On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, George H.W. Bush, an “oilman” running for the US senate from Texas, called the FBI office in his hometown of Houston. He wanted it known that he was in a smaller city and therefore not Dallas, where the president had just been killed, but that he had a tip on a possible suspect. The man he fingered turned out not only to have nothing to do with the assassination, but actually to be much better known to Bush than he let on. A study of this episode concludes that the call was a distraction to hide the fact that Bush had actually just been in Dallas—and that he was connected to a web of figures in the intelligence world, including a longtime friend who had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s mentor.