On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. His Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in the same day. The next morning, at 10:01 he received a phone call from the legendary J. Edgar Hoover. The telephone conversation was recorded. You can read a transcript of the conversation if you buy Michael Beschloss’s book Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964. I own the book and have been wanting to share some of its contents without having to transcribe it myself. I went looking for transcriptions and instead found only actual audio files. I wanted to upload the initial conversation between Hoover and LBJ so you could listen to it, but I discovered that the audio file for this particular conversation (perhaps one of the most interesting in our nation’s history) has nothing audible on it. It is 15 minutes and 16 seconds of nothing but a recurring ticking noise. If you want to check for yourself, here’s the URL. Nothing there. All the other conversations I have checked are clearly audible and match the transcripts in Beschloss’s book. Then I discovered something truly fascinating. If I want a transcript of this conversation I can buy it here.
Notice this little nugget:
The Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program is committed to producing authoritative transcripts of the presidential recordings. Below is a list of published volumes (through W.W. Norton) as well as those in progress. All of these are published under the general editorship of Philip Zelikow and Ernest May or Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, and Timothy Naftali.
Of course, Philip Zelikow was a key member of the Bush 2000 transition team, the chief investigator for the 9/11 Commission, as well as a co-author with Condi Rice. He currently serves as legal counsel for Rice in the State Department. Wow. I never saw that coming.
I’ll just transcribe one little piece of the missing LBJ/Hoover conversation here. This is a briefing that LBJ received after one day’s investigation. Obviously, he had been receiving snippets of information along with everyone else, and probably talked to Hoover the night before.
LBJ: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?
HOOVER: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason- we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there [snip]
…The case right now is not strong enough to get a conviction…Now if we can identify this man who was at the…Soviet Embassy in Mexico City…This man Oswald has still denied everything. He doesn’t know anything about anything, but the gun thing, of course, is a definite trend.
Now, that was the earliest, rawest information that the FBI Director had. In under 24 hours they had already received the photos and tapes of ‘Oswald’ from Mexico City AND THEY DID NOT MATCH the Oswald they had in custody.
Fast forward to the 1978 Congressional Investigation. Start reading here. You;ll quickly discover that no photos currently exist and no audio tapes are available. Hoover got rid of them. Now I want to fast forward to November 29, 1963. A week has passed since the assassination and LBJ is calling up Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the Chairman of the Armed Serives Committee. He is telling Russell that he has already named him to a Blue Ribbon panel (the Warren Commission). Russell hates Earl Warren and doesn’t want to serve with him. Here is a part of their conversation.
LBJ: Dick, it has already been announced. And you can serve with anybody for the good of America. And this is a question that has a good many more ramifications than on the surface. And we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.
And there you have it. The Warren Commission was set up with the express purpose to make sure that the American people did not get it in their head that the Soviets or Castro killed Kennedy. It was done to protect the country. The result of the investigation was a foregone conclusion.
For the latest attempts to crack the case, check out Jefferson Morley v. the CIA (.pdf).
