Warren Commission

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On 29 November 1963, one week after the murder of John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order No. 11130, creating the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The executive order instructed the seven-man panel to "evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding [the] assassination, including the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination," Lee Harvey Oswald. Johnson directed all federal agencies to cooperate with the special panel, which soon became known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The panel represented a careful political balancing act by Johnson. Warren was a towering figure among liberals because of the Supreme Court decisions reached under his stewardship. To offset him, Johnson picked Georgia Democratic senator Richard B. Russell, whose reputation (among conservatives) was the equal of Warren's. Other members from Congress were Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican; Representative Hale Boggs, a Democrat from Louisiana; and then-Representative Gerald R. Ford, a Michigan Republican. Because of the international repercussions and intelligence issues involved, Johnson also appointed two lawyers with broad government experience: Allen W. Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John J. McCloy, a former assistant secretary in the War Department.

Over the next ten months, the commission reviewed and expanded upon FBI, Secret Service, and CIA investigations; weighed the testimony of 552 witnesses; visited the site of the assassination; and oversaw the writing of the 888-page final report, which was presented to President Johnson on 24 September 1964 and made public three days later. Subsequently, twenty-six additional volumes of testimony and exhibits were printed, making the full Warren Report one of the most voluminous documents about a single episode ever published by the U.S. government.

The commission unanimously concluded that Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby was a self-appointed vigilante when he killed Oswald two days later. Contrary to popular belief, the commission did not conclude definitively that there was no conspiracy. Rather, the panel stated that despite its best efforts, it had been unable to find any evidence of a conspiracy. This finding reflected the commission's recognition that pertinent records in communist bloc countries were beyond its reach.

President Johnson formed the commission to provide a forum for fact-finding (in the absence of a purgative trial) and to prevent competing, televised investigations in Congress. Initially, these goals were achieved. Congress declined to investigate, and upon publication, the Warren Report persuaded most Americans that the truth was known, insofar as it was knowable. Over time, confidence in the commission's probity and the report's validity eroded. The commission, operating as it did in the midst of the Cold War, had to keep some facts secret, and some information was kept from it. None of the revelations that trickled out in the years following the assassination, however, altered the accuracy of the commission's findings. But critics, only some of whom were well-meaning, repeatedly exploited the contradiction between the need for answers and the need for secrecy to suggest that the commission was either incompetent or intentionally avoided the truth. The Warren Commission's reputation also suffered collaterally from later cynicism engendered by the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal.

Bibliography

Holland, Max. "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination." Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (June 1994): 191–209.

Manchester, William. The Death of a President: November 20–November 25 1963. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964.

With Lee Harvey Oswald's death and many questions about President Kennedy's assassination left unanswered, President Lyndon B. Johnson, on November 29, 1963, appointed a commission to investigate the assassination under the leadership of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. Although it was formally called the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, colloquially it has been referred to as the Warren Commission. After ten months of investigation, the Warren Commission concluded, "The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald." However, vast disagreement about the number of shots fired, the direction from which they came, and other details existed between Governor Connally and key eyewitnesses. Many refused to believe that Oswald was the only assassin. In 1977, the U.S. House of Representatives reopened the investigation, and in 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassins ruled that Kennedy was "probably" killed as the result of a conspiracy, but was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."

Although in 1994 Congress appointed a federal Assassination Review Board to gather records about Kennedy's assassination and make them public, no single assassination theory predominates. Over the years, both the FBI and CIA have been implicated, as well as the Dallas Police Department and organized crime groups. The assassination occurred after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to topple the communist Cuban government of Fidel Castro and America's increased military presence in South Vietnam. As a result, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, pro-Castro Cubans, and Vietnamese groups all became suspect over the years.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, was a shocking event that immediately raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the death of the president. Those questions increased when the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered while in the custody of Dallas police on November 25 by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

President Lyndon B. Johnson moved quickly to reassure the nation that a thorough inquiry would take place by creating a commission of distinguished public servants to investigate the evidence. On November 29, 1963, Johnson appointed Earl Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to head the commission, which became known as the Warren Commission. Its 1964 report, which sought to put to rest many issues, proved controversial, provoking charges of a whitewash. The facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination remain the subject of debate.

Chief Justice Warren, fearing that his service disrupted the traditional separation of powers, reluctantly agreed to serve as director of the commission. The other members of the commission were Senators Richard B. Russell of Georgia and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky; two members of the House of Representatives, Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Gerald R. Ford of Michigan; Allen W. Dulles, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency; John J. McCloy, former head of the World Bank; and James Lee Rankin, former U.S. solicitor general, who was appointed general counsel for the commission.

The Warren Commission began its investigations on December 3, 1963. The commission used accounts and statements provided by the Dallas police force, the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the military, and government and congressional commissions. Over the course of ten months, the commission took testimony from 552 witnesses.

The commission published its conclusions, popularly known as the Warren Report, in September 1964. According to the commission, Oswald acted alone in the assassination. The commission characterized Oswald as a resentful, belligerent man who hated authority. The commission endorsed the "single bullet theory," which concluded that only one bullet, rather than two, struck President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally, who was sitting directly in front of the president in the open convertible. This was important because it appeared unlikely that Oswald could have fired his rifle twice in succession quickly enough to strike the two men. It found no connection between Oswald's Communist affiliation, his time living in the Soviet Union, and the murder, nor between Oswald and his murderer, Jack Ruby. The commission also found no evidence that Ruby was part of a conspiracy. It criticized the security measures taken to protect Kennedy and recommended that more effective measures be taken in the future.

Although the conclusions of the commission were well received at first, public skepticism soon grew about the findings. In 1966 two influential books were published that challenged the methods and conclusions of the commission. Both Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein and Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane declared that the commission had not investigated deeply enough to produce conclusive results. In that same year, Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney, stunned the public with his revelations of a conspiracy and his accusations against prominent businessman Clay Shaw. Shaw was tried on conspiracy charges but was acquitted in 1969.

Since the release of the Warren Commission report, thousands of articles and books have been published promoting various theories surrounding the assassination. A 1979 special committee of the House of Representatives reexamined the evidence and concluded that Kennedy "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

Allegations that federal agencies withheld assassination evidence led Congress to enact the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (44 U.S.C.A. § 2107). The act created the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency that oversees the identification and release of records related to the assassination of President Kennedy. The act granted the review board the mandate and the authority to identify, secure, and make available, through the National Archives and Records Administration, records related to Kennedy's assassination. Creation of the review board has allowed the release of thousands of previously secret government documents and files.

Final report cover

The President's commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established on November 29, 1963, by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22. Its 888-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally. The Commission's findings have since proven controversial and been both challenged and supported by later studies.

The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. According to published transcripts of Johnson's presidential phone conversations, some major officials were opposed to forming such a commission, and several commission members took part only with extreme reluctance. One of their chief reservations was that a commission would ultimately create more controversy than consensus, and those fears proved valid.

Contents 1 Members 2 Method 3 Aftermath 3.1 Secret Service 3.2 Commission records 3.3 Criticisms 3.3.1 Witness testimony 3.4 Other investigations 4 Notes 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

Members

• Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States
• Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA), U.S. Senator
• John Sherman Cooper (R-KY), U.S. Senator
• Hale Boggs (D-LA), U.S. Representative
• Gerald Ford (R-MI), U.S. Representative
• Allen Welsh Dulles, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
• John J. McCloy, former President of the World Bank

Among the advisors was attorney Arlen Specter, now a Senator.

Method

The Commission conducted its business primarily in closed sessions, but these were not secret sessions.

"Two misconceptions about the Warren Commission hearing need to be clarified...hearings were closed to the public unless the witness appearing before the Commission requested an open hearing. No witness except one...requested an open hearing...Second, although the hearings (except one) were conducted in private, they were not secret. In a secret hearing, the witness is instructed not to disclose his testimony to any third party, and the hearing testimony is not published for public consumption. The witnesses who appeared before the Commission were free to repeat what they said to anyone they pleased, and all of their testimony was subsequently published in the first fifteen volumes put out by the Warren Commission."^[1]

Aftermath

Secret Service

The specific findings prompted the Secret Service to make numerous modifications to their security procedures.

Commission records

In November 1964, two months after the publication of its 888-page report, the Commission published twenty-six volumes of supporting documents, including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses and more than 3,100 exhibits. All of the Commission's records were then transferred to the National Archives. The unpublished portion of those records was initially sealed for 75 years (to 2039) under a general National Archives policy that applied to all federal investigations by the executive branch of government,^[2] a period "intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case.”^[3] The 75-year rule no longer exists, supplanted by the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the JFK Records Act of 1992. By 1992, 98 percent of the Warren Commission records had been released to the public.^[4] Six years later, at the conclusion of the Assassination Records Review Board's work, all Warren Commission records, except those records that contained tax return information, were available to the public with redactions.^[5] The remaining Kennedy assassination related documents are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act.^[6]

In 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board was created by the JFK Records Act to collect and preserve the documents relating to the assassination. It pointed out in its final report:

Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings.^[7]

Criticisms

Specter reproducing the assumed alignment of the single bullet theory

In the years following the release of its report and 26 investigatory evidence volumes in 1964, the Warren Commission has been frequently criticized for some of its methods, important omissions, and conclusions.

Witness testimony

There were many criticisms about the witnesses and their testimonies. One is that many testimonies were heard by less than half of the commission and that only one of 94 testimonies was heard by everyone on the commission (Hurt).

Other investigations

Three other U.S. government investigations have agreed with the Warren Commission's conclusion that two shots struck JFK from the rear: the 1968 panel set by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which reexamined the evidence with the help of the largest forensics panel. The HSCA involved Congressional hearings and ultimately concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, probably as the result of a conspiracy. Their conclusion was based, in part, on acoustic evidence which was later called into question. ^[8] The HSCA concluded that Oswald fired shots number one, two, and four, and that an unknown assassin fired shot number three (but missed) from near the corner of a picket fence that was above and to President Kennedy's right front on the Dealey Plaza grassy knoll. However, this conclusion has also been criticized, especially for its reliance upon questionable acoustic evidence. The HSCA Final Report in 1979 did agree with the Warren Report's conclusion in 1964 that two bullets caused all of President Kennedy's and Governor Connally's injuries, and that both bullets were fired by Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.^[9]

As part of its investigation, the HSCA also evaluated the performance of the Warren Commission, which included interviews and public testimony from the two surviving Commission members (Ford and McCloy) and various Commission legal counsel staff. The Committee concluded in their final report that the Commission was reasonably thorough and acted in good faith, but failed to adequately address the possibility of conspiracy.

Notes

1. ^ Bugliosi, Vincent, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY, 2007. ISBN 978-0-393-04525-3 p. 332
2. ^ Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, endnotes, p. 136-137.
3. ^ National Archives Deputy Archivist Dr. Robert Bahmer, interview in New York Herald Tribune, December 18, 1964, p.24
4. ^ Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board (1998), p.2.
5. ^ ARRB Final Report, p. 2. Redacted text includes the names of living intelligence sources, intelligence gathering methods still used today and not commonly known, and purely private matters. The Kennedy autopsy photographs and X-rays were never part of the Warren Commission records, and were deeded separately to the National Archives by the Kennedy family in 1966 under restricted conditions.
6. ^ "[U]nless the president certifies that continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, and the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” — JFK Records Act. Both the National Archives and the former chairman of the ARRB estimate that 7.6 percent of all identified Kennedy assassination records have been released kent to the public. The great majority of the unreleased records are from subsequent investigations, including the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
7. ^ FAS.org
8. ^ JFK Assassination site
9. ^ HSCA Final Report, pp. 41-46.

References

• Hurt, Henry. Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985.

• Inquest—The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, Edward Jay Epstein, 1966, Viking Press. This book was originally a master's thesis. It discusses the formation of the Warren Commission, its members and their responsibilities.

• McKnight, Gerald D. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why. Kansas: University Press, 2005. McKnight's thesis is that President Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department, the Secret Service, the U.S. Navy, the CIA, and the Warren Commission were all, from the very beginning, determined to cover up the assassination.

• Kelin, John (2007). Praise from a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report. San Antonio, Texas: Wings Press. ISBN 978-0916727321. 

See also

• Lone gunman theory
• Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories
• Single bullet theory
• Presidential Commission

External links

• Warren Commission Report (Full Text)
• Warren Commission Hearings (Full Text)
• Assassination Records Review Board link
• House Select Committee on Assassinations link
• Rockefeller Commission link
• Church Committee link
• Historical TV Footage from Dallas TV Station KDFW Exclusive television coverage -- most from the KRLD -TV/KDFW Collection at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
• historic audio-video of the assassination

v • d • e Assassination of John F. Kennedy Assassination Timeline • Lee Harvey Oswald • J. D. Tippit • John Connally • James Tague • Zapruder film Aftermath Autopsy • Reaction • Funeral • Jack Ruby • Warren Commission • HSCA • Dictabelt evidence • Conspiracy theories • Single bullet theory • In popular culture

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