Video: 'Who killed JFK? Behind the scenes of Warren Commission'
(Friday, November 29, 1963, announced by the White House at 7:30 p.m. EST) — One week after U.S. President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, Lyndon B. Johnson, his successor, created the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, chaired by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination.
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.
Its 888-page final report would be presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later.
It concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.
Video: 'The JFK Assassination: Author Gerald Posner' (The Warren Commission at 15:19)
The Commission’s findings have proven controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies.
One commission member, Rep. Gerald Ford (R-Mich.), the House minority leader, and a future president, said the CIA had either destroyed evidence or kept it from investigators to avoid exposing secrets involving “potentially damaging operations.” The CIA actions, Ford added, could “easily be misinterpreted as collusion in JFK’s assassination.”
The remaining five commission members were: Sens. Richard Russell (D-Ga.), John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.), Rep. Hale Boggs (D-La.), who was the House majority whip, Allen Welsh Dulles, a former director of Central Intelligence and head of the CIA and John McCloy, a former president of the World Bank.
Critics cited reports by ballistics experts and a home movie shot at the assassination scene in Dealey Plaza to dispute the commission’s “lone gunman” theory. But three subsequent U.S. government investigations — a 1968 panel set up by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, as well as a probe by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978-79 — agreed with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that two bullets had struck JFK from the rear.
The House panel, however, said Oswald’s actions probably stemmed from a conspiracy.
