One of the long standing issues regarding the attack on President Kennedy in Dallas has been the question of trust – primarily in terms of trust in the overall official investigation, but secondarily in terms of what witness reports to trust, in the work of the Dallas Police, and especially in the FBI follow on investigation.

Its a question I do pursue in several respects in my forthcoming book, The Oswald Puzzle, however that has to do with Oswald himself, as a person more than simply a suspect. In the broader sense though many people, especially those that decide to delve into the assassination seriously for the first time, have much broader questions of trust.

Robbie Robertson and I chatted about trust issues – and issues of what might be termed ‘standard practice’ in FBI investigations in a recent edition of his Out of the Blank podcast. One of the things that I stressed is that we have to evaluate the FBI work in terms of the directions it was given immediately following the assassination – which changed from an open ended inquiry into all its sources on Friday to a tightly focused on Oswald alone by mid-day Saturday as well as by what are clearly standard FBI field interview practices (what did Hoover want in reports and what did he object to…his being the ultimate micromanager, punctuation could ruin your career).

Many who decide to pursue the assassination seriously becomes frustrated by the people the FBI did not interview, or interviewed only superficially, or quite literally handled in a fashion that closed off leads and if anything obfuscation a comprehensive investigation. There is no doubt about such concerns at this point in time – the question is more one of how much of that was due to Hoover’s management of the inquiry, the orders the agents were given by the various station chiefs (especially in Dallas and New Orleans) and the extent to which we simply face ‘standard practice’, CYA in terms of Bureau history with Oswald, or something more damming.

After having extensively studied the FBI practices in respect to several major political assassinations, in particular that of MLK, I have some opinions on those questions and if you are interested they certainly come out in the discussion with Robbie at the link below.

Oh, also apologies, the video shows a good bit of ‘jitter’ in my movements, not sure if it was a camera tracking thing or the stability of my mid-century modern table which I work on …sorry, if it becomes distracting. It was not showing at all during the recording.