Warren Report
The Warren Report is the official document produced by the Warren Commission, established in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. Appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Commission was tasked with investigating the assassination, identifying the shooter, and examining the possibility of a conspiracy. The report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy and also murdered Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, while asserting that nightclub owner Jack Ruby acted independently in shooting Oswald.
A significant point of contention in the report is the "single bullet theory," which suggests that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally. This has been met with skepticism, particularly in light of visual evidence from the assassination. Although initially accepted by a majority of the public, trust in the report waned over time, with many Americans later expressing doubts about its findings. Various critiques and alternative theories emerged, fueled by media coverage and investigations, leading to renewed scrutiny of the events surrounding the assassination. Subsequent inquiries, including one by the U.S. House of Representatives, hinted at the possibility of a conspiracy, contributing to the ongoing debate about the circumstances of Kennedy's death.
Warren Report
Date: Published September 27, 1964
Author President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
The Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It became one of the most controversial government documents in U.S. history.
The Work
After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, made the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) responsible for investigating the crime and issuing a report. However, he was soon persuaded that a presidential panel would be needed to put the matter to rest and, on November 29, 1963, appointed a commission consisting of Chief JusticeEarl Warren, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles, U.S. Senators Richard Russell and Sherman Cooper, U.S. Representatives Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs, and banker John McCloy. This group became known as the Warren Commission.
The main task faced by the Warren Commission was to identify the assassin of President Kennedy and to consider the existence of a possible conspiracy. Texas Governor John Connally, riding in the same car as the president, had also been wounded, and Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit had been murdered soon afterward in another part of the city. Two days later, the accused assassin of the president, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot to death in the basement of a Dallas police station. Between the end of November, 1963, and September 27, 1964, when the Warren Commission released its report, the commission and its staff heard testimony from more than a hundred witnesses and entered into evidence thousands of reports from the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, State Department, and other government agencies as well as information from foreign sources. The final report stated that Oswald, acting alone, fired all of the shots that struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally and that he also murdered Officer Tippit. The commission also declared that Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby acted alone in shooting Oswald and that it had “found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”
Perhaps the most controversial element of the Warren Report was its conclusion that Governor Connally was wounded by a bullet that had first struck President Kennedy.
This so-called single bullet theory was embraced despite the absence of serious damage to the bullet purported to have wounded both men and the fact that Connally can be seen in bystander Abraham Zapruder’s famous home movie of the assassination reacting to his wounds after Kennedy reacts to a hit from supposedly the same bullet. Also controversial was the commission’s conclusion that all shots were fired by Oswald from the rear of the presidential limousine when the Zapruder film appears to show the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head throwing him backward rather than forward in his seat. The report also found no conspiratorial significance in Oswald’s 1959 to 1962 stay in the Soviet Union, his pro-Castro activities, or his trip to Mexico City just before the assassination and dismissed as rumor and speculation the attempts by some to find sinister overtones in these aspects of Oswald’s background.
Impact
The Warren Report had its intended effect: to assure the American public that President Kennedy’s assassin had been identified and that there had been no conspiracy. However, its persuasive effect proved temporary as critics of the report revived old questions about the assassination and posed new ones. Following the release of the report, public opinion polls showed that more than half of Americans accepted the conclusion that Oswald acted alone, but by late 1967, only one-fourth of the public believed there had been no conspiracy. Stimulating the public’s doubts were articles in such major magazines as Life and Look, best-selling books such as Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment (1966), and New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s widely publicized investigation of the assassination (1967-1969). However, the 1969 acquittal of Garrison’s main suspect, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, was a major setback to those who favored a conspiracy theory.
After the Watergate affair and government spying scandals of the 1970’s, doubts about the Warren Report were revived. The U.S. House of Representatives conducted an inquiry from 1976 to 1979 that concluded a conspiracy had probably been involved in the assassination. In 1991, Hollywood director Oliver Stone’s film JFK cast Garrison’s ill-fated investigation in a heroic light and generated sufficient controversy to persuade Congress to open the government’s still-secret files on the assassination.
Additional Information
A proconspiracy alternative to the Warren Report can be found in Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), and the report’s most adamant defense is Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993).