Directly responsible for JFK’s death

Don Moore has a story (first published in the Charlotte Sun newspaper, Port Charlotte, Florida, on 16 November 2003 and republished with permission) at War Tales about JFK:

Because 22 November was the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we thought it was appropriate to provide our readers something special they probably had not read before:

Former FBI Agent James Hosty told Don Moore, senior writer for the Charlotte Sun daily newspaper in Port Charlotte, Florida, during an interview about President John Kennedy’s assassination on the fortieth anniversary of his death in 2003, that J. Edger Hoover blamed him for the President’s murder. What follows is the interview and a question and answer session Moore had with the retired FBI agent about what he thought and what he knew about the JFK assassination:

James Hosty says the FBI had an “open-and-shut case” on who killed President John F. Kennedy. Hosty knows the details and facts better than any man alive. He maintains eyewitnesses and recovered forensics give him “irrefutable proof.”
What gives him special knowledge?Forty years ago, he was Special FBI Agent James P. Hosty Jr. working as a counter-intelligence officer in FBI office in Dallas, Texas at the time JFK was murdered. Hosty now lives in Burnt Store Marina, south of Punta Gorda, Florida.
He was assigned to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald before the Communist sympathizer pulled the trigger. He found no legal reason to put Oswald away. And that was the FBI man’s downfall, according to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination. Hosty didn’t arrest Oswald before the President was shot.
And the Warren Commission concluded Oswald was the shooter. It was FBI agent James Hosty's job to keep tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald days before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas fifty years ago.
To make matters worse for the retired agent, Hosty’s name and number were in Oswald’s address book when he was captured by the Dallas Police Department shortly after killing Kennedy. Hosty visited the Oswald home shortly before the President’s assassination. He talked to Oswald’s wife Marina about her husband when he wasn’t home. She passed the agent’s name and phone number on to Oswald, who put it in his address book.
Hosty says, forty years later, that neither he nor anyone else in the law enforcement-intelligence business in the United States had reason to suspect that Oswald was going to assassinate JFK.
Hosty believes he became the fall guy when Hoover and the Commission needed someone to blame. As a consequence for not arresting Oswald before the assassination, Hosty was banished by Hoover to the FBI bureau in Kansas City, Kansas. In those days it was considered by the director as the graveyard for agents who failed in the line of duty.

But Hosty’s opinion of Kansas City was that “Hoover had thrown me in the briar patch”. The FBI agent meant that Kansas City was a great place for him and his late wife, Janet, to raise their nine children, and a good place for an FBI agent to work.
“I was a special agent and the majority of my cases at the Dallas office were domestic intelligence,” he said. “Klansmen and General Edwin Walker and his Minutemen; I had to keep an eye on the general and his crew.”
United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson came to Dallas to make a speech a couple of weeks before Kennedy was shot. Stevenson was jeered and heckled by a group of Minutemen called the Indignant White Citizens Council, known in earlier days as the Ku Klux Klan.
No one wanted a similar occurrence when the President arrived. So most of the Dallas Police Department’s officers surrounded thirty or forty of Walker’s right-wingers stationed along the parade route. They were trying to keep the Minutemen from hassling the President, or worse, according to Hosty . “The truth of the matter is that security in Dallas for the President that day was nonexistent,” he explained. “The Secret Service was undermanned and understaffed and they couldn’t do the job.
The night before Kennedy was killed, the Secret Service didn’t have any manpower left to guard the President. So they brought in off-duty Fort Worth firemen to guard him after deputizing them.
“The Secret Service in those days had fewer than three hundred men in the entire United States. To complicate things further, they had so much pride in what they did, they wouldn’t let any other federal agency help them. The FBI had 85 agents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We could have guarded Kennedy, but they wouldn’t work with us,” Hosty said.
A day or so before Kennedy arrived in town, one of the local papers published a map of his proposed parade route. Thus knowledge of where the president was going and how he was going to get there became common knowledge. JFK and his entourage would drive right by the FBI’s headquarters and the Texas Book Depository (photo, above), where Oswald had just gotten a job.
Moments before President John Kennedy was assassinated, he and his wife, Jackie, were all smiles as they waved at the adoring crowd that mobbed the curbside on 22 November 1963.
Hosty hoped he could catch a glimpse of the President as he drove by in the open Lincoln convertible. A Democrat and an Irishman just like John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Hosty thought the President was his man.
At 12:38 p.m., the FBI agent was eating a cheese sandwich in a restaurant near the department’s headquarters in downtown Dallas when a waitress said: “Oh, my God, they’ve shot the president!” Hosty didn’t know it at the time, but her words would change his life.
It wasn’t long before Oswald’s name was mentioned as a potential suspect. Immediately, Hosty realized Oswald had been his case.
In an official censure letter to Hosty after Oswald was arrested, Hoover wrote on 13 December 1963:

“It has been determined that your recent handling of a security-type case was grossly inadequate. In view of the slipshod manner in which you handled this Oswald investigation, you are being placed on probation. It will be incumbent upon you to handle your future duties at a higher level of competence so that future administrative action of this nature will not be necessary.
Very truly yours,
John Edgar Hoover, Director

The result of the Warren Commission’s ten-month investigation into the President’s assassination was that the FBI hadn’t sufficiently helped the Secret Service protect JFK. To take this logic one step further, Hosty reasoned “…I was directly responsible for the President’s death,” according to J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission.
Two days later, Hosty found out from his boss in the Dallas office that he was being transferred to the FBI’s Kansas City office, by direct order of Hoover.
To clear the air and set the record straight, Hosty wrote a book with his son, Tom, in 1995 about his experiences involving the Oswald case and the Kennedy assassination called Assignment: Oswald.
The 79-year-old former FBI agent finished his tale of intrigue and assassination by observing:

“I’ve raised nine fine kids with Janet, my wife, held the highest rank a street agent could hold in the FBI by the time I retired in 1979, and explained what really happened with the Oswald case in the book my son and I wrote. What else could a man ask for?”

Rico says questions without answers...