A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (52 page)

The article would allege that Hosty had known, long before the assassination, that Oswald was potentially dangerous and capable of murdering Kennedy, and that Hosty and the FBI had shared none of that information with the Dallas police department or the Secret Service. The source of the story was Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill, who claimed that Hosty had walked up to him on the afternoon of the assassination to report that Oswald had been under FBI surveillance for weeks and that the bureau was well aware of the threat he posed. Revill’s account had been recorded in an internal memo that the police had shared with the Warren Commission.

Hosty would later insist that Revill’s allegations were a lie and that he, Hosty, had said no such thing. But he could not tell that to Aynesworth. Under FBI policy Hosty needed permission to speak to a reporter. “No comment” was all he told Aynesworth before hanging up. He tried to go back to bed, hoping that the story was not as “god-awful” as it sounded.

A few hours later, the phone rang again, waking Hosty from a fitful sleep, and this time the caller was his boss in the Dallas field office, Special Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin. “Listen, Aynesworth called me earlier to say they are running a story about you telling Revill you knew Oswald was capable of killing the president.”

Shanklin ordered Hosty to come to the office that minute to prepare a message that could be sent overnight to headquarters in Washington to try to preempt some of the damage the article might do. Hosty rushed to get dressed. “Walking out to my car I looked at all my neighbors’ homes, wondering what they would be thinking later this morning as they sat in their kitchens, drinking their coffee in their robes, reading the
Morning News
.”

He arrived in the office at about three fifteen a.m. and noticed a copy of the first edition of the paper on Shanklin’s desk. The bold-faced, front-page headline:
FBI KNEW OSWALD CAPABLE OF ACT, REPORTS INDICATE
.

“Oh, God,” Hosty groaned. He hurriedly read through the article, convinced it had been planted by the Dallas police in an attempt to shift the blame to him—again—for the law-enforcement bungling that allowed Kennedy, and then Oswald, to be murdered. The information in the story was attributed to “a source close to the Warren Commission.” According to Aynesworth, Hosty had told Revill that the FBI knew Oswald was capable of assassination “but we didn’t dream he would do it.” The police claimed that Revill’s memo was filed within hours of his conversation with Hosty.

Hosty put down the newspaper and turned to Shanklin. “This article has got it all wrong. I don’t understand how they can print crap like that.” It was true, he said, that he had talked to Revill on the day of the assassination and suggested that Oswald was “the guilty party.” But he insisted that he had said nothing about Oswald having a violent streak or being capable of killing the president. Before the assassination, Hosty said, he had no sense that Oswald posed a danger to Kennedy—or to anyone else. That was what he planned to tell the Warren Commission when he testified in Washington in early May, an appointment he already dreaded. Shanklin ordered Hosty to draw up a summary of his version of events, which they would immediately send by Teletype to Washington. They hoped it would land on Hoover’s desk first thing in the morning, before he had a chance to see the
Morning News
article. Shanklin and Hosty could be sure that Hoover would be incensed about the story—furious with the Dallas police and furious with them.

The Teletype did the Dallas agents some good. To the relief of Shanklin and Hosty, Hoover came out fighting the next morning, seemingly on their behalf. With Hosty’s denial in hand, the FBI director issued a statement in Washington that categorically denied the allegations being made by the Dallas police. Revill’s assertions, he declared, were “absolutely false.”

Hosty was grateful that “I had kept my job for another day,” even if he was more convinced than ever that his future with the FBI was in doubt. Aynesworth’s article was picked up and reprinted across the country.

*

Hosty spent much of the following week preparing for his testimony before the commission in Washington. He began what he remembered as the “tedious but thorough review of everything” that was in the bureau’s Oswald files in Dallas. It was not long, he said, before he realized that two important documents were missing. Both had come from Washington that fall and involved Oswald’s trip to Mexico. One was an October 18 report from FBI headquarters that outlined what the bureau knew about the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico. The other was a November 19 memo prepared by the FBI’s Washington field office about the contents of a letter that Oswald had written to the Soviet embassy in Washington, referring to his Mexico trip and his contacts there with a Soviet diplomat; the diplomat had been identified as an undercover KGB agent. Hosty tried to imagine why someone had removed the two documents. Was someone trying to hide them, “hoping that I hadn’t already seen them?”

He had no answer to that mystery when he flew to Washington on May 4, the day before his testimony. He had wanted to get there a day early, to try to get a good night’s sleep before what could be one of the most difficult days of his life. The next morning, he pulled on a dark suit, a well-starched white shirt, and a neutral tie—“the uniform of an FBI agent”—and walked into the commission’s offices at the VFW building on Capitol Hill with two other FBI agents who had also been called to testify. They were accompanied by FBI assistant director Alan Belmont, the bureau’s number-three official, who oversaw all criminal investigations in the FBI. “I couldn’t help that I was starting to sweat,” Hosty recalled.

He was greeted by commission lawyer Samuel Stern, who said he needed to ask a few preliminary questions before Hosty went into the witness room to testify. Stern wanted to clear up confusion about exactly what Hosty had known about Oswald before the assassination. How much had he known about Oswald’s Mexico trip? Hosty said he remembered reading two reports about the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico—the documents that had since disappeared from the files in Dallas.

Belmont looked stricken at the mention of the reports, Hosty said. “He leaned over and muttered in my ear, ‘Damn it, I thought I told them not to let you see them.’”

Hosty was startled at the comment. “Here was the head of all FBI investigations admitting that FBI headquarters was deliberately trying to conceal matters from me.” What had happened to Oswald in Mexico that the FBI did not want Hosty to know? “I understand the need-to-know policy, but what was going on?”

That afternoon, Hosty was escorted into the commission’s hearing room, which resembled the sort of conference room “you would find in any prestigious law firm, nicely furnished, and against two walls were stacks of what looked like law books.” Off to one corner, he could see the damaged windshield from President Kennedy’s limousine, which the commission had been inspecting as evidence. “I shivered when I looked at it,” he recalled.

Chief Justice Warren and several other members of the commission sat at a large wooden conference table, “all staring at me expectantly.” He was invited to take a seat at the head of the table, with Stern to his left and, next to Stern, the chief justice. On Hosty’s right was Congressman Ford. When the court reporter nodded to Warren that he was ready, the chief justice swore in Hosty and asked Stern to lead the questioning.

Hosty had anticipated most of the early questions—about the history of the FBI’s investigation of Oswald, including the transfer of the investigation in 1963 from the FBI field office in Dallas to the field office in New Orleans and back again to Dallas, as Oswald moved between the two cities. Hosty became alarmed when the commissioners interrupted Stern with questions that seemed designed to show that the FBI had a responsibility before Kennedy’s visit to Dallas—specifically, that Hosty had a responsibility—to warn the Secret Service about Oswald’s presence there.

“Did it occur to you that he was a potentially dangerous person?” Senator Cooper asked.

“No sir,” Hosty replied. “Prior to the assassination of the president of the United States, I had no information indicating violence on the part of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

He had expected tough questions about Aynesworth’s article, but he was relieved that the commission seemed just as skeptical about the story as he was. That was confirmed, Hosty said, when Warren asked to take the conversation off the record, so that the court reporter would not take down what was being said. The commissioners, Hosty said, told him they were “disgusted” with the Dallas police; they suggested that they, too, believed Revill’s memo was a phony, written months after the assassination to create a paper trail that would allow the police to make a scapegoat of the FBI.

Hosty was relieved, too, at the questions that were not being asked. He faced no questions about the handwritten note that Oswald had delivered to the FBI field office in early November—the note that Hosty had torn up and flushed down a toilet. Maybe, he hoped, that meant the commission had never learned about the note’s existence and its destruction. Stern did ask if Hosty had retained any of his own notes from the day of the assassination. Hosty replied that he, like most agents, routinely threw away handwritten notes after using them to prepare typewritten reports. He had kept no notes of his own about Oswald, he said.
*

The questioning ended at five ten p.m. Hosty left the commission’s offices thinking his testimony had gone well, or at least as well as he could have hoped. It was a warm spring day, and he took a walk down Capitol Hill and along the National Mall to FBI headquarters at Ninth and Pennsylvania. “Feeling better and glad this was over, my step became a little lighter, and I enjoyed the green grass and beautiful blooming trees on the Mall.”

*

It was something less than an open-door policy, but all FBI agents knew they could request a private meeting with Hoover when they visited Washington. The FBI director sometimes granted the request, sometimes not. Hoover said he found the meetings a useful way of bolstering agent morale and gathering information that might not otherwise reach him.

Hosty had requested a meeting with Hoover while he was in the capital, and he took it as a good sign that Hoover agreed.

At about two p.m. on Wednesday, May 6, he found himself standing in Hoover’s office, facing “the Old Man” himself. “Hoover had his head buried in foot-high stacks of paperwork,” Hosty said. “Next to this desk was a single chair, which he waved for me to take when he looked up and saw me. I sunk into the low chair, descending significantly lower than Hoover. I am sure this was the desired effect.”

Hoover put down his pen and swiveled in his chair toward him. As Hosty recalled it, “I just burst out with the only thing I wanted to say: ‘Mr. Hoover, I just wanted to thank you in person for really standing by and publicly defending me on the Revill memo a couple of weeks ago.’”

“Oh, that was nothing,” Hoover said, smiling.

Hosty had no chance to say much more, he remembered. Hoover took over the conversation, launching into a monologue that lasted several minutes in which he described his lunch that day at the White House with President Johnson, who had just decided to waive the mandatory retirement age for Hoover. “The president told me that the country just couldn’t get along with me,” Hoover said, obviously delighted. He went on to talk about his close friendship with Johnson and his loathing for Robert Kennedy. The attorney general, he said, “disgusted him.”

He then referred to Chief Justice Warren and the commission. “He told me that the FBI had a source on the commission,” Hosty recalled. “Hoover’s information, which he considered reliable, was that the commission would clear the FBI of any mishandling of the Oswald case by a 5-to-2 margin.” According to Hoover, only Warren and McCloy would vote against the FBI. “Hoover told me how Warren detested him,” Hosty said.

*

Whatever his apparent self-confidence in front of a rank-and-file agent like Hosty, Hoover was actually in something like a panic that spring. He was convinced the Warren Commission and its staff were feeding stories to reporters in Washington, Dallas, and elsewhere that were designed to undermine his legacy—even to threaten the bureau’s very survival. At the commission’s insistence, Hoover had been reduced to answering to the reports of scandal-mongering tabloids. On May 5, Rankin wrote to Hoover to demand the FBI’s detailed response to a front-page story in the
National Enquirer
—the sensationalist weekly tabloid that billed itself as “The World’s Liveliest Newspaper” and was best known for stories focused on sex and violence—that alleged the FBI had covered up evidence that Oswald and Ruby had known each other. The article claimed that the Justice Department had pressured the Dallas police to hold off arresting both Oswald and Ruby earlier in 1963 for their involvement in a supposed plot to kill General Walker. As a result of the article, FBI agents were ordered to interview the police chief in Dallas, Jesse Curry, who insisted that the
Enquirer
story was a fabrication and that the Dallas police had never heard of Oswald until the day of his arrest. On May 8, Hoover wrote back to Rankin to say there was no truth to the tabloid’s article.

On Thursday, May 14, Hoover was himself called to testify before the commission. It appeared to be another sign of the ill will between Hoover and Warren that the chief justice offered no words of welcome or support to Hoover, usually treated with such deference before every other audience in Washington. After swearing Hoover in at nine fifteen, Warren got straight to business, outlining what the commission wanted from the FBI director: Hoover’s unqualified statement, under oath, that the FBI was not hiding evidence about Oswald.

“Mr. Hoover will be asked to testify in regard to whether Lee H. Oswald was ever an agent, directly or indirectly, or an informer or acting on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in any capacity at any time, and whether he knows of any credible evidence of any conspiracy, either domestic or foreign, involved in the assassination of President Kennedy,” Warren said. Hoover would not be above questions about even the most outrageous allegations in a gossip magazine. The commission, Warren said, wanted to know what Hoover “has to say about the article in the
National Enquirer
.”