Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [175]
When Edgar called Kennedy a second time, forty minutes after the shooting, he was still talking only of ‘critical’ wounds. The Attorney General, who had better sources, set him straight. ‘You may be interested to know,’ he snapped, ‘that my brother is dead.’
That evening, Edgar went home to watch television. The next day he went to the races.
‘The track raced on the Saturday, the day after Kennedy died,’ said Bill Koras, an official at Pimlico, ‘and Mr Hoover was there. He used our little private office and was there most of the day conducting business about the assassination. Mr Tolson was with him, and he went down to place the bets.’
Within hours of the murder, before leaving his office, Edgar had written an ingratiating letter to Lyndon Johnson, the man who had gambled – correctly – that fate might bring him the presidency.
My dear Mr President,
I was indeed shocked by the brutal assassination today of President Kennedy and I want to offer my deepest sympathy on the Nation’s tragic loss of your personal friend.
My staff and I want to reaffirm our earnest desire to be of assistance to you in every possible way.
This was pure hypocrisy. Edgar well knew that Johnson and the Kennedys had at best tolerated one another. By contrast, he and Johnson had long been exchanging letters of mutual admiration. In one, just months earlier, the Vice President had expressed his ‘complete and utter devotion’ to Edgar.
Johnson’s first calls as President were to two former leaders – Truman and Eisenhower – and to Edgar. Within days, at the White House, he would be pouring out his concern that he might be assassinated himself. Edgar offered the use of one of his own bulletproof cars, and Johnson responded emotionally. He thought, Edgar noted, ‘I was more than head of the FBI – I was his brother and personal friend … that he had more confidence in me than anybody in town …’
In one of his notes as Vice President, Johnson had spoken of continuing to rely on Edgar ‘in the years ahead.’ Now, his accession to power offered Edgar the likelihood of reprieve from the forced retirement that, under Kennedy, would soon have been his fate. Meanwhile, there was a most sensitive game to be played – tidying up after Dallas.
Thanks to two conflicting official verdicts, millions of Americans remain confused about the assassination. The initial inquiry, the Commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that the President had been killed by twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, former Marine and recently returned defector to the Soviet Union, acting on his own. Yet as we now know, four of the Commission’s own eminent members had doubts. And in 1978, Congress’ Assassinations Committee decided that there had ‘probably’ been a conspiracy.
The committee believed Oswald was only one of two gunmen and that the murder was most likely planned by the Mafia. Others, pointing to evidence that Oswald had links to U.S. intelligence, wondered if it was quite so simple. Even a former chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, David Phillips, himself a committee witness, in 1988 declared his belief in a plot involving ‘rogue American intelligence people.’
There might never have been such confusion had the Warren Commission not had to rely on the FBI for the vast majority of its information. Edgar’s priority from the start was to protect himself and the Bureau and to insist that Oswald was the lone assassin. Less than four hours after the shooting, Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei was astonished to hear the Director declare himself ‘quite convinced they had found the right party.’ Yet called upon to brief the new head of state the next day, Edgar was less positive. Jotting down what Edgar told him, President Johnson wrote:
Evidence