page_title: Hale Boggs
section_title: Later House elections
hierarchical_section_title: Hale Boggs / Career / Later House elections
caption_attribution_description: Members of the Warren Commission present their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to President Lyndon Johnson. Cabinet Room, White House, Washington DC. L-R: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Congressman Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman Hale Boggs
context_page_description: Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. was an American Democratic politician and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the House majority leader and a member of the Warren Commission.
  In 1972, while he was still majority leader, Boggs was on a fundraising drive in Alaska when the twin engine airplane in which he was travelling with Alaska congressman Nick Begich and two others, disappeared while flying from Anchorage to Juneau, Alaska.
context_section_description: In 1960, the Republican Elliot Ross Buckley, a cousin of William F. Buckley Jr., challenged Boggs but got only 22,818 votes (22 percent) to the incumbent's 81,034 ballots (78 percent). The Kennedy-Johnson ticket easily won in Louisiana that year.
  In 1962, 1964, and 1968, David C. Treen, a Metairie lawyer who became the first Louisiana Republican governor in 1980, challenged Boggs for reelection. Treen built on Buckley's efforts in the first contest, and Goldwater's momentum in Louisiana helped in the second race. It was in the 1968 election, however, that Treen fared the best: 77,633 votes (48.8 percent) to Boggs's 81,537 ballots (51.2 percent). Treen attributed Boggs's victory to the supporters of former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace Jr., who ran for president on the American Independent Party ticket. Treen said that Wallace supporters "became very cool to my candidacy. We couldn't really believe they would support Boggs, but several Democratic organizations did come out for Wallace and Boggs, and he received just enough Wallace votes to give him the election.""Republican officials seemed convinced that fraudulent votes in some Orleans Parish precincts benefited Boggs and that Treen may have actually won the election.
  During his tenure in Congress, Boggs was an influential player in the government. After Brown v. Board of Education, he signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto condemning desegregation. Boggs voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, but voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He was instrumental in passage of the interstate highway program in 1956.
  Boggs was the youngest member of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy from 1963 to 1964. Boggs has been reported to have differing positions regarding the Warren report. Based upon Office of the House Historian and Clerk of the House Office of Art and Archives, Politico reports that "Boggs dissented from the commission's majority report which supported the single bullet thesis — pointing to a lone assassin. Boggs said he "had strong doubts about it." But in a 1966 appearance on Face the Nation, Boggs defended the Commission's findings and stated that he did not doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. He said that all the evidence indicated that Kennedy was shot from behind and that the argument that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally was "very persuasive." Boggs took issue with the assertions of Warren Commission critics and stated that it was "human nature" that "many people would prefer to believe there was a conspiracy." It is unknown why his position was stated in such opposite terms but conspiracy theorists have pondered that difference as significant.
  In the 1979 novel "The Matarese Circle" author Robert Ludlum portrayed Boggs as having been killed to stop his probe into the assassination."
  He served as majority whip from 1962 to 1971 and as majority leader from January 1971 to his disappearance. As the whip, he ushered much of President Johnson's Great Society legislation through Congress.
  On August 22, 1968, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk was testifying in a hearing concerning the Vietnam War, Boggs interrupted the session to announce the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Soviet Union, after hearing of a recent Radio Prague broadcast telling the Czechoslovaks not to take any action against the occupying forces. That caused Secretary Rusk, who was previously unaware of the situation, to excuse himself immediately, mid-testimony, to attend to the issue of the invasion. (Source: Walter Cronkite: The Way It Was: The 1960s)
  In April 1971, he made a speech on the floor of the House in which he strongly attacked Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover and the whole of the FBI.
  That led to a conversation on April 6, 1971 between President Richard M. Nixon and the Republican minority leader, Gerald R. Ford, Jr.. Nixon said that he could no longer take counsel from Boggs as a senior member of Congre
caption: Hale Boggs on 24 September 1964 at the White House as a member of the Warren Commission presenting their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to President Lyndon Johnson
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