Hale Boggs

Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. (born February 15, 1914; presumed to have died on October 16, 1972 but not declared dead until January 3, 1973) 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.

In 1972, while he was still Majority Leader, the twin engine airplane in which Boggs was traveling disappeared over a remote section of Alaska. The airplane presumably crashed and was never found. Congressman Nick Begich was also presumed killed in the same accident.

Early start in politics
Born in Long Beach in Harrison County on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Boggs was educated at Tulane University where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1934 and a law degree in 1937. He first practiced law in New Orleans but soon became a leader in the movement to break the power of the political machine of U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr., who was assassinated in 1935. Long had previously broken the power of New Orleans politicians in 1929.

A Democrat, Boggs was elected to the U.S. House for the Second District and served from 1941 to 1943. At the time he was elected he was, at twenty-six, the youngest member of Congress. After an unsuccessful re-election bid in 1942, Boggs joined the United States Navy as an ensign. He served the remainder of World War II.

Gubernatorial bid
After the war, Boggs began his political comeback. He was again elected to Congress in 1946 and was then re-elected thirteen times, once just after he disappeared, but before he was presumed dead. In 1951, Boggs launched an ill-fated campaign for governor of Louisiana. Leading in the polls early in the campaign, he was soon put on the defensive when another candidate, Lucille May Grace—at the urging of long-time Louisiana political boss Leander Perez—questioned Boggs' membership in the American Student Union in the 1930s. By 1951, the ASU was thought to be a Communist-front group. Boggs avoided the question and attacked both Grace and Perez for conducting a smear campaign against him. In his book, The Big Lie, author Garry Boulard suggests strongly that Boggs was a member of the ASU, but tried to cover up that fact in the different political climate of the early 1950s. Boggs ultimately placed third in the balloting for governor in early 1952. And the Boggs candidate for lieutenant governor, C.E. "Cap" Barham of Ruston, prevailed in a runoff against future Governor John J. McKeithen. And the Boggs choice for register of state lands, Ellen Bryan Moore, won the office vacated by Lucille May Grace. Moore defeated Mary Evelyn Dickerson, future state treasurer in the second McKeithen administration.

Boggs won the gubernatorial endorsement of the Shreveport Times, which hailed the representative for having stopped the Truman administration from "altering oil-depletion allowances in federal taxation, thus blocking . . . efforts to tie a millstone around the neck of the petroleum industry of Louisiana." The Times, in a dig at Miss Grace, also cited Boggs' fight in Congress as early as 1941 against communism and subversion in government.

U.S. Senator Russell B. Long also endorsed Boggs though many in the Long faction had preferred Judge Carlos Spaht of Baton Rouge, who ultimately lost the runoff election to another judge, Robert F. Kennon of Minden.

Later congressional elections
In 1960, the Republican Elliot Ross Buckley, a cousin of William F. Buckley Jr., challenged Boggs but drew 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. There were rumors of election officials who cast votes for people who did not show up at the polls and signed for them in the precinct registers.



During his tenure in Congress, Boggs was an influential player in the government. After Brown v. Board of Education he signed the Southern Manifesto condemning desegregation in the 1950s and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet unlike most southern congressmen of his era, he supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Open Housing Act of 1968. He was instrumental in passage of the interstate highway program in 1956 and was a member of the Warren Commission in 1963–64.

He served as Majority Whip from 1962 to 1971 and as majority leader from January 1971 until his disappearance. As the whip, he ushered much of President Johnson's Great Society legislation through Congress.

In 1968, while 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 a broadcast telling the Czech and Slovak people not to take any action. This caused Rusk, who was unaware of the situation, while immediately into seeking more about the cause 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 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the whole of the FBI. This led to a conversation on April 6, 1971, between then-President Richard M. Nixon and the Republican minority leader, Gerald R. Ford, Jr., in which Nixon said that he could no longer take counsel from Boggs as a senior member of Congress. In the recording of this call, Nixon is heard to ask Ford to arrange for the House delegation to include an alternative to Boggs. Ford speculates that Boggs is on pills as well as alcohol.

Disappearance and search
As Majority Leader, Boggs often campaigned for others. On October 16, 1972, he was aboard a twin engine Cessna 310 with Representative Nick Begich of Alaska, who was facing a possible tight race in the November 1972 general election against the Republican candidate, Don Young, when it disappeared during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. The only others on board were Begich’s aide Russell Brown and the pilot, Don Jonz; the four were heading to a campaign fundraiser for Begich. (Begich won the 1972 election posthumously with 56 percent to Young's 44 percent, though Young would win the special election to replace Begich and won every election through and including 2010.)

Coast Guard, Navy, and Air Force planes searched for the party. On November 24, 1972, after thirty-nine days, the search was abandoned. Neither the wreckage of the plane nor the pilot's and passengers' remains were ever found. The accident prompted Congress to pass a law mandating Emergency Locator Transmitters in all U.S. civil aircraft.

Both Boggs and Begich were re-elected that November. House Resolution 1 of January 3, 1973, officially recognized Boggs's presumed death and opened the way for a special election.

Speculation, suspicions, and theories
The events surrounding Boggs's death have been the subject of much speculation, suspicion, and numerous conspiracy theories. These theories often center on his membership on the Warren Commission. Boggs dissented from the Warren Commission's majority who supported the single bullet theory. Regarding the single-bullet theory, Boggs commented, "I had strong doubts about it." In the 1979 novel The Matarese Circle, author Robert Ludlum portrayed Boggs as having been killed to stop his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Family
In 1973, Boggs’s wife since 1938, Lindy Boggs, was elected as a Democrat to the 93rd Congress, by special election, to the second district seat left vacant by his death. She was reelected to the eight succeeding Congresses (March 20, 1973–January 3, 1991) where she served until 1991. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Lindy Boggs U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. She served until 2001.

Hale and Lindy Boggs had three children: U.S. TV and public radio journalist Cokie Roberts, born December 27, 1943, and the wife of journalist Steven V. Roberts; Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., a prominent Washington, D.C.,-based attorney and lobbyist; and the late Barbara Boggs Sigmund, who served as mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. In 1982 Mrs. Sigmund lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Frank Lautenberg.

Tributes
The Hale Boggs Memorial Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish, is named in memory of the former congressman. The visitor center at Portage Glacier in Southcentral Alaska (located within Chugach National Forest) is named the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center. The Hale Boggs Federal Building, at 500 Poydras Street in New Orleans, is also named after him.

In 1993, Boggs was among thirteen politicians, past and present, inducted into the first class of the new Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.