J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  BOOK TEN

  On Borrowed Time

  “I tell you something, in another two months from now, the FBI will be like it was five years ago. They won’t be around no more. They say the FBI will get it [the investigation of President Kennedy’s death]. They’re gonna start running down Fair Play for Cuba, Fair Play for Matsu. They call that more detrimental to the country than us guys.”

  —Chuck English in a conversation

  with Butch Blasi and Sam Giancana,

  from an ELSUR, Chicago,

  Armory Lounge, December 3, 1963

  “We accepted the answers we got, even though they were inadequate and didn’t carry the battle any further. To do so, we’d have had to challenge the integrity of the FBI. Back in 1964, that was something we didn’t do.”

  —Judge Bert W. Griffin,

  assistant counsel, Warren Commission

  30

  Seriously Flawed

  From the start, the FBI investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was seriously flawed. It was based on a faulty premise, the presumption that the director was never wrong.

  Hoover had learned of the shooting of the president just minutes after it happened, from Gordon L. Shanklin, special agent in charge of the Dallas field office, who’d had two men monitoring the progress of the presidential motorcade on the police radio frequency.

  Presuming there was a federal law covering the killing of the president, which gave the FBI jurisdiction, Hoover informed Shanklin that as senior agent on the scene he would be in charge of the investigation. But, as the director soon learned, there was no such law—Texas had claim to the crime, which was classed as a felony murder, no different from a killing that resulted from a barroom brawl—and the jurisdictional nightmare this caused would complicate the whole investigation.*

  During that day, and the ones that followed, Shanklin was rarely off the phone, the Dallas agents interrupting him to report their latest findings, which Shanklin immediately passed on to FBIHQ. Many of these calls were to and from the director. Shortly after 3 P.M.,† Shanklin informed Hoover of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was believed to have killed both the president and a Dallas police officer. The Dallas office had an open security file on Oswald, the SAC told the director, well aware that he was waving a red flag, and he summarized its contents. Minutes later, Hoover called back, not to ask about this but to inquire about the president’s condition. The query perplexed Shanklin, who had already informed the director of Kennedy’s death—by now the whole world knew—and he repeated the Parkland Hospital announcement. No, the president, Hoover emphasized, President Johnson. Watching TV, Hoover had noticed that Johnson was clutching his coat to his chest in a strange way and wondered if he’d had a heart attack. Although days would pass before most Americans adjusted to the transition, J. Edgar Hoover had instantly adapted to the change in chief executives.

  Air Force One, bearing the new president, the body of the slain president, and his grieving widow, landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:05 P.M. Most of official Washington was in attendance, but not the FBI director, who had already gone home, after leaving instructions with the FBI switchboard that when the president called, as he was sure he would, he was to be put right through. At 6:26 the presidential helicopter set down on the White House lawn. By 7:00 P.M. the president had already talked to most of Kennedy’s Cabinet and the congressional leadership. At 7:05 he called former President Harry S Truman and at 7:10 former President Dwight David Eisenhower. At 7:20 he dictated two brief, but very touching, letters to John John and Carolyn Kennedy. And then, at 7:26 P.M., he called J. Edgar Hoover. He wanted a complete report on the assassination, the president told the director. And Hoover, who had been waiting for presidential authorization, informed him that the FBI was already on the case, that he had thirty agents on standby, ready to fly to Dallas to join the seventy already there, and more would be available if needed. He also offered to send additional agents to the White House, to beef up the president’s Secret Service protection, and LBJ, unsure whether there was a plot to wipe out the whole government, and all too aware that the Secret Service had failed to protect his predecessor, gratefully accepted. Although the detail was withdrawn the next day, thereafter FBI agents were assigned to Johnson whenever he traveled or was in a motorcade. But Hoover never again suggested the FBI’s taking over the Secret Service’s protective functions, not after what had happened that day in Dallas.

  Although Lee Harvey Oswald would not be charged with the president’s murder until 2:30 the following morning, J. Edgar Hoover had already decided that Oswald was guilty. Late that afternoon former Vice-President Richard Nixon had called the FBI director and, getting right through, had asked, “What happened? Was it one of the right-wing nuts?”

  “No,” Hoover replied, “it was a Communist.”*1

  On November 23, the day after the assassination, Hoover sent the White House the FBI’s “preliminary inquiry” into the death of President Kennedy, together with a summary memorandum containing some of the information the Bureau had on Oswald.

  Officially the FBI was now on record as stating that it appeared that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was the assassin of the late president. Having made up his mind on this point—solving the case, in effect, in less than twenty-four hours—Hoover never changed it, no matter how much the evidence might indicate otherwise.

  At 3:15 A.M. on November 24, Shanklin awakened Hoover—the FBI switchboard had been instructed to put any emergency calls through—informing him that someone had called the Dallas field office and said that Oswald was going to be shot when he was moved from the Dallas Police Department to a secret jail later that day.

  The FBI director instructed the SAC to call the Dallas police chief, Jesse Curry—wake him up, if necessary, Hoover probably added—and inform him of the threat, at the same time urging him not to announce the time of the transfer. Shanklin called Curry, who was still at his desk, only to learn that the Dallas police had received the same call. He needn’t worry about Oswald’s safety, the chief said, since they were using two armored cars, one to transport the prisoner, the other as a decoy. As for the press, well, Curry had to be accommodating, figuring Dallas had already had more than its share of bad publicity.

  At 12:21 P.M. the Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Live, on NBC. Like the former president he was charged with slaying, Oswald died at Parkland Hospital, at 2:07 P.M.

  Later that same afternoon, Shanklin called in one of his special agents, James P. Hosty, Jr., and gave him certain instructions. The FBI’s cover-up of its role in the Oswald case had begun. Actually it had commenced the previous day, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had decided not to inform the president, in his preliminary report, of all the information the Bureau had on Lee Harvey Oswald.

  SA James P. Hosty, Jr., was Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer. On his return from Russia, Oswald had been interviewed by agents from the Fort Worth office. They found him arrogant and uncooperative. Arrested following a scuffle while passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets in New Orleans, Oswald had asked to see the FBI, but he told the local agents only that he was a Marxist rather than a Communist. On learning that Oswald had moved to the Dallas area, the New Orleans office had transferred his case file, and on November 1, 1963, SA Hosty had gone to the Irving, Texas, address of Mrs. Ruth Paine, looking for Oswald. Mrs. Paine informed him that although Mrs. Oswald was living with her, Lee had a job in Dallas, at the Texas Schoolbook Depository, and was staying in a rooming house there. She didn’t have his address but promised to get it. On November 5 Hosty was on the freeway and, spotting the Irving turnoff, decided to see if Mrs. Paine had obtained the address. She hadn’t.

  On his November 1 visit, Hosty had been introduced to Marina Oswald but hadn’t interviewed her. He did give Mrs. Paine his name and the address and telephone number of the Dallas FBI office, and, as he was drivin
g off, Marina Oswald copied down his license plate number. Following the assassination, Dallas police found an entry with this information in Oswald’s address book.

  Shortly after Hosty’s second visit—no one can recall the exact date, but it was apparently November 6, 7, or 8—Oswald unexpectedly appeared in the Dallas field office.

  Nanny Lee Fenner was the receptionist. She noticed the man when he got off the elevator. “From my desk I could see him clearly,” she recalled. “My desk was right in the aisleway. He came to my desk and he said ‘S.A. Hosty, please.’ And he had a wild look in his eye, and he was awfully figgety, and he had a 3X5 envelope in his hand.” There was a piece of paper in the envelope, folded like a letter, and “during this time he kept taking the letter in and out of the envelope.”

  Mrs. Fenner called downstairs and learned Hosty was out. When she informed the man of this, he took the paper out of the envelope “and threw it like that [indicating] on my desk, and said, ‘well, get this to him’ and turned and walked back to the elevator.”

  Mrs. Fenner read the note. It wasn’t long, just two paragraphs, handwritten, in a rather childish scrawl. Later she was unable to recall exactly how it started, but it was to the effect that if Hosty didn’t stop bothering his wife the writer would “either blow up the Dallas Police Department or the FBI office.”

  Mrs. Fenner had been working for the FBI since 1942. “Oh, I have seen people come in and lay down pistols and knives and stuff on my desk and it didn’t bother me,” she recalled. But she knew a threat when she saw one, and she took the note to ASAC Kyle Clark. Scanning its contents, Clark said, “Forget it, give it to Hosty.” After Mrs. Fenner had returned to her desk, one of the girls from the steno pool, Helen May, walked by and “wanted to know who the creep was in the hall,” and Mrs. Fenner said, “ ‘Well, according to this, it is Lee Harvey Oswald,’ because his name was signed on the letter. The name meant nothing to me.” She handed the letter to May, who also read it. “Shortly thereafter,” she remembered, “Mr. Hosty came to my desk and got the letter, and I have not seen it since.”3

  Hosty read the letter, deciding “it didn’t appear to be of any serious import.” He later elaborated, “It appeared to be an innocuous type of complaint…I looked at it. It didn’t seem to have any need for action at that time, so I put it in my workbox.”*

  On November 22 Hosty was having lunch near the parade route when he heard that the president had been shot. Directed first to Parkland Hospital, then back to the field office, he was going through the files on local right-wing groups—Hosty was the resident expert on the Klan—when word came through that the Dallas police had captured President Kennedy’s killer and that his name was Lee Harvey Oswald. Shocked, Hosty ran over to the Dallas police station to sit in on Oswald’s interrogation. Running up the stairs with the Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill, and briefing Revill on Oswald as they hurried to the interrogation room, Hosty made a comment that he would long regret: “We knew that Lee Harvey Oswald was capable of assassinating the president of the United States, but we didn’t dream he would do it.” Lieutenant Revill, who headed the police criminal intelligence squad, later reported the remark to Chief Curry.

  Returning to the field office after Oswald’s interrogation, Hosty was called into the office of SAC Shanklin. Both Shanklin and Kenneth Howe, Hosty’s supervisor, were there, and they had the Oswald note, which Howe had retrieved from Hosty’s workbox. According to Hosty, Shanklin was “quite agitated and upset” and he ordered Hosty to prepare a memorandum of his visit to the Paine residence, when and how he received the note, and so on. Hosty dictated the memorandum and give it to Shanklin later that same day. As Hosty was leaving the SAC’s office, Shanklin picked up the telephone.

  The panic at FBIHQ can only be imagined. One page, two short paragraphs, but the note proved conclusively that the FBI had known, two weeks before the president’s trip, that Lee Harvey Oswald was potentially dangerous and should have been reported to the Secret Service for inclusion on its “risk list,” the roster of those persons who are watched or detained whenever the chief executive is in the area.

  Moreover, the note suggested the very real possibility that the FBI itself might have triggered Oswald’s rage, and therefore was at least partially responsible for the assassination of the president of the United States.

  Everybody worked that Sunday, November 24. Some two to four hours after Oswald’s death was announced, Shanklin called Hosty back into his office—Howe was also there—and, reaching into a file, took out the Oswald note and Hosty’s memorandum, and handed them to Hosty. According to Hosty, he then said, in effect, “Oswald’s dead now; there can be no trial; here get rid of it.”

  Hosty then proceeded to tear the documents up, but Shanklin said, “No, get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office; get rid of it.” Although he had access to a shredder, Hosty took the note and memo into the men’s room and, after tearing them in small pieces, flushed them down the toilet.4

  Several days later Shanklin asked Hosty if he had destroyed the note, and he said he had. When Mrs. Fenner asked him, “What happened to the Oswald letter?” Hosty replied, “What letter?” Hosty’s response didn’t surprise her, since she’d already been instructed by ASAC Clark, on Sunday, the twenty-fourth, to “forget about the Oswald note.”*5

  When Hosty interviewed Mrs. Paine a few days after the assassination, she gave him the rough draft of a letter Oswald had written to the Soviet consulate, which she’d retrieved from a wastepaper basket. (Thanks to the Bureau’s mail-opening program, the FBI had read the original, before the Soviets saw it.) In writing up his report of the Paine interview, Hosty wasn’t sure whether the letter should be part of the text or handled separately, and asked Shanklin. Apparently confusing this with the Oswald note, Shanklin, according to Hosty, “became highly upset and highly incensed and appeared to be almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and said ‘I thought I told you to get rid of that, get rid of it.’ ”†7

  The fact that Oswald had written a threatening letter to the FBI two weeks before the assassination was suppressed for twelve years.

  On May 14, 1964, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Warren Commission, “There was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president or to the vice president.”8

  Days earlier, under extreme pressure by the Bureau, Hosty told the commission, “Prior to the assassination of the president of the United States, I had no information indicating violence on the part of Lee Harvey Oswald. I wish for the record to so read.”9

  Nor were these the only documents destroyed in the hours after Kennedy was assassinated. Estimates vary from a few to dozens, perhaps even over a hundred. It is possible, even probable, that included among them were the Jose Aleman interview reports, in which the Cuban exile told the special agents Davis and Scranton that the Mafia boss Santos Trafficante, Jr., had predicted, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.” If so, they were just one of a number of threats which the FBI had failed to report to either the Secret Service or the Kennedys—and certainly would never mention to the Warren Commission.

  In the absence of Robert Kennedy—grief-stricken, he did not return to his duties for months—Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach had taken charge of the Justice Department. Both Hoover and Katzenbach were anxious to cut off, as quickly as possible, any conspiracy talk. On November 24, just two days after the assassination and just hours before Ruby shot Oswald, Katzenbach sent a memo to President Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers. “It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination be made public in a way that will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now…The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have
been convicted at trial. Speculations about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off.” In order to accomplish this, Katzenbach suggested “making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination.”10

  Jack Ruby’s sudden involvement changed nothing, at least as far as Hoover was concerned. In a telephone call with the White House aide Walter Jenkins immediately following Oswald’s murder, Hoover stated, “The thing I am most concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”11

  The pressure to issue a report that would establish that Oswald was the lone assassin was reflected in internal Bureau memoranda. That same day Belmont memoed Tolson that he was sending two headquarters supervisors to Dallas to review the “investigative findings of our agents on the Oswald matter, so that we can prepare a memorandum to the Attorney General [setting] out the evidence showing that Oswald is responsible for the shooting that killed the President.”12

  The agents couldn’t fail to get the message: the director has decided that Oswald acted alone and any evidence to the contrary will be most unwelcome. A dozen years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded, “Hoover’s personal predisposition that Oswald had been a lone assassin affected the course of the investigation, adding to the momentum to conclude the investigation after limited consideration of possible conspiratorial areas.”13