Warren Commission

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WARREN COMMISSION

WARREN COMMISSION. 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.