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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 U.S. President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy. The Commission's findings have since proven extremely controversial, and have been both challenged and reaffirmed.

The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren.

Overview

After Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy, was shot dead by Jack Ruby two days after his arrest on November 22, 1963, President Johnson consulted with various government officials. His consultations, many by telephone, resulted in the decision to form an official enquiry investigation into the assassination. Further pressure was brought to bear on President Johnson on November 26, 1963, when The Washington Post published an editorial advocating the formation of an investigative commission.

President Johnson, by

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on November 29, 1963, created an investigatory commission to be headed by Earl Warren. He also appointed the following political figures as members of the commission:

• Congressman Hale Boggs (D-LA)
• Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY)
• Former CIA Director Allen Dulles
• Congressman Gerald Ford (R-MI), a future Vice President and U.S. President
• Former World Bank president and diplomat John J. McCloy
• Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA)

J. Lee Rankin served as the commission's general counsel. Future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, Iowa attorney David Belin, and New York University Law Professor Norman Redlich worked as assistant counsel for the commission.

The Commission first met in February 1964 and returned its final report in September.

The Commission took the sworn testimony of 489 witnesses, with 94 testifying before members of the Commission itself and 395 questioned in depositions by members of the Commission's staff. Additionally, 61 witnesses gave sworn affidavits, and two others made statements; in all, 552 witnesses. Over 3,100 pieces of evidence were accepted as exhibits.^[1]

Gerald Ford, who went on to become both Vice President of the U.S. and President of the U.S., was the last living member of the Warren Commission at the time of his death on December 26, 2006.

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."^[2]

Findings

The Commission issued a published Report on September 27, 1964, formally titled Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but commonly referred to simply as "the Warren Report." The Report was 888 pages in length and contained 296,000 words.^[3] The Commission had concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination of Kennedy and that the commission could not find any persuasive evidence of a conspiracy, either domestic or foreign. The conclusion, that Oswald had acted alone, is today called the lone gunman theory.

Conclusions on events in Dealey Plaza

The commission concluded that only three bullets were fired during the assassination and that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all of them from the Texas School Book Depository behind the motorcade. It noted that three empty shells were found in the sixth floor sniper's nest in the book depository, and the rifle was found (with one live cartridge left in its chamber) on the sixth floor.

The commission's determination was that:

• it was likely that all injuries inside the limousine were caused by only two bullets, and thus one shot likely missed the motorcade, but it could not determine which of the three. (The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed that two shots caused all the injuries.)
• the first shot to hit anyone struck President Kennedy in the upper back, exited at his throat, and likely continued on to cause all of Governor John Connally's injuries.
• the second shot to hit anyone fatally struck Kennedy in the head 4.8 to 5.6 seconds later.

The commission concluded that the first bullet that struck Kennedy entered Connally's back, exited his chest, went through his right wrist, lodged in his left thigh, and later fell out onto his stretcher at the hospital.^[4] The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations Report agreed with this theory but differed on the time frame.

The Commission suppositioned that if the second shot missed, then 4.8 to 5.6 seconds was the total time span of the shots. If either the first or third shots missed, then a minimum of 2.3 seconds (necessary to operate the rifle)^[5] must be added to the time span of the shots which hit, giving a minimum time of 7.1 to 7.9 seconds for the three shots. If more than 2.3 seconds elapsed between a shot that missed and one that hit, then the time span would be correspondingly increased. ^[6]

Secret Service rebuked

The Warren Commission Report in chapter 8 details flaws in the United States Secret Service security at the time of the assassination. Procedures in place and not in place combined with events of the day presented security lapses that enabled the assassination. These included:

• Failing to identify 'authorized personnel' to Dallas police (those standing on bridges or overpasses)^[7]
• Failing to search all buildings, windows, and roof tops surrounding the path of a motorcade^[8] and instituting a policy based upon those results
• Improperly checking the backgrounds of those in potentially close contact with Kennedy and those who were potential threats to Kennedy, particularly Oswald, whose FBI file should have alerted the Secret Service of the possible risk^[9]
• Assuming that security measures taken in a 1936 Franklin Delano Roosevelt visit to Dallas could be used to model Kennedy's visit
• Providing insufficient personnel to accomplish the task of planning and executing security within the motorcade
• Failing to provide a car with a bulletproof top for the President. This vehicle was proposed in October 1963, but no such car had been available to the White House since 1953, because removal and replacement of the top would have been overly inconvenient.
• When on the phone with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a week after the assassination, Johnson asked if Hoover had a bulletproof vehicle. Hoover replied, "Yes, I do." Johnson asked if he should have one, and he was told, "Yes."^[10]

Aftermath

Secret Service

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

Commission records

In November 1964, 2 months after the publication of its 888-page report, the Commission published 26 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,^[11] a period "intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case.”^[12] 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.^[13] 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 only minor redactions.^[14] 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.^[15]

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.^[16]

Criticisms

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—in particular its lack of comment on the destruction of crucial evidence by law enforcement authorities and intelligence agencies. Comments were apparently made on this behind closed doors, but these did not reach the published report. Several individual pieces of the commission's findings also have been called into question since its completion.

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). Another criticism had to do with their star witness, Howard Brennan. Brennan testified that he saw Oswald on the 6th floor and identified him as the shooter, but the consistency of his testimonies and his credibility have both been questioned (McKnight).

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 found to be unreliable. ^[17] 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.^[18]

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

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
• 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
• historic audio-video of the assassination

John F. Kennedy assassination
Timeline | Autopsy | Reaction | Funeral | Lee Harvey Oswald | Warren Commission | HSCA | Dictabelt evidence | Conspiracy theories | Zapruder film | Single bullet theory | In popular culture

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