Don Edwards

Don Edwards was born in San Jose, California, on 6th January, 1915. After being educated at Stanford University Edwards was admitted to the bar in 1940. He worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a year before becoming a lawyer.

Edwards joined the United States Navy as a gunnery officer in 1942. He also worked in naval intelligence during the Second World War.

In 1951 Edwards became president of the Valley Title Company. A member of the Democratic Party, Edwards was elected to the 88th Congress in November, 1962. Edwards was one of those politicians who questioned the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report.

As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights he interviewed key figures in the FBI involved in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He discovered that Gordon Shanklin had ordered FBI agent, James Hosty, to destroy the letter written by Lee Harvey Oswald. He also found out that the FBI had been in contact with Jack Ruby at least seven times between a visit to Cuba in 1959 and the events in Dallas in 1963.

In 1975 Richard Case Nagell contacted Don Edwards to tell him about "a registered letter that I dispatched to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in September 1963, informing him of a conspiracy involving Oswald and two Cuban refugees to assassinate President Kennedy".

Edwards told a group of Congressmen in 1976 that: "There's not much question that both the FBI and CIA are somewhere behind this cover-up. I hate to think what it is they are covering-up - or who they are covering for."

Don Edwards retired from Congress in 1995. He died on 1st October, 2015.