Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [177]
Edgar had long buttered up Chief Justice Warren, to the extent of running FBI checks on his daughter’s boyfriends. Now, however, he treated him as a nuisance. ‘If Warren had kept his big mouth shut,’ Edgar scrawled on one memo, ‘these conjectures would not have happened.’ He sent agents hunting for derogatory information on the staff of the Warren Commission.
At least one Commissioner felt pressured to toe the FBI line on the assassination. According to his son Thomas, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs ‘felt personally intimidated by the FBI’s visits to see him. It was, you know, “We know this and that about you, and a lot of things could come out in public about you …” My father tried not to let it affect his judgment.’2
Former Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who stood in for Robert Kennedy in the wake of the assassination, would recall ruefully that Edgar and the FBI had a virtual monopoly on vital information. ‘I did not know what was going on,’ he said. ‘Nobody else in the government knew.’ Had they known, neither Katzenbach nor the Warren Commission would have placed any trust at all in Edgar. The FBI concealed evidence from the Commission and, in one damning episode, destroyed it.
Early on, Warren staffers became suspicious about a discrepancy between the original of Oswald’s address book and the FBI’s typed inventory of its contents. In the FBI version one page had been retyped, omitting some information that had appeared in the original. And part of the excised material was the name, address and car license plate number of an FBI agent, James Hosty.3
Hosty was the Dallas agent who, according to the Bureau, had had the routine job of checking up on Oswald because of his background as a former defector. He testified that he never met Oswald, but left a message with Oswald’s wife not long before the assassination, asking him to call. If that was all, why then did the Bureau try to conceal the Hosty relationship from the Commission?
The FBI denied that it had, offering a complex bureaucratic explanation for the omitted entry. Commission staff remained skeptical. ‘We never forgot the incident,’ said attorney Burt Griffin. ‘It established in our minds that we had to be worried about them.’
This leads on to a horrendous discovery, something the Commission never found out. Oswald had told his wife’s close friend Ruth Paine that he had left a note at the Dallas office of the FBI following the Hosty visit. After the assassination, told by an agent that this was not so, Mrs Paine decided it had been just a tall story. In 1975, however, a congressional committee learned that the alleged assassin had indeed left a note at the FBI office two weeks before the assassination – addressed to Agent Hosty.
According to a receptionist, the note was a warning by Oswald that he would blow up the FBI office if they did not ‘stop bothering my wife.’ According to Hosty, there was no threat of violence – merely a warning that Oswald might ‘take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.’
That note is not part of the official record because, Hosty testified, Dallas Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it. The note was in Shanklin’s possession after the assassination. Two days later, when Oswald had been shot, Shanklin produced the letter from a desk drawer. He told Hosty, ‘Oswald’s dead now. There can be no trial. Here – get rid of this.’ Hosty then tore up the note in Shanklin’s presence, took it to the lavatory and ‘flushed it down the drain.’
Who originally issued the order to destroy Oswald’s note, and why, may never be known. Shanklin is dead and former Agent Hosty refused further comment. Agent Cril Payne, who served in Dallas during the inquiry that followed Hosty’s revelations,