Monday, Feb. 18, 1957
Dashaway Dave
From a transatlantic plane at London Airport last week strode Teamster Boss Dave Beck, ready for the question uppermost on the minds of newsmen: Had he left the U.S. to dodge the investigation by a special Senate committee into labor racketeering? Snapped beefy, truculent Beck, whose 1,400,000-member union will be the center of the probe: "Why should I dodge? I have nothing to hide."
For a man with nothing to hide, Boss Beck's recent behavior had been highly peculiar. Within the past three weeks he had: 1) declined, pleading illness, to appear before a Senate subcommittee investigating misuse of union funds; 2) turned up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at the Miami Beach midwinter meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council. There he cast the sole vote against a policy statement calling for removal of union officers who plead the Fifth Amendment, particularly at Government rackets investigations (TIME, Feb. 11). After the vote Beck stamped out, and the word was that he was headed home for Seattle. Five days later newsmen flushed him out in Nassau in the Bahamas, en route to Europe on "official business."
Explained Beck in London: "My schedule isn't an ordinary schedule. It keeps me moving all the time." Nonetheless, said he, "I have no objection to appearing before any committee"--as long as it does not "interfere with my schedule."
In Washington, Senate rackets investigators were proceeding with their own schedules. To show that he means business in the weeks ahead, Arkansas' John McClellan got his Government Operations Committee to cite for contempt four Teamster officers who had refused to testify about the union's financial affairs on the ground that the subcommittee was without jurisdiction. Among those cited: Einar O. Mohn, Beck's personal assistant, and Seattle's Frank W. Brewster, chairman of the Teamsters Western conference, which the subcommittee charged with coughing up $8,826.98 to pay some of Beck's personal bills.
As for Beck himself, John McClellan, who also heads up the Senate's newly created special rackets committee, put the alternatives in two crisp sentences: "If he is leaving the country for good, well, that's it. But I assume he will be back, and when we are ready to hear him, we will subpoena him."
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