kennedy was interested in Mr. Beck's successor, James Riddle Hoffa, who was then the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And so that was sort of my connection with Robert Kennedy, and I subsequently went to work with him in Washington.

TI: Because he offered you a position as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General at that point.

CS: Right.

TI: I mean, how did that feel? I mean, coming from Seattle, being asked to come to Washington, D.C., to join the administration?

CS: Well, to me it was not a big deal, and you have to understand that I'm never impressed with these things. And the way it happened was this: Edwin O. Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize writer for the Seattle Times, went to Washington as Bob Kennedy's Special Assistant for Public Affairs. Ed called me and said, "Are you going to be at home? Bob wants to call you." And I said, "Oh, sure." So...

TI: And at this point, he -- this is Bob Kennedy -- he was the attorney general?

CS: Bob was then the attorney general. And historically, I had been a Republican. I hesitate to admit that, but -- [laughs] -- and I was very resentful when John F. Kennedy named his brother as attorney general. So I was prepared to dislike him totally. And I had known Bob Kennedy when he was with the old McClellan Committee, and I didn't care for him then. I thought he was too brash. So when he became attorney general, and my friend Ed Guthman was his public information officer, called and said, "He's going to call you," at least I knew he was going to call me. So he called me -- I can't remember whether I was in my office or whether I was at home, and he said, "I'd like for you to come to Washington to work for me." And I said, "I don't think so. I'm a Republican, I didn't vote for your brother." And he said, "I'm looking for lawyers, not politicians." So at that time, my wife was in the hospital having just given birth to our fourth child, our daughter who was several days old. And I said, "Well, I'll have to consult with my wife, and I'll call you back." I said, "When do you want me to come to work?" He said, "Tomorrow." So I said, "Well, I'll call you back in a couple of days." And I talked with my wife about it, and she is, fortunately, one of those persons who will never direct me. And she will not tell me, "I think you should," "I think you should not." She said, "It's up to you." So two days later, I called Bob Kennedy and said, "I've talked with my wife about it. Yes, I will come to Washington." And that meant moving my family and all of that.

TI: Which, which was a huge inconvenience. So why did you take the position?

CS: I suppose the challenge -- and I had been a prosecutor at the state level, and getting involved in an investigation. Quite frankly, I didn't know all the details of the reason for my going to Washington. But moving from Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for King County to Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States in the legal field was sort of a move upward, and not in terms of prestige, but in terms of challenge and opportunity. So I went to Washington and found out that what Bob Kennedy had in mind was assigning me to a unit that later became known as the "Hoffa Squad." We denied that it existed. I was technically assigned to Organized Crime and Racketeering, and if anybody ever asked me what I was doing, "I'm in Organized Crime and Racketeering." But my job was to run grand juries around the country, and principally, I, my offices were located in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago, but I was supervising grand juries run in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Detroit, and I had a staff of government lawyers who were reporting to me, and we were investigating mismanagement of Teamster pension funds out of the Central States Pension Fund in Chicago.

And so that's what I did for four years, I traveled a lot, back and forth, back and forth. For a while I was commuting daily from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, because I had these four small children, and I would be away from them for two or three weeks at a time. Bob Kennedy had told me, "Whenever you can arrange it, go home and visit your family." So Chicago was, for me, ideal, after they opened Dulles Airport, which was ten minutes away from my house, and so I would leave home at 7:30 in the morning, get an 8:10 flight to Chicago, put in a full day in Chicago, leave my office at 5 o'clock, get a flight, and get back to Dulles airport by 8 o'clock at night. And I did that on a daily basis for about a month.

TI: So when you said "commute," it's not like a weekly commute, it was a daily commute.

CS: A daily commute.

TI: From D.C. to... to Chicago.

CS: To Chicago. But I didn't do that regularly. When I would commute to Los Angeles, I'd go once a week, and I'd leave home on Sunday night, be in my office in Los Angeles on Monday, leave my office on Thursday, get back home on Thursday night, go into my office on Friday in Washington, and be at home on Saturday, and get a flight out on Sunday night. That I did for four years on a regular basis, either... and I was young, fortunately then and still am now, in excellent health. And so it was easy for me physically, but it was, I'm sure it must have been difficult for my wife with four small children, two in diapers at the same time, to have to manage, and she learned to be an efficient manager in my absence. And that was the time of her growing, because I had always been in charge of everything, I'm the old macho father figure who runs everything, and I'm not there. And so she had to do all these things herself. And so for that approximately four-year period, she learned how to survive with an absent husband, and the children don't seem to have suffered from it too much.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.