FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was already worried about conspiracy theories just two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was already worried about conspiracy theories just two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
After Lee Harvey Oswald was fatally shot while in police custody in Dallas on Nov. 24,1963, Hoover vented his frustration in a secret report that has been made public.
« There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead, » Hoover wrote in the report. « The thing I am concerned about, and so is (deputy attorney general) Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. »
Nicholas Katzenbach apparently felt the same way, writing in a memo three days after Kennedy was shot that « the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial, » according to NBC News .
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The report was among the thousands of declassified documents released by the National Archives on Thursday.
Hoover had also written that « last night we received a call from our Dallas office from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organized to kill Oswald. »
Oswald was gunned down by Jack Ruby the following day despite the warning, and Hoover lashed out at local cops.
« Oswald having been killed today after our warnings to the Dallas Police Department was inexcusable, » Hoover wrote, according to NBC News. « It will allow, I am afraid, a lot of civil rights people to raise a lot of hell because he was handcuffed and had no weapon. There are bound to be some elements of our society who will holler their heads off that his civil rights were violated — which they were. »
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The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, and another congressional probe 15 years later found no evidence to support the theory that the CIA had been involved.
With News Wire Services
