Hale Boggs
Hale Boggs was a US lawyer and politician who was on the Warren Commission. He was the most vocal of its dissenting voices, leading dissent from the majority who supported the single bullet theory. He gave a blistering attack on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1971. He disappeared, presumed killed, in Alaska in 1972 when his Cessna disappeared. Travelling with him and also presumed dead was Nick Begich.
Contents
Warren Commission
In a conversation with an aide, Boggs said: “[Edgar] Hoover lied his eyes out to the [Warren] Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”[citation needed] 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.”[1]
Dissent
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.’"
“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) [2]
Several years after his death, 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]."[citation needed]
1970 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 Seattle Weekly that it could not locate any relevant records.[3]
Death
Bogg's airplane, so the official narrative, went down somewhere 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. A young Bill Clinton is alleged to have driven Boggs to the airport on the day that Boggs disappeared.[4]
Anonymous tipster
Immediately after the plane 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. He was interviewed by the FBI, which reported him "appeared rational, extremely intelligent, but somewhat strange."[3]
Crash Survivors
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.[4]
A 2012 report from the Seattle Weekly observed that in the days after Bogg's disappearance, "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."[3] Research continues into his death, with new documents occasionally turned up by FOIA requests.[5][3]
Hale’s widow expressed doubts about it being an accident.[citation needed]
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.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1979 novel The Matarese Circle, author Robert Ludlum portrayed Boggs as having been killed to stop his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.”
