JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate > JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate
The "mysterious death" of Hale Boggs, anyone?
Lance Payette:
Oh, Jesus, it only gets better ...
Below is an issue from September of 1973. The seller describes the Star as "an underground, reader-written sleaze paper. Filled with b/w erotic photographs and drawings, personal erotic experiences, art, letters, a large personals and classifieds section, and news on politics and censorship. This issue features a nude, tied up, and chained Janis Joplin on the cover."
This is your Los Angeles Star, CT fans. Are those Hale Boggs quotes starting to look just a bit iffy?
Back issues are also available at my beloved Advanced Book Exchange, although I couldn't find the 11-22-63 edition.
Lance Payette:
Lest the salient points in all of the above be lost, let's recapitulate and then I'll move on to greener fields ...
1. Boggs' plane most likely went down in October of 1972 as the result of a Mafia bombing that had nothing to do with Boggs but was focused on Congressman Begich and may have involved the knowing or unknowing participation of Boggs' wife, who married the confessed bomber 14 months later.
2. Alternatively, the plane may have gone down as the result of poor weather and a daredevil pilot; however, there are just too many Mafia connections for this to be the preferred explanation.
3. On the floor of Congress in April of 1971, Boggs did not say the things about Hoover that the CT literature reports him as saying; you can read the 1-minute speech for yourself.
4. What Boggs said about Hoover had already been said by other members of Congress; the only novelty of Boggs' speech was his call for AG Mitchell to demand Hoover's resignation (when Hoover was 75 and a year away from death).
5. Boggs' crash was five months after Hoover's death, at which time Nixon (a Boggs admirer) was President, Kleindienst was AG, Gray was Acting Director of the FBI, and the Watergate scandal was in full bloom.
6. The confessed Mafia bomber, years later and while in prison, floated the idea that Hoover had ordered Boggs killed; as noted above, Hoover had been dead five months at the time of the crash, and there is every reason to believe the bomber floated this as an (unsuccessful) negotiating tool in his then-ongoing negotiations with the FBI.
7. The Los Angeles Star of November 22, 1973, in which a quotation that is the foundation of the "Boggs as a JFKA mystery death" factoid supposedly appeared, did not exist. There had been no Los Angeles Star for almost 100 years.
8. A different publication, the LA Star, was the ultimate sleazy, sensationalist, sexually explicit rag that billed itself as "an unauthorized newspaper" and featured articles written by readers. It described itself as "journalism at its funnest."
9. Richard E. Sprague, a CT True Believer if there ever was one, had founded a company in the LA suburb of Hawthorne and wrote articles for the LA Star.
10. The November 22, 1973 edition of the Star (i.e., tenth anniversary of the JFKA) contained an article quoting an unnamed former Boggs aide to the effect that Boggs had "startling revelations" about the JFKA and Watergate shortly before his death.
11. The CT literature attributes the "startling revelations" quotation to Boggs, even though the piece in the LA Star attributed it to an unnamed former aide.
12. The "startling revelations" quotation first received wide attention in the 1977 "mysterious deaths" book Coincidence or Conspiracy? by Bernard Fensterwald; it has since been repeated, invariably as "reported in the Los Angeles Star," throughout the CT literature.
13. Fensterwald, a longtime radical and extreme CT True Believer, was virtually joined at the hip with Sprague, including their founding of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations and their participation in Garrison's investigation. One can be reasonably certain that Sprague and/or Fensterwald wrote the piece in the 11-22-73 edition of the Star.
14. Also appearing in Fensterwald's book is another quotation, likewise attributed to an unnamed former Boggs aide and almost surely originating in the same 11-22-73 piece in the Star, to the effect that “Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."
15. The "lied his eyes out" quotation is almost always attributed to Boggs himself in the CT literature.
16. There is utterly no reason - no factual basis - for believing that Boggs was a "JFKA mystery death." He was skeptical of some aspects of the Warren Report, but this would scarcely have been a reason to blow up his plane eight years later (by which time CT books by Lane, Weisberg, Garrison and others had already been published).
17. Boggs' wife Lindy replaced him in Congress, served until 1991, and lived to be 97. She acted as the "unofficial ambassador to New Orleans" for the ARRB and authorized the ARRB's access to all of Boggs' papers at Tulane University.
18. None of the above will stop the CT community from declaring Boggs a JFKA mystery death, mischaracterizing his speech to Congress, attributing the bogus quotations to him, or claiming that said quotations were reported in the Los Angeles Star.
19. You're welcome. Please, hold your applause. Now back to masturbating over whether Baker took 83, 97 or 112 seconds to reach the lunchroom because that's really, really, really important and just might hold the key to the entire case. ::)
Tim Nickerson:
Lance,
When you finally do tire of the JFK assassination discussion, please don't delete your account here. You did that on the ED forum and a lot of good info was lost.
Lance Payette:
--- Quote from: Tim Nickerson on September 10, 2025, 02:03:01 AM ---Lance,
When you finally do tire of the JFK assassination discussion, please don't delete your account here. You did that on the ED forum and a lot of good info was lost.
--- End quote ---
Yes, I wish I could recover some of it myself! I was fairly proud of my work on the HT LINGUAL program and the Raleigh phone call. I did only delete the posts from my most recent incarnation there. However, all the surviving ones are now shown as "Guest" posts. Since lots of other people who have departed are also shown as "Guest," mine are hell to find unless I remember exactly what I said and can search by the specific language, as with my "Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game."
Tim Nickerson:
--- Quote from: Lance Payette on September 10, 2025, 02:35:45 AM ---Yes, I wish I could recover some of it myself! I was fairly proud of my work on the HT LINGUAL program and the Raleigh phone call. I did only delete the posts from my most recent incarnation there. However, all the surviving ones are now shown as "Guest" posts. Since lots of other people who have departed are also shown as "Guest," mine are hell to find unless I remember exactly what I said and can search by the specific language, as with my "Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game."
--- End quote ---
I actually have some of what you posted in the ED Forum saved in a Doc file. Not much though.
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