Trail of Destruction, Pt. 1: The LBJ-Hoover Phone Call

The tape recording of a chat on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963, is scrubbed

Photos of an unidentified man FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described in the transcript of a conversation with President Johnson as “at the Soviet Embassy” in fall 1963 “using Oswald’s name” in a phone call recorded by the CIA. (Credit: NARA)

[Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in the JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” New installments will appear every Wednesday.]

Someone erased a conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that took place on the morning after the assassination, Nov. 23, 1963. The conversation, recorded automatically by the White House, no longer exists. Only a transcript of that chat remains, in memo form, and it is very likely incomplete.

In the surviving transcript, Hoover refers to a tape of a phone call that the CIA had recorded in Mexico City at the time accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies there in late September or early October 1963:

LBJ: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?

JEH: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.