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 JusticeEarl 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]
Formation
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]
Meetings
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]
The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository.
President Kennedy was first struck by a bullet which entered at the back of his neck and exited through the lower front portion of his neck, causing a wound which would not necessarily have been lethal. The President was struck by a second bullet, which entered the right-rear portion of his head, causing a massive and fatal wound.
Governor Connally was struck by a bullet which entered on the right side of his back and traveled downward through the right side of his chest, exiting below his right nipple. This bullet then passed through his right wrist and entered his left thigh then it caused a superficial wound.
There is no credible evidence that the shots were fired from the Triple Underpass, ahead of the motorcade, or from any other location.
The weight of the evidence indicates that there were three shots fired.
Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President's throat also caused Governor Connally's wounds. However, Governor Connally's testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President's and Governor Connally's wounds were fired from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald killed Dallas Police Patrolman J. D. Tippit approximately 45 minutes after the assassination.
Ruby entered the basement of the Dallas Police Department and killed Lee Harvey Oswald and there is no evidence to support the rumor that Ruby may have been assisted by any members of the Dallas Police Department.
The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.
The Commission has found no evidence of conspiracy, subversion, or disloyalty to the U.S. Government by any Federal, State, or local official.
The Commission could not make any definitive determination of Oswald's motives.
The Commission believes that recommendations for improvements in Presidential protection are compelled by the facts disclosed in this investigation.[16]
Death of Lee Harvey Oswald
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]
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[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 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]
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] 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]
Weak points of the report
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.
Other investigations
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.
The Church Committee
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 House Select Committee on Assassinations
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 Plazagrassy 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]
Legacy
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]
Jack Leon Ruby was an American nightclub owner who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. Marine veteran who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963.
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, when he was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally was also wounded in the attack but recovered. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was hastily sworn in as president two hours and eight minutes later aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field.
The single-bullet theory, also known as the magic-bullet theory, was introduced by the Warren Commission in its investigation of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to explain what happened to the bullet that struck Kennedy in the back and exited through his throat. Given the lack of damage to the presidential limousine consistent with it having been struck by a high-velocity bullet, and the fact that Texas Governor John Connally was wounded and was seated on a jumper seat 1+1⁄2 feet in front of and slightly to the left of the president, the Commission concluded they were likely struck by the same bullet.
J. D. Tippit was an American World War II U.S. Army veteran and police officer who served as an 11-year veteran with the Dallas Police Department. About 45 minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Tippit was shot and killed in a residential neighborhood in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was initially arrested for the murder of Tippit and was subsequently charged for killing President Kennedy. Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, two days later.
The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and 1968, respectively. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the following year, which concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In addition to now-discredited acoustic analysis of a police channel dictabelt recording, the HSCA also commissioned numerous other scientific studies of assassination-related evidence that corroborate the Warren Commission's findings.
This article outlines the timeline of events before, during, and after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.
A Dictabelt recording from a motorcycle police officer's radio microphone stuck in the open position became a key piece of evidence cited by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in their conclusion that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Made on a common Dictaphone-brand dictation machine that recorded sound in grooves pressed into a thin vinyl-plastic belt, the recording gained prominence among Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists following the HSCA's 1978 conclusion, based in part on this evidence, that there was a "high probability" that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy.
David William Ferrie was an American pilot who was alleged by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Garrison also alleged that Ferrie knew Lee Harvey Oswald. Ferrie denied any involvement in a conspiracy and said he never knew Oswald. Decades later, photos emerged establishing that Ferrie had been in the same Civil Air Patrol unit as Oswald in the 1950s, but critics have argued this does not prove that either Ferrie or Oswald was involved in an assassination plot.
Mark Lane was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator. Sometimes referred to as a gadfly, Lane is best known as a leading researcher, author, and conspiracy theorist on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. Lane authored 10 books on the JFK assassination, including Rush to Judgment,, the 1966 number-one bestselling critique of the Warren Commission and Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, published in 2011.
The John F. Kennedy assassination rifle is the long-barrelled firearm that was used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
The autopsy of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was performed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The autopsy began at about 8p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on November 22, 1963—the day of Kennedy's assassination—and ended in the early morning of November 23, 1963. The choice of autopsy hospital in the Washington, D.C. area was made by his widow, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who chose the Bethesda as President Kennedy had been a naval officer during World War II.
On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and others. On January 29, 1969, Shaw was brought to trial in Orleans Parish Criminal Court on these charges. On March 1, 1969, a jury took less than an hour to find Shaw not guilty. It remains the only trial to be brought for the assassination of President Kennedy.
David William Belin was an attorney for the Warren Commission and the Rockefeller Commission. Belin was a partner in a Des Moines, Iowa law firm and, with former NBC News president Michael Gartner, was co-owner of The Tribune in Ames, Iowa.
The John F. Kennedy assassination and the subsequent conspiracy theories surrounding it have been discussed, referenced, or recreated in popular culture numerous times.
The CIA Kennedy assassination is a prominent John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. According to ABC News, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is represented in nearly every theory that involves American conspirators. The secretive nature of the CIA, and the conjecture surrounding the high-profile political assassinations in the United States during the 1960s, has made the CIA a plausible suspect for some who believe in a conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists have ascribed various motives for CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, including Kennedy's firing of CIA director Allen Dulles, Kennedy's refusal to provide air support to the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy's plan to cut the agency's budget by 20 percent, and the belief that the president was weak on communism.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 has spawned numerous conspiracy theories. These theories allege the involvement of the CIA, the Mafia, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, the KGB, or some combination of these individuals and entities. Some conspiracy theories have alleged a coverup by parts of the federal government, such as the original FBI investigators, the Warren Commission, or the CIA. Former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi estimated that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people had been accused at one time or another in various conspiracy scenarios.
Silvia Odio del Torro is a Cuban-American who provided testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of three strangers who visited her Dallas, Texas apartment in September 1963 to solicit money for the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary group JURE.
John Moss Whitten (1920–2000) was an American Central Intelligence Agency officer, known under the pseudonym John Scelso. He was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 1970.
Howard Penney Willens is a lawyer and author who served as Assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission from December 1963 to September 1964. In that role, Willens worked with the lawyers and agents conducting the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, reviewed the lawyers’ memoranda for submission to members of the commission, and edited the material that became the Report of the commission. His book, History Will Prove Us Right: Inside the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, published in 2013, relied on previously undisclosed primary sources to document the methods and strategies underlying the "most massive, detailed and convincing piece of detective work ever undertaken."
↑ Mohr, Charles (September 25, 1964). "Johnson Gets Assassination Report". The New York Times. p.1.
↑ Roberts, Chalmers M. (September 28, 1964). "Warren Report Says Oswald Acted Alone; Raps FBI, Secret Service". The Washington Post. p.A1.
↑ Lewis, Anthony (September 28, 1964). "Warren Commission Finds Oswald Guilty and Says Assassin and Ruby Acted Alone". The New York Times. p.1.
↑ Pomfret, John D. (September 28, 1964). "Commission Says Ruby Acted Alone in Slaying". The New York Times. p.17.
↑ Morris, John D. (November 30, 1963). "Johnson Names a 7-Man Panel to Investigate Assassination; Chief Warren Heads It". The New York Times. p.1.
↑ Beschloss, Michael R. (1997). "Taking charge: the Johnson White House tapes, 1963-1964". New York: Simon & Schuster.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 LENTZ, Thierry (2010). L'assassinat de John F. Kennedy: Histoire d'un mystère d'Etat (Assassination of John F. Kennedy: history of State mystery) (in French). Paris: Edition Nouveaux Mondes. ISBN978-2847365085.
↑ DeLoach, C. D. (12 December 1963). "Miscellaneous Records of the Church Committee; Memorandum to Mr. Mohr; Subject: ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT"(PDF). National Archives and Records Administration. p.14. Retrieved 18 November 2021. On the occasion of their second meeting, Ford and Hale Boggs joined with Dulles. Hale Boggs told Warren flatly that [Warren] Olney would not be acceptable and that he (Boggs) would not work on the Commission with [former Assistant Attorney General] Olney. Warren put up a stiff argument but a compromise was made when the name of Lee Rankin was mentioned. Warren stated he knew Rankin and could work with him.,
↑ "Chapter 1". National Archives. September 24, 1964. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
↑ Fixx, James F. (1972). The Great Contemporary Issues: The Mass Media and Politics. New York, NY: Ayer Co. Publishing. pp.82–83. ISBN978-0405012914.
↑ Belair Jr., Felix (September 28, 1964). "(Warren Commission) Rebukes Secret Service, Asks Revamping". The New York Times. p.1.
↑ "Johnson Names 4 to Act on Report". The New York Times. Associated Press. September 28, 1964. p.1.
1 2 3 Marry Ferrel Foundation (4 March 2023). "Warren Commission". Mary Ferrel Foundation - preserving the legacy. Retrieved 4 March 2023.
↑ "Warren Commission Report: Appendix 5". National Archives. 2016-08-15. Retrieved 2023-11-25. …list of the 552 witnesses whose testimony has been presented to the Commission. Witnesses who appeared before members of the Commission… those questioned during depositions by members of the Commission's legal staff… those who supplied affidavits and statements…
↑ Lewis, Anthony (November 24, 1964). "Kennedy Slaying Relived in Detail in Warren Files". The New York Times. p.1.
↑ Sylvia Meagher, Gary Owens (1980). Master Index to the J. F. K. Assassination Investigations: The Reports and Supporting Volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Warren Commission. Michigan University: Scarecrow Press.
↑ 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.
↑ "[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 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.
1 2 "Ford defends panel's findings". Lawrence Journal Daily World. Vol.120, no.226. Lawrence, Kansas. AP. September 21, 1978. p.1. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
↑ "Findings". archives.gov. 15 August 2016. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
↑ US House of representatives, House Select Committee on Assassinations (January 2, 1979). Final Report: summary and findings (Firsted.). Washington: US Government Printing Office. p.261.
1 2 Summer, Anthony (2013). Not in Your Life Time. London: Headline Publishing Group. ISBN978-0-7553-6542-5.
↑ US House of representatives, House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979). Volume X: The Ingredients of an Anti-Castro Cuban Conspiracy (Firsted.). Washington: US Government Publishing Office. pp.5–18.
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