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There was no more talk about weaknesses in the evidence the day after that, when Oswald had in turn been shot by Jack Ruby, and with no further prospect of a trial. ‘The thing I am concerned about,’ Edgar told the White House two hours after Oswald’s murder, ‘is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.’ Soon the President was saying he hoped he could ‘get by’ with a hastily prepared FBI report.1

Of the few FBI veterans prepared to discuss the Kennedy assassination, two senior officials* and a field agent told a story of rush to judgment and information distorted. ‘Hoover’s obsession with speed,’ said Assistant Director Courtney Evans, ‘made impossible demands on the field. I can’t help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover’s demand was “Do it fast!” That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.’

Agent Harry Whidbee was assigned to talk to people who had known Oswald in California, where he had served during his stint in the Marines. ‘I remember distinctly,’ he told the author. ‘It was a hurry-up job. Within three weeks a letter of general instruction came to the field divisions. We were effectively told “They’re only going to prove he was the guy who did it. There were no co-conspirators, and there was no international conspiracy …” I had conducted a couple of interviews, and those records were sent back again and were rewritten according to Washington’s requirements.’

There are numerous stories of badgered witnesses and edited evidence. Two of President Kennedy’s senior aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, both believed shots had come from behind the fence in front of the motorcade – rather than from the building behind it, where Oswald supposedly lay in ambush. ‘I told the FBI what I had heard,’ O’Donnell recalled, ‘but they said it couldn’t have happened that way … So I testified the way they wanted me to.’

As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy would normally have played a key role in the investigation. But he remained traumatized and away from his office for weeks after the assassination. According to a senior FBI official, Edgar ordered aides to get the Bureau’s assassination report out of the Justice Department ‘before Bobby gets back.’

Edgar opposed inquiry by any body other than the FBI. Then, once Johnson decided he had to have a presidential commission to ward off calls for independent investigation, Edgar wanted to head it himself. When the job went to Chief Justice Warren, Edgar interfered from the start. He opposed the Chief Justice’s choice of Warren Olney, a former head of the Criminal Division at Justice and an expert on organized crime, as the Commission’s Chief Counsel. Lee Rankin, who was appointed, would conclude belatedly that ‘the FBI couldn’t be trusted.’

Edgar used Cartha DeLoach to liaise secretly with two members of the Commission: Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Gerald Ford, the future President. DeLoach gleaned details of the Commission’s secret deliberations from Ford, and supplied him with a secure briefcase to carry documents on a ski trip. Ford, said William Sullivan, was a member of the FBI’s ‘congressional stable …“our man” on the Warren Commission. It was to him that we looked to protect our interest and to keep us fully advised of any development that we would not like … and he did.’

Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s former aide, offered an explanation for Ford’s readiness to help the FBI. For a period in the year preceding the assassination, he and Ford both had access to a ‘hospitality suite’ at Washington’s Sheraton-Carlton Hotel rented by a mutual friend, the lobbyist Fred Black. ‘Like me,’ Baker said, ‘Jerry Ford had a key to the suite. And sometimes Black would tell me not to use the room, because Ford was meeting someone there.’

For two months in 1963, as later emerged during court proceedings