Hale Boggs

Hale Boggs   (Lawyer, politician)
Born	Thomas Hale Boggs February 15, 1914 Long Beach, Mississippi
Died	1972-10-16 (Age 58) Alaska, United States
Alma mater	Tulane University
Religion	Roman Catholic
Children	• Cokie Roberts • Thomas Hale Boggs Jr • Barbara Boggs Sigmund
Spouse	Lindy Boggs
Member of	American Committee on United Europe, The Warren Commission
Victim of	premature death
Party	Democratic
Relatives	• Steven V. Roberts • Rebecca Roberts • Daniel J. Hartman • Paul Sigmund • Lee Roberts Jr • David Sigmund • Stephen Sigmund • DeLesseps Story Morrison
House Majority Leader In office January 3, 1971 - January 3, 1973  House Majority Whip In office January 10, 1962 - January 3, 1971  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 2nd district In office January 3, 1947 - January 3, 1973  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 2nd district In office January 3, 1941 - January 3, 1943

Hale Boggs was a US politician who was on the Warren Commission.

Warren Commission

In a conversation with an aide, Boggs said: “[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.” Later that month Boggs went on to say: “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.”

Boggs dissented from the Warren Commission’s majority who supported the single bullet theory. In the 1979 novel The Matarese Circle, author Robert Ludlum portrayed Boggs as having been killed to stop his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.”

Bernard Fensterwald and Michael Ewing in Coincidence or Conspiracy? wrote that “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 Dallas journalist Jim Marrs pointed out, Boggs was "The most vocal critic among Commission members. 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.’"

Qualifying Statement

“This is somewhat like the position the Warren Commission took when Richard Russell, Hale Boggs and John Sherman Cooper refused to sign the draft of the Warren Report until a qualifying statement was inserted. The statement read, ‘Because of the difficulty of proving negatives to a certainty the possibility of others being involved with either Oswald or Ruby cannot be established categorically but if there is any such evidence it has been beyond the reach of all the investigative agencies and resources of the United States and has not come to the attention of this Commission.’”
Richard E. Sprague (1985) 

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]."

Run off the road

Around 11:30 p.m. on July 23, 1970, Boggs was driving in Washington, D.C., when a late model Lincoln Continental forced him off the road. He gave chase and was able to take down a license plate number. No additional information is available in the file, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which investigated the incident, told the Weekly that it could not locate any relevant records.

Death

A young Bill Clinton is alleged to have driven Boggs to the airport on the day that Boggs disappeared.

Bogg's airplane, so the official narrative, vanished in Alaska and was never found. With him 3 others vanished as well: Don Jonz, the pilot, Representative Nick Regich, and Regich’s aide, Russell Brown. Immediately after the plan disappeared, an anonymous tipster reported that he had access to experimental electronic equipment, and he provided detailed directions to the wreck. Tracked down, he was reported to be "white male, about thirty five, six foot three inches, two hundred and fifteen pounds, hair black, who apparently has injured left arm." He appeared to have served in the military, and may have been connected to Richard Nixon. Interviewed by the FBI, which reported that he "appeared rational, extremely intelligent, but somewhat strange."

Crash Survivors

In the days after Bogg's disappearance, a 2012 report from the Seattle Weekly observes that, "several independent ham radio operators in Northern California said they spoke with or heard a transmission from someone on the plane after it crashed, who told them that there were survivors." Their interesting report concludes that "tour decades after the plane vanished, plenty of questions remain." Research continues into his death, with new documents occasionally turned up by FOIA requests.

James F. Marino refers to an FBI telex which was obtained in 1992 by the Washington publication, Roll Call through a FOIA request which indicates that Boggs' plane had been found and that there were at least two survivors.

Hale’s widow expressed doubts about it being an accident.

The Los Angeles Star, on November 22, 1973, reported that before his death Boggs had claimed he had ‘startling revelations’ on Watergate and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

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