Warren Commission

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

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

Contents

[edit] Overview

After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death, President Johnson consulted with various government officials, many of them by telephone, regarding having some form of investigation into the assassination. On November 26, 1963, The Washington Post published an editorial advocating the formation of an investigative commission.

Throughout the week, Johnson, by executive order on November 29, 1963, created an investigatory commission to be headed by Warren. He also called on the following members and told them that they would be members of the commission:

Future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter worked as a staff attorney for the commission.

Their first executive meeting was held on December 5, 1963 (McKnight), and during its investigation, the commission heard testimony from 552 witnesses and the reports of ten federal agencies, including the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of State, the CIA, and military intelligence. The hearings were closed to the public unless the person giving testimony requested otherwise; only two witnesses made that request. Some of the witnesses gave sworn affidavits; two witnesses gave just written statements. On September 27, 1964, after a ten month investigation, the Warren Commission Report was published. The report itself was almost 900 pages long (Hurt) and included 26 volumes (almost 17,000 pages) of witness testimony and ballistic evidence (McKnight).

[edit] Findings

The report 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—involving any other person(s), group(s), or country(ies). The theory that Oswald acted alone is informally called the lone gunman theory.

[edit] Events in Dealey Plaza

The commission concluded that only three bullets were fired during the assassination and that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all three bullets 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, balanced unsupported on its buttstock.

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 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. [1] Some ballistic evidence has suggested that such a bullet trajectory was possible, and there are some frames of the Zapruder film in which the position and reaction of the two men could be consistent with this scenario. [citation needed] 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) 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. [2]

[edit] 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 [3])
  • Failing to search all buildings, windows, and roof tops surrounding the path of a motorcade [4] 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 [5]
  • 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." [6]

[edit] Aftermath

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

Upon its release in 1964, all files of the Warren Commission were sealed from public view for 75 years (until 2039) by executive order of President Johnson. According to the Assassination Records Review Board, Kennedy assassination related documents that have not been destroyed are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017.

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.

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).

According to a 1997 New York Times article, the CIA conducted a covert propaganda campaign to squelch criticism of the Warren Report. The CIA urged its agents to use their "propaganda assets" to attack those who didn't agree with the Warren Report. In a dispatch from CIA headquarters, the Agency instructed its CIA agents around the world to:

  • 1---counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and proposing] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization";
  • 2---"discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors;" and
  • 3---"employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ... Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ... " The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..."

"Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report" New York Times, December 26, 1977,p.A3

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]

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 there Oswald assassinated Kennedy probably as the result of a conspiracy based on acoustic evidence which was later found to be unreliable. [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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] External links

John F. Kennedy assassination

Timeline | Autopsy | Reaction | Funeral | Lee Harvey Oswald | Warren Commission | HSCA | Dictabelt evidence | Conspiracy theories | Zapruder film | Single bullet theory
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