Was Hale Boggs an Alcoholic?

The conventional political wisdom about Hale Boggs is that he was an alcoholic who was prone to speak out of turn or with compromised mental faculties - especially when it came to defaming J Edgar Hoover and the US Justice Department. Our view is that there is no evidence that Boggs was an alcoholic.

 

We cannot say for certain that Boggs was not an alcoholic since proving a negative is a fool's errand. But we can say that the evidence for its claim is weak as it seems to rest upon an elaborate game of telephone and rumor mongering.

 

The most substantive case for Boggs' alcoholism comes from a 1988 article by Steven Waldman in The Washington Monthly reviewing numerous congressional leaders from the 1960s and 1970s who were alcoholics. Some of the subjects such as Wilbur Mills admitted his problem, as did others, but Boggs was thrown into the mix and labeled guilty by association long after his murder.

 

Waldman cites Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson, the latter of whom could be considered the Paula Jones of gossip columnists. Anderson is more credible and should give pause when considering his revelations. But Anderson was not perfect, and relied upon numerous unnamed and unqueryable sources for information.

 

The other main source for the allegation of Boggs' alcoholism was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, two men who were criminals and murderers. If fraud vitiates all, then we can dismiss both men as liars and unreliable sources who should be discarded like so much Soviet propaganda.

 

After Boggs' incendiary speech in April 1971 in the House of Representatives, where he was Majority Leader, lambasting the criminal Department of Justice and FBI under the criminal and murderer J Edgar Hoover, Nixon became infuriated as only Nixon could become.

 

A taped conversation between him and Minority Leader Ford the following morning reveals the inception of the rumor, and the means by which they would cordon Boggs from any White House Congressional meetings.

 

Before getting to their strategy, Nixon lamented the shameful conduct of Boggs in lashing out against the FBI and its infringement on civil liberties by tapping the phones of Congressmen. Nixon said to Ford, "Do you realize that the FBI has not tapped the phone of one congressman or senator since 1924? And Hoover has the records to prove it." Our comment: ROTFLSHIPMP.

 

The statement is pure chutzpah and infantile playground bluster. Here is one professional feces substantiating the virtue of another with yet a third swallowing the feces. Nixon was covering up the murder of John Kennedy while Ford did exactly the same thing when he acted covertly as the Warren Commission liaison with the FBI in contravention to all ethical conduct for such an investigation. Ford's role was to make sure that the FBI presented only evidence which bolstered the Dulles-McCloy Commission's a priori claims of Oswald's guilt. Ford also doubled as a bullet hole mover "to clarify the evidence."

 

Hoover for his part had been caught in numerous income tax frauds, covering up the Kennedy murders, and claiming that organized crime didn't exist, or that if it did, that it was not a problem.

 

We see what kind of character we are dealing with on this phone conversation. Following Nixon's lead that he thought Boggs might be on "the sauce", Ford picked up from there by saying that Boggs might be under medication, was incoherent, that he embarrassed Albert (Speaker of the House Carl Albert), and that he wasn't safe to take in public.

 

Here we have it folks - Carl Albert, a lush, drunk, alcoholic according to Waldman's article, showing discomfort at Boggs' alleged slurring. Only in a CIA Kafkaesque world could anyone take any of this seriously.

 

So Nixon told Ford that in order to keep Boggs out of White House meetings, he would invite only the Speaker and Minority Leader from the House, and the Majority Leader and Minority Leader from the Senate, thus neatly cutting Boggs out of the circle.

 

Nixon's concern was that his criminal and unethical machinations would become public knowledge with Boggs present, and thus fodder for more speeches in the House. In other words, Boggs decided to support the law and the Constitution, whereas Nixon and Ford wanted none of that.

 

Thus our belief is that Ford or one of his direct associates fed the information to Anderson in order to discredit and ruin Boggs. We admit that this is just a theory, but given that Anderson peddled much material based upon secret and anonymous sources, it is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that he was fed bad information quite frequently as a means of discrediting him.

 

Thus when Waldman passed along his allegations that Boggs was an alcoholic, he was passing along junk which originated in the Nixon Oval Office, and laundered unwittingly through Jack Anderson.

 

None of this is to say that we would ignore credible evidence documenting the fact that Boggs had a drinking problem. Nothing would surprise us. However, we would not even accept the testimony of his daughter Cokie Roberts whom we liken to Paula Jones - "she is not to be believed."

 

Our view is that more research is required to establish the point that Hale Boggs was an alcoholic. Until it is forthcoming, we aren't buying it.

 

Reference

Nixon Tapes, Conversation 42-9, April 6, 1971, nixontapes.org

 

-, The Matarese Circle -- "USA elite and USA secret police" Boggs - Speech before Congress (April 22, 1971), Tangible Information (tangibleinfo.blogspot.com), February 17, 2010

 

Steven Waldman, Governing Under the Influence, The Washington Monthly, January 1988, accessed from UNZ.org

 

Copyright 2015 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Why Hale Boggs Was Murdered

Hale Boggs (1914 - 1972) was the Majority Leader of Congress from Louisiana whose plane disappeared in October of 1972 while campaigning for Nick Begich of Alaska. We believe that Boggs’ plane was sabotaged – in the time honored fashion of political assassinations – because Boggs was “unstable.” But therein lays the secret.

 

Why was Boggs unstable and why would it matter? Based upon new evidence we have obtained concerning the International Trade Mart and its connections to the Rockefellers, we are certain that Boggs’ knowledge and involvement with the murder of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963 was the source of that instability.

 

We all know that loose lips sink ships, and Boggs - a World War 2 Navy man would know that – should have admonished himself with those words of wisdom before speaking to Jim Garrison, the courageous district attorney who prosecuted unsuccessfully Clay Shaw for his involvement in the murder of the president.

 

In Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, Boggs is observed expressing misgivings about the conclusions of the Warren Commission, of which he was a member. His membership on the commission was no accident based upon the history of the International Trade Mart we obtained. Boggs was described as a good friend of that Rockefeller front organization which had its genesis in International House, another Rockefeller front organization founded in 1924, 3 years after the founding of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Boggs was selected for the Warren Commission precisely because he was a reliable puppet of the plutocrats who knew that he would ask no embarrassing questions while working on the cover-up committee.

 

Why Boggs began sending signals that he might talk or have second thoughts about the Warren Commission Report is beyond our grasp at present. Why would he betray his benefactors? Was he whining for more money to keep silent, about which the Kennedy killers tired?

 

Whatever the specific trigger, he was clearly murdered – in our opinion – as part of a larger clean-up operation which would claim the life of Dorothy Hunt a couple of months later in another airplane “accident.”

 

The important lesson is that Boggs was closely allied with the International Trade Mart of which Clay Shaw was director, and the ITM was closely allied with the Rockefeller International House which was the economic analogue – of sorts – to the CFR.

 

But the connections do not end there. Another prominent member of the ITM was Dr Alton Oschner who headed the research effort to develop the highly lethal cancer weapon which was ostensibly created to kill Fidel Castro, but which in reality was a centrifuge for the Kennedy assassination.

 

Oschner funded several efforts which involved Lee Oswald, whose fake pro Castro activities, such as Fair Play for Cuba, were part of an operation designed to flush out pro Castro sympathizers. The important point is that Oschner was heavily involved in framing Oswald and supporting the murder conspiracy against President Kennedy.

 

Oschner’s ties to the intelligence world and Latin America ran deep and wide, a web of murder which included the Rockefellers, Dulles, and Bushes, connections which we will develop in future postings.

 

Boggs’ close association with the ITM gave him information which would implicate Shaw and Oschner, information which he most likely supplied Jim Garrison which Garrison used in hunting down Clay Shaw.

 

We have read reports that Boggs had a drinking problem near the end of his life, but we cannot corroborate that. It could have been real or contrived by the newsfakers in the press. If contrived, it could be used to explain away some accident. If real, it would explain the fear of the murderers about being implicated in the crime of the century by the Congressman from Louisiana with loose lips.

Reference
History of International Trade Mart, 1974 [Details forthcoming]

Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.