Assignment by James P. Hosty

Author:James P. Hosty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2011-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

11

Wednesday, May 6, 1964

TIME: 2:00 P.M.

“It will just be a moment.”

“Thank you,” I replied to J. Edgar Hoover’s aide, Sam Noisette. I was sitting in a chair in the reception room of Hoover’s office. Noisette was a black FBI agent, a rarity in 1963. For all practical purposes, Hoover had made Noisette an agent to do nothing more than act as his personal assistant and chauffeur.

I had requested a private meeting with Hoover. While it is every agent’s prerogative to make these requests, Hoover didn’t always oblige. The day before I testified for the Warren Commission, I had asked Belmont for a meeting with Hoover. Belmont said that he would wait and see how I testified before he put in my request. This morning, after I briefed Belmont on my Warren Commission testimony — although I could tell he knew just about everything I’d said — I asked again if I could meet with Hoover. Apparently satisfied with my performance, Belmont agreed to put in my request. Later that morning, his secretary informed me I would be able to meet with Hoover after lunch, at 2:00 P.M. This was another encouraging sign: one of the most significant prerequisites for meeting with Hoover was to have earned his favorable regard. The meeting itself indicated that my handling of the Oswald case had met with Hoover’s approval.

A few minutes after two o’clock, Noisette ushered me into Hoover’s office. As I walked in — the first time I had ever been there — my eyes immediately rested on a massive executive desk, elaborately ornamented and highly polished, resting on an elevated platform in the center of the room. Then I saw the Old Man himself. At a smaller desk, off to one side, against one of the walls, Hoover had his head buried in foot-high stacks of paperwork. Next to this desk was a single chair, which he waved for me to take when he looked up and saw me. I sunk into the low chair, descending significantly lower than Hoover. I am sure this was the desired effect.

I didn’t need this trick to be made aware that I was sitting in front of a legendary man, the man who had built the FBI from scratch and still controlled it from the bottom up. In 1917, after graduating from law school, Hoover went to work as a departmental attorney in the U.S. Justice Department. In 1921 he was appointed assistant director of the FBI, an obscure federal agency with little jurisdiction. When the Teapot Dome scandal broke, the FBI director and U.S. attorney general at the time were both implicated and forced from office. Har-lan Fisk Stone was appointed the new attorney general, and he in turn appointed Hoover as the director of the FBI in 1924 — incidentally the year I was born. Hoover took this corrupt agency and turned it around, totally rebuilding and professionalizing it.

It had been the middle of the Prohibition and gangster era. Gangsters bribed and corrupted all the law enforcement agencies with relevant jurisdiction.

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