When Teamsters' President Dave Beck appeared before Senate investigators five years ago. the nation thought it saw a man being destroyed. He was accused of stealing $370.000 from the members of his International Brotherhood of Teamsters, of betraying his friends and of robbing a friend's widow. Robert F. Kennedy, then the Senate committee's chief counsel, wrote an early epitaph: "He was dead.
All that was needed was someone to push him over and make him lie down as dead men should." But Beck did not lie down. In the years since the Senate hearings, he has spent just one night behind bars,...