On September 24, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson receives the
Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since the
assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald’s motive for assassinating the president remained
unknown. Seven days after the assassination, Johnson appointed the President's
Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy to investigate the event.
The commission was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and became known as the
Warren Commission. It concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that the Secret
Service had made poor preparations for JFK's visit to Dallas and had failed to
sufficiently protect him.
The circumstances surrounding Kennedy's death, however, have
since given rise to numerous conspiracy theories. The commission's conclusion
that Oswald was a "lone gunman" failed to satisfy some who witnessed
the attack and others whose research found conflicting details in the report.
Critics of the Warren Commission's report believed that additional ballistics
experts' conclusions and a home movie shot at the scene disputed the theory
that three bullets fired from Oswald's gun could have caused Kennedy's fatal
wounds as well as the injuries to Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding
with the president. Because of these controversies another congressional
investigation was conducted in 1979; that committee reached the same conclusion
as the Warren Commission. During its almost year-long investigation, the Warren
Commission reviewed reports by the FBI, Secret Service, Department of State and
the attorney general of Texas. It also poured over Oswald's personal history,
political affiliations and military record. Overall, the Warren Commission
listened to the testimony of over 500 witnesses and even traveled to Dallas
several times to visit the site where Kennedy was shot. The enormous volume of
documentation from the investigation was placed in the National Archives and
much of it is now available to the public.
Michael Thomas Barry is the
author of Murder &
Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949. The book
can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:
No comments:
Post a Comment