| The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy | |
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 Cover of final report | |
| History | |
|---|---|
| Established by | Lyndon B. Johnson on November 29, 1963 |
| Disbanded | 1964 |
| Related Executive Order number(s) | 11130 |
| Membership | |
| Chairperson | Earl Warren |
| Other committee members | Richard Russell Jr., John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs, Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy |
The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson through Executive Order 11130 on November 29, 1963,[1] to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy that had taken place on November 22, 1963.[2]
The U.S. Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 137 authorizing the Presidential appointed Commission to report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, mandating the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence.[3] Its 888-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964,[4] and made public three days later.[5]
It concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone.[6] It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.[7] The Commission's findings have proven controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies.
The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren.[8] 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 reluctantly. One of their chief reservations was that a commission would ultimately create more controversy than consensus.[9]
The creation of the Warren Commission was a direct consequence of the murder by Jack Ruby of the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, carried live on national television in the basement of the Dallas police station.
The lack of a public process addressing the mistakes of the Dallas Police, who concluded that the case was closed, created doubt in the mind of the public.[10]
The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, himself from Texas, the state where the two assassinations had taken place, found himself faced with the risk of a weakening of his presidency. Confronted with the results obtained by the Texas authorities, themselves seriously discredited and criticized, he decided after various consultations, including in particular that with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to create a presidential commission of inquiry by Executive Order 11130 of November 29, 1963. This act made it possible both to avoid an independent investigation led by Congress and to avoid entrusting the case to the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, deeply affected by the assassination, whose federal jurisdiction would have been applied in the event of withdrawal of the share of the State of Texas for the benefit of the federal authorities in Washington.[10]
Nicholas Katzenbach, Deputy Attorney General, provided advice that led to the creation of the Warren Commission.[11] On November 25 he sent a memo to Johnson's White House aide Bill Moyers recommending the formation of a Presidential Commission to investigate the assassination.[11][12] To combat speculation of a conspiracy, Katzenbach said that the results of the FBI's investigation should be made public.[11][12] He wrote: The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large."[12]
Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson appointed to the commission some of the nation's most prominent figures, including Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States.[11][12] At first, Warren refused to head of the commission because he stated the principle of law that a member of the judicial power could not be at the service of the executive power. It was only under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson, who spoke of international tensions and the risks of war resulting from the death of his predecessor, that he agreed to chair the commission.[10]
The other members of the commission were chosen from among the representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties, in both houses of Congress, and added diplomat John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank, and former CIA director Allen Dulles.[10]
The Warren Commission met formally for the first time on December 5, 1963, on the second floor of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C.[13] 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.[14]
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The report concluded that:
In response to Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Warren Commission declared that the news media must share responsibility with the Dallas police department for "the breakdown of law enforcement" that led to Oswald's death. In addition to the police department's "inadequacy of coordination," the Warren Commission noted that "these additional deficiencies [in security] were related directly to the decision to admit newsmen to the basement."[17]
The commission concluded that the pressure of press, radio, and television for information about Oswald's prison transfer resulted in lax security standards for admission to the basement, allowing Ruby to enter and subsequently shoot Oswald, noting that "the acceptance of inadequate press credentials posed a clear avenue for a one-man assault." Oswald's death was said to have been a direct result of "the failure of the police to remove Oswald secretly or control the crowd in the basement."[17]
The consequence of Oswald's death, according to the Commission, was that "it was no longer possible to arrive at the complete story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy through normal judicial procedures during the trial of the alleged assassin." While the Commission noted that the prime responsibility was that of the police department, it also recommended the adoption of a new "code of conduct" for news professionals regarding the collecting and presenting of information to the public that would ensure "there [would] be no interference with pending criminal investigations, court proceedings, or the right of individuals to a fair trial."[18]
The findings prompted the Secret Service to make numerous modifications to its security procedures.[19][20]
The Commission made other recommendations to the Congress to adopt new legislation that would make the murder of the President (or Vice-President) a federal crime, which was not the case in 1963.[21]
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[22] and more than 3,100 exhibits[23] making a total of more than 16,000 pages.
The Warren report, however, lacked an index, which greatly complicated the work of reading. It was later endowed with an index by the work of Sylvia Meagher for the report and the 26 volumes of documents.[24]
All of the commission's records were then transferred on November 23 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,[25] a period "intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case."[26]
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.[27] Six years later, after 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.[28]
The remaining Kennedy assassination-related documents were partly released to the public on October 26, 2017,[29] twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act. President Donald Trump, as directed by the FBI and the CIA,[30] took action on that date to withhold certain remaining files, delaying the release until April 26, 2018,[30] then on April 26, 2018, took action to further withhold the records "until 2021".[31][32][33]
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Main article: CIA Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory |
CIA Director McCone was "complicit" in a Central Intelligence Agency "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the Warren Commission, according to a report by the CIA Chief Historian David Robarge released to the public in 2014.[34] According to this report, CIA officers had been instructed to give only "passive, reactive, and selective" assistance to the commission, to keep the commission focused on "what the Agency believed at the time was the 'best truth' — that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy." The CIA may have also covered up evidence of being in communication with Oswald before 1963, according to the 2014 report findings.[34]
Also withheld were earlier CIA plots, involving CIA links with the Mafia, to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro, which might have been considered to provide a motive to assassinate Kennedy. The report concluded, "In the long term, the decision of John McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA's anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the Commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation."[34][35]
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.[36]
The results obtained by the commission as well as its methods were harshly criticized in the years following its publication.
If the major media (CBS, the New York Post, etc.) lined up behind the conclusions of the Warren report, in the name of the higher interest of the nation and in the need to unite after the tragedy, then the report and the media were both called into question by skeptics. Many independent investigators, journalists, historians, jurists, and academics issued opinions opposing the conclusions of the Warren commission based on the same elements collected by its works.[21][10] These skeptics and their works included Thomas Buchanan, Sylvan Fox, Harold Feldman, Richard E. Sprague, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact or Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas.
English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: "The Warren report will have to be judged, not by its soothing success, but by the value of its argument. I must admit that from the first reading of the report, it seemed impossible to me to join in this general cry of triumph. I had the impression that the text had serious flaws. Moreover, when probing the weak parts, they appeared even weaker than at first sight."[10]
In 1992, following popular political pressure in the wake of the film JFK, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created by the JFK Records Act to collect and preserve the documents relating to the assassination. In a footnote in its final report, the ARRB wrote: "Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert F. 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."[37]
In its conclusions, the opposition of the summary of the report and the documents constituting the 26 volumes of annexes leading to a falsification of the facts. For example, the Warren Commission argued that direct witnesses to the shooting, who immediately rushed en masse to the grassy knoll after the shots were fired, were fleeing the area of the shooting. In reality, the people present, including a dozen members of the security forces, in particular Sheriff Decker's team, who had given the order to investigate the area, all testified that they were running to the search for one or more shooters posted on the grassy Knoll.[10]
It also did not interview John Fitzgerald Kennedy's personal doctor, George Burkley, who was present during the shooting in the convoy of official vehicles then at Parkland Hospital, on board Air Force One, then at Bethesda Naval Hospital during the autopsy. He signed the death certificate and also took delivery of the brain of John Fitzgerald Kennedy which is declared lost in the National Archives. Concerning the conclusions of the Warren commission about the three shootings, the practitioner had declared in 1967: "I would not like to be quoted on this subject".[38]
The ballistic reports conducted by the FBI and the autopsy reports were not the subject of any counter-investigation, which made the commission directly dependent on the work of the latter. The Warren Commission, by decision of Earl Warren, refused to hire its own independent investigators. However, it had its own investigative capacity thanks to direct access to the emergency presidential budget funds granted by President Lyndon Johnson when it was created, to conduct its own investigations. Thus the Warren commission was not informed by the FBI of the discovery the day after the attack, on November 23, 1963, by a medical student, William Harper, of a piece of occiput located at the rear left in relation to at the position of the presidential limo during the fatal shot to the head. He had it examined by the professor and medical examiner, Doctor Cairns who measured it and photographed this piece before informing the FBI, on November 25, 1963. The latter received instructions not to make any publicity on this subject. It was the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, who, informed by a letter from Dr. Cairns transmitted to the Warren Commission, allowed the latter to question the practitioner.[10]
The non-use by the members of the Warren Commission of the direct elements of the autopsy such as notes, photos and x-rays. He only used drawings by FBI artists reproducing photographic images.[10]
The revelation by Edward Jay Epstein, in his book Inquest published in 1966,[39] that as early as the beginning of 1964, the chief adviser, J. Lee Rankin, had given the outcome of the results of the work of the commission: guilt of Oswald, the latter having acted alone. Even before the creation of the commission, on November 25, 1963, and a few hours after the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in the premises of the Dallas police, Nicolas Katzenbach, assistant attorney general, had indicated in a memorandum intended of Bill Moyers that: "The public must be convinced that Oswald was the killer; that he had no accomplices still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been found guilty at trial"[40] creating a political orientation of the results of the investigation, even before the start of the first official investigations and knowledge of the results. Its objective was to cut short the speculations of public opinion either on a plot of communist origin (thesis of the Dallas police) or a plot fomented by the far right to blame the communists (hypothesis defended by the press of communist bloc formed around the USSR).
As early as the 1970s, official members of the Warren Commission questioned its work, in particular Hale Boggs who criticized the influence of J. Edgar Hoover, the historic director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, who had centralized all of the information from the FBI agents before synthesizing it and transmitting it to the Warren Commission. He campaigned for a reopening of the file considering that the director of the FBI had lied to the Warren commission. He disappeared in an unsolved plane crash in October 1972.[10]
Commission member Richard Russell told the Washington Post in 1970 that Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy, criticizing the commission's no-conspiracy finding and saying "we weren't told the truth about Oswald". John Sherman Cooper also considered the ballistic findings to be "unconvincing". Russell also particularly rejected Arlen Specter's "single bullet" theory, and he asked Earl Warren to indicate his disagreement in a footnote, which the chairman of the commission refused.
Four other U.S. government or senate investigations have been conducted about the Warren Commission's conclusion or its material in different circumstances.
The Church Committee analyzed in 1976 the work of the CIA and FBI which had communicated the different elements to the Warren Commission Members.[41]
The three others concluded with the initial conclusions 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 and bringing new materials to the public.
In 1975, the Church Committee was created per US Senate after the revelations about illegal actions of federal agency as the FBI, CIA and IRS on the territory of the United States of America and after the political Watergate scandal. The Church Committee carried out investigative work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, questioning 50 witnesses and accessing 3,000 documents.
It focuses on the necessary actions and the support provided by the FBI and the CIA to the Warren Commission and raises the question of the possible connection between the plans to assassinate political leaders abroad, in particular in relation to Fidel Castro in Cuba, a huge point of international tension in the 1960s, and that of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The Church Committee questioned the process of obtaining the information, blaming federal agencies for failing in their duties and responsibilities and concluding that the investigation into the assassination had been flawed.[41]
The American Senator Richard Schweiker indicated on this subject, in a television interview on June 27, 1976: "The John F. Kennedy assassination investigation was snuffed out before it even began," and that "the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was to not use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence"[21].
The results of the Church Committee opened the way of the creation of the HSCA, with parallelly the March 6, 1975, first time diffusion on network television in the show Good Night America of the Zapruder film, which had been stored by Life magazine and never shown to the public during the preceding twenty years.
The HSCA involved Congressional hearings and ultimately concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, probably as the result of a conspiracy. 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 disputed 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.[42]
In his September 1978 testimony to the HSCA, President Ford defended the Warren Commission's investigation as thorough.[43] Ford stated that knowledge of the assassination plots against Castro may have affected the scope of the Commission's investigation but expressed doubt that it would have altered its finding that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy.[43]
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:[44] "...the Warren Commission was not, in some respects, an accurate presentation of all the evidence available to the Commission or a true reflection of the scope of the Commission's work, particularly on the issue of possible conspiracy in the assassination."[45]
The HSCA also pointed to the role of the mafia in the attack because of Cuba. Indeed, the Cuban Castro Revolution of 1959 had caused the criminal organization to lose millions of dollars, which had tried in vain to win the favors of the Cuban leader during the change of regime. In 1959, the income generated by criminal activities amounted to an annual amount of 100 million dollars, i.e. 900 million reported in 2013.[46]
The HSCA determined that the gradual change in policy of the Kennedy administration toward Cuba, first with the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, then more sustainably with the missile crisis of October 1962, in order to appease relations with the Cuban regime on a lasting basis and to open up new prospects, contributed to directing, if not slightly, within the many groups of paramilitary operations the most radical fringe of anti-Castro Cubans, American intelligence agents and Mafia criminals who continued their operations to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro despite requests for formal arrests from the White House.[47]
The HSCA invited the Department of Justice to resume investigations. The latter would respond eight years later, arguing the absence of decisive evidence allowing the reopening of an investigation, which is equivalent to supporting the conclusions of Warren report.[10]
The findings of the Warren Commission are generally highly criticized, and while the majority of American citizens believe that Oswald shot President Kennedy, the majority also believe that Oswald was part of a conspiracy and therefore do not believe the official thesis defended by the commission. In 1976, 81% of Americans disputed the findings of the Warren Report, 74% in 1983, 75% in 1993 and 2003.[10]
In 2009, a CBS poll indicated that 74% of respondents believed there had been an official cover-up by the authorities to keep the general public away from the truth.[46]
