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Hale Boggs - Warren Commission Member and Critic
"Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police
within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people.
At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their
appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of
power from due accounting and strict surveillance." "[FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover lied his eyes out to the
[Warren] Commission
– on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name
it." It is a myth that the Warren Commission was united in its conclusion that a lone assassin killed President John F. Kennedy. On the seven member Warren Commission, there were three dissenters: Senator Sherman Cooper, Senator Richard Russell, and Congressman Hale Boggs. As journalist Jim Marrs points out, "The most vocal critic among Commission members [was Hale Boggs]. Boggs became frustrated with the panel's total reliance on the FBI for information. Speaking of the 'single-bullet theory,' Boggs once commented, 'I had strong doubts about it.' On April 1, 1971, House Majority Leader Boggs delivered a blistering attack on [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover, charging that under his directorship the FBI had adopted 'the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo.' Boggs, who undoubtedly would have become Speaker of the House and a powerful ally in any reopening of the JFK assassination investigation, vanished on October 16, 1972, while on a military junket flight in Alaska. Despite a massive search, no trace of the airplane or of Boggs has ever been found." "Several years after [Hale Bogg's] death in 1972, a colleague of his wife Lindy (who was elected to fill her late husband's seat in the Congress) recalled Mrs. Boggs remarking, 'Hale felt very, very torn during his work [on the Commission] ... he wished he had never been on it and wished he'd never signed it [the Warren Report].'" Links: American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone |
