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.
