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Hoover opposed the establishment of the Warren Commission, presumably because he thought the FBI should handle the case. At one point he dispatched aides to the Washington Post to try to stop that paper from publishing an editorial supporting such a blue-ribbon panel. The mission was unsuccessful. He thought many requests made by the commission were foolish (one he labeled "poppycock"). But he dispatched agents to fulfill them. Hoover's personality, including his most odious and eccentric characteristics, comes through vividly in the files. He told aides that President Johnson wanted all leads pursued vigorously "without complete regard for technicalities." and he had a fetish about not letting any bureau reports go to the commission marred by spelling or grammatical errors.
The bureau's investigation shed light on a number of the murkier aspects of the crime. After exploring the mountains of transcripts, memoranda and telex messages, TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey sent this summary of the 40,001 pages of FBI documents:
On the Mafia. The files make clear that the Warren Commission failed abysmally to pursue FBI leads linking Oswald's own assassin, Jack Ruby, to the Mob. Ruby had ties to mobsters in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, and even, as a boy, to the infamous Al Capone. Nor did the commission seem impressed that Ruby, twelve days before he shot Oswald, asked a notorious Teamster racketeer from Chicago, Barney Baker, to "straighten out" a troublesome union dispute at Ruby's Dallas night club. (The commision might have been more interested, of course, had the FBI disclosed that the CIA had recruited Chicago gangsters to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro.) There is no evidence that organized crime had anything to do with the Kennedy murder, but the commission's failure to investigate the possibility left a fertile field in which conspiracy theories have flourished.
On the Cuban Connection. When CIA attempts to kill Castro became known in 1975, the news touched off speculation that Cubans had engineered Kennedy's murder in retaliation. The files reveal that this possibility had occurred to Hoover and caused him to anguish in private over his public declarations that Oswald had acted alone. But the Director seemed reassured when two letters linking Oswald to a Cuban agent turned out to have been hoaxes. Both letters — one addressed to Oswald but mailed after the assassination, the other sent to the Attorney General — indicated that a Pedro or Peter Charles of Havana had paid Oswald $7,000 to carry out an unidentified mission that involved "accurate shooting." The FBI discovered that both letters had been written on the same typewriter. Nonetheless, Hoover and other Bureau officials continued to worry about Ruby's own Cuban back ground. Ruby had visited Havana in both the pre-and post-Castro periods, and there were persistent rumors that he had run guns to Cuba in the late 1950s. An Akron woman gave testimony — later discounted — that after Oswald was slain she heard two Cuban men say: "We have to do away with Ruby because he fouled things up." However, the FBI never turned up proof of any links between Castro's government and either Oswald or Ruby.