J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (92 page)

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after reviewing all the stillextant files and obtaining testimony from many of the still-surviving witnesses, concluded in 1979 that “the FBI’s investigation into a conspiracy was deficient in the areas that the committee decided were most worthy of suspicion—organized crime, pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, and the possible associations of individuals from these areas with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. In those areas in particular, the committee found that the FBI’s investigation was in all likehood insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”
²⁵

That J. Edgar Hoover didn’t want to find one helped.

From its inception, Hoover treated the Warren Commission as an adversary. He publicly offered it his full cooperation—after all, it was a creation of the president—but instructed his agents to volunteer nothing beyond what was requested, and then only after prior approval of FBIHQ. He delayed responding to its requests, until the committee was under tremendous pressure to issue its report, then inundated it with materials he knew its staff wouldn’t have time to examine carefully.

The commission was totally dependent on him—as Chairman Warren observed
in their first session, not one of its seven members had any investigative experience—and yet, increasingly, came to distrust him.

It also feared him.

The first session was on December 5. And the commission members had nothing to work with. The promised FBI report hadn’t yet arrived. But for a dime they could read it, in the
Chicago Tribune
or
Washington Star,
Crime Records having two days earlier leaked it to those papers, causing Senator Russell to ask caustically, “How much of their findings does the FBI propose to release to the press before we present the findings of this Commission?”
^*
26

Warren was quite content to read the FBI report, when and if it arrived, discuss it, then issue a report on the commission’s findings. But others, and they were in the majority, thought a more comprehensive investigation was mandated, complete with subpoena powers and their own independent investigators. Otherwise the FBI would be investigating itself. McCloy: “There is a potential culpability here on the part of the Secret Service and even the FBI, and these reports, after all, human nature being what it is, may have some self-serving aspects in them.”
²⁷

Hoover’s informant on the commission promptly reported back its deliberations, via DeLoach.

The last thing Hoover wanted was a group of private snoops conducting their own investigation, and perhaps finding things the FBI hadn’t. The committee “should be discouraged from having an investigative staff,”
²⁸
Alan Belmont noted, and it was. Although the commission did obtain subpoena power from Congress, the FBI would continue to investigate itself.

By December 9 the commission had received the Bureau’s five-page report on the assassination.

W
ARREN
: “Well, gentlemen, to be very frank about it, I have read the FBI report two or three times and I have not seen anything in there yet that has not been in the press.”

B
OGGS
: “…reading the FBI report leaves a million questions.”
²⁹

By December 16 the committee had received the Bureau’s initial, fivevolume report of its investigative findings, but no one was happy with it.

M
C
C
LOY
: “Why did the FBI report come out with something that was inconsistent with the autopsy?…The bullet business has me confused.”

W
ARREN
: “It’s totally inconclusive.”

B
OGGS
: “Well, the FBI report doesn’t clear it up.”

W
ARREN
: “It doesn’t do anything.”

B
OGGS
: “It raised a lot of new questions in my mind…There is still little on this fellow Ruby, including his movements…what he was doing, how he got in [the Dallas jail], it’s fantastic.”
³⁰

There was much criticism of the FBI report, the members finding that it “lacked depth,” was “hard to decipher,” and had “so many loopholes in it.” As Rankin put it, “Anybody can look at it and see that it just doesn’t seem like they’re looking for things that this Commission has to look for in order to get the answers that it wants and it’s entitled to.”
³¹

The inadequacies of the FBI’s fabled investigative efforts shocked the commission members, some of whom showed an abysmal ignorance about the intelligence agencies. Chief among them was Chairman Warren. Asked by McCloy whether he had contacted the CIA, Warren responded, “No, I have not, for the simple reason that I had never been informed that the CIA had any knowledge about this.”

McCloy: “They have.”

Warren: “I’m sure they have, but I did not want to put the CIA into this thing unless they put themselves in.”
³²
The former CIA director Allen Dulles volunteered to expedite the CIA reports.

Senator Russell, who distrusted both the FBI and the CIA, suggested that a staff member “with a more skeptical nature, sort of a devil’s advocate,” should analyze the FBI and CIA reports for “every contradiction and every soft spot…just as if we were prosecuting them or planning to prosecute them…Maybe the other fellow could do it, go through here and take these reports as if we were going to prosecute J. Edgar Hoover.”
³³

It is surprising that Russell’s remarks, when reported back to Hoover, did not cause the FBI director to have a second heart attack.

On January 22 Chairman Warren called a secret session to discuss a startling new development. He said, “I called this meeting of the commission because of something that developed today that I thought every member of the commission should have knowledge of, something you shouldn’t hear from the public before you had an opportunity to think about it. I will just have Mr. Rankin tell you the story from the beginning.”

The sensational development, Rankin explained, was the claim of Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Texas that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a paid FBI informant.

The committee was stunned. “If that was true and it ever came out and could be established,” Rankin said, “then you would have people think that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination that nothing the Commission did or anybody could dissipate.”

B
OGGS
: “You are so right.”

D
ULLES
: “Oh, terrible.”

B
OGGS
: “The implications of this are fantastic, don’t you think so.”

W
ARREN
: “Terrific.”

R
ANKIN
: “Now it is something that would be very difficult to prove out…I am confident that the FBI will never admit it, and I presume their records will never show it.”
³⁴

Dulles admitted that if he were still CIA director, and a similar situation arose, he would deny the whole thing. He would even lie under oath, he said. Although, of course, he added, he would never lie to the president.

All the accumulated frustrations of the committee came out at this session, all its suspicions that the FBI was hiding something. Why was Hoover, who so often maintained that the FBI did not evaluate or reach conclusions, so anxious to declare the dead Oswald the lone assassin and close the case? Ranklin asked. Was this what Hoover was hiding, that Oswald had been working for the FBI?

R
ANKIN
: “They would like for us to fold up and quit.”

B
OGGS
: “This closes the case, you see. Don’t you see?”

D
ULLES
: “Yes, I see that.”

R
ANKIN
: “They found the man. There is nothing more to do. The commission supports their conclusions and we can go on home and that is the end of it.”

Boggs, obviously worried about Hoover’s reaction if this discussion reached him, nervously remarked, “I don’t even like to see this being taken down.”

Dulles: “Yes, I think this record ought to be destroyed.”
^*

Boggs: “I would hope that none of these records are circulated to anybody.”
³⁵

It was a vain hope. When the committee again met on January 27, a letter was waiting for them. So angered was Hoover that he risked exposing his own informant on the committee. “Lee Harvey Oswald was never used by this Bureau in an informant capacity,” the FBI director wrote. “He was never paid any money for furnishing information and he most certainly never was an informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the event you have any further questions concerning the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this case, we would appreciate being contacted directly.”
³⁶

But Hoover’s letter didn’t resolve the matter. It only exacerbated it. The committee needed something more than Hoover’s word. The problem was howto obtain it without so offending him that he would withdraw his cooperation. The committee was totally dependent on the FBI for its investigative data, the chairman noted. The January 27 meeting lasted for three and a half hours. More than two of them were spent on the Hoover problem. To question him
now, after receiving the letter, would be to impugn his veracity. No, Rankin argued, no one was calling him a liar; all they were asking for was some documentary proof that he was telling the truth—a subtle distinction that almost certainly would have been lost on the FBI director. Rankin: “I don’t see how the country is ever going to be willing to accept it [the commission report], if we don’t satisfy them on this particular issue.”
³⁷
But how do you prove a negative? Dulles: “I don’t think it can [be proved] unless you believe Mr. Hoover, and so forth and so on, which probably most of the people will.”
³⁸
Russell said that he was willing to believe Hoover but that you couldn’t base the committee’s conclusions on that. But that was exactly what the committee did. Since no one had the nerve to confront the FBI director—for months the members debated ways to approach him—the committee finally simply accepted his assurances that neither Oswald nor Ruby had been an FBI informant.

Then, on February 24, the committee discovered that the FBI had excised the Hosty entry from the typed copy of Oswald’s address book which had been supplied to the committee. It wasn’t even a very good job: the page number was misplaced and the margins weren’t the same. The FBI’s explanation—that only investigative leads had been copied and that since this wasn’t an investigative lead (they knew who Hosty was), it hadn’t been necessary to copy it—didn’t convince anyone, but by now the commission was beyond complaining.

The testimony of the witnesses took up the summer months—Hoover testified, as did Alan Belmont and a carefully rehearsed James Hosty—after which the committee hurriedly wrote its final report, even though some of its members and staff privately admitted that a lot of questions remained unanswered. The commission member Ford opposed criticizing the FBI for having failed to inform the Secret Service that Oswald was in Dallas and working in a building located on the parade route, but Chairman Warren insisted it go in, and so the final report, which Warren presented to President Johnson on September 27, 1964, contained a muted, almost apologetic censure that was buried in the middle of the volume. Hoover retaliated by having Earl Warren’s name stricken from his Special Correspondents list.

The complete report of the Warren Commission, including testimony and exhibits, ran to twenty-six volumes. Probably an equal number could have been devoted to what the commission was never told. Even though a member of the commission, the former CIA director Allen Dulles never saw fit to mention the plots to assassinate Castro, which continued up to the very day Kennedy was shot; a CIA contact passed a Cuban exile code-named AMLASH a poison device just minutes before the president was assassinated. Nor did the commission learn that the agency had been conspiring with the Mafiosi Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante, Jr., and thus had a vested interest in covering up any role they may have played in the Kennedy
assassination.
^*
The committee learned next to nothing about Jack Ruby, little more about certain of Lee Harvey Oswald’s associations, and nothing at all about the growing escalation of mob threats against the president and attorney general, as picked up by FBI bugs, taps, and informants. They were never informed of the Hosty note, or the Trafficante threat, or Marcello’s “
Livarsi na petra di la scarpa!
” or of any other assassination talk the FBI may have overheard and suppressed. Nor were they told that Hoover’s informant on the commission was Representative Gerald Ford.

The Warren Commission concluded, as Hoover had maintained from the start, that the assassination of President Kennedy was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The commission further found that Jack Ruby had acted on his own in killing Oswald and that there was no other connection between the two men.

All this may be true. Or, as the volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations indicate, there may have been a far different scenario. Thanks to the efforts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, probably no one will ever know.

Johnson, according to his biographer Robert Caro, “exercised more power in the Senate than any other man in the nation’s history.”
⁴⁰
In the 1950s, as he wove together the complex web of favors and threats that became his mantle of power, one minor strand was his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that dealt with State, Justice, and the judiciary. And therefore “oversaw” the work of J. Edgar Hoover.