G-Man, page 85
In Washington, oddly, there was less to do. Just as at earlier moments of high crisis, Hoover spent the afternoon by the phone, awaiting news. Assistant director Alan Belmont took operational charge of the afternoon’s events, staying on the line with Dallas, spitting out instructions, and demanding impossible answers. Hoover remained one step removed, sealed off in the director’s quarters, less the master of events than the final repository of other men’s information. He accepted just one more direct call from Dallas that afternoon: special agent in charge Gordon Shanklin phoned at 2:17, presumably to report that police officer J. D. Tippit had just been shot along a tree-lined residential street. About half an hour later, Dallas police apprehended the chief suspect in that shooting, a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who was also wanted for questioning in the president’s murder.[8]
The Oswald arrest sent the FBI’s energies veering in another direction, away from roundups of “hate group” contacts and into drill-down scrutiny of a single man. In Dallas, Hosty recalled a jolt of dread upon hearing Oswald’s name: he had been keeping tabs on Oswald for almost a year, not because of any assassination plot but due to Oswald’s bizarre past. In 1959, after a stint in the Marines, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union and attempted to renounce his American citizenship. Three years after that, he had returned to the United States with a Russian wife and baby daughter, bouncing between Texas and his hometown of New Orleans before settling in Dallas. Since then, it had fallen to Hosty, among others, to try to figure out what was going on.
The chief suspicion was that Oswald or his wife, Marina—or both—had been sent to the U.S. as Soviet sleeper agents, to be activated at a propitious moment. “To me Lee and Marina were just routine espionage cases,” Hosty later explained. “All I was trying to find out was whether either one of them was a spy for the Soviets.” Despite the high stakes, he had never interviewed Oswald, for fear of revealing too much about the FBI’s counterespionage methods. He had tried to speak with Marina, but to no avail. Just weeks before the assassination, Oswald had delivered an outraged note to the field office telling Hosty to lay off or “appropriate action” would be taken. That note, along with Oswald’s file, was sitting in Hosty’s file drawer at the Dallas field office.
Upon realizing these connections, Hosty thought of “Old Man” Hoover, hoping against hope that Hoover would understand that Oswald had not appeared to pose any violent threat. In the meantime, he located the office file on Oswald and brought it to his boss, Shanklin, who put him on the phone with Belmont at headquarters, who ordered Hosty down to the Dallas police department to participate in Oswald’s interrogation.[9]
Around the time of Oswald’s arrest, Hoover was on the phone with oilman Billy Byars, apparently the one Texas friend he sought out that afternoon, presumably to gain a firsthand report from the ground. By the time Richard Nixon called in an hour and a half later, Hoover had been fully briefed on the latest developments in Dallas and sounded confident of Oswald’s guilt. “I said, ‘What happened?’ ” Nixon recalled. “ ‘Who was it? One of those right-wing nuts?’ Hoover responded, ‘No, it was a Commonest.’ He never said Communist, incidentally, always Commonest.” For at least a few hours that afternoon, Oswald’s story seemed to align neatly with Hoover’s worldview.
Even under these conditions, in conversation with trusted allies and close friends, there was something notably aloof about Hoover’s demeanor that day. Nixon himself later described the afternoon as an “agonizing” ordeal, recalling how a doorman rushed toward his cab in New York with “tears . . . streaming down his cheeks” to report that the president had been killed. Nobody ascribed any such emotion to Hoover. Nor did Hoover himself ever describe the afternoon that way. In his few personal accounts of the assassination, he proceeded methodically through events: first the news ticker, then the call to Bobby, then the business of finding a murderer. At no point did he pause to express any great personal grief or official regrets, or any sense that the FBI could have or should have saved the president.[10]
Hoover also seemed ready to accept the simplest solution to the crime, to wrap up the whole matter right then and there. Even as his agent snuck into the Dallas police station to participate in Oswald’s interrogation, Hoover was assuring confidants in Washington that “very probably we had in custody the man who had killed the President in Dallas” though “this had not definitively been established.” When assistant attorney general Norbert Schlei called just after five o’clock, seeking to gather background information for a public announcement, Hoover calmly ticked off the available facts. “I stated [Oswald] was born an American but tried unsuccessfully to lose his American citizenship; came back to this country in 1962.” He also passed along at least one mistake, suggesting that Oswald had visited Cuba “several” times in recent years. Hoover made no attempt to hide the FBI’s past interactions with Oswald. Nor did he show much concern that Oswald might not have acted alone. Instead, he seemed to take the facts at face value. Most likely, he informed Schlei, the president had been killed by a man who was at once “a nut” and “an extreme radical of the left.”
Hoover’s confidence would later fuel speculation: Why was he so certain about Oswald? What could account for his calm in the midst of so much emotion and chaos? In conversation with Schlei that afternoon, Hoover hinted at one explanation: almost alone among men in government, he had seen this sort of thing before. At the age of sixty-eight, Hoover was one of the few federal officials who could claim a living memory of another presidential assassination, the shooting of William McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, when Hoover was six. As Hoover described it, Czolgosz was not so different from Oswald, both a radical and a fantasist who believed that shooting the president would inspire a revolution. During Hoover’s childhood, the nation had been racked with debates over whether Czolgosz was a madman or a true anarchist. As Hoover now recounted to Schlei, he himself had been one of the people who helped to put the debate to rest. “I advised Mr. Schlei that Czolgosz, who killed President McKinley, was a student of Emma Goldman and that I later prosecuted her for deportation from the United States.”
If Schlei found it strange to be discussing Hoover’s early glories at a moment of national panic, he did not register any objection. Instead, after more discussion of Oswald, he expressed his thanks—“Mr. Schlei stated I had been very helpful”—and then hung up, prepared for a long night at Justice headquarters.[11]
* * *
—
Hoover made no plans to stay late, as he might have done in his younger years. He left the office at 6:01, content to leave matters in the hands of subordinates. Lyndon Johnson found him at home later that evening, in the first of many phone calls that would pass between the two men in the days to come. Johnson had been in Dallas that morning, riding with his wife, Lady Bird, in his own open-top car, a respectful seventy-five feet behind the president. The Secret Service had raced him to Parkland Hospital, then out to Love Air Field, where they smuggled him onto Air Force One. Jackie Kennedy had arrived at the plane half an hour later. She stood at Johnson’s side while he recited the presidential oath, her cheerful pink suit stained brown by her husband’s blood. They arrived back in Washington at 5:58, just as Hoover was preparing to leave the office. At 6:10, Johnson spoke briefly from the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, his first public words as president. “I will do my best,” he said plaintively into a bank of microphones, “that is all I can do.” Then he departed for his old suite in the Executive Office Building, not yet ready to lay claim to the Oval Office. At 7:26, after speaking with Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, the last two occupants of the White House, he placed a call to Hoover.[12]
Johnson no longer lived down the street on Thirtieth Place, but he and Hoover had remained fast friends, exchanging a steady run of birthday gifts and holiday greetings. Johnson had been bitterly unhappy as vice president, a hulking, twangy Texan among lithe brain trusters, “treated more or less as an orphan by the Kennedy administration,” in the words of one FBI official. This was part of what sustained his friendship with Hoover: both men viewed the Kennedy presidency as something to be endured rather than engaged, and both reserved a special dark place in their hearts for the president’s brother. Bobby had been merciless toward Johnson, closing him out of key administrative meetings and mocking him privately as “Rufus Cornpone,” a rube in a world of sophisticates.[13]
Johnson’s phone call to Hoover that evening lasted just three or four minutes, hardly enough time to mark the momentous occasion. By all accounts, Johnson appeared as calm as Hoover by that point, all business and leadership. It was too soon to speak of politics, or to acknowledge that the assassination, for all its present horror, might be a good thing for both Hoover and Johnson. This first call was transactional, with one important piece of business to be accomplished. Despite the vagaries of federal jurisdiction, that night Johnson “asked me to take over completely the investigation of the assassination,” Hoover later wrote.[14]
Only then did Hoover accept that the Kennedy assassination, like the escalating violence in the South, would require a sweeping, long-term commitment from the FBI. Around ten p.m., authorized from his home on Thirtieth Place, Hoover shared Johnson’s instructions with the field offices. “The Bureau is conducting an investigation to determine who is responsible for the assassination,” his message read. “This matter is of utmost urgency and should be handled accordingly.”[15]
* * *
—
While Hoover slept, other men in Washington and Dallas spent the night wired and awake, trying to move the nation through a tragedy of as yet unknown dimensions. At Bethesda Naval Hospital, doctors performed an autopsy on the late president’s body, removing what was left of his brain before concluding that he had been killed by bullet wounds to the head and upper back. At four thirty a.m., they released the body back to Jackie Kennedy, and a naval ambulance sped through the empty Washington streets with both Jackie and Bobby aboard, heading for the White House. Staff had decorated the East Room as a site of mourning, with a raised black catafalque toward the center. A Marine guard carried the casket into the room, now lit by candles in homage to those critical hours when Abraham Lincoln’s body, similarly pocked by an assassin’s bullet, had lain there a century earlier.[16]
Half a continent away in Dallas, the night belonged to Oswald, the peculiar young man whose alleged actions had set the whole tragedy in motion. At midnight local time, Dallas police gave the press its first glimpse of him: short and disheveled, in a wrinkled white T-shirt torn at the neck, his left eye bruised and just beginning to swell. An hour and a half later, Oswald was arraigned for the crime of murder in the death of John F. Kennedy.[17]
At the FBI field office, SAC Shanklin held court at his desk throughout the night, chain-smoking cigarettes, calling the Dallas police and then Bureau headquarters and then the police again, the chief point of contact between two distraught bureaucracies. His agent Hosty later described Shanklin as a “nervous” man, “afraid of his own shadow” more often than not. “To survive with J. Edgar Hoover as his boss,” Hosty wrote, “he always had to be looking over his shoulder.” But that night everyone at the Dallas office was nervous—not just about what had happened the previous day, but about what might happen once the director awoke the next morning. Updates flowed in to Hoover’s office throughout the early morning hours: Dallas police found a rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository; the rifle belonged to A. Hidell; A. Hidell was one of Oswald’s pseudonyms; the rifle was heading east on an Air Force jet to be examined at the FBI lab. At four a.m., Shanklin wrote up a lengthy overview, the first master summary of investigation, to be ready for the director first thing in the morning.[18]
Hoover was in no rush to reengage the matter. November 23 was a Saturday, and Hoover no longer went into the office on Saturdays, usually spending the morning at Thirtieth Place and the afternoon at the track. Even on this Saturday, he started out following the usual routine. He received a briefing from headquarters summarizing Shanklin’s memo. At ten a.m., as if he had spent the whole night deep in the details, Hoover called Johnson from home with an update on the investigation.
Hoover’s decision not to go into the office that morning did not significantly alter the developing investigation. But it may have introduced elements of uncertainty and misinformation into the call with Johnson that could otherwise have been avoided. Hoover began by speaking as if the police and FBI investigations had seamlessly melded into a single investigative effort. “This man in Dallas,” he explained, “we, of course, charged him with the murder of the president.” As on the previous day, Hoover expressed confidence in Oswald’s guilt but warned that “the case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction” despite the discovery of Oswald’s rifle. According to the latest reports, Oswald had acquired the rifle through a mail-order catalog, a detail that Hoover found particularly upsetting. “It seems almost impossible to think that for $21 you could kill the president of the United States,” he told Johnson. Hoover reminded the new president that “no one knows this”—that the information he was conveying would be kept from the press as long as possible to allow the investigation to develop.
Unlike their brief exchange the previous night, this conversation went on for some time—at least ten minutes, possibly as many as fifteen. Hoover did most of the talking, clipping along at his martial pace, while Johnson listened, occasionally interjecting a question or two. Some of what Hoover conveyed that morning was truly bizarre, a concoction of newly discovered facts and eager leaps of imagination. The Bureau knew, for instance, that Oswald had made a visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City (and soon it would be realized that he had visited the Cuban consulate there as well). Though nearly every aspect of that trip remained a mystery, Hoover informed Johnson that it was not Oswald but a doppelgänger who had gone to Mexico, using Oswald’s name. This was a minor detail, just one of many conveyed during the phone call. But it was strange enough to raise Johnson’s level of alarm about a possible conspiracy behind the assassination. Perhaps this was Hoover’s intent—to impress Johnson and show that only the FBI could uncover the greatest of secrets. More likely, he simply did not yet understand the details of the developing investigation, and he had nobody by his side to correct him.[19]
At this point, perhaps sensing that he was on uncertain footing, Hoover came to the obvious conclusion: his presence was required at headquarters, even though it was a Saturday. Once there, he assumed the same pose he had adopted in the hours after the shooting: he was calm, dispassionate, and faintly impatient, seeking not to mourn the president but to move the investigation toward a swift conclusion. Around twelve thirty, some twenty minutes after arriving at headquarters, he issued a message informing all special agents in charge that “Lee Harvey Oswald has been developed as the principal suspect in the assassination of Pres. Kennedy.” He ordered them to resume normal contact with the right-wing informants and suspects they had rushed to locate the previous day.[20]
Those instructions marked another shift in the Bureau’s direction. Even as they continued to run down new leads, they increasingly focused on gathering evidence of Oswald’s complicity. As Hoover had suggested to Johnson, the problem was not only one of guilt or innocence, but of securing enough evidence to convict Oswald in court. Looking back, some of his men would wonder if he had moved too soon. “Hoover’s obsession with speed made impossible demands on the field,” Courtney Evans recalled. “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 developed.” But Hoover was under enormous pressure, Oswald was by far the most credible suspect, and not pursuing that investigation aggressively enough would have yielded its own complaints and problems.[21]
Indeed, if Hoover had limited interest in pursuing other paths that afternoon, it was partly because he was seeking to do what he often did best: protect the Bureau. To inquire more expansively into the previous day’s events was, in his mind, to court disaster—not only for the FBI but also for the nation and possibly the world. Oswald was a newly returned Soviet defector; one wrong comment—one off-the-cuff hint that the Bureau suspected the Soviets had killed the president—and the world might find itself embroiled in a major international incident, perhaps even on the brink of nuclear war. Then there were the more immediate concerns about Bureau operations, and about what might be revealed if the investigation wandered down too many twisting paths. Given free rein to pursue all avenues, what would agents inadvertently reveal about SOLO, or about the Bureau’s investigations of organized crime? How many of those efforts would be disrupted or exposed to public view? Hoover may have ordered the resumption of standard informant proceedings that afternoon not just because he believed in Oswald’s guilt, but because other options seemed so perilous.
Finally, there was the great, consuming question of blame—of whether the Bureau would be held responsible for failing to prevent the assassination. Already that morning, the Dallas police chief had revealed in a press conference that “the FBI knew [Oswald] was in Dallas.” The Secret Service, too, would undoubtedly try to shift responsibility onto the FBI. Hoover would have to make judgments about what his own agents had done or not done in the days and hours leading up to the assassination. He would have to decide, too, whether those judgments should be made public, or whether they would be contained within the Bureau.
