One of the questions that tugged at us on Labor Day is what would have been made of America’s current crisis by Jimmy Hoffa. We’re not speaking of the incumbent president of the Teamsters, James P. Hoffa, who, over the weekend at a labor rally at Detroit, warmed up the crowd for President Obama. Rather of the his father, James Riddle Hoffa, who built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into such an enormous power by the mid-20^th century that Robert Kennedy, wrongly in our view, considered it a threat to America.

“My father was a very different person than myself,” James P. Hoffa told Jeffrey Goldberg of the New York Times when, in the late 1990s, he was seeking to become president of the union his father built. “I’m my own person. My father was born in 1913. He lived through the Depression. He came up through the school of hard knocks. I’m not going to war with anyone.” Yet two days ago, over Labor Day weekend, here was the same James P. Hoffa declaring, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out . . .”

What would Hoffa, the father, have made of this? He spent his early decades battling against employers, using a combination of violence and inspiring leadership and an extraordinary, even uncanny, intelligence in respect of collective bargaining. Our own theory is that whatever else he was, Hoffa Senior was just smarter than his adversaries. He was brought down by a vendetta of Robert Kennedy, who, in what became a personal feud, marshaled all the prosecutorial powers of the federal government to put Hoffa in prison, where he stood until President Nixon commuted his sentence while barring him from returning to the union.

There is a marvelous recreation of the RFK-Hoffa confrontation in Danny DeVito’s movie “Hoffa,” in which Jack Nicholson portrays the labor leader who stands up to RFK at a hearing of the Senate Rackets Committee. Youtube.com offers a glimpse of the real-life hearing, where RFK tries to trick Hoffa by quoting Hoffa’s own words. Hoffa parries the gambit by insisting that the American workers would never put at the head of a union someone who would disrupt the American system (visible at about 3 minutes and 10 seconds into the clip below).

Hoffa came to so detest the Kennedys that when President Kennedy was slain by an assassin, the Teamsters refused to lower their American flag to half staff. Later, while Hoffa lay in prison, the Teamsters formed their alliance with President Nixon, who eventually commuted Hoffa’s sentence. The union endorsed Nixon for re-election in 1972. Hoffa himself was enraged that the commutation deal had included a prohibition on him returning to the leadership, and he went to his grave — his disappearance has never been fully solved — with a feeling that he had been betrayed by the federal government, Republicans and the Democrats, and by the mob.

Would he, had he lived a century, have emerged to lead an army to re-elect a president who is the heir to the same left-wing of the Democratic Party to whom Robert Kennedy sought to deliver the presidency in 1968? Well, history doesn’t disclose her alternatives. But we have our doubts. For all his faults, the senior Hoffa was one of the shrewdest and most independent of any of the powerful labor leaders, and our own guess is that he would have stood apart, as the union did in 1980, when, five years after Hoffa’s disappearance, it endorsed Reagan.

It would be hard to overstate how controversial that move was, and much has been written questioning the Teamster’s motives. But whatever else one can say about the Teamsters, they were not dumb. Our guess is that they comprehended that Reagan, a former union leader himself, understood and respected the labor movement. They could see he was putting up a big tent, and they knew which way the unemployment rate was heading under President Carter; by November 1980 it was well above 7%. It’s hard to imagine the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was surprised when the man they endorsed put through the policies that touched off one of the greatest and longest expansions in American history. Or to imagine that the interests of labor lie in a similar campaign today.