Hosty Pudding: An FBI Rewrite of the JFK Assassination
Chapter 7
Is Hosty Rational?
There are many ways in which Hosty reflects his rather extreme political views although he is careful to make no direct reference to them. They occur throughout his book. Although he did make a point of saying he was a Democrat he is also virulently anti-Kennedy, even making up what he thinks can damage their reputation.
Early in his Chapter 16 (pages 194-203), which he begins with his account of his travail before the House Judiciary subcommittee, with more of Fenner, and then he makes up out of nothing a Bobby Kennedy determination to take the assassination case away from the Dallas Police:
When Bobby Kennedy and other Washington insiders saw the Dallas police had jurisdiction over the investigation of the assassination, they were desperate to wrest it away for the FBI. The Justice Department and the FBI were frantic to find any loophole to jerk jurisdiction away from the police, and Shanklin was largely responsible for these endeavors. If Oswald had threatened to blow up the FBI office and the police station as Fenner claimed, Shanklin would have snatched this note as evidence of a federal crime, enabling the FBI to assert jurisdiction over the police. As Shanklin said, a bomb threat against federal agents is the "equivalent of a red flag in front of a bull" (page 199).
Hosty does not even pretend to have a source on this. It is all false. He says it on his own authority and there is no question about it, it is a deliberate fabrication. He made it up to defame Robert Kennedy, in effect to have him responsible the for the cover-up. That is as unconscionable as any extremist of the right political fringe is capable of.
Neither Robert Kennedy nor any other lawyer had to take time to "see" that murder is a local crime. If "Shanklin was largely responsible for those endeavors" there would be records of it in the Dallas files. I got them in CA 78-0322. There not only is no such record in them, there is not even what can be taken as a hint of anything at all like this.
There was no Dallas case to be taken from the Dallas police the moment Oswald was killed and that was on Sunday. The funeral was not until the next day. Until and after the funeral Kennedy was not in the office and had nothing to do with the Department of Justice or anything other than the funeral arrangements and the tragedy.
The only person in any position of authority in Washington who had any such plans was Hoover of Hosty's own FBI. Events eliminated the possibility that Hoover could have taken the case from Dallas. But his plan was not to "wrest it away for the FBI," which not only did not have the case, it had no jurisdiction. As Hoover himself told the Warren Commission when he testified months later (5H98-9).
As Hosty wanders and wanders he gets back to that Oswald letter he destroyed:
. . . Bill Sullivan, in his September 1975 statement to Bassett's men, said that shortly after the assassination he had spoken with Shanklin by phone. During this conversation, Shanklin told Sullivan he had internal personnel problems in the Oswald case because one of his agents (the name was not given to Sullivan, or if so he had forgotten) had received a threatening letter from Oswald while Oswald was still alive, a letter from Oswald prompted by the agent's investigation of him. Sullivan told Bassett's men that he tried to get more details from Shanklin, but that Shanklin seemed disinclined to discuss it further, other than to say he was handling it with Mohr as a personnel problem. Shanklin made no mention of anything being destroyed. Sullivan also told Bassett's men that later he had another phone conversation with Shanklin, during which he identified me as the agent who had received the threatening note, again failing to mention that the note had been destroyed. He also mentioned that Hoover was furious with me and was going to transfer me out of Dallas (page 200).
Knowing that Shanklin was lying his head off, as Hosty says without any knowledge that it was to protect Mohr, how he could quote Shanklin as an authority for anything at all controversial as in the previous quotation aimed at defaming Robert Kennedy can be explained only as the viciousness that some of strong political beliefs indulge or evil for the sake of evil. It is not necessary in Hosty's own defense.
In his next chapter (pages 204-9) he reflects not only his lack of interest in intelligence matters, even when they affect his FBI, but his willingness to state as fact what is laughable.
He refers to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was known as the Church committee after its chairman, Democrat Senator Frank Church of Idaho. It had a subcommittee on the assassination of President Kennedy. Its chairman was Republican Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. It had but one other member, Democratic Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. Hosty finds it possible, as he always does, to be critical of that committee.
After saying that Schweiker was the subcommittee chairman and that the only other member was Hart, Hosty next days, "Mondale was the chairman, but I never saw him" (page 204).
He is not finished with Democrat Walter Mondale. And, expert as he is on everything no matter how little he knows about it, he defends those who were first and widely thought of as the assassins, those who unlike Hosty's favorites had ample and well known motive:
Senator Gary Hart interrupted us briefly at one point during the first day to ask some rather silly questions about whether right-wing Cuban exiles had anything to do with the killing of Kennedy. I suppose Hart was thinking back to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and I couldn't help wondering if he had given any thought to the events since November 22, thirteen years ago. In any case, I told him I knew nothing to support such a far-fetched theory. Hart would not return during my four days of testimony. With Mondale never showing at all, the only other senator I saw was Schweiker. In the end, Schweiker, who was interested in my testimony, was only able to stay for just over half of it (page 206).
"Modest to a fault, his next words are, [although] the committee learned a lot from me . . ."
How much it could have learned from him is by now clear.
How much Hosty knew that it was "silly" to ask "whether right-wing Cubans exiles" were involved in the assassination or why he can say the idea is "far-fetched" Hosty does not say. He needs no authority. He is the authority. As he spends this book saying. if he had known the files of his own FBI they abound in such information, including what some of those Cubans were doing that legitimately brought suspicion down on them. Doing, saying and threatening. Some of them also plagued his FBI with false reports that interfered with what should have been investigated.
Hart had little interest in the subcommittee's work. That could account for his not being there after the first day of Hosty's testimony. But is it not impossible that Hosty and what he said accounts for it, too.
Referring to two subcommittee staff members Mike Epistein and Paul Wallach, Hosty continues to develop his imagined conspiracy against him:
Wallach asked me if I knew before the assassination that Oswald had been in regular contact with Vitaliy Gerasimov, the Soviet paymaster in Washington and the contact for deep-cover Soviet espionage agents in the United States. I told them no, and again Wallach and Epstein told me that the Warren Commission had assumed I knew all about this prior to the assassination, which again meant that FBI headquarters had virtually set me up (page 206).
Oswald neither knew nor ever spoke to or even saw Gerasimov. He wrote the Soviet embassy about his plans to return to the USSR and the letter reached Gerasimov.
As the chapter then ends it is with a little more of the real Hosty that from time to time he cannot hide. It just oozes from his paranoid politics and beliefs and his paranoia about it all being a monster conspiracy against him:
. . . the committee had released a 106-page report. In this abridged version, the committee, like the Warren Commission, steered totally clear of all the Soviet and Cuban information -- information that again had been deliberately kept from the American people. In 1976, the United States was still locked in the cold war, so maybe the reasoning went that this information could still lead to an international confrontation, thirteen years after the fact.
My more cynical side speculated that the Senate committee was packed with Soviet/Cuban apologists. In 1976, there were many people who wanted to negotiate peace with the Soviets and the Cubans, which they hoped would include nuclear arms limitation treaties. I also suspected that Senator Church, who was gearing up for a run for the presidency in 1976, may not have wanted to stir the pot, especially since letting everything come out would have forced him to acknowledge that John and Bobby Kennedy were two of the driving forces to overthrow Castro. This kind of admission would have embarrassed and angered many in the Kennedy faction, whose support he desperately needed.
One of the more significant things to come out of the final report was the Church Committee's criticism of the CIA. The committee falsely alleged that the CIA had failed to follow up on obvious leads that could have implicated Castro in Kennedy's death. When the 1963 U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann -- who became President Johnson's undersecretary of state -- read this, he blew his stack. He struck back in the press, explaining that CIA agents in Mexico City had tried to run out all information about Oswald's dealings with the Cubans, but they had been ordered by Bobby Kennedy to cease and desist their investigation just days after the assassination. As Mann told the Chicago Sun-Times (June 24, 1976), "If the President's brother thought Oswald did it entirely on his how, I didn't see why I should be more Catholic than the Pope." Because of the cease-and-desist order, the investigation into the Soviet/Cuban angles of the president's assassination was left incomplete (pages 208-9).
Quite a mouthful even for this big mouth.
Especially when his direct quotation of Mann does not, by content, relate to any calling off of any investigation. Perhaps Mann said it that way but if he did Hosty eliminated that part from what he quotes. That does not encourage the belief Mann said what Hosty says he said.
We have seen that there is not a thing here other than the extreme right politics on the irrational right, of those who wanted a war over the assassination, with the assassination providing the excuse. There's not a thing to all that jabber about Mexico City, the Cubans and the Soviets. These political zanies, which includes many in the CIA, just refused to face the actuality that Khrushchev and the Soviets did not prefer Johnson to Kennedy, which is who they had to deal with Kennedy killed, and Castro did not want anyone to live more than he wanted that for Kennedy, his only real protector. Kennedy did guarantee Castro against any invasion, not just by us, as the solution to the Cuba missile crisis of more that a year before the assassination.
Nothing that Hosty refers to was "withheld from the American people" because there was nothing to it other than the wildest political fabrications which happen to be what Hosty clings to despite all that is real and well established.
When he refers to the Senate intelligence committee as "packed with Soviet/Cuban apologists," he mentions no names. Could he have been referring to Senator Barry Goldwater, who was its coming chairman?
There were no such members on that committee. This, too, reflects the extreme of the right extreme where Hosty dwells.
His suspicions about Senator Church at least he says are suspicions. But what he next says about the Kennedys and Cuba had not been true since the missile crises of 1962 and much of the anti-Cuba activity was without their knowledge. They are for example, blamed for the CIA's Mafia plot to kill Castro. They did not even known about it until it got public attention. That was a scheme of the CIA under the Eisenhower/Nixon administration, started even before Kennedy was elected, as the CIA's own records I have state with clarity and specificity.
Of this Hosty writes that "admission" of what was publicly known and he exaggerates and misrepresents "would have embarrassed and angered many of the Kennedy faction." Sloppy as his writing it what he refers to is not clear. He appears to be referring to the Democrats on that committee. Whether to them or to others, this kind of reference to a political party, particularly the majority political, party reflects the extremist and the irrationality of Hosty's own politics. There was no such "faction" on that committee. Moreover, and whether this is from his permeating ignorance or his permeating dishonesty is immaterial, the plain and simple truth is that the Kennedy Cuba policy was inherited from the Republican administration he succeeded. The Bay of Pigs and the Mafia plot, among many others, were not of the Kennedy administration. Those anti-Cuban policies and acts began with the Republican administration, to which Hosty does not refer as a "faction."
What Hosty attributes to former ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann is not true, that Bobby Kennedy had ordered the CIA in Mexico "to cease and desist their investigation just days after the assassination." We have more on this later.
That there was no such order from Robert Kennedy is clear in the CIA's own disclosed records. Besides which in those days Robert Kennedy was not participating in any government activities. The department was run by his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach. As the Commission's own record reflect and I published in 1975 in Post Mortem, Kennedy had completely detached himself from the investigation of his brother's assassination. He should have because of his personal involvement. It is those who have their own records to hide who after his death made this canard up. Few had more to hide that Mann.